Srebrenica's genocide survivors await justice

The Hague // Fahrudin and Suada Ali remember the day when their world came to an end. Their 14-year old nephew, Osman, told them he had seen the enemy commander, Ratko Mladic, reach the centre of Srebrenica.

"My nephew, who always went to look everywhere, told me that he saw him and that Mladic told everybody that they would be OK," Mrs Ali recalled from 11 July 1995. "And he believed him, but it was all lies and he did not survive."

Osman and his father, Mr Ali's elder brother Bajro, were killed in the massacre that followed, along with Mr Ali's father, Alaga, and some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the supposed UN safe haven, watched over by Dutch peacekeepers.

On Friday, Mr Mladic was finally arraigned for crimes in Srebrenica and elsewhere before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, 16 years after first having been indicted.

But Mr Ali and other survivors did not get the moment of satisfaction that they had been craving.

"I want to see him squirm and be quiet and really small when he listens to the charges being read," Mr Ali said.

Instead the former Bosnian Serb general, in spite of his much reduced physical presence and possible illness, was as proud and confident as ever, recalling for Mr Ali the full spectre of his past behaviour.

"He was waving and smiling to some of his supporters in the gallery. He was so arrogant, I wanted to jump at him and shut him up," says Mr Ali, who attended the proceedings. Mr Mladic was combative and called the charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, "obnoxious" and "monstrous".

Srebrenica stands out, amid all the other crimes committed during the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, as the largest single instance of genocide on European soil since the end of the Second World War. It was perpetrated by Christian Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims and it happened while the world watched, including the Dutch UN-peacekeepers who were assigned to the enclave.

Mr Ali, now 45, moved to the Netherlands with his family in 2001 because he felt they could no longer stay in Bosnia. He is not only a survivor of the massacre but also a former deputy commander in the Bosnian army's 2nd corps in Srebrenica that succeeded in holding off the Serb advance for years. He feels betrayed by everyone - the UN, the Dutch government, even his own country's leadership which, he says, could have done more to prevent the fall of the enclave to the Serbs.

The arrest of Mr Mladic and his extradition have a special resonance in the Netherlands. Even now, , Joris Voorhoeve, who was the minister of defence in 1995, emphasises the blamelessness of the Dutch. "It was impossible to defend the enclave, which was not the mandate in any case," he said, reacting to the arrest.

But several Bosnian Muslims are suing the commanders of the Dutch peacekeepers over complicity in the genocide. In addition to failing to prevent the massacre, they accuse the Dutch soldiers of actively co-operating with the Serbs by handing over more than 260 men and boys who had sought refuge on their compound in the nearby village of Potocari.

Liesbeth Zegveld, a human rights lawyer in the Netherlands, who has taken on the case, gets outraged just talking about it. "You're there on a UN mission to protect those people and then you hand them to the enemy?" she asks incredulously. "At the gate stood the Serbs, with Dutchbat (Dutch battalion), and the women and children went to the right and the men to the left, it was that simple."

Among those seeking the protection of Dutchbat, was Mrs Ali. She remembers the selection process for the refugees, before the women and children were put on buses to safety.

"I saw one man with a young girl on his shoulders, maybe she was three years old. He said that his wife had died and that his girl needed him on the bus. But they refused and said no way. I can still see him, he just stood there, took one step toward the bus, one step back until they took the girl from him and put her on the bus and he had to stay behind. I knew then that things would not be OK," she recalls haltingly.

Many of her close relatives, brothers and brothers-in-law, were killed, as well as a large part of her extended family. "We never counted how many. It is too painful."

Mr Ali feels that he and his family were sacrificed partly because they were Muslims. "When the same happened in Croatia, the international community handled it differently, I feel, because they are Catholics, Christians. Srebrenica was only a small area in Bosnia (and) Muslim. I think they did not find it very important."

When Srebrenica fell, he and thousands of other men attempted to escape through Serbian lines though the forest. It turned into a death march with many not surviving the attacks and privations. The escape was extremely perilous, recalls Mr Ali. "We walked through the Serb lines, one after the other, some 12,000 men in a line, stretching for kilometres. You could not get off the path because there were mines." It was somewhere along the trail that he lost his brother, Bajro. He did not see it happen but years later the remains were found next to the path.

"Back then, I was strong, young and athletic but I was afraid that I would not make it. I told myself that I would not fall into Serbian hands. I was ready to kill myself first."

The capture of the man they see as mainly responsible, Mr Mladic, has not brought a sense of closure to Fahrudin and Suada Ali. They fear that now the world wants to move on and forget all about Srebrenica.

"What I saw from Serbia, the president, Tadic, said they want to turn a page," says Mr Ali. "Also in the Netherlands, I feel that they want to close the book on it. They cannot, it is still before the court but they would like to leave it all behind."

foreign.desk@thenational.ae