![]() ![]() During the past two decades, remnants of Muslim families have returned to Srebrenica, slowly repairing their lives. While Bosnian Serbs spray paint walls with giant messages of support for Mladic and reject genocide claims, recovery on the ground remains elusive. The killing fields and mass graves are now the makings of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague, where the mocking and unremorseful Serb General Ratko Mladic, known as the “Butcher of the Balkans,” stands trial. Some 10,000 men fled to the thick of the surrounding forest women and children hid there, too, where they foraged for roots, leaves, and berries to eat. ![]() The assailants expelled tens of thousands more in what they termed an “ethnic cleansing” operation, forcing women, children, and elderly people onto busses for relocation in Bosniak-controlled areas. Serbian army personnel, uniformed police and Srebrenica’s own Serb residents who turned on lifelong neighbors, slaughtered over 8,000 men. In July 1995, Serb forces systematically purged Srebrenica of all Bosniaks, the ethnic term for Bosnian Muslims. And in the years since, festering animosity has had a crippling effect. President Bill Clinton, who resisted military engagement during post-Yugoslavia’s inter-ethnic battles (newly declassified White House minutes convey the vexing issues for the President and his advisors), and ultimately became the driver of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the conflict.īosnians have grown resentful of the U.S.-brokered agreement that pushed combatants into an uneasy peace, but offered little more than the template for separateness: Serb governance in the north and northeast (called Republika Srpska) with a Bosnian and Croat federation covering the rest of the landscape. A steep drop near the Serbian border, the largely Muslim town of Srebrenica is still in aftershock.įor two decades, Srebrenica has memorialized the massacre, and this year a staggering 50,000 people came, including former U.S. The delegations soon formed a caravan speeding along the country’s highway and edging hairpin turns cut from thickly forested mountains. ![]()
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