Louis Gentile worked in Srebrenica during the siege of that enclave and for the first time in five years recently revisited the scene to confront a personal nightmare:

It is four days before Christmas and still dark as we climb into the hills around Sarajevo and head for Srebrenica.

There is no avoiding it now. I will soon be in a place associated with the worst crime in Europe since the Second World War, a place where, in 1993, I had witnessed hell on earth and then naively believed that the international community had finally stopped the killings instead of just standing by and watching another slaughter.

It has been more than five years since I left Srebrenica and on this day I have still not come to terms with what I had seen there nor with what has happened there since.

The closer I get the more apprehensive I feel. For the past few weeks in London I have been waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I know why I’m having nightmares but can’t remember a single detail once I’m awake.

I re-read my old notes from Srebrenica. One entry from April 14: “Although I have witnessed many terrible scenes in Srebrenica ... nothing I have ever seen compares to the events of April 12 in terms of sheer horror. At approximately 14:15 a barrage of shelling, clearly intended to target civilians, landed directly on the town.

“Body parts and human flesh clung to the schoolyard fence and the ground is literally soaked with blood. I saw two ox carts covered with bodies, and what remained of bodies, being wheeled into the hospital. Total casualties were 56 dead and approximately 100 wounded.

“Suffice, to say, I did not look forward to closing my eyes at night for fear that I would relive the images of a nightmare that was not a dream.”

An impossible journey

In less than three hours we make the journey from Sarajevo that would have been impossible during the war and I think back to the first time I entered this place: The main street was crowded with people waving, blowing kisses, thousands of smiling children shouting thank you. Forty thousand people were crammed into a town which had once accommodated 8,000.

Everyone believed they were going to die unless they managed to be evacuated. That panic dissipated when the Security Council declared the enclave a ‘safe area’ and I recall a Canadian officer telling me his troops had a moral obligation to defend the population, but he was unsure they had the means to do so if the town came under renewed attack.

Nobody who was in Srebrenica in 1993 is there today. All were subsequently expelled or massacred in July 1995, when the ‘safe area’ fell to the Bosnian Serbs. And it’s clear to me now that although I’m officially returning to write an article, I’ve really come back to mourn.

The majority of today’s inhabitants are displaced Serbs from places like Sarajevo. The town is run by a small group of ‘powerful locals.’ The return of Bosniaks is not a possibility according to one international official here. The economy is a disaster.

I walk through the town in the rain, past the schoolhouse playground where children were killed while playing football on April 12, 1993. I have no words. At Cafe 171 a group of local young men say they have no jobs and they all hope to leave.

Nowhere do I ask the questions I really want to ask: Who participated in the 1995 killings? Who can confirm who was killed to ease the grief of mothers, daughters, wives? How can you live in this blood drenched, cursed place after everything that has happened here?

A glimmer of hope

Marinko Sekulic was a Serb journalist at Radio Srebrenica for 27 years before the war and his parents and brother returned there last year. In a chat in nearby Tuzla we discuss what happened there and he leaves me with a small glimmer of hope for a more tolerant future when he says some of the original inhabitants would like to see their Bosniak neighbors back. But these people are mostly elderly and those who control the town today rule through intimidation.

A young woman named Mirzoda recounts the fall of Srebrenica and the three nights she spent in Potocari clutching her baby tightly while her father and husband fled into the woods, never to be seen again.

She begs us to check among those detained and as I’m to discover, many Srebrenica survivors hope their men, missing for three years, are still alive, still detained somewhere. But none of the rumored detention centers have turned out to be true.

It is probable that all 7,396 missing are dead. The fate of only 49 has been clarified and their remains returned to families. The work of identifying other remains from mass graves continues, but staff at Physicians for Human Rights believe only a tiny minority will ever be identified.

I recognize one young woman who used to work as a cleaner at the post office building where I lived and she remembers me. I ask after someone we knew but “he never arrived.” Another woman says, “Everything good vanished in one hour of one day, my son, my husband, my brother and my house.”

There are people in Srebrenica who know exactly what happened to their families but I have no answers to their questions. “Why couldn’t the killings be stopped after the first day when 1,000 or more were executed? If you had protected us in 1993 why didn’t you continue until the end? If you’d just left us alone maybe a few thousand of us would have died fleeing in 1993, but not as many as were slaughtered in 1995.”

I’m grateful to have had the chance to see Srebrenica again, and even more grateful to leave it behind. Alone in my hotel room I mourn for the dead and for those who are still waiting for loved ones who will never come. Srebrenica.

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)