Last year, when my daughter was just a few months old, I walked past an open-air exhibition at London’s South Bank, a photographic project related to the Srebrenica massacre. On the photographs mothers held hand-written testimonies increased fists, stories of their lost sons.
Almost 16 years later some bodies have not been found, only clothing and personal objects scattered across mass graves. The bones had been mixed up, the murdered men jumbled together by bulldozers operated by Ratko Mladic’s men to make Âidentification more difficult.
And though I have always appreciated my good fortune in leaving Bosnia alive and healthy — the death of several family members and friends notwithstanding — having a child of my own has opened up an understanding of loss that I now realise was previously incomplete.
With the overwhelming love of one’s own children and the life-long preoccupation with their safety, how do you survive in the wake of such brutality as was experienced by the people of Srebrenica? Can you ever heal if you are not able to hold the body you raised? The news of Mladic’s arrest tugged at my gut; this had been a long time coming. But I feel no solace.
I left Bosnia at the end of 1992 when Mladic and his forces were still gearing up for their most flamboyant war efforts, though their disregard for human life was already evident. Mladic’s voice was broadcast on the radio as he ordered his subordinates, who, at the time, were positioned around Sarajevo, to pummel only “live flesh”, or probably in his ethic “live meat” — the word meso means both. I later saw him on film, uniformed, hatless and plump, speaking from what he called “Serbian Srebrenica” on July 11 1995.
“It’s the day,” he said, slightly out of breath, the streets behind him ghostly bare, “when I gift this town to the Serb people as the final revenge on the Turks.” That gift was the death of more than 8 000 men and the dispersion of many more.
The war will always be an integral part of my personal and national history; it is one of my people’s most potent roots. It is why I am in London and why my daughter was born here. My life has been formed and hers framed by it.
The Bosnian war and, with it, the Srebrenica genocide, is part of my daughter’s heritage. And the way I will tell her about it one day — the way a mother tells her daughter about her history, whether that memory will be stained with bitterness or a vague sense of justice — depends on the outcome of the trials held at the international Hague tribunal.
In his court appearances Radovan Karadzic is still sticking to his guns, though thankfully not literally. Mladic is likely to do the same, despite his poor health and provided he ever gets to trial. Slobodan Milosevic died in prison, never having been properly convicted, and Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic, the other two key players in the Yugoslavian breakdown, both died free men.
Across the tribunal’s hearings remorse from the war criminals has been hard to find.
Mladic stamped his legacy through murder, destruction and a blind hatred based on a perverted interpretation of history. He left behind a country — Bosnia-Herzegovina — permeated by mistrust and corruption, with growing national and religious extremism as its moral compass. And I am not sure his arrest or an extended, limping trial will change that.
Serbia will probably benefit from the extradition of Mladic to The Hague by increasing its chances of entering the European Union and rehabilitating its international reputation, but Bosnia-Herzegovina and the victims of the Srebrenica genocide still have a long way to go towards recovery. —