demoralized both the town’s defenders and the Dutch peacekeepers. If NATO Close Air Support had been used earlier, or if Naser had been present, the 7,079 missing might still be alive today.
The fall of Srebrenica did not have to happen. There was no need for thousands of skeletons to be strewn across eastern Bosnia. There was no need for thousands of Muslim children to be raised on stories of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers being slaughtered by Serbs. The fall of Srebrenica could have been prevented.
What was unusual about Srebrenica was the speed of its demise. The collective failure of the United States, France and Britain, NATO, the United Nations, the Bosnian government, the Dutch and the town’s Muslim defenders to effectively protect the town is one of the great controversies—and mysteries—of the war in Bosnia.
Serbs who captured the town are convinced that the Muslims defending it had secret orders from Sarajevo to abandon the enclave. Many Dutch are certain the Muslims had instructions from Sarajevo not to defend the town. The Dutch and Muslims adamently believe that Janvier had secret orders from France to halt air strikes.
Janvier, though, denies having secret orders from France. He blames the Dutch for not putting up more resistance on the ground.
The Bosnian government, meanwhile, denies there was any secret deal and holds Akashi and Janvier wholly responsible. Finally, Srebrenicans, in general, are convinced that the safe area was secretly traded for the Serb-held suburbs around Sarajevo in a deal brokered by the United States.
The reasons the town fell so quickly are clear: the lack of NATO Close Air Support and the absence of Naser Ori demoralized both the town’s defenders and the Dutch peacekeepers. If NATO Close Air Support had been used earlier, or if Naser had been present, the 7,079 missing might still be alive today.
While the bombardment was intense, only four Serb tanks and several hundred infantry led the main attack up the narrow asphalt road, something NATO jets or well-organized defenders could have likely held off for several more days. The attack on Srebrenica should have taken the same pattern as attacks on the safe areas of Goražde in 1994, numerous attacks on Biha in 1994 and 1995, the attack on Srebrenica in 1993 and the attack on Žepa only days later. Large initial Serb gains slowed when entrenched Muslim defenders confronted them. Unwilling to engage in house-to-house fighting and suffer heavy casualties, the Serbs paused and tried to shell their opponents into submission. As civilian casualties mounted, the United Nations and Western powers were then finally embarrassed into taking some kind of action to stop the Serbs. Time was the key factor in Srebrenica. Close Air Support and Naser Ori would only have given the town a few more days at best, but that may have been enough.
In the end, both the town’s defenders and the UN failed in Srebrenica. Naser Ori’s absence and the lack of NATO Close Air Support were responsible for the rapid fall of the town.
In peacetime, Naser Ori wears leather jackets, designer sunglasses and thick gold chains. He drives silver Audi and Mercedes coupes and tears out of parking lots—his tires spitting rocks and dust into the air. Just over six feet tall with a powerful, but compact frame, he looks like the weight lifter, bodyguard and nightclub bouncer that he once was. He asks foreigners to get him books about how American and British elite Special Forces units train—one of his main interests.
But Ori is far from the simple thug or small-time mafioso he may appear to be. At twenty-nine, he was already a legenda—Serbo-Croatian for legend. Other men spend lifetimes trying to create the aura of fear and respect that surrounded Naser in Srebrenica. Both arrogant and charismatic, he had an intangible quality about him that was difficult to define. Naser was a leader.
The men who fought with him in Srebrenica still say his name with reverence. If Naser Ori and the enclave’s fifteen best soldiers had been in Srebrenica, soldiers from Srebrenica insist, the town would have held for at least several more days. The UN, most likely, would have been forced to intervene. Srebrenica may have been peacefully traded as part of a peace settlement in the end, but 8,100 lives would have been saved.
Why Naser Ori was not in Srebrenica has become a bitter bone of contention. Naser insists the Bosnian government barred him from returning to the enclave. The Bosnian government insists that they ordered Naser to return, but he refused.
Rumors that Sarajevo intentionally sacrificed Srebrenica grew so persistent that it became a campaign issue in Bosnia’s first postwar elections. On August 2, 1996, the Bosnian Army commander, General Rasim Deli, announced in a speech to the Bosnian parliament that Naser had been ordered to walk back to Srebrenica after the helicopter carrying Ramiz Beirovi was shot down on May 7. But Naser said he would return to Srebrenica only in an armored helicopter. A government-controlled newspaper then attacked a lakeside restaurant Naser had opened in Tuzla, citing it as evidence of his black-market activities.
In an interview, Naser said he would have been on the helicopter with Ramiz Beirovi that was shot down on May 7 but he was asked by General Deli to stay in central Bosnia until a weapons shipment for Srebrenica was arranged. After the helicopter was downed, Bosnian pilots refused to fly to Srebrenica or Žepa.1 Naser said he and the fifteen officers opposed walking back to Srebrenica because in the past the Serbs were tipped off that such groups were departing and then wiped out in ambushes. One of the fifteen officers who had been pulled out with Naser confirmed that the group had been given an order to reenter Srebrenica but had disobeyed it.
At the same time, Srebrenica’s civilian leaders and military commanders sent a secret message to Sarajevo in mid-May stating that Naser and the fifteen officers should not be forced to walk back into the enclave, according to Zulfo Tursunovi, one of the brigade commanders. It was too dangerous, they said. Naser and the officers should only fly back in an armored helicopter.2 In May, it seemed, many officials—including Srebrenica’s own leaders—had little sense of a pending Serb attack.
In June, Sarajevo’s actions become more suspect. Either a decision was made to sacrifice Srebrenica or the government is guilty of ignoring the threat posed to the town. One month before the Serb attack, senior Bosnian Army officers in Tuzla began warning UN officials that the Serbs were preparing to seize Srebrenica.3 At the same time, Bosnian Army headquarters then ordered the men in Srebrenica to carry out the largest raid ever from the safe area to aid the offensive to liberate Sarajevo. The raid clearly risked provoking the Serbs.
According to officials close to the ruling Party of Democratic Action, the Bosnian leadership was completely focused on the pending June 15 offensive to lift the siege of Sarajevo. The sweeping operation involved more than 20,000 troops from around the country. Throughout the war, Sarajevo was the center of national and international attention.
General Deli refused to be interviewed for this book but said in public speeches and interviews with the Bosnian press that he was confident that Srebrenica’s defenders, with the weapons that had been secretly flown into the enclave by helicopter, could defend themselves from a Serb attack for at least thirty days. He also expected the UN to defend the safe area as promised and said he was surprised when it fell so quickly.4
But Naser Ori maintains that the enclave was deliberately sacrificed. He claims he was relieved of his command on May 29.5 Then, when the town was on the verge of falling, he was ordered once again to walk to Srebrenica when commanders in Sarajevo knew it would be impossible. He said he asked for a written order to return to the town but was called back and told not to walk back. An attempt was made to get a helicopter pilot to fly him and the officers back to Srebrenica at the last minute, but this never materialized. By the time Srebrenica fell, Naser says, it was clear to him that the UN and officials in Sarajevo had sacrificed it. His efforts during the attack to get the 2nd Corps in Tuzla to launch a major offensive in central Bosnia to relieve pressure on Srebrenica were rebuffed, Naser said.
But senior officers from the 2nd Corps said in interviews that they did all they could to aid Srebrenica. Their best troops and equipment were still participating in the stalled offensive around Sarajevo and a major operation could not be mounted. Srebrenicans counter that the lack of aid from the 2nd Corps is proof that they were sacrificed.
Trading Srebrenica and Žepa for the Serb-held suburbs that encircled Sarajevo was proposed several times during the war. In the summer of 1993, Srebrenica’s representative in Sarajevo, Murat Efendi, was asked by the Bosnian government whether the people of Srebrenica would accept. Naser Ori and Srebrenica’s leaders refused. In the fall of 1993, the UN facilitated secret negotiations between the Muslim-led Bosnian government and the Serbs at the UN-controlled airport to discuss trading Srebrenica and Žepa for the suburbs of Sarajevo.
According to Bosnian Serb Vice President Nikola Koljevi, the Bosnian Serb leadership supported the deal but could not get Serbs in the bitterly contested suburbs to agree to it. Former Bosnian Army commander Sefer Halilovi and one senior former ruling party official said leaders in the Bosnian government also supported a deal but couldn’t persuade the people in Srebrenica to agree to it—a charge that Bosnian Vice President Ejup Gani denied. But Halilovi and the former ruling party official are convinced the United States or Europe brokered a secret deal in which Srebrenica and Žepa were abandoned by the Bosnian government in exchange for the suburbs. The deal went horribly wrong when General Mladi killed so many men.6
Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. and European officials vehemently deny making any secret agreements. There is also no concrete evidence of secret meetings between the Serbs and the Muslims. Most importantly, the failed Bosnian Army offensive in mid-June to capture the suburbs around Sarajevo cannot be explained by the conspiracy theory. If the Muslim-led government was to receive the suburbs in a deal, then the offensive should have succeeded. It is illogical that after the Sarajevo offensive failed the Bosnian government would still hand over Srebrenica to the Serbs.
Some UN military officers allege that the Bosnian government sacrificed Srebrenica to garner international sympathy. But giving up such a valuable bargaining chip without any certainty of a return would make little sense. Given the West’s long record of passivity, there was no guarantee that the fall of a safe area would result in any substantive changes to the UN mission.
The most likely motive for the pullout is political. Naser Ori repeatedly thwarted attempts by the ruling Party of Democratic Action to gain control of Srebrenica’s municipal government. The central government may have planned to replace him with a commander loyal to the party as they did in other parts of the country during the war. Bosnian Army officials also complained about Ori’s corruption and said he organized the town’s defenses poorly.
An officer who was pulled out with Naser presented a version of events that appears to be the most accurate. Naser and his officers received no new orders after they rebuffed the initial instructions to walk back to Srebrenica in May. The men from Srebrenica trusted neither officers in the Tuzla-based 2nd Corps nor those in the Bosnian Army headquarters in Sarajevo. They had still not forgiven them for failing to liberate the enclave in January 1993. The orders to reenter, they thought, were part of a plot to kill Naser.
Assuming the UN would defend the enclave, Naser and his men made no serious effort to return to it. There was last-minute talk of walking to the enclave or arranging a helicopter flight, the officer said, but when the enclave actually fell, the officers from Srebrenica were as stunned as everyone else that the UN had not defended it with NATO air attacks.
If one accepts that Naser Ori and his officers were simply stuck by accident or incompetence in central Bosnia after the downing of the helicopter on May 7, the onus then shifts to UN Special Representative Yasushi Akashi and French general Bernard Janvier, who were responsible for the UN’s failure to protect the safe area.
Suspicions that Janvier cut a deal with General Ratko Mladi at the secret June 4, 1995, meeting they had in the midst of the hostage crisis have steadily grown since the meeting was revealed three weeks later.7 Janvier turned down requests for air strikes from Srebrenica, the theory goes, because he secretly gave assurances to Mladi of no further air strikes in exchange for the release of the 350 predominantly French peacekeepers.
In hindsight, a suspicious string of events followed the June 4 meeting. Two days later, French general Bertrand de Lapresle was sent directly from Paris to meet secretly with the Bosnian Serbs in Pale. The day after de Lapresle’s meeting, the Serbs released 111 hostages.
On June 9, Yasushi Akashi held a meeting with Janvier and General Rupert Smith in the Croatian city of Split.8 In a debate that struck at the core issue of the UN mission—peacekeeping versus peace enforcement, Smith argued that the Serbs needed to be confronted by force. He predicted they would soon try to create a crisis by attacking the eastern enclaves or cutting off Sarajevo to end the war. “I remain convinced that the Serbs want to conclude this year and will take every risk to accomplish this. As long as the [economic] sanctions remain on the Drina [River],” Smith said, referring to Serbia’s alleged halt of military supplies to the Bosnian Serbs, “they risk getting weaker every week relative to their enemy.”
Janvier completely disagreed, arguing that it was “essential to allow the political process” to begin and avoid confronting the Serbs. He predicted the Serbs would not attack “unless there is a major provocation by the BH.” “The Serbs need two things, international recognition and a softening of the blockade on the Drina,” Janvier said. “I don’t think they want to go to an extreme crisis. On the contrary, they want to modify their behavior, be good interlocutors.”9 After the meeting, Akashi stated that the UN would return to “strictly peacekeeping principles” or not use force or take sides in the conflict.
Four days later, on June 13, the Bosnian Serbs released 28 more hostages and their self-styled Foreign Minister, Aleksa Buha, said that Serbian President Miloševi had received assurances of no further air strikes. “We understand that the international community will keep their promise to President Miloševi that there will not be any more bombing,” Buha said. Akashi denied any deal had been made.10
On June 17, Akashi met with Miloševi in Belgrade. The Serbian President said he had been told by Chirac that Clinton agreed that air strikes would not occur without Paris’ approval. On June 18, the remaining 26 UN hostages were released, and 92 peacekeepers in surrounded weapons collection points were allowed to withdraw to Sarajevo. Simultaneously, the UN released the four Bosnian Serb soldiers captured when French peacekeepers retook the Vrbanje Bridge in Sarajevo on May 27. Nikola Koljevi, deputy leader of the Bosnian Serbs, said the Serbs had received the promises they wanted. “We got a commitment of no more air strikes,” Koljevi said. “No more hostile acts against the Serbs.”
Three days later, two Bosnian Serb Super Galeb jet fighters took off from the Banja Luka airfield in violation of the NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Bosnia. NATO Southern Europe commander Admiral Smith, seeing the flight as a test of Western will, requested permission from Janvier to carry out air strikes against the airfield. Janvier flatly refused, saying an air strike would only lead to another confrontation.11
A high-ranking French military officer then publicly criticized Smith’s call for air strikes. “He is wrong to ask for those strikes against Banja Luka airfield,” the officer said in a background briefing to reporters. “This would lead us to war with the Serbs.”12
Janvier’s secret June 4 meeting was exposed by Roger Cohen of The New York Times on June 23.13 UN and French officials flatly denied any deal was struck but the rumors continued. The head of the UN’s peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan, sent a cable to Akashi asking about Bosnian Serb statements that they had received assurances of no further air strikes. “You know well we have issued no such instruction,” Annan wrote in the June 15 cable.
The strongest evidence came on May 29, 1996, a full year after the hostage crisis. An investigation by Roy Gutman of Newsday and Cabell Bruce of Reuters Television concluded that Janvier made a deal with Mladi and blocked the Close Air Support request as a result.14 They quoted a close aide of Janvier’s as saying, “We were the supplicants … Janvier proposed the meeting, Janvier proposed the deal.” The aide said Janvier received no specific instructions from the UN in New York or the French government to speak with the Serbs, but felt under pressure to end the crisis. Janvier volunteered to secretly meet with Mladi. “He really thought he was doing the best he could. He was under pressure,” the aide told Gutman. “Yes, he was naive to believe Mladi but what else could he do?”
But when contacted later by me, the aide backtracked. He said the story was accurate in terms of the sequence of events but he objected to the term “deal.” The aide, who may have come under intense pressure not to speak after the Newsday story and Reuters Television documentary appeared, denied that even a vague understanding was reached between Janvier and Mladi about air strikes. He also asked not to be named.
Unfortunately, the aide was not at the secret meeting. Those present—Janvier, a translator and two military aides—refused to be interviewed for this book. Janvier’s report to the UN on the meeting, which wasn’t filed until after Annan cabled Zagreb about rumored assurances, mentions no deal but states that Mladi prepared a letter stating: “1. The Army of the Republika Srpska will no longer use force to threaten the life of and safety of members of UNPROFOR. 2. UNPROFOR commits to no longer make use of any force which leads to the use of air strikes against targets and territory of the Republika Srpska. 3. The signing of this agreement will lead to the freeing of all prisoners of war.” According to the report, Mladi asked Janvier to bring the document to Zagreb for “immediate ratification.”
Without confirmation from Janvier’s aide, there is no definitive proof of a deal. The French government denies Chirac or any other official ever gave assurances to Miloševi or the Bosnian Serbs that there would be no further air strikes. General de Lapresle and an aide who attended the secret meeting on June 6 in Pale said in separate interviews that they only urged the Serbs to release the hostages and did not negotiate. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali refused to be interviewed, but Akashi said that he personally never agreed to a deal, nor had Janvier.15
Dutch Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve, General Ton Kolsteren, the UN chief of staff in Zagreb, General Cees Nicolai, the UN chief of staff in Sarajevo, and Colonel Harm De Jonge, the operations chief in Zagreb, who came up with the idea for the blocking position, would appear to have no reason to spare Janvier after the debacle their countrymen suffered. All of them said in interviews that they do not believe Janvier made a deal with Mladi. The French general, they said, is at worst guilty of simply making a bad decision regarding Close Air Support. NATO Southern Europe commander Admiral Leighton Smith, an advocate of airpower, said in an interview that he asked Janvier after the fall of Srebrenica if he had made a deal.
“He said no, absolutely not,” Smith said, “and I believe him.”
Secret meetings in and of themselves were not unusual and occurred throughout the war. General Rupert Smith, whose aides said he opposed negotiating with the Serbs about the hostages, held secret phone conversations with General Ratko Mladi. On May 28, he was told to “take a tranquilizer” by the Serb general, who rebuffed Smith’s demand that the hostages be released and turned down an offer from Smith to meet.16
Nikola Koljevi, who said he opposed taking the hostages, stated in an interview that he did not recall receiving any assurance that there would be no further air strikes from the UN or France. He only remembered Miloševi putting intense pressure on the Bosnian Serbs to release the hostages through the frequent visits to Pale of Miloševi’s feared secret police chief, Jovica Staniši.
Cutting a deal with the Serbs does not fit with Chirac’s carefully crafted public image, at least, of his approach to the war in Bosnia. Chirac, a former cavalry officer, was reportedly furious at Lanxade and Janvier when he saw humiliated French peacekeepers surrendering with white flags. He criticized them for “cowardice and laxness” and reportedly ordered them to begin retaliating when attacked. Chirac’s trademark (his nickname was “the Bulldozer”) was his bluntness, and U.S. officials say his arrival in office was a sea change in French policy toward Bosnia. Chirac publicly proposed the creation of the 12,000-man Rapid Reaction Force to British Prime Minister John Major and publicly proposed, even if it was a bluff, the recapture of Srebrenica by force.
While Mitterrand saw the Serbs as France’s allies from World War II, Chirac apparently dismissed them. At a European Union banquet on June 9, Chirac had just ended another phone call with Serbian President Miloševi when Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou began to defend the Serbs. The Greek leader said they felt vulnerable spread out in different states and were only defending their Orthodox religious faith. Chirac cut him off, according to witnesses. “Don’t speak to me about any religious war,” Chirac said, fuming. “These are people without any faith, without any sense of law; they are terrorists.”17
One Western diplomat with extensive experience in both Paris and the former Yugoslavia suggested the two most likely scenarios. Janvier may not have sensed the change in attitude in the new administration and brokered a deal with Mladi on his own. Or Janvier had secret instructions from Paris to cut a deal for the release of the hostages to solve the immediate problem of getting the hostages freed. Any deal, though, was not a long-term French conspiracy to sacrifice the enclaves launched only three weeks after Chirac took office.
Whether the French, the UN and the Serbs are telling the truth is difficult to determine. For various reasons, none of the parties would want such a deal—if one in fact existed—to be revealed.
It’s possible that language Chirac used during his phone calls to Miloševi at the time or Akashi’s “traditional peacekeeping” statement was interpreted by the Serbs as assurances. It’s also possible that an overt deal was, in fact, cut by French diplomats in Belgrade. The evidence, though, is not conclusive.
But Miloševi’s claim that Chirac told him air strikes would not occur without French approval is not an assurance of no further air strikes. Miloševi, desperate to curry favor with the West and free the hostages, may have lied and told the Bosnian Serbs he received a verbal assurance when he did not. The response to the hostage crisis may simply have been the latest in the series of knee-jerk, short-term Western reactions to another crisis in Bosnia.
Intentionally or unintentionally, the very public halting of the May 29 air strikes as soon as the hostages were taken made it clear to the Bosnian Serbs that they could stop NATO air attacks by threatening peacekeepers. Deal or no deal, the hostage crisis reinforced the message the United States, France, Britain and the UN kept repeating to the Bosnian Serbs throughout the war: the West does not have the will to stand up to you.
The two individuals who bear the brunt of responsibility for the lack of NATO Close Air Support are Yasushi Akashi and Bernard Janvier. Akashi agreed to two lengthy interviews for this book. Janvier, who rarely spoke to the press before Srebrenica’s fall, turned down interview requests from the media for several years. His refusal to speak fueled speculation that he was trying to hide something.
In 1999 and 2001, Janvier spoke with UN and French officials who carried out two investigations of what occurred in Srebrenica. Janvier denied cutting a deal to the UN investigators, according to their final report. In 2001, he repeated his denial in testimony to the French parliament.
“There has been no negotiation, no agreement with Mladi,” Janvier said. “I want to clarify so there is no ambiguity.”
Janvier insisted that air strikes would not have halted the Serb advance on Srebrenica. Their effectiveness, he argued, had been exaggerated. Only ground forces could have halted the Serb attack, according Janvier, who questioned why the Dutch did not put up more resistance. The former UN commander said he did not know Naser Ori had left the enclave. He concluded by saying the responsibility for the massacre lied with the Bosnian Serb commanders who carried it out.
Survivors from Srebrenica and other skeptics said they did not believe Janvier’s statements. They insisted a secret deal was struck and pointed to a series of statements that Janvier made before, during and after Srebrenica’s fall.
In his May 24, 1995, address to the Security Council, Janvier urged the UN to withdraw from the safe areas, which he said the Bosnian government were abusing and using to launch raids. During his June 9 debate with General Smith in Split he talked about withdrawal again.
“What would be most acceptable to the Serbs would be to leave the enclaves,” Janvier said. “It is the most realistic approach and it makes sense from a military point of view, but it is impossible for the international community to accept. … As long as the enclaves exist, we will be neutralized to an extent. In New York, I said the BH [Bosnians] should defend the safe areas. They are strong enough to do it. This was not well received at all.”
But Janvier’s statements and failure to approve Close Air Support in Srebrenica can be explained as vintage Janvier, not a decision to sacrifice Srebrenica. Except for the Close Air Support request he approved the day Srebrenica fell, he blocked every air strike or Close Air Support request he received that spring. Akashi and Janvier consistently upheld the view that NATO airpower was a blunt, dangerous and generally ineffective tool that enraged Bosnian Serbs and put peacekeepers at risk. The new, restrictive May 29, 1995, guidelines issued by Janvier on the use of NATO Close Air Support were a reflection of this belief. Issued five days before Janvier’s secret meeting with Mladi, they may indicate that there was no secret deal on air strikes—only Akashi and Janvier’s unwillingness to use them.
Serb nationalists in Bosnia and Croatia were viewed as fierce and dangerously rash by both men, according to aides. In one meeting Akashi wondered aloud whether the Serbs had a “Masada complex”—referring to the fortress city whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans.
Western diplomats complained that both men bought into the notion of Serb invincibility and irrationality—an image Serb nationalist leaders cultivated in meetings. The ever-defiant “Serb spirit” could not be bombed into submission. The “Serb warrior” would simply withdraw to the hills to fight an endless guerrilla war. All sides were seen as equally bad. Aides in Zagreb who were seen as pro-Bosnian were viewed skeptically, according to staffers. General Rupert Smith, Janvier frequently said, was in “le milieux Bošnjak” or Bosnian Muslim world in Sarajevo and therefore couldn’t see the war from the proper perspective.
The sixty-three-year-old Akashi dominated the relationship between the two men and strongly influenced General Janvier’s view of the conflict, according to aides. A thirty-three-year UN veteran, Akashi was an adamant adherent of traditional peacekeeping. Any hint of taking sides or using force against one side was anathema to the bright, but single-minded Japanese diplomat with a dry sense of humor. One aide went so far as to call Akashi a “peacenik.”
He was extremely uncomfortable with the enormous destructive power he wielded by controlling NATO air strikes. Akashi even had an eighteen-point checklist entitled “SRSG’s criteria for use of Close Air Support of United Nations.” The questions included “How is the reputation of UN likely to be affected by the use of Close Air Support?” and “What will be the impact of the use of Close Air Support on peacemaking efforts?” Playing for time, avoiding confrontation and constantly supporting more negotiations no matter how bad the situation were Akashi’s hallmarks.
Conservative and cautious, Akashi was the opposite of the naive but bold former UN commander General Philippe Morillon, who had saved Srebrenica in 1993. The aggressive style of the astute British UN commander in Bosnia, General Rupert Smith, was an anomaly as well in the cautious, slow-moving UN culture. General Smith left Sarajevo two days before the attack on Srebrenica began, and aides say the rumors that Smith left because he knew Srebrenica was going to be sacrificed are untrue. Sadly, the most influential proponent of the theory that the Serbs were going for broke in the summer of 1995 and needed to be confronted was on vacation.18
At times, Smith’s and Morillon’s boldness enabled them to embarrass or pressure Western capitals into giving the UN more of the political backing and military resources it needed to carry out its mission in Bosnia. Akashi’s and Janvier’s cautiousness, on the other hand, allowed Western governments to blame Akashi for the failures of the impossible UN mission, diverting responsibility from the countries that lacked the political will to confront the Serbs and suffer politically unpopular casualties.
Janvier’s May 24 address to the UN Security Council about the safe areas can be viewed as either Machiavellian or misguided. He was wrong when he stated that Bosnian government forces in Srebrenica and the other four isolated enclaves were strong enough to defend themselves. But he was correct in maintaining that the isolated peacekeepers in the enclaves were ready hostages the Serbs could use to cow the West.
Two months later, General Rupert Smith removed British peacekeepers from Goražde at the end of August and the strategy worked. It allowed NATO jets to pound Serb targets for two weeks without fear of UN hostages being taken. The difference was that Smith saw the Serbs as abusing their advantage in firepower. Janvier, on the other hand, viewed the Muslims as abusing the safe areas to draw the UN into fighting the war for them.
According to senior civilian UN staffers, Janvier was more in over his head than Machiavellian. He was generally considered the least competent of the four UN Force Commanders who served in the former Yugoslavia.19
A key element in Janvier’s thinking was an apparent belief that he could do business with the Bosnian Serbs. Janvier may have turned down the crucial request for Close Air Support on the night before the town fell because he sincerely believed General Tolimir’s promise the Serb attack had stopped. Janvier was quick to believe Serb propaganda and Mladi’s complaints about Muslim provocations, according to aides. Janvier argued in the June 9 meeting in Split that the Serbs would no longer defy the UN if they were treated with respect.
Bernard Janvier and Yasushi Akashi both said there were no clear instructions from Paris or New York during the attack on Srebrenica. Akashi said Janvier was pressured by Paris several times—including during the hostage crisis—but Srebrenica was not one of them. Interviewed by Gutman, the aide said that the problem during Srebrenica was a lack of instructions. He described the situation as “chaotic.” “When Srebrenica happened we were upset because of a lack of decisions and orders,” the aide said. “Janvier was left out on a limb by himself.”20
Akashi said that Janvier “agonized” over whether to use Close Air Support in Srebrenica during the final days of the attack. Janvier told him he could not understand why the Serbs would take the safe area, something Janvier also said during the Close Air Support deliberations the night before Srebrenica fell. Following the same logic of CIA analysts, Akashi said Janvier didn’t think the Bosnian Serbs would want to risk provoking the international community.
Janvier, a longtime infantry commander, also advised Akashi that air strikes would not stop advancing troops in the Srebrenica area because of the terrain. Echoing the thinking of Colin Powell earlier in the war and the consensus among French commanders, Janvier said that air support would be totally ineffective. Janvier’s military analysis of the effectiveness of air attacks may have simply been wrong.
Taking the extraordinary step of deciding to sacrifice a UN safe area on his own without the permission of his superiors does not fit into Janvier’s character, according to supporters and detractors. “This was a man who should’ve been selling roasted chestnuts on the streets of Paris,” said one former UNPROFOR official. “Not making these kinds of decisions.”
Whether Janvier was cynical or misguided, he is more responsible than any other individual for the fall of Srebrenica. The restrictions on the use of airpower that he actively endorsed and his decision not to approve Close Air Support on Monday, July 10, had disastrous results. He did not take “the necessary measures, including the use of force” to deter attacks on the safe area as Resolution 836 charged him. More than any other UN official, he betrayed the people of Srebrenica.
Supporters and detractors of Janvier agree on one point: he was a by-the-book general who closely followed orders. If Janvier were told to save or sacrifice Srebrenica, he would have done what he was told. But if there was an international conspiracy against Srebrenica, the Bosnian government, the Clinton administration and the new administration of French President Jacques Chirac would have had to agree on the plan. The Bosnians needed to neutralize the enclave’s defense by pulling out Naser Ori, Janvier needed to block Close Air Support requests from UN officials not in on the conspiracy and the Clinton administration would have had to suppress intelligence on the Bosnian Serb buildup around the enclave.
Suspicions about what U.S. intelligence knew about the attack on Srebrenica and subsequent executions have been high. The CIA, the theory goes, knew of the pending attack and knew the town would fall. The United States then stood by as Srebrenica fell and an enclave that didn’t fit into Anthony Lake’s endgame strategy was eliminated. Aerial photos of suspected mass graves, according to the theory, were suppressed until after the executions were well over to avoid embarrassment and the United States being called on to stop the killing.
But senior officials in the National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon and CIA all deny intentionally or tacitly sacrificing Srebrenica. The United States underestimated the seriousness of what was occurring in Srebrenica, they say, due to an honest failure of the CIA to correctly assess Serb intentions. Like the UN, the CIA believed that the Serbs did not intend to take the entire safe area. On Sunday, July 9, the Serb attack was “most likely to punish the Bosnian government for offensives in Sarajevo and a means to press a cease-fire,” according to the daily CIA intelligence brief circulated to senior U.S. officials in the National Intelligence Daily.21 On Monday, July 10, the day before the town fell, the assessment was unchanged. The CIA believed that the Serbs would not take the town, in large part, because they did not want to deal with the tens of thousands of civilians inhabiting it.22
Officials in charge of monitoring Bosnia for the CIA, Pentagon and National Security Council say they believed until the day Srebrenica fell that General Mladi would never dare take a UN safe area and risk provoking the West.
The UN intelligence assessment in Zagreb matched and may have influenced the CIA’s in Washington. But UN officials were missing crucial information. UN intelligence analysts knew little about the deep desire among Bosnian Serbs for revenge against Naser Ori. Through little fault of their own, they had minimal experience in Bosnia and knew little about Srebrenica’s history. To make contributing peacekeepers more palatable to governments, the UN rotated most peacekeepers out of the former Yugoslavia after six months.
The gaps in the UN command chain were glaring. Officials in Zagreb never received reports of the mortars, the tank, the howitzer and the troops the Dutch hostages witnessed on the enclave’s eastern front line en route to Bratunac on July 8 and July 9.23 Somehow, the crucial reports were lost in the UN labyrinth that ran from the Dutch in Srebrenica to the UN’s Sector Northeast command in Tuzla, to the UN’s Bosnia-Herzegovina command in Sarajevo, to UN headquarters in Zagreb.
The disorganization was representative of a far larger problem. Intelligence operations were anathema to the traditional UN concept of peacekeeping. The UN prided itself on operating with complete “transparency,” meaning that all parties it was dealing with were to be aware of all UN activities. Mounting any kind of covert intelligence-gathering operation was barred. The primary sources of information for the UN were Military Observers—officers who drove around the former Yugoslavia in white four-wheel-drive vehicles with “Military Observer” emblazoned on the side. Their access to certain areas was blocked whenever Croat, Serb or Muslim forces found it convenient.
The UN was also infamous for leaking information. NATO and national intelligence agencies, especially American ones, dreaded giving information to the UN because they feared it would quickly be leaked and made public and secret sources and methods would then be exposed. American officers occupied senior positions in the UN intelligence units in Zagreb and Sarajevo because they had access to sensitive U.S. intelligence, and could tightly control it. Private, informal meetings were sometimes held between the Americans and UN officers from other NATO nations—such as France, Britain or Holland—where sensitive information was discussed. But in larger group meetings attended by officers from other countries, such as Russia, the information was not mentioned, or it was deliberately kept vague.
The most potent form of American intelligence in Bosnia was aerial surveillance. U.S. satellites and spy planes photographed hundreds of miles of territory as they passed over the former Yugoslavia every few days, as Captain Groen in Srebrenica suspected.24 In the spring of 1995, the United States had also begun deploying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, with high-tech surveillance equipment—including videotape cameras—over Bosnia. But the system was not operational in early July, according to Pentagon officials.25
U.S. spy planes and satellites, intelligence officials argue, did not see all. When a Serb missile shot down U.S. pilot Scott O’Grady on June 2, NATO and the Pentagon were stunned. The Bosnian Serbs had dismantled an existing SAM-6 missile in northern Bosnia and secretly transported it by truck to a new location a hundred miles away. U.S. intelligence spotted the system the day before O’Grady was shot down, but the information didn’t get to O’Grady’s commander. O’Grady did not know there were any missiles in the area. The Serbs had fired the missile first, and then turned on the radar that guides the missile to its target, giving O’Grady almost no warning his plane was being tracked.
Strict new rules for flights over Bosnia were subsequently established. One of them was that NATO planes were to fly over with an escort that could jam SAM missiles and avoid, when possible, areas where SAM missiles were. A SAM site was located near Han Pijesak southwest of Srebrenica. NATO Southern Europe commander Admiral Smith said reconnaissance missions would have to include electronic warfare planes but were still possible. Smith said he received no request from the Dutch military or the UN for the aerial photos Captain Groen so desperately wanted in Srebrenica.
But the deputy commander in Srebrenica, Major Robert Franken, said the Dutch requested UN and NATO intelligence on a suspected buildup in the area from his UN superiors in Sarajevo twice in June and for a third time in July only two days before the July 6 attack. After a UNHCR worker visiting Srebrenica on July 4 saw artillery moving toward Bratunac, Franken wanted to know what aerial photography of the region showed. Franken said he was told the June 3 attack on OP Echo was a local action, there were no indications of a large attack; and that flying within the SAM ring around Srebrenica, which included an active site in Sase only five miles outside the enclave, was judged not worth the risk.
“Someone had to have seen what was going on,” said Franken. “That they didn’t is fucking nonsense.”
On the day the town fell, the reconnaissance photos made available to the UN26 showed a potential attack coming from only four Serb tanks deployed to the south of the enclave. Possibly viewing the conflict on a NATO—not Bosnian—scale, UN intelligence officials concluded that there wasn’t enough equipment to take the enclave. American satellites and spy planes should probably have spotted the artillery, tank and multiple rocket launcher to the east of the enclave and the multiple rocket launcher in Bratunac. According to intelligence officials in both Washington and Zagreb at the time, their honest assessment was that, despite the Serb build-up, it would be illogical for the Serbs to risk provoking the West by taking an entire safe area.
Warnings about the Serbs’ intentions were ignored by the UN, the United States and NATO. In a March 1995 memorandum, the head of the UN intelligence unit in Sarajevo predicted that the Serbs would try to sweep across eastern Bosnia that summer and take all three enclaves. Each day, according to the analysis, the Bosnian Muslims were smuggling more weapons into the country and their army was becoming better armed and organized. The outnumbered Bosnian Serbs realized that time was against them. The analysis predicted that the Serbs would launch one final offensive in the summer of 1995, try to take the safe areas and sue for peace from a position of strength in the fall.
Four months later, the assessment—one of several produced by the UN—and other warnings sent in May and June had apparently been buried. Just before the attack on Srebrenica was launched, the UN intelligence analyst who wrote the report voluntarily went on vacation.
There is also no concrete evidence of the United States suppressing the aerial photos of suspected mass graves. Analysts involved in finding the graves insist they only began the time consuming process of searching the hundreds of thousands of images of the Srebrenica area after the specific Nova Kasaba tip arrived. Madeleine Albright publicly distributed photos, she said in an interview, as quickly as possible.
U.S. diplomats deny they cut any secret deals involving the enclave. U.S. special envoy Robert Frasure did carry out talks with all three sides during the spring of 1995, but Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials say the talks focused on lifting UN economic sanctions on Serbia, not trading the enclaves.
It is unlikely that there was a vast, preplanned international conspiracy to sacrifice Srebrenica. It is unlikely that Muslim and Serb leaders, after three years of merciless fighting, would trust their enemies to honor a trade. It is unlikely French President Chirac, who was inaugurated on May 17, could plan a conspiracy or would approve an inherited conspiracy only two months into office. It is also unlikely that the Clinton administration, focused on the 1996 elections, would see the war in Bosnia as a large enough political priority to risk being caught planning and carrying out an insidious scheme that would endanger the lives of 450 Dutch soldiers and 40,000 Bosnian Muslims.
France and the United States would have had to agree not to tell their closest ally—Britain—of a plan that would have a destabilizing impact in a country where 4,000 British peacekeepers were stationed. If the British were informed, then somehow the three nations who were so bitterly divided over what to do in the former Yugoslavia for three years would have miraculously agreed to a risky conspiracy to end the unpredictable war. Two factors—Bosnia not being important enough for a politically dangerous conspiracy to be launched and the West’s inability to agree on what to do there—argue most powerfully against a premeditated plan.
If there was a conspiracy, it was a tacit one. The West, the Bosnian government, as well as Akashi and Janvier, let events run their course and a troublesome enclave was eliminated. The fall of Srebrenica and Žepa simplified the geographic division of Bosnia and eased the reaching of a peace agreement.
UN, American, European and Bosnian officials, though, vehemently deny sacrificing the town. “We are not that cynical,” Akashi said.27
In the end, the most blame and the largest responsibility lie with the men who ordered the executions. Srebrenica’s fall would have been largely ignored if it had not been so bloody.
On the night of Thursday, July 13, 1995, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadži and Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladi held thousands of lives in their hands. Between 1,000 and 2,000 Muslim prisoners were crammed inside warehouses and buses around Bratunac that night. Serb soldiers, except those around the warehouse in Kravica, had clearly been given orders to gather prisoners but not kill them. What led the two leaders to make the decision is both simple and at the same time incomprehensible.
Both men appear to have been driven by a classic, deep-rooted racism that lay at the core of their nationalism. The Muslim prisoners around Bratunac that night were things that “bred” too quickly. The prisoners were also an opportunity for Mladi and Karadži to make a dramatic historical statement.
For them, the fall of Srebrenica was part of the Serb people’s centuries-old struggle against Islam and the Turks. It was an opportunity to avenge the Serbs killed in the Srebrenica area during World War II and an opportunity to wipe out several thousand soldiers whom the manpower-short Bosnian Serb Army would face again if they were exchanged.
One of Mladi’s first statements when he entered Srebrenica—his vow to take revenge on the “Turks” for Serbs killed in the area in the 1804 “rebellion of the Dahijas”—appears to be self-explanatory. Mladi’s father, who fought with Tito’s Partisans, was killed by fascist Croats allied with Nazi Germany—Ustaša—during World War II. Mladi was only two years old at the time. The general’s first name comes from the SerboCroatian word rat, or war. Ratko literally means “of the war” or “warlike.” Karadži’s father survived a mass execution carried out by Tito’s Partisans during World War II. Karadži, a psychologist who lived and practiced in Sarajevo, later said he felt as if he had never been accepted in the multiethnic city. Nationalism brought him the success that had eluded him earlier in life.28
The years of haphazard and weak-kneed U.S. and European policy inflated Mladi’s and Karadži’s real and imagined power. For the last three years, Radovan Karadži had outthought, outmaneuvered and outnegotiated what he believed were the most sophisticated diplomats in the world. Time and again, Karadži easily derailed or dismembered peace plans.
Mladi, a military commander who had a 400-to-50 advantage in tanks over his enemy, had twice halted the most powerful fighting force on earth—NATO—by taking 350 UN peacekeepers hostage in May 1995 and 55 Dutch peacekeepers hostage in July. Mladi was at the height of his military strength after the fall of Srebrenica. His delusional belief in his own power was at its zenith.
Karadži and Mladi ordered the manhunt and mass execution of Srebrenica’s men because they wanted to, because they could and because they were confident that no one would ever hold them accountable for it.
UNPROFOR The United Nations Protection Force mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina officially ended on December 20, 1995. In a brief transfer-of-authority ceremony in Sarajevo, UN Force Commander Bernard Janvier turned over the responsibility for peacekeeping in Bosnia to Admiral Leighton Smith of the United States, the commander of the U.S.-led NATO Implementation Force. Smaller UN peacekeeping operations would continue in neighboring Croatia and nearby Macedonia, but the UN’s largest, most expensive and most deadly peacekeeping operation was over.
In all, 210 peacekeepers died during the mission’s nearly four-year deployment. Supporters argued that the UN mission saved the lives of over one million Muslims by facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid when possible. Critics held that it prolonged the war and in some cases—such as Srebrenica—facilitated the deaths of thousands of Muslims.
As of 2011, no Bosnian, UN or Dutch official has been reprimanded for what occurred.
YASUSHI AKASHI The UN Special Representative for the former Yugoslavia returned to UN headquarters in New York in October 1995 and was promoted to Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.
In an interview for this book, the Japanese diplomat blamed the UN Security Council for giving the UN mission in Bosnia a safe-areas mandate without the soldiers needed to enforce it. He argued that even if Close Air Support had been approved several days earlier in Srebrenica, it would not have halted a determined Bosnian Serb attack on the safe area. Akashi has repeatedly said that he and General Janvier made no major mistakes during the fall of Srebrenica.
GENERAL BERNARD JANVIER The UN Force Commander in the former Yugoslavia returned to France in February 1996 and was named director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Militaires—a prestigious government think tank. The new position was, at best, a lateral move. Janvier hoped to win the prestigious post of commander of the French Land Army, but President Jacques Chirac—reportedly unhappy with Janvier’s performance in Bosnia—rejected him.
DUTCH DEFENSE MINISTER JORIS VOORHOEVE At first, Voorhoeve managed to survive the scandal surrounding the fall of Srebrenica. His reputation for personal integrity saved him. In 1998, he resigned as defense minister and left Dutch politics. As of 2011, he was a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL THOMAS KARREMANS While Dutch Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve was on vacation in the fall of 1995, the Dutch Army promoted Karremans from lieutenant colonel to full colonel. He was transferred to the Dutch embassy in Washington and participated in a training program in Virginia. Karremans initially refused to speak to journalists about Srebrenica.
One year after the fall of Srebrenica, Karremans again sparked controversy. In testimony before the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in July 1996, Karremans failed to mention his initial opposition to the use of Close Air Support, confusion in the mostly Dutch UN command chain over Close Air Support versus air strikes and his statements to Srebrenica’s leaders that they should withdraw their troops from the “zone of death” that was going to be created by NATO south of Srebrenica town.
Under follow-up questioning from Judge Fouad Riad of Egypt, Karremans stated that he held another meeting with General Mladi on Friday, July 14. But in the meeting, Karremans failed to ask about the elderly Muslim men who were separated from their families in Poto
ari. “To be frank,” Karremans told Riad, Judge Odio Benito of Italy and Judge Claude Jorda of France, “I [had] not thought about the idea of asking him what happened with the refugees.”
On the streets of the Netherlands, Karremans was recognized and publicly ridiculed by his countrymen. Some shouted “coward!” when they saw him. After serving in the United States, Karremans was posted in Germany and Spain by the Dutch military. Karremans eventually retired and settled in Spain. He cannot live in Holland, he said, because of the hostility he faced there.
MAJOR ROBERT FRANKEN Returning home, the deputy UN commander in Srebrenica commanded his own unit in Holland. After turning down all requests for one year, he gave his first interview regarding the fall of Srebrenica to Dutch television in July 1996. He maintained that the outgunned Dutch could have done nothing more to halt the Serb attack or protect the enclave’s civilians. He faxed the list of the 239 men to the Dutch government from Potoari, and blamed the UN and Dutch officials for failing to publicize the list of men forced to leave the UN base. All 239 men on the list perished. The Dutch major pointed out that his soldiers identified at least thirty-eight Serb tank, artillery or troop encampments around the enclave. Franken, who was told by Serbs that 6,000 soldiers participated in the attack, believed U.S. spy satellites must have seen the buildup around the town.
CAPTAIN JELTE GROEN One of the first people the commander of the southern half of the safe area spoke to when he arrived back in Holland was the mother of Raviv van Renssen. He assured her that the peacekeeper killed by a Muslim hand grenade was one of the finest men in his company.
Two years after the fall of the town Captain Groen was still an officer in the 13th Air Mobile Battalion and planned to stay in the Dutch military for the remainder of his career. He still believed that trying to fight the Serbs would have been hopeless. Not firing directly at the Serbs prevented an even worse massacre in Srebrenica, he said, one that could have involved more of the enclave’s women and children.
LIEUTENANT VINCENT EGBERS Shortly after he arrived in Zagreb on July 21, the Dutch officer was interviewed by Dutch journalists. Lieutenant Egbers failed to mention the prisoners on the Nova Kasaba soccer field, the shots heard by the Dutch during the night and the abused prisoners he had seen. Egbers said he assumed his commanders would mention them in their press conference.
In the summer of 1996, Egbers left the Dutch Army, which was drastically cutting back its size, to study for a master’s degree. He hoped to join the Dutch Air Force after graduation. He vehemently argued that there was nothing more the Dutch could have done in Srebrenica. The politicians who put the peacekeepers in the hopeless situation were to blame, he said, not the soldiers.
LIEUTENANT LEEN VAN DUIJN The Dutch peacekeeper who agreed to work with the Serbs to control the crowd of Muslims in Potoari remained in the Dutch Army and defended his actions.
He rejected charges that making an agreement with the Serbs to control the crowd was “collaborating.” It would have been worse if the Dutch simply retreated to their base, he argued, and watched the Serbs abuse Muslim civilians as they were expelled. What he did was not aiding the Serbs, van Duijn contended, but saving lives.
LIEUTENANT EELCO KOSTER The pictures he and the other peacekeepers took of the nine bodies, including the one of Koster posing next to them, were on the roll of film that the Ministry of Defense “accidentally” destroyed. Koster, who believes he risked his life by taking the photos, believes the Dutch government intentionally destroyed the film to cover up the scandal.
PRIVATE MARC KLAVER The lookout in OP Foxtrot and one of the peacekeepers who formed the human wall in Potoari returned to Holland with the rest of the battalion on July 24. His brother Tonny, who suffered from cystic fibrosis, died the day before his arrival.
Klaver pointed out that the much-maligned 13th Air Mobile Battalion, still consisting of many men who were in Srebrenica, beat an elite American armored unit in a war game in the summer of 1996. Klaver planned to stay in the army, but had nothing but resentment against the Muslim who killed his fellow lookout Raviv van Renssen. He believed van Renssen died a pointless and meaningless death in Bosnia.
Depressed by the criticism aimed at the Dutch battalion by his peers in the military and by the public, he felt it would have been better if the seven peacekeepers in OP Foxtrot had fought the Serb tanks closing in on them and been killed. “Maybe if more Dutch boys died defending the town,” he told me, “it wouldn’t have been so easy for them [the politicians] to sacrifice Srebrenica.”
PRIVATE RAVIV VAN RENSSEN The soldier killed by Muslims after the fall of OP Foxtrot, was buried in the Dutch National Military Cemetery in Arnhem. Defense Minister Voorhoeve and every member of Captain Groen’s Bravo Company attended a memorial service for him on July 26.
His mother, Magda Prins, was divorced and lived alone in the small town van Renssen grew up in, Sgraveland. On the wall of her living room was a large photograph of the peacekeepers from OP Foxtrot carrying her son’s coffin draped in the light blue flag of the United Nations.
When she thought of the women from Srebrenica who had lost their sons, fathers and husbands she was overwhelmed by the scope of their anguish. She said she tries to “cradle” her pain and not let it make her bitter. She said she doesn’t let herself think about whether her son’s death was meaningless or not.
BOSNIAN PRESIDENT ALIJA IZETBEGOVI
The Muslim nationalist leader who portrayed himself to the West during the war as a believer in a multiethnic Bosnia ran an overtly nationalist reelection campaign in 1996. One of the main campaign slogans of his nationalist Party of Democratic Action (SDA) was “Croats know who they’re going to vote for, Serbs know who they’re going to vote for … And you?”
Playing on Muslim fears, Izetbegovi’s Party of Democratic Action was reelected. His party systematically removed many Serbs and Croats from top positions, even if they had remained loyal to the Muslim-led government. After serving as president until 2000, Izetbegovi died in 2003.
NASER ORI In June 1996, Ori and several business partners opened a floating restaurant on the shores of a lake just outside of Tuzla, located at a prime spot on a stretch of beaches and restaurants. It was rumored that Ori’s profits from black marketeering in Srebrenica paid for the construction of the floating platform of two dozen tables and a bar.
Ori denied ever being involved in black marketeering, saying that he was “just a small businessman.” When asked whether he had a message for General Milenko Živanovi, the commander of the Bosnian Serb Drina Corps, which led the attack on Srebrenica, Ori replied, “Tell him the score is one to nothing.”
In 2003, the Hague tribunal indicted Ori for command responsibility in the killing of seven Serb civilians in the Srebrenica police headquarters in 1992 and 1993. It also indicted him for leading dozens of raids against Serb controlled towns around the enclave.
Several weeks later, NATO forces arrested Ori and he was sent to The Hague. In 2004, the Tribunal convicted Ori of failing to prevent the murder of the seven Serbs but acquitted him of the other charges. He was sentenced to two years in prison, a term that infuriated Bosnian Serbs.
In 2006, an appeals court reversed the verdict. Ori was set free and returned to Bosnia. The rulings further incensed Bosnian Serbs. They insisted that Ori had killed hundreds of Serb civilians during the course of the war. The treatment of Ori convinced them that the tribunal was biased against Serbs and lenient on Muslims.
RAMIZ BEIROVI Srebrenica’s acting commander during the attack, Beirovi and four of Srebrenica’s five brigade commanders survived the walk through the woods. Many of the officers also reached central Bosnia. He denied that he or his wife absconded with any of the $20,000 in charity money for orphans that had not yet been distributed when Srebrenica fell. He claimed that his wife, who fled to Potoari, threw the $20,000 in a dumpster outside the Dutch base when she heard the Serbs were searching people. Several years after the war, Beirovi died of cancer.
FAHRUDIN SALIHOVI AND OSMAN SULJI Salihovi, the town’s mayor, and Sulji, the war president, at first took over aid distribution for Srebrenica’s refugees in Tuzla and were rumored to again be pilfering money. Salihovi immigrated to Switzerland. As of 2011, he worked as a security guard at a UN building in Geneva.
Sulji remained in Bosnia and helped coordinate efforts by Bosnian Muslims to move back to Srebrenica. Violent demonstrations by local Serbs blocked initial attempts, but by 2005 a $21 million program funded by the United States, Europe and Canada resulted in 2,500 Bosnian Muslims returning to the town. Most of the returnees settled in outlying villages long controlled by Muslims. After the resettlements, the Srebrenica area’s population became 35 percent Muslim and 65 percent Serb. Before the war, Muslims made up 65 percent of the population. In 2008, Sulji was elected mayor of Srebrenica. Soon after, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
MIDO SALIHOVI AND IBRAN MALAGI The two men who helped lead the fight to defend Srebrenica survived, but their fathers did not. Ibran Malagi and his brothers believe they are the only three brothers from one family to have survived the walk to Tuzla. Their father went to Potoari, was seized by the Serbs and went missing. Two of Mido Salihovi’s brothers survived, but his youngest brother—who was last seen near the Kamenica ambush—disappeared. Salihovi’s father went to the Dutch base in Potoari, was taken away by the Serbs and disappeared as well.
Several years after the war, Salihovi paid for he and his family to be smuggled to Sweden. During the trip, they nearly suffocated in the back of a truck. After arriving, they were granted asylum.
EDHEM LUANIN AND HAŠIM MUSTAFI The two former teachers of Bosnian Serb police officer Zoran Radi survived and settled in Tuzla. Mustafi lived with his wife, and Luanin with his wife and ninety-four-year-old mother. Following Radi’s instructions not to identify him, Luanin refused to name the Serb who saved his life. A prisoner whom Radi helped earlier in the war led the author to the compassionate policeman.
Luanin worked part-time for a Bosnian aid agency and stayed in touch with many refugees from Srebrenica. He knew of only three other cases in which a Serb saved a former Muslim friend and helped him escape.
VAHID HODŽI The translator who narrowly escaped his run-in with General Mladi outside the Dutch base, left Potoari with the Dutch and reached Zagreb. After the war, he went to college in Sarajevo, and his mother resettled in a formerly Serb town so full of people from the fallen safe area that refugees renamed it “Srebrenica.” After studying in Sarajevo, Hodži immigrated to the United States and settled in Des Moines, Iowa. The translator’s father and fifteen-year-old brother died in the executions.
HASAN NUHANOVI The entire family of the translator, whose brother, father and mother were forced to leave the Dutch base, were killed. According to eyewitnesses, Nuhanovi’s brother and father were immediately separated from his mother after they left the base. Nuhanovi’s father, who was one of the civilian negotiators,29 is believed to have been killed as soon as the truck full of men crossed into Serb-held Bratunac. It is not known where Nuhanovi’s brother perished.
His mother was last seen in Tiša, where the buses carrying women and children dropped people off for the four-mile walk to Muslim-held central Bosnia. Babbling incoherently about Hasan’s brother, she was last seen walking back into Serb territory.
In the years after the fall of the town, Nuhanovi emerged as one of its heroes. He married, had a daughter and worked tirelessly to publicize the crimes in Srebrenica and hold Bosnian Serb ultra-nationalists and Dutch commanders responsible for their actions. For years, he patiently gave interviews to journalists about what happened to his family on the Dutch base. He traveled to the Netherlands repeatedly, creating so much pressure that the Dutch government funded numerous programs to aid Srebrenica survivors and intensely pushed for the arrest of Serb war criminals.
In an effort to prevent future victims from being abandoned by the UN, he found a lawyer in the Netherlands and sued the Dutch military officers who forced his family to leave the base in Potoari. The case wound its way through the Dutch court system for nine years, with lower courts dismissing the claim. In a surprise verdict on July 6, 2011, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the Dutch state was responsible for the death of Nuhanovi’s three family members and Rizo Mustafi, an electrician who worked on the base and was also forced to leave. The landmark ruling set a precedent where governments no longer had legal immunity for the actions of soldiers who serve as UN peacekeepers.
In Bosnia, Nuhanovi filed a court case against the Bosnian Serb who he was told killed his mother. He planned to file a case against Mladi as well. A patient and articulate voice of Srebrenica’s victims, his family would be proud of the extraordinary advocate he became.
HAKIJA HUSEJNOVI The man who survived the massacre in the warehouse settled with his family in central Bosnia. After a flurry of interviews after he crossed into central Bosnia, interest in his story died out.
He was elated when American troops arrived in Bosnia, but bitterly disappointed when they made no effort to arrest General Ratko Mladi. In an interview in 2005, he said he believed Mladi would never be arrested. That year, Husejnovi moved back to his village in Sueska outside Srebrenica with his family.
AMILA OMANOVI Evacuated from Potoari with the wounded on July 17, amila found her children the following day by telephoning a house where she was told they were staying. When she heard their voices, she was unable to speak.
For three months she received psychological counseling and withdrew into a circle of close friends and family. In October 1995, she finally gave her first interview, to Elizabeth Neuffer of The Boston Globe. She then refused to speak to journalists for another three months.
amila’s daughter, her husband and their son Naser—like thousands of other refugees from Srebrenica—moved into an apartment abandoned by Serbs when the suburbs around Sarajevo were turned over to the Muslim-led government. amila and her son Dermin settled outside Tuzla. Every household in her neighborhood had a man who was missing.
amila’s husband, Ahmet, never emerged from the forest. At first, she clung to the idea that maybe one of Ahmet’s former Serb co-workers spared him and that he was being held in a secret prison camp. She told herself he would be used to rebuild the zinc factory in Potoari. Killing such a gifted engineer, she believed, would be senseless.
Several years later, her husband was identified as one of the dead at an ambush site. His head and one of his arms was missing. She insisted he be buried at a memorial that was being built in Potoari across the street from the abandoned Dutch base.
In 2004, Camila accepted a job as a bookkeeper at the memorial and moved back to Srebrenica. Her office was in the same factory where she tried to kill herself. One of the teenage boys who helped save her was a town policeman; the other was a guard at the memorial.
When I visited Srebrenica in 2005 for the tenth anniversary of the town’s fall, I met with Camila. She said that being close to her husband’s grave drew her back.
“It’s the contentment of the soul,” she told me. “I feel close to him. I go to the grave.”
In Srebrenica, Camila lived on a street of abandoned houses. Her only neighbors were eight other Muslim widows. Ignoring rumors that the town was haunted, they restarted a competition that honors Srebrenica’s most beautiful garden. Amid the abandoned houses of the dead, pockets of carefully nurtured red roses, white lilies and yellow carnations bloomed.
“I would like this town to be like it used to be,” she said.
When she met her husband’s former assistant, a Serbian woman, they embraced. The Serb trembled and wept, she recalled. In line at the local bank, Serbs waved Ms. Camila to the front.
But she and other residents said the town’s Muslims and Serbs inhabited parallel worlds. They rarely socialized. Both sides, they said, hid their true emotions.
“They are very polite, they kiss me,” Camila told me. “After everything that happened, I know it’s just acting.”
In 2007, Camila died of a stroke.
HUREM SULJI Of the hundreds of mostly elderly men separated from their families in Potoari, Hurem Sulji was the only survivor.
After arriving in Tuzla and telling the police his story, Sulji got a ride to the nearby town where he heard his family was staying. When he hobbled into the house, his wife and daughter wept. His granddaughter Merima was the most excited. She sat next to him on the couch for hours, refusing to let go of his arm.
Men who turned back at the blocked asphalt road and returned to Sulji’s village said they found his paralyzed cousin still alive in mid-July. But they, too, eventually abandoned him.
After seeing that NATO troops were not enforcing the guarantee that people be allowed to return to their homes, Sulji moved to a home abandoned by Serbs outside Sarajevo. Sulji, who was religious before the war, found solace in Islam. He was remarkably calm, considering what he had endured, and made no calls for revenge. He blamed Serb nationalists for Srebrenica, and said he was willing to live with “good Serbs” again. When asked what he would do if his Serb executioners were lined up in front of him and he was handed a gun, he said he would be unable to pull the trigger. Hurem said he had seen enough killing. He only asked that General Ratko Mladi be tried.
MEVLUDIN ORI Ori quickly found his mother, wife and daughter on the UN base in Tuzla. He broke down as he told them his story, but he cried the hardest when he located the young wife of his cousin Haris and his infant daughter Lejla.
Mevludin went about the grim task of informing the relatives of the other neighbors he had seen in the Grbavi gym. One was Haso Hasanovi, the sixteen-year-old from Lehovii who was captured near the Kravica warehouse and escaped when he was sent to fetch water. Haso had been captured again in Konjevi Polje but spared with three other young boys when a Serb officer arrived and said the children should be separated.30 Haso’s father had not been so lucky. Mevludin had seen him in the Grbavi gym. Haso accepted that his fifty-nine-year-old father was gone, but his mother refused to believe it, arguing that he might somehow still be alive.31
In Tuzla, Mevludin lived like most of Srebrenica’s 30,000 other impoverished refugees. He and his family moved into an overcrowded elementary school turned refugee camp. For the next year, he, his wife, mother, daughter and a newborn daughter shared a chemistry classroom with thirty-five other people. The 120 refugees who lived in the school shared one bathroom.
Mevludin grudgingly gave up his hopes of returning to Lehovii and moved in the summer of 1996 to a house abandoned by Serbs outside Sarajevo. His former village lay in ruins. Makso Zeki, the Serb who vowed to burn Mevludin’s house to the ground, apparently kept his word. Journalists who visited Lehovii found all twenty-five houses burned or dynamited. Bricks, wiring and anything else of value had been looted.32
Of the forty-five men from Lehovii who set off with Mevludin and his father on July 12, only fifteen survived. Four out of five of the village’s men are dead. One woman and one boy perished as well.
The male sides of entire families were wiped out. Fifty-six-year-old Sevko Hasanovi and his twenty-five-year-old son Sefik died.
Osman Hasanovi, fifty-four, the former Yugoslav National Army officer, survived. But his brothers, Ismet, fifty-two, and Nusret, forty-three, were killed. Ismet’s son Jusuf, eighteen, is also dead. Redzep Hasanovi, the village giant with the basketball hoop, perished. His wife and two teenage children waited in vain for him in Tuzla.
Mevlida Hasanovi is typical of women from Lehovii and Srebrenica. Her two sons and husband are dead. Her daughter-in-law’s husband, father and brother are dead. Her grandson has no father, no uncles and no grandfathers.33
For months, Mevludin Ori had a secret plan. When called before the International War Crimes Tribunal to testify at the trial of General Ratko Mladi, he would remain calm and get as close to Mladi as possible. When the opportunity came, he would lunge for Mladi’s throat and avenge his cousin Haris’ death. But as the years passed Mevludin gave up on the plan. He thought Mladi would never be tried.
Like Hurem Sulji, Mevludin believes that Serb nationalists are responsible for what happened in Srebrenica, not all Serbs. He too says he is willing to live with Serbs again and even scolds neighbors who criticize Serbs as a group.
During one drunken evening in March 1996, he sat down between two men he had become friends with since arriving in Tuzla. “This man, this man,” Mevludin said, putting his arm around the man to his left. “This man is my greatest friend and he is a Croat.”
Putting his arm around the man to his right, he said, “This man is my greatest friend and he is a Serb.”
Mevludin pulled each man’s face close to his.
“This is my Bosnia,” he said. “This is my Bosnia.”
Mevludin moved to the United States for several years in the late 1990s but eventually returned home. He settled with his family in a suburb of Sarajevo. As of 2011, he had patiently told his story countless times to journalists and researchers. He had testified in numerous trials at The Hague. Mevludin had courageously served as a voice for Srebrenica’s execution victims while refusing to blame all Serbs for the killings. His father was among the dead.
ZORAN RADI A broad grin spread across Zoran Radi’s face when he was told in June 1996 that his old high school teacher—Edhem Luanin—was alive and well in Tuzla. Radi, who quit being a policeman shortly after the war ended, wanted Luanin to know that his former student was now a cook at the hotel where Luanin once instructed him.
After the war ended, Radi moved back to Srebrenica, but he knew few people. Serb refugees from Sarajevo neighborhoods turned over to the Muslim-led government under the peace accord filled most of the town’s abandoned houses. The cash-short Bosnian Serb government struggled to repair the town’s damaged infrastructure. Eighteen months after the “liberation” of Srebrenica, the town had no telephone service and running water only every other day.
Radi said he still doesn’t view people by what they were; he judges them by what they did. But echoing state-controlled television, he said he believes the war was a good thing. If it wasn’t for Radovan Karadži’s Serbian Democratic Party, he said, Serbs probably would have been forced by Muslims to leave eastern Bosnia.
The Bosnian Serbs won the war, he believes, but lost the peace. Under the Dayton peace accord, the Bosnian Serb Republic, the Republika Srpska, is an “entity” within Bosnia. On paper at least, the Bosnian Serbs do not have a fully independent state. Again echoing state-controlled TV, he said the Serbs had been unfairly demonized by the international media, and accounts of mass executions—especially those involving General Mladi—are totally untrue.
Still amazed by the lack of Muslim resistance during the attack on the safe area, he is convinced that Srebrenica and Žepa were traded in some kind of a secret deal that ended the war.
Radi said he believed Bosnia’s people could never live together again. There was too much bitterness left from the war. Muslims, Serbs and Croats would never trust each other. “We will be better friends if we stay apart,” he said.
In 2005, I visited Radi in Srebrenica. The bitterness he expressed just after the war had grown. He complained that Muslims had more jobs in the town’s government, police force and factories.
Like other local Serbs, he resented the changes in Srebrenica and minimized the massacre. He dismissed vast amounts of forensic evidence and confessions from two Serb military officers in war crimes trials. He also questioned the number of dead.
“Islam is financing all that,” he said.
Radi complained that with Muslims returning to Srebrenica the Serb population had dwindled to 4,000, a third of what it was just after the war. He said the international community was forcing Serbs to live with Muslims.
“We all are aware what is imposed,” he told me. “We are not that stupid. We understand.”
He was cynical, too, about Serbian nationalists. At one point after the war, he tried to break up a fight involving a Serb allied with an ultra-nationalist group. During the struggle, Radi was shot. He predicted that the man would never be punished.
“We were fighting for a system,” he said, meaning a well-governed Serbian state. “This is what we get.”
DRAŽEN ERDEMOVI The reluctant executioner pled guilty to crimes against humanity before the International War Crimes Tribunal in June 1996. He then testified in hearings to issue arrest warrants against Bosnian Serb President Karadži and General Mladi in July. He detailed the executions and said he was told the unit’s orders came directly from Bosnian Serb Army headquarters in Han Pijesak.
Repeatedly breaking down on the witness stand, Erdemovi begged the judges to be lenient. He said he had killed the prisoners because he was sure that if he resisted he himself would be killed and the prisoners would die anyway. The executions had destroyed his life, he said. Whether Erdemovi was playing to the judges and cameras was unknown. He agreed to be interviewed for this book, but the tribunal barred interviews with suspects in its custody.
While Erdemovi stood trial, dozens of Serbs, Croats and Muslims indicted for war crimes remained at large for years. They lived freely in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, with little fear of being arrested and extradited by their own leaders or NATO.
In 1996, Erdemovi was sentenced to ten years in jail with time off for good behavior for killing seventy people. In 1998, an appeals court reduced the sentence to five years. In 1999, Erdemovi was granted early release from the Norwegian prison where he was serving his sentence. All told, he spent only three years behind bars. Erdemovi testified for the prosecution at the trials of several Serb commanders accused of overseeing the killings. In the tribunal’s witness protection program, as of 2011 he was believed to be living somewhere in Europe.
SLOBODAN MILOŠEVI With the signing of the Dayton peace accord, the President of Serbia had come full circle. The man who was most responsible for cultivating Serb nationalism, riding it to power and bringing war to the former Yugoslavia was portrayed as the West’s new peacemaker in the Balkans. The United States and its allies chose to ignore Miloševi’s role in the fall of Srebrenica.
Miloševi at least tacitly approved of the attack on the town. Volunteers and possibly whole units from the Miloševi controlled Yugoslav Army were seen participating in the attack on Srebrenica by Dutch and Muslim eyewitnesses. The fuel-short Bosnian Serb Army must have also received large amounts of gasoline from Serbia to be able to carry out the expulsion of Srebrenica’s Muslims.
General Ratko Mladi was also close to Miloševi and was repeatedly seen in the Yugoslav Army headquarters in Belgrade before the attack.34 Miloševi’s secret police supported or at least tolerated the activities of Serbia-based ultranationalist paramilitary groups like the Arkan Tigers. His government paid the salaries of the Bosnian Serb Army officer corps. In short, without Miloševi’s approval, the Bosnian Serbs would not have received the fuel and supplies they needed for the attack on Srebrenica.
Miloševi’s link to the executions is less clear. There is no direct evidence that Miloševi explicitly approved the executions, but he was most likely aware that they were taking place. If they weren’t involved, his secret police had extensive knowledge of what occurred in Bosnian Serb territory. They probably knew of or quickly heard about the first round of mass executions on July 14. Miloševi then attended the July 15 meeting at which General Mladi promised the ICRC access to the prisoners. The following day, July 16, the remaining prisoners were executed by Dražen Erdemovi and his unit.
In 1999, Miloševi overplayed his hand. Responding to rising attacks by ethnic Albanian separatists in the disputed territory of Kosovo, he unleashed the Serbian army. Miloševi’s forces expelled more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Fearing another Srebrenica, President Clinton and other western leaders approved massive NATO air strikes across Belgrade and Serbia. After seventy-eight days of heavy bombardment, Miloševi relented and withdrew his forces.
The Serbian leader never recovered. In the late 1980s, he had risen to power by promising Serbs he would create a Greater Serbia that stretched from Croatia to Bosnia to Kosovo. A decade later, Miloševi ruled a rump Serbia that was an international pariah. With support from the United States, a popular uprising overthrew Miloševi in 2000. The following year, Serbia’s new Prime Minister, Zoran Djindji, sent Miloševi to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes across the former Yugoslavia.
Professing his innocence in rambling courtroom speeches, Miloševi was a shadow of the man who ruled Serbia with a deft hand for a decade. Weeks before a verdict was to be reached in his 2006 war crimes trial, he was found dead in his prison cell from a heart attack. The man who sparked the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction died before being held accountable for the death of 140,000 of his countrymen.
RADOVAN KARADŽI With the Dayton peace accord mandating that no indicted war criminal could hold public office, Karadži resigned from the presidency of the Republika Srpska in July 1996 under intense international pressure.
At first, Karadži was able to maintain power indirectly by appointing loyal deputies to run the Republika Srpska. The 60,000 American and NATO troops made little effort to arrest Karadži or other war criminals after arriving in the country in late 1995. American and European diplomats later told reporters from The New York Times that a consensus prevailed that no NATO country wanted to spill its soldiers’ blood in a battle with heavily-armed, hard-line Serbs.
In 1996, the former Bosnian Serb leader apparently lived in hiding in the Republika Srpska. On occasion, he even granted interviews to journalists.
In 1997, Western governments launched a series of aggressive new tactics designed to undermine Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat nationalists. First UN investigators, then British, then Dutch, and finally American commandos arrested three Serbs and two Croats wanted for war crimes. British troops killed one Bosnian Serb who resisted arrest. The Croatian government turned over six Croats indicted for war crimes in October 1997, and a Bosnian Serb voluntarily surrendered to the tribunal in March 1998.
Karadži, though, disappeared. Rumors circulated that he was living in a monastery in Eastern Bosnia and posing as a priest. Others reports said he had fled abroad.
The September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States diverted attention from Bosnia. In 2004, all but 150 American forces withdrew from the country. With 7,000 European peacekeepers still in the country, the capture of Karadži became a primarily European issue.
For the next several years, the trail went cold. Survivors from Srebrenica assailed the West for not apprehending Karadži when NATO forces arrived in 1995. They insisted that Karadži was hiding in Serbia under the protection of ultra-nationalists there.
European leaders, led by the Netherlands, pressured Serbia’s new pro-western, post-Miloševi rulers to find Karadži. They refused to consider Serbia’s application for E.U. membership until Karadži, Mladi and other fugitive war criminals were arrested.
For years, the country’s new rulers made little effort. Serbian investigators involved in tracking Karadži and Mladi later told The New York Times that they had known both men’s whereabouts but never received orders to arrest them. Boris Tadi, the country’s pro-western president, may have feared a backlash. In 2003, ultra-nationalists assassinated Zoran Djindji, the Prime Minister who sent Miloševi to The Hague two years earlier.
On July 22, 2008, twelve years after the fall of Srebrenica, Serbian police arrested a tall man with long grey hair and a flowing beard as he rode a public bus in Belgrade. The man, who went by the name Dragan Dabi, was a minor celebrity in the city’s little-known alternative medicine scene. Dabi wrote a monthly column called “Meditations” in a national magazine and was a sales representative for CaliVita, a Connecticut-based vitamin company. He said he had lived in New York for several years where his ex-wife and children remained.
The man was Karadži. From 2005 to 2007, one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives successfully hid in plain sight in Belgrade posing as a new age healer. Karadži had deceived a coterie of friends while being secretly supported by a small group of loyal supporters.
Extradited to The Hague, Karadži was put on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity during the siege of Sarajevo and the fall of Srebrenica. In a March 2010 court appearance, he professed his innocence and denied that the Srebrenica massacre occurred. The exhaustively documented slaughter of 8,100 men and boys, he said, was based on “false myths.”
GENERAL RATKO MLADI For years after the war General Mladi enjoyed an almost mythic following among Serbs. Most Serbs interviewed did not believe any mass executions occurred after the fall of Srebrenica. If they admitted that some killings occurred, they said it was impossible that Mladi, with his reputation for professionalism and decency, was involved. Their primary source of information was a video aired repeatedly on Bosnian Serb television. It showed General Mladi in Potoari promising that no one would be hurt and Serb soldiers doling out bread and chocolate to Muslim women and children.
Mladi resigned as commander of the Bosnian Serb Army in November 1996, but he remained hugely popular among Serb soldiers and was believed to still tacitly control the Bosnian Serb Army.
He lived with his wife, Bosa, in a vacation house inside the Bosnian Serb Army headquarters near Han Pijesak. The sprawling complex, built by Tito as a final stronghold in case of invasion, included miles of underground shelters that allegedly could withstand a nuclear attack. At all times, Mladi was constantly surrounded by bodyguards. During 1996, an American military base was set up only twelve miles away. U.S. troops announced their visits to the headquarters complex, making it painfully clear that they would not try to arrest Mladi.
A journalist who met with Mladi said the retired general filled his days tending a bee colony and caring for a small herd of goats he was raising.35 The goats were named after the former UN commanders in Bosnia and the leaders of the Western world.
At some point in 1997, Mladi moved from the Republika Srpska to Serbia itself. That year Serbian President Miloševi created a fifty-two-man security detail to guard Mladi, a former bodyguard later testified. After Miloševi was toppled in 2000, elements of the Serbian military continued to protect the Bosnian Serb general.
In 2000, Mladi watched a soccer match surrounded by bodyguards at a Belgrade stadium. In 2001, he prayed at his brother’s funeral in a jogging suit and sunglasses. In 2003, he visited his dying mother’s bedside. He was also photographed dancing with his wife at his son’s wedding and repeatedly seen visiting the grave of his daughter, Ana, in Belgrade.
In 2006, raids by Serbian police netted some of Mladi’s protectors, but drove him deeper into hiding. In 2008, the arrest of Karadži raised hopes that Serbia would quickly arrest Mladi as well.
When no arrest occurred, European countries began to waiver on continuing to block Serbia’s application for E.U. membership. Some argued that Serbia’s economic stability was more important than the arrest of a single fugitive. By October 2010, only one European country continued to insist that Serbia’s application be denied until Mladi was arrested: the Netherlands.
In May 2011, Serbian police raided the home of a cousin of Mladi in the village Lazarevo thirty miles north of Belgrade. Inside, they found a bald and befuddled old man living alone in poverty. Identifying himself by name, Mladi put up no resistance.
Days later, he was extradited to The Hague to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in Srebrenica and Sarajevo. Mladi’s lawyers said he had suffered three strokes and suffered from high blood pressure. In his first appearance before the court, the general who terrorized the people of Srebrenica slurred his speech and asked the judges to consider his poor health. “I am a gravely ill man,” Mladi said. “I need a bit more time. Please be patient with me.” He begged for the mercy he never showed the people of Srebrenica.
