8

This Is What a Genocide Looks Like

Srebrenica

On a table in a corridor was the Book of Belongings. Inside were photographs of mundane items – buttons, belt buckles, watches, wallets, a ‘Made in Portugal’ label, a toy car. For years, this was almost the only way to identify remains of those killed in the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War, so mutilated were the bodies.

After the war, mothers and wives of men and boys who had disappeared would come and silently leaf through the pages, one photograph after another, torn between wanting to end the uncertainty and praying not to recognise anything.

The women were from Srebrenica, where on 11 July 1995 around 8300 Muslim men and boys were loaded onto trucks by Serbian soldiers then shot and bludgeoned to death in meadows, football fields, farms and factories and dumped in mass graves. The firing squads were killing at such a rate that one member who later confessed at The Hague, Dražen Erdemović, told of asking to sit down because he was so tired.

I was shown the Book of Belongings in a white warehouse in a small business park in the city of Tuzla on the Drina river, deep in Republika Srpska. The other side of the river is Serbia. Russian volunteers used to go there and take potshots, says Resad. The journey there in March 2018 across the mountains from Sarajevo had been magical, like driving through Narnia, with snowy forests and wooden chalets. But talking to Bakira had left me uneasy and the book was a stark reminder of the evils that had gone on.

From the outside the warehouse looked unremarkable. A small plaque by the door said International Commission of Missing Persons. Inside was the world’s biggest DNA identification project.

I was let in by a no-nonsense woman in jeans called Dragana Vučetić, known as the Bone Lady. She led me into a room on the right with a strange musty smell. Inside were row upon row of metal shelves lined with white sacks, each scrawled with a number. On the top of the shelves were a series of large brown paper bags. On the floor two skeletons were laid out on long metal trays, the bones a brackish brown. Inside the white sacks were bones, while the brown bags were filled with remnants of clothing.

Dragana Vučetić with body parts still to be identified (Christina Lamb)

Dragana was the senior forensic anthropologist and matter-of-fact about her gruesome task. She explained that the bodies of those killed from Srebrenica were first buried in mass graves but Serbs then dug them up and moved them elsewhere to try and stop them being found. ‘They used big diggers so many of the bodies were destroyed and bones scattered in different places. One individual we found in fifteen different locations in four different mass graves. Only in 10 per cent of cases do we find complete bodies.’

They had found bones in more than 500 locations. ‘Putting them together is like a puzzle,’ she said. ‘First, we wash them, then I lay them out in anatomical position and check the bones are all consistent in age and size. If we find skull fragments we try and glue them together. Then I do a skeleton inventory.’

She handed me a printed page almost like a children’s colour-in sheet, only the picture was of a human skeleton. Bones left white denoted ‘present bones’, those coloured red were ‘absent’ and yellow ‘partially present’.

I noticed that the skeletons on the trays had many bones missing and others were crumbled almost to dust. Five ribs, six fingers, one tibia …

Dragana betrayed no emotion. Other staff told me when they opened up sacks of newly exhumed body parts, often still with skin and hair, the smell could be so overpowering that they would vomit.

The Institute opened in 1997 and many bodies were so badly decomposed that it identified just 140 victims in its first five years. Aside from identifying marks like scars and dentures, as well as age and size, this was mainly through the Book of Belongings.

Occasionally there were other clues – some bones were embedded with shards of green glass, indications they had been executed near a bottling plant.

Then in 2002 they started using DNA testing. That year they had 501 official identifications.

DNA was taken from larger bones such as the femur or tibia in the presence of the prosecutor then sent to a lab in The Hague. Results took two or three months and were then cross-referenced with blood samples from families of the missing – they now had more than 70,000 in their database.

It has been such a success that they had identified 6708 victims – more than 80 per cent of the missing. Most were men – just thirteen or fourteen women – and the youngest just thirteen. In about half the cases one could see how they died, with clearly visible holes from bullet wounds or crushed skulls.

The sacks still on the shelves contained about 800 bodies they haven’t identified including 92 where they have found no DNA match.

‘DNA is 100 per cent accurate but the problem is we don’t do every bone and not all families have given blood,’ explained Dragana.

‘Every year we are finding less because the bones have deteriorated. Locations are based on witnesses or satellite images. The last mass grave found was in 2016 which had 55 body parts from 18 individuals.’

They were still getting cases, three in the first three months of 2018. The two skeletons on the floor were from Kozluk, a military farm where around 500 men were executed.

Some were surface burials where people fell in the forest trying to escape while on the so-called Death March. These were usually found by people out walking dogs. Dragana told me of one man, Ramiz Nukic, who they call ‘the bone hunter’, who had discovered more than 250 bodies. He walked his dog in the forest for twenty miles every day looking for his father, two brothers and uncle, and finally he found part of his father, but not the others.

Once identified, a doctor signs the death certificate and the family must decide what to do with the remains. Most bury them at Potočari cemetery in Srebrenica on 11 July, the anniversary of the massacre.

In 2017, another sixty-six were buried. But some families refused. ‘In this facility we have forty officially identified where the families don’t want to bury because they are still missing bits,’ says Dragana. ‘We have others where they just bury a bone.’

Often they find more bones of those already buried, in which case they exhume them and rebury. In 2017 they exhumed 550 to add extra bones and 150 exhumations were planned for 2018.

The forensic evidence gathered by the Institute had been critical in some of the trials in The Hague. Its methods of identification were being employed in other conflicts where many went missing, such as Iraq and some staff transferred. The Bosnian project was winding down, with funding squeezed and the number of employees in Tuzla reduced to eight from twenty.

For those who still had missing sons or husbands this was very distressing. ‘For the families it’s important we continue; they don’t want us to give up,’ said Dragana.

‘Apart from the bodies still to identify, we have 3000 bags of clothing and also more than 12,000 small body bags with bones or fragments too small to identify.’

I imagine what it must be like to spend day after day, year after year, mapping a human genocide. ‘I deal only with the bones,’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t know the names or the stories.’

She pointed at the metal tray.

Afterwards I found out she is a Serb.

The drive from Tuzla to Srebrenica was a strange mixture of abandoned houses and newly built ones. This valley was where men and boys were bussed to their executions or shot dead in the hills trying to escape. We call it the Valley of Death, says Aida, my purple-haired interpreter.

In Potočari cemetery just outside Srebrenica the graves rose and fell like waves, one white needle-shaped stone after another across the hillside. On one someone had left a single white rose. A small clump of yellow primroses grew in front of another where the snow had melted.

Across the road were large white hangars and you could make out the letters DutchBat on the gatepost. This was where the 700-strong Dutch battalion were stationed who were supposed to protect the people of Srebrenica, which the UN had designated a safe zone.

They failed to do not only this when General Mladić’s forces seized the town in July 1995 but also to protect the 20,000 to 30,000 civilians who fled to the compound seeking refuge. A few thousand were allowed in to start but then the gate closed and eventually all of them were forced out to the mercy of the Serbs, who began dividing them up as the blue-helmeted Dutch soldiers looked on. It’s hard not to picture the people there, the women screaming as they were ordered to the left, along with the elderly and young children, while their husbands and sons were sent to the right.

The hangars had been converted into a museum of disturbing stories. ‘My son’s hand was pulled from mine,’ said one woman in a video. ‘He begged me to look after his backpack as they dragged him away. He never came back.’

Once the men had been taken away, there were more screams as young women were raped by Serb soldiers.

I warmed to Dr Branka Antic-Stauber straight away. She had a reassuring smile and a kindly face framed by a dark bob streaked with grey, and she ran an organisation called Snaga Zene, which translates as Girl Power.

She welcomed me into her cosy office in Tuzla and offered me tea made from camomile and thyme grown by women of Srebrenica, for, like Bakira, they too have found working with the earth to be nature’s way of healing. She drank hers from a Father Christmas mug.

Dr Branka was working in 2001 with a paediatrician colleague to treat infectious diseases in the collective centres in Tuzla where women and children had been taken. They were shocked to hear that some of the women were returning to Srebrenica.

‘We decided to go and see for ourselves,’ she said. ‘I had never been there but felt I knew it from talking to all the women. They used to talk about the balconies and roses but when we got there the whole place was destroyed, everything was black and grey. Then we saw smoke coming from the chimney of one of those destroyed houses so we went in and found six women huddled in a corridor in coats and scarves around a woodstove – it was November and freezing.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked them. ‘Aren’t you cold, aren’t you afraid?’

One of the women said, ‘We’re not afraid at all because there is nothing to be afraid of anymore – we came to look for our dead children and we’ve been dead for a long time. Only our bodies are present and a person who came and killed those wouldn’t make any difference.’

Tears started falling from her eyes and she got a tissue. ‘Something about that reply really got to me as a woman, as a mother, as a doctor, and I decided to try and help. We couldn’t solve all the problems they had, we couldn’t give them their children back or undo what had happened to them, but at least we could talk to them and try to build something new and I felt something from the universe would give us strength.’

Ever since she had gone there every two weeks. The original six women returnees had swelled to more than 300 as well as their families.

‘They are simple women, barely educated, but I think they can serve as a great example,’ she said. ‘We’ve always had wars and will again but if those who have lived through them can get out and speak about it, maybe we will learn.

‘In twenty years I’ve never heard any of them say they want revenge – they just want answers and for this to never happen to anyone else.’

She struggled for a long while, she said, on how to help them. ‘Rape trauma is always very difficult to work with. It affects the mental, physical and intimate health. But the women of Srebrenica not only have the trauma of what they had suffered – rapes and murders of loved ones – but also were expelled from their homes, had to live in collective centres, and then the re-traumatisation of funerals and burials every year as bodies are found.

‘We tried various approaches but after five years there was no progress; everything was still dark. Then I realised the women were trying to tell us something. They had lost their husbands and sons yet returned to the land as if Mother Earth was calling them. So we started horticultural therapy and that changed everything.’

Just as Safina Lohani in Bangladesh had found, Dr Branka realised it was important for the women to have some economic power to regain control of their lives. She came up with the idea of growing roses and secured a donation of 3000 cuttings from Holland.

‘The idea was for the women to grow and sell them in the shop at the Potočari memorial,’ she said. ‘But when they grew they didn’t cut them. They told me we’re sitting drinking coffee and enjoying the beauty and the perfume in our gardens!’

Eventually she managed to get 35,000 seedlings, so there was enough for farms as well as the women’s gardens. They were running three rose farms and had branched out to the herbal tea we were drinking. Not only did the gardening serve as occupational therapy but it provided funds for her work.

Although the rose-growing had helped the women’s healing, most still suffered physical problems, she said. ‘Women who suffered sexual violence either don’t go to gynaecologists at all because they are scared something may happen to them or they go there all the time. Some have developed cervical cancer, a lot have thyroid-gland disorder because the thyroid is the organ most affected by stress, and have low insulin levels triggering diabetes.’

She still met every Friday with survivors. ‘Even though it has been a long time, the stories are still very vivid. They start crying and shaking. I never stop being shocked.’

Just the week before my visit, a woman had told her a story which she said gave her chills. ‘She told me she was pregnant when she was raped and her eight-year-old daughter was made to watch. She was raped by several men in front of her daughter then afterwards the rapists asked the girl to wash their penises and the mum’s genitalia. Afterwards the woman gave birth prematurely at thirty-four weeks and her baby boy was born blind. As for her daughter, she never finished school and became very promiscuous and had five children with three different men.

‘That was hard to hear,’ said Dr Branka. ‘That man caused so much damage. The woman could cope with her own trauma but the blind son and the damaged daughter …

‘She didn’t talk about her rape for years because after that happened their home was burnt down, so they had nowhere to live, and she struggled to support the children. So with all this going on to say she had been raped seemed less important. Many don’t tell their story for years because of the shame.’

It was twenty-five years before Enesa told anyone her story. Her reddish hair was pulled back in a short ponytail, her eyes red-rimmed, and she kept licking her lips and rubbing her hands. At fifty-nine she looked wrung out by life.

She lived in Tuzla but was originally from Srebrenica and was living between Srebrenica and Potočari with her husband and two children when the war started. ‘On 16 April 1992 what happened to me, happened in my house,’ she started. ‘Srebrenica was meant to be a safe haven protected by the UN but it was already clear we Muslims would need to leave and so we were all keeping guard. Every night we would stay in different houses, several families together. That particular night I was in a third house with friends and children. The electricity and water had been cut off by the Serbs and it was just days before we would be forced out altogether.

‘It was semi-dark, the first dark, when I realised we didn’t have enough water. I picked up two five-litre bottles and told my friend I’d go to the spring to fetch some. I also wanted to go and get my children some spare clothes from our house. So I went to fetch the water then left the bottles at the entrance to my house while I popped in. The house was unlocked. As I entered the hallway, I was grabbed from behind. A man’s hand came over my mouth then another man appeared wearing a mask and calling me balinka, which is a very bad name for a Muslim, and demanding to know where our gold and money was. They were in uniforms. I was shaking and screaming. I was wearing a dark-red house dress which tied like a bathrobe, and after I said there was no gold or money, they pulled it off and did what they did in the way they wanted from the front and back. One was raping me and the other said, “I’d like some too.” I was on the ground then another came and suddenly I felt sharp pain in my left breast and I didn’t know what it was. I fainted. When I came round I was lying in blood and bleeding from my left breast and right hand. Half of my nipple was bitten away. I took my robe and tried to remove the blood from the floor then went to my cupboard to get clothes. Then my two-year-old son came into the house and asked, “Mummy, what was it?”’

She started crying. ‘We had been in the middle of building another storey on our house so I told him I’d fallen on the steps which were unfinished. He took me by the hand and back to my friend’s house.

‘I put bandages on my arm and didn’t tell anyone what happened. The following day we were told we had to leave so on the 17th we left with other people and came to Tuzla and registered as refugees. On the way there were soldiers at checkpoints and our van was stopped by men using the same bad words and asking for gold and silver and money.

‘I had both my children in my arms. They were shaking, terrified. When we all said we had nothing, the soldiers started checking us roughly. My daughter had tiny gold earrings which were a gift from my mother and he ripped them out. She was screaming and I was trying to calm her, and the soldier said you should feel lucky because we haven’t slaughtered you.

‘All we had left were blankets. For more than a year we lived in Maidan sports hall. My husband remained in Srebrenica and found another woman and stayed there four years. He somehow survived then left for Sarajevo and died there in 2002.

‘Then a year after we came to Tuzla I realised my son was not well. He wasn’t growing and his thyroid and other functions had stopped. Finally, when he was nine, he was diagnosed with complete hormonal dysfunction because of stress. Now he gets hormone shots to replace them – he walks and talks but is completely dependent on the shots and I don’t get any help from the state – just 55 euros a month, so I work cleaning homes and offices but his medicines are very expensive … Now they are saying there is insufficient copper in his body and his liver has almost stopped working and doctors are arguing over what to do …’

She looked at me in despair.

‘What about your own health?’ I ask.

‘Don’t ask,’ she replied. ‘Blood pressure, stress, heart … My doctor tells me I can’t look after my son if I don’t look after myself.’

In all those years she had told nobody what had happened to her until the previous year.

‘I had several parallel struggles,’ she explained. ‘One was shame for what happened. Also I feared if I started talking about it then it would happen again. Then I wanted to kill myself then I thought about cutting out my female parts. Then there was the illness of my son so I was busy fighting for him.

‘Every time I was about to speak to someone, I didn’t know who to talk to, then something would happen to my son – he would have a seizure. Last time I couldn’t find all the medicines he needed and he fell down, his eyes white and spitting foam, and me and my daughter were so lost we couldn’t remember the emergency number. Another time about nine years ago I was ready to speak and my son ended up in hospital.’

Things changed for her when she moved the previous year and met a neighbour in another apartment who had also been raped. ‘We talked about our experiences and I finally told her. I’d been dreaming about my mother who was killed in Srebrenica in 1993 by a mortar shell and she kept asking me, “Baby, what do you want to tell me?” I think in the end I just felt so tired, that’s why I told. My neighbour told me to come to Dr Branka.

‘I didn’t feel any better after talking about it but am now in therapy,’ she added.

Dr Branka patted her hand. ‘It’s a crucial step to acknowledge it happened,’ she said.

‘My children don’t know,’ said Enesa. ‘I am giving my daughter hints, she knows something is going on but … I don’t know why I feel ashamed.

‘I’m never going to that house ever again. Even when I go for the memorial service it takes me three or four months to recover. I have a sister who returned to Srebrenica but I can’t visit her.’

I asked Enesa if she had found love again after her husband.

‘No,’ she almost shuddered. ‘I can’t imagine. I was thirty-three when I was raped and the blood that came out of me that day was the last blood.’

Branka told me this was not the first time she had heard this. ‘I also had a girl raped at twenty-two who never again had a period,’ she said. ‘The stress causes hormones to rise to abnormal levels and everything stops because the adrenalin and cortisol produced blocks all others.’

She had become curious about what men got from war rape and had researched the chemical processes in the brain. ‘How can a person who is not motivated by desire even get an erection?’ she asked. ‘Can hate or fear or revenge do this? Oxytocin, the hormone which both men and women produce, which is responsible for sexuality and arousal and reaches high levels during both – some people call it the cuddle hormone – is also produced in fear so perhaps that’s one of the explanations. But it’s not acceptable, men choosing to attack something which is the symbol of love and new life. Why are they deliberately choosing to attack that?’

‘Whatever is the worst punishment, the men should face,’ said Enesa. She blew her nose then checked her watch and said she must go to her cleaning job. I asked if I could hug her. Some of the women don’t like being touched but she smiled and buried herself in my jumper before slipping away.

She seemed so fragile, I told Branka I felt scared that talking about it had made things worse. ‘It’s not possible to heal from this forever,’ she said, ‘but it helps to speak about it as soon as possible and to share the story with someone compassionate. What I have seen definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.

‘The problem is only a few have been convicted. My association has participated in eight cases where women went to court but only two got convictions. There was one case with a group of eleven men who went into homes taking girls and ended up with fifty-six girls. But of those eleven, only three were declared guilty. Three were declared not guilty and the others set free on lack of evidence. That case took three years, the women repeatedly having to go to court and testify, and we needed to prepare them over and over again. They went through all of that painful suffering to get justice only to hear their perpetrators declared not guilty. After that they felt there was no point in speaking up and told the other women we should all keep silent.

‘I tell the women, “If you remain silent, it’s as if nothing happened. There are no perpetrators.” I told them, “Yes, those men were declared not guilty but they were singled out in court for three years, their names are public, their families and friends have heard. Don’t you think people will wonder?”

‘But when you look at how long rape trials go on and how few convictions there are, you can’t escape the feeling that something else is going on – that the government is considering war rape as something not serious. This needs political will and recognition by every single political leader, regardless of their ethnic background.’

Listening to Enesa left me lost for words. We came out to darkness. I realised we hadn’t eaten since leaving Srebrenica after breakfast so told our driver to head to a nearby shopping mall. Inside, the lights seemed too bright, the people too noisy. We sat down in a pizza place and, as usual in Bosnia, everyone around was smoking, including Aida and the driver.

On the way back to Sarajevo, they started bickering like an old married couple even though they had only met two days before. I asked the problem. ‘He says he’s a romantic and he dreams of going to Cuba,’ complained Aida. ‘I’m telling him why don’t you just go? Don’t wait. You never know what life might throw at you.’