Authors: Tim Butcher
The town’s remote position was its saviour at the start of the war in early 1992. Bosnian Serb forces swept through only briefly and then pulled out, focusing their military efforts instead on their attempt to take Sarajevo, and on the ethnic cleansing of territory they regarded as more strategically important, adjacent to Serbia on the western side of the Drina River. It was here that Bosnian Muslim communities fell victim to the extreme nationalism espoused by the political leadership of Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade: houses torched, women raped, men murdered. Srebrenica lies some distance away from the main roads that the Bosnian Serb forces needed for their military operations, so after their departure it was soon retaken by the Bosnian Muslim side. Largely cut off from the shrinking area of central Bosnia controlled by Bosnian Muslim forces, the people of Srebrenica ended 1992 surviving on food gathered in from outlying villages. People went hungry, but they did not starve.
With the hardening of winter the situation deteriorated, as the town’s population was swollen by thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilian refugees forced out of their homes by the intensified systematic cleansing of the Drina valley by Bosnian Serb forces. Srebrenica had now become the closest town of any size still in the hands of the Bosnian Muslim authorities, so there they streamed on foot and on carts hauled by tractors, horses and donkeys, traumatised by the cruelty they had witnessed and forced to cram themselves into houses, apartments, rooms and any other viable space, eking out what little food was available.
Bosnian Muslim soldiers grew ever more desperate for supplies, launching raids from what had become a pocket of Bosnian Muslim territory centred on Srebrenica, surrounded by land controlled by Bosnian Serb forces. In a war characterised less by the clash of soldiers against soldiers and more by soldiers committing atrocities against civilians, there were a number of attacks on Bosnian Serb towns and villages that led to civilian casualties on the Bosnian Serb side. In the propaganda battle, the Bosnian Serbs emphasised these fatalities more than any suffering endured by their enemies. The Bosnian Muslim forces lacked artillery and tanks, fighting with whatever pistols, machine guns and hunting rifles they could muster, but local knowledge of the mountain terrain made them at times a potent military threat. Over the winter months of 1992 they broke out of the pocket several times, even succeeding in blocking the main road needed by the Bosnian Serbs to resupply their forces around Sarajevo. No longer could Bosnian Serb commanders afford to ignore Srebrenica.
Early in spring 1993 Bosnian Serb forces moved to deal with the growing military threat from the Srebrenica pocket. Infantry supported by tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pounded the area, attacking outlying villages, killing large numbers of civilians and driving the survivors into an already crowded town centre gripped by hunger, panic and fear. The assault eventually failed, in part because of piecemeal intervention by UN peacekeepers struggling to protect the civilian population. With casualties rising on both sides, an uneasy stand-off was eventually reached after Srebrenica was given special status, designated in April 1993 a ‘United Nations Safe Area’ to be protected by UN peacekeepers. The UN commander, a French general called Philippe Morillon, had made a brief and chaotic visit to the pocket, at one point being blocked from leaving by a mob of desperate Bosnian Muslim civilians. The people of Srebrenica remember little about his visit, apart from what he said at a heaving public meeting where the atmosphere was jumpy and tense. The UN’s most senior general in Bosnia gave them a personal assurance that he would not abandon them.
Srebrenica spent the next two years in a zombie-like state, its men growing thinner and more malnourished as they desperately manned the defences, its women and children clinging to life on aid supplies begrudgingly allowed in by the besieging Bosnian Serbs. A few hundred UN peacekeepers nominally guaranteed Srebrenica’s Safe Area status, although in truth the pocket was defended by a Dad’s Army militia of ill-equipped Bosnian Muslim forces. Relations between the UN soldiers and Bosnian Muslim forces were strained, not least because under the rules of the Safe Area arrangement all local soldiers were supposed to be disarmed, entrusting their weapons to the UN. Stuck in Sarajevo, I would stare at the map showing Srebrenica’s unreachable island of Bosnian Muslim territory adrift in a sea controlled by the Bosnian Serbs. Occasionally there would emerge accounts of starvation among the besieged, accusations of atrocities by the besiegers, mysterious military resupply flights by unmarked helicopters, and stories of smuggling deals cut by local Bosnian Muslim thugs with Bosnian Serb opportunists. As so often in the Balkans, the stories would circulate wildly, but would rarely harden.
The end came in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces launched a final assault to deal with the pocket once and for all. The combat lasted only a matter of days as Bosnian Serb tanks and armoured personnel carriers swept past the primitive defences. It was what happened next that will for ever taint the name of Srebrenica. Thousands of male prisoners were exterminated by the dominant Bosnian Serb forces, with the best estimates suggesting a death-toll of around 8,000. The exact number remains unclear, although human remains are still being exhumed from mass graves all these years later. What is clear is that the Srebrenica killings represent the worst genocidal war crime in Europe since the Holocaust.
The assault on Srebrenica would prove to be the beginning of the end of the Bosnian War. After three years of standing by on the sidelines, the international community was shamed into finally taking determined action. NATO – a military alliance that had spent four decades in the Cold War preparing for combat, but never actually fighting – came of age. It was in Bosnia in the late summer of 1995 that NATO forces launched large-scale attacks for the first time in its history, their artillery and war planes pounding Bosnian Serb positions. A military machine equipped, trained and motivated to take on the Cold War’s perceived enemy from the Soviet Union found itself fighting not Russian soldiers, but Bosnian Serbs. The United States went one step further by using its air power to support Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat forces on the ground as they attacked a Bosnian Serb enemy that had been so dominant throughout the entire Bosnian War.
Srebrenica changed everything. Within a matter of months the Bosnian Serb forces were routed, the political leadership of Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade forced to come to the negotiating table. The peace accords that ended the war were agreed in November 1995. A war that had drifted on for three years was over, the borders of the country unchanged, the former enemies agreeing to live alongside each other in a single country, albeit one where the three ethnic groups fiercely guard their own devolved authority. Of great importance was the way in which this relatively confined war in Bosnia would come to influence future global events. In 1914 events in Bosnia had had global consequences, and so it proved once more eighty years later. The events surrounding the fall of Srebrenica changed fundamentally the attitude of the international community towards military intervention. In the years that have followed, world powers have repeatedly shown a greater willingness to deploy ground troops, whether in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.
At the strategic level I had charted all this as a war correspondent for the Telegraph in the late 1990s and 2000s, but it took the hike through the mountains of eastern Bosnia to give me a fuller understanding of the horrors that had such monumental impact.
*
The route I took after arriving by bus in Tuzla was the main one used by the few thousand Bosnian Muslim men who made it out alive from Srebrenica in July 1995. When Bosnian Serb forces launched their attack on the pocket, the defenders faced the grimmest of choices as the UN’s public undertaking to protect the Safe Area collapsed to nothing. A Dutch peacekeeping detachment with a few dozen combat troops was in the pocket at the time of the assault, hopelessly under-equipped to stop the Bosnian Serb forces, and haplessly commanded by officers tactless enough to be filmed engaging with the attackers, drinking toasts and accepting gifts. As the situation became more chaotic, several peacekeepers were taken prisoner by advancing Bosnian Serb forces and many were disarmed. One was shot dead by the Bosnian Muslim side as he tried to withdraw from an observation post. The Dutch did eventually make requests for NATO war planes to attack, but they were lost in the UN chain of command. With the situation on the ground unclear, a small group of British special forces was deployed by helicopter on the hilltops, but they were under orders simply to observe and not intervene. The political leadership of the international community was yet to be shamed into decisiveness. Precisely what the French general had assured the people of Srebrenica would never happen was happening – they were being abandoned.
The population of the pocket was then estimated to stand at roughly 30,000, the majority of whom were non-combatant civilians. To begin with, the Bosnian Serb commanders made repeated promises that anyone who surrendered would be treated properly. They would be taken by bus and delivered safely to Bosnian Muslim-held territory a few hours’ drive to the west. While the locals could be confident that the Bosnian Serbs would deliver on their promise to allow free passage to women and children, they were not so sure that men of fighting age would receive the same treatment. Every single person inside the pocket knew how the Bosnian Serbs had routinely maltreated male civilian prisoners earlier in the war. By this point most of the pocket’s population were themselves the victims of ethnic cleansing, forced to flee here from their homes closer to the Drina River, and many knew from first-hand experience how casually murderous Bosnian Serb militiamen could be. Some of these militia were not trained soldiers, but common criminals and thugs; some were loutish football fans recruited from the rougher end of the terraces, who were given uniforms, weapons and licence to persecute non-Serbs. The men of Srebrenica had to decide whether to hand themselves over to this type of militia or try and make it out by themselves.
The men who trusted the Bosnian Serbs were to become victims of genocide. They were separated from the women and children, sometimes dragged off buses in front of their families, taken away and executed. A group of ten was led away within clear sight of Dutch peacekeepers, their corpses found the next morning, shot in cold blood within walking distance of the UN base. Much larger numbers of men, estimated to total several thousand, were corralled by the Bosnian Serbs for three days in buildings a few miles north of Srebrenica, before the order was given for their extermination. Driven by bus to remote rural locations, they were shot at close range, often being made to kneel and told derisively to ‘pray to Allah’. Buried initially in mass graves, some of which the victims themselves were forced to dig, they would subsequently be disinterred and dispersed to a number of other smaller mass graves, as part of a deliberate attempt at concealment by the Bosnian Serbs. Sometimes the bus drivers were given orders to shoot at least one prisoner as a disincentive ever to speak about what happened.
All of this came out in eyewitness testimonies that would be given at war-crimes trials years after the event. What has never fully emerged is the story of the men who did not trust the Bosnian Serbs; those who refused to give themselves up, embarking instead on an extraordinary forced march which, like so many epic Balkan stories, is both heroic and tragic. Of the 13,000 men who started this march, it is believed a little over half survived.
Srebrenica might have been surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces since the war began in April 1992, but the truth was that the pocket was never hermetically sealed. The Bosnian Serbs blocked all the roads that fed in and out of the area, laid minefields and put observation posts on strategic heights, but the terrain of eastern Bosnia defied them. Lumpy with mountains, pleated with valleys and patched all over with thick deciduous and conifer forests, it gave enough cover for small, inconspicuous groups of Bosnian Muslim defenders to smuggle themselves occasionally in and out of Srebrenica. It was via this route that modest ammunition stocks inside the pocket were maintained.
The closest territory in central Bosnia controlled by friendly forces – the Bosnian Muslim army – lay about twenty miles west of the pocket. Instead of taking this direct route, which was heavily defended by the Bosnian Serbs, the smugglers used one that was longer but safer: a fifty-mile overland trek running north-west from the pocket. Particular care had to be taken when passing the occasional main road and around minefields planted near bridges that cross small mountain streams that feed the Drina River, but much of the route ran through remote countryside, none more so than the massif of a mountain called Udrč. With stealth and courage it was possible to trek under cover of darkness all the way from Srebrenica to territory close to Tuzla, the largest city in the north of Bosnia held continuously during the war by the Bosnian Muslim side.
Throughout the war a small patch of land just east of Tuzla was among the most heavily fought over in all of north Bosnia. It would become known as the ‘Sapna Thumb’ because of the thumb-like shape on the map of land fiercely defended by Bosnian Muslim forces, surrounded on three sides by Bosnian Serbs and tipped by a small town called Sapna. Princip would pass through here when he was making his way back to Sarajevo for the assassination, although when I first went there in 1994 I was more focused on the modern war.
My diary reminds me of an anxious encounter when I made it to Sapna. Conditions in the area were bleak, with Bosnian Muslim villagers clinging on to their homes under constant threat of mortar and artillery attack from the Bosnian Serbs while being defended by Bosnian Muslim forces. A teenage boy told me the attackers had been using cluster bombs, a breach of international convention, and offered to show me some evidence. I agreed, thinking he would show me one or two of the devices – dangerously unstable bomblets that are armed and primed to go off any time after landing on the ground. Bomb-disposal experts despise cluster bombs because they are so unpredictable and volatile, set to explode at the slightest movement or even a change of temperature. Direct sunlight can be enough to cause a detonation. The boy led me to a bucket in which he had tossed about thirty bomblets, casually collected from the surrounding countryside. I took a photograph and backed away very slowly and carefully, making sure not to cast a shadow across them. What I did not know when I first went to Sapna was its secret. This was where Srebrenica’s lifeline began. If the Sapna Thumb fell, then the smuggling route in and out of Srebrenica would be closed.