Serbian villages in the region of Srebrenica, then and now
More than 20 years have gone by since the attacks on Serbian villages in the region of Srebrenica, Bratunac, and Skelani. Since then, the surrounding landscape has not changed much and, in general terms, it would be fair to say that their appearance has deteriorated. The villages in this area appear more ruined and ghostly than they were back then, when their inhabitants were subjected to devastating attacks and massively expelled from their centuries-old homesteads.
It seems that today there are even more unanswered questions than there were twenty and some years ago, but regrettably there are far fewer answers. Many events which took place in that region remain obscure, or they have been overshadowed by what happened in July of 1995. The truth should have come out in the end, but it did not. It is that, for the most part, Serbian villages have remained in the same dismal state in which their Muslim neighbors had left them after a series of unprovoked and relentless attacks, mostly in 1992 and 1993.
The first issue that strikes the observer is the Serbian community’s strange reticence to speak about their experiences during the 1992 – 1995 war and to share the story of their suffering with the rest of the world. They rationalize their silence by pointing out that after peace was concluded in 1995 the Serbian community was the target of an effective, thoroughgoing media war. Not only in Bosnia, but in the world at large, a climate of opinion was artificially nurtured where there was little room for empathy for their plight.
While touring these villages, one has the impression of abandonment and alienation. In some of them, time continues to stand still and the rhythms of life are imperceptible. Empty, barren, and isolated, they mutely greet each year as it comes and see it off as it departs. They also narrate the tale of human suffering and of the persecution of an innocent people. Those homesteads are now home to wild animals and stray dogs. There are no children left in these communities, or they are too few to be noticed. Schools were destroyed, but nobody is investing into their reconstruction because there is no one left to attend them. Here and there, you might run into a remodeled church, but as a rule its doors will be locked. There is not a living soul anywhere near, and the Orthodox diocese considers that it suffices to open the doors a few times a year, for the major holidays.
One of the first villages that we visited was Podravanje. It is located about 30 kilometers from Srebrenica. When we came to visit it was under a cover of snow, and it barely showed any signs of life. Our hostess, Milojka Bibić, gave us a comprehensive account of the attack on Podravanje, which took place on September 24, 1992, from the direction of the neighboring Muslim villages. She is the only survivor of the formerly numerous Bibić family. Her two brothers, father, and mother, were not so lucky. She found one slain brother with his limbs broken, while the other was decapitated. On that sinister day, the Muslims destroyed the entire village, torched the inhabitants’ homes, and killed the cattle and every villager who had remained behind. The ritualistic murders which took place in that village deserve to be mentioned. Severed Serbian heads were stuck on fence posts. In some cases, the persons whose heads were cut off were over 80 years-old, which speaks a great deal of the monstrosity of this crime, as well as a bit about the perpetrators.
The fate of Podravanje inhabitant Drago Mitrović is eloquent testimony to this mindless cruelty. During the occupation in World War II, he was a child and his throat was slit by neighbors of the Muslim faith who had enlisted in the ranks of the Ustashi collaborators. But while the relatively superficial wound miraculously healed, damage to the vocal chords left him permanently mute and with an ugly scar. During the last conflict, however, the Muslim neighbors managed to finish the botched job they started during World War II. The unfortunate man, who had to live with aphasia (inability to speak as a consequence of the attempted throat-slitting during the preceding war), was hunted down by Naser Orić’s forces from Srebrenica during their 1992 attack on Podravanje and this time around they managed to slaughter him. The grandsons of those who tried to slit the unfortunate man’s throat during the last world war showed more skill the second time and they successfully finished the job. It is as if in the interim they had been taking lessons from their fathers and grandfathers. Even several decades later, their World War II knives had evidently remained sharp.
Somewhat closer to Srebrenica, the village of Brežani was attacked on June 30, 1992. To this day, the effects of violence are visible on the houses. In the center of the village, there is a small Orthodox cemetery which still exhibits signs of vandalism. Once they took over the village, and after expelling the Serbian population, the Muslims turned their attention to Serbian cemetery headstones. They knocked them down and gouged out the eyes of the dead who were depicted in the photographs. After the locals were finally able to return, one of the graves was found wide open. During the attack, the entire village was devastated. The bones of Serbian children were scattered all over the village and they had to wait almost nine months for a proper burial since between June of 1992 and March of 1993 the village was under Muslim control. During that period, the bodies of slain Serbs were left to stray animals to feed on the remains. Signs of physical violence were found on some of the bodies. Clearly, for some of the attackers it was not enough to kill a person; they also needed to leave their personal mark on the corpse. Today, the village has barely 50 inhabitants, while once there were over 200. Among the victims, in addition to women, there were also children and some elderly persons. The youngest person killed on that day was 14, the oldest 88 years-old.
The road now takes us to Bukova Glava. We proceed on foot, because the condition of the main road does not permit access by automobile. The path takes us mainly through the forest and finally we arrive at this tiny outpost, separated from the rest of civilization and situated in the midst of a beautiful landscape. The first thought that occurs to us is a question: Who might have been so offended by this off-the-beaten-path and strategically, and in every other way insignificant place, to come over and inflict on it such a grim fate? There is not much to see, except for ruins and a handful of elderly people trying to breathe some semblance of new life into their village but – it so seems – with negligible prospects of success at the end of their life span, and without any young people returning to help them. In the immediate vicinity, there is also the village of Mala Turija, and somewhat farther, Pribićevac. Both of those villages experienced an identical fate: they were totally destroyed.
Everyone familiar with the region of Srebrenica will know whereof we speak, as soon as we mention the village of Zalazje. During World War II, in 1943, local fascist collaborators killed over 90 inhabitants of this village, mainly children and women. A collective ossuary and memorial, erected in 1962, attest to those events. Half a century later, on July 12, 1992, that scenario was repeated, and Serbian homes were destroyed and their inhabitants were put to the knife once more. Not far from Zalazje is the village of Obadi, and further on lies Andrići, a village that is no longer to be found on the world’s map. Indeed, although the village was wiped out, life here abounds, but in a different form. Each year, numerous apple trees persistently offer up their bounty as they await the return of their owners. Obviously, apple trees are more determined than the local politicians have been during all these years in their attempts to maintain some semblance of normal life. All over, there are apples to spare, seemingly in quantities not seen anywhere else. For the moment, they happen to be the only life form here and the only witnesses to heinous crimes. The village cannot be reached using the now nonexistent former road. Determined travelers must make their way through the forest if they wish to appreciate what is left of Andrići. Once in Andrići, what they would see are the remnants of foundations of razed homes which are now overgrown with weeds, as well as bushes and other similar kinds of vegetation.
At the other end of Srebrenica municipality is the village of Krnići. The road to that village takes us through the fully renovated and revitalized Muslim village of Tokoljaci.
Krnići used to be known for the considerable number of learned people who had been born there. Until 1959, it had the status of a municipality. In the middle of the village are the remains of the Cultural Center which was completely destroyed and burned down during the attack. In the Cultural Center, the Muslims burned alive the village teacher, Vasa Parača, born in 1912, who taught not only local Serbs, but Muslims as well. He was a man who during his lengthy career as an educator served members of both communities. In addition to the Cultural Center and the schoolhouse, all Serbian households were also targeted by the marauding attackers. As a result, not a single home survived the attack of July 5, 1992. Today, not a soul lives in Krnići any longer. Inhabitants who managed to survive the attack have found refuge in Serbia, Hungary, Russia, and in other locations throughout Europe.
It is difficult to talk about Srebrenica without mentioning the village of Karno. In the center of that village stands a 19th century monastery dedicated to the Protection of the Mother of God. This is a place that was mentioned and described by the Nobel prize winning author, Ivo Andrić, who held the people of this village in great esteem. Unfortunately, this – as well as the neighboring Serbian village of Medje – are today both depopulated. The destroyed Serbian homes in the area have practically blended in with surrounding nature. In a few years, hardly any signs will remain to indicate that human beings had ever lived here and that this land was Serbian.
And just as you think that the bitter chalice of suffering for the local Serbian people was full, you experience a surprise in the form of the village of Ratkovići. The village is situated in the midst of several completely renovated Muslim villages. On one side of it lie Osmače, Podkorijen, Dedići, and Poznanovići, on the other – Moćevići. These Muslim villages are brimming with life and are full of happy children running around. Alongside the asphalt and the mended gravel roads, we see renovated schools, houses, and an entire infrastructure offering a sustainable life to the inhabitants. In contrast to those villages, Ratkovići cannot be reached by any conveyance. In order to come to the village, you must walk several kilometers on foot, up a muddy road. In the village there is not even electricity. As for infrastructure, it is superfluous to even talk about it.
We can therefore say without hesitation that it would be difficult to find, anywhere else, a people who had been treated with comparable callousness.
I am unaware that anywhere in Europe such a double standard is practiced toward communities who live side by side in such a relatively small geographical space. Whatever happened to the noble ideas about justice and equality that foreign diplomats never tire of preaching? This example lays bare the hypocrisy of a good part of Europe, and of America as well, because their reconstruction agencies have refused to invest a single penny into the renewal of this Serbian village, or of Serbian villages in this region in general. To put it starkly, they are not interested in suffering, if it is Serbian. One even gains the impression that they are not particularly pleased when any reference is made to it. The political climate in their countries favors others in this region, and Serbs are simply nonexistent in that equation.
Finally, after walking several kilometers, we found ourselves in the hamlet of Gornji Ratkovići. The first thing that you notice is the size of the village. Before the war, the village had the status of a local community and it was indeed one of the largest in the area. That fact is illustrated by the presence of several cemeteries in the hamlet of Donji Ratkovići.
It seems almost superfluous to make a special point of the fact that we did not encounter a single local in this village. The village is totally barren and empty. While you tread the muddy road, you feel the silence pressing down upon you from all around. There is not a sound to be heard and you see only the thick fog which has descended upon the remaining ruins. That makes the scene more ghostly still. True, there is a single home in the village that one of the locals had rebuilt, but it is uninhabited. The owners found refuge on the other shore of the Drina River.
The village was attacked on June 21, 1992. While pillaging and plundering, the Muslims torched every single home they could lay their hands on and they killed every villager who failed to run away, or who might have attempted to prevent the destruction of his homestead. Surely, there must also have been those among them who had faith in their Muslim neighbors and for that reason did not abandon their homes. That trust cost them their lives and it also imparts a valuable lesson to the younger generations.
On the monument which was later erected to honor the victims, you can even see the names of persons who were entering the ninth decade of their lives. Even so old and helpless, they were targeted in the Muslim pogrom. Some of them, like the paralyzed grandmother, Desanka Stanojević, were burned alive inside their own homes.
The other aspect of the tragic fate of this village are its homes, or to be more exact the remnants and foundations of what used to be homes, because not a single dwelling was spared in the attack. With our camera, we made a record of more than 50 completely obliterated Serbian homes. Some of them we could not approach closely because of the thick vegetation; others in fact exist no more because the ravages of time have removed and wiped them out forever from these parts.
It should be noted that before the war Ratkovići had over 300 inhabitants. Today, not a single one is left. A portion of the inhabitants were killed, another portion were expelled, and their homes – as the photographs demonstrate – were completely destroyed, leaving the village practically dead. The village started down that martyr’s path over two decades ago, thanks to its Muslim neighbors. But, strangely, the village continues along in much the same shape today, not anymore because of the Muslims but thanks to those who have shut their eyes and turned their heads away from the heinous crime that occurred here.
When we are talking about crimes in the area that were committed by members of the Muslim community, we cannot sidestep the village of Kravica, which is spread over a considerable area and includes several settlements and hamlets. All those neighboring locales experienced the same fate as Kravica itself; they were attacked on Orthodox Christmas Day in January 1993. The attack was carried out from three directions; it was well organized and had been planned for some time in advance. The entire area which lies above the village of Kravica belongs to the large village of Brana Bačići, with several of its hamlets strewn all across the foothills. All the hamlets (Donji Bačići, Štulici, Velika Njiva, Rušići) were completely obliterated, the homes torched, and most of the population expelled.
That the wickedness of those who conducted the attack seemingly knew no bounds is shown by the fate of a monument left over from World War II. During the 1993 attack, a memorial was desecrated that long ago had been erected to honor Mileva Mladjenović. In 1944 she was slaughtered together with her one year-old daughter and her mother-in-law. Their throats were slit by the local Ustashi collaborators. Even though the memorial is not located even close to any inhabited area or in a conspicuous place, the Muslims, who occupied the zone for several months after their 1993 Orthodox Christmas Day attack on Kravica, did not leave it in peace. With bullets and a dull object, they damaged the picture of the dead person on the memorial headstone. Perhaps the headstone desecration was some small comfort for the descendants of those who slit the throat of a year-old child for no other reason than that it was Serbian. In the last war, there apparently were some who could not resist honing their grandparents’ rusted knives, which had been lying dormant for half a century.
Villages in the area of Skelani fared no better. The series of obliterated Serbian villages in that area of the Srebrenica district is quite lengthy. Regrettably, some of them are no longer accessible because the roads which formerly led to them are overgrown with thick weeds. In some of those villages there is not a soul living anymore. On one occasion, while we were on our way to Skelani, we crossed paths with an elderly man astride a horse. As the local guide explained it, he is the sole human being still left living in what remains of his village and every so often he rides his horse down to Skelani to buy basic provisions. Somewhat further on is the village of Božići. Whether it was because of its name (linguistically, the word “Božići” suggests Christmas), or for some other reason, the village was totally destroyed. Like so many other villages, it was attacked at a moment when the locals had no clue what was coming. It was while the wheat harvest was in full swing, on August 5, 1992, that Muslim neighbors attacked, killed a number of the inhabitants, put homes to the torch, and carried away the wheat.
One of the village inhabitants made a special impression by pointing to the foundation of his destroyed former home and explained to us that it had survived the First and the Second World Wars, but that it did not fare as well and did not manage to outlive the attack of the Muslim neighbors this time around.
We should also mention some of the other nearby villages, such as Klekovići, Pribojevići. Arapovići, Gaj, Jezero, Bradići, among a number of others, where Serbs used to live and which today are burnt piles of debris.
There is no end to tales that could be told about these wretched Serbian villages. For the most part, they have one feature in common. They were destroyed systematically, following essentially the same, standard pattern.
The process of their slow withering away since then has not been reversed to this day. As a result, most of these villages today look considerably worse than immediately after the war years.
Today, upon the foundations of what used to be Serbian homes, rather than children what you see are weeds, and they are conquering Serbian land relentlessly, meter by meter. On some sites, where there used to be a family home there remain now only heaps of scattered bricks and broken masonry. In most cases, the foundation stones are covered with tall vegetation which makes them almost unrecognizable during spring and summer months.
There are countless questions that come to mind, seemingly as many as there are devastated villages and homes. What seems to be lacking are clear answers or is it, perhaps, that conditions are not yet ripe to disclose them? I believe that the future will ultimately tell us who is responsible for the exodus of the Serbs and for the obliteration of their roots, as well as for the cloud of reticence which is suspended over the entire region and which prevents both the domestic and the foreign public from learning the truth about the fate of Srebrenica’s Serbs.
During the post-war period, countless organizations became involved in reconstruction and refugee return. Many of them have refused to invest a single penny into the return of Serbian refugees or the reconstruction of their dwellings. They rationalize their policy by saying that there is no hard evidence of Serbian suffering. That shallow rationale only encourages those whose goal is to expel even the handful of remaining Serbs. Proof of that are the broken windows on the facade of a modest home that was rebuilt for a family of displaced Serbs who returned to the village of Jezero. It is located side by side with a splendid turnkey housing complex constructed exclusively for Muslims by a British donor agency. The burning question is clear: after all the horrors of the past, who still dares to cast stones at Serbian homes, and is it really possible that Serbs are still not secure on the land of their ancestors, the land where they have been living for centuries?
Up to the present, a bit over 500 Serbian homes have been rebuilt. That is an insignificant figure by comparison to the number of homes that were reconstructed for the other community. When account is taken of the fact that the majority of destroyed homes in the villages surrounding Srebrenica belonged to Serbs, this disparity becomes even more blatant. Reconstruction money for the region is measured in the millions of dollars. Regrettably, Serbs have received no more than crumbs from the community reconstruction cake set aside by Europe and the international community for the revitalization of the Drina Valley region.
From the political perspective, it is understandable that for most Western reconstruction agencies to become involved in the restoration of Serbian villages would be to play with fire. Rebuilding upon the foundations of Serbian homes would be tantamount to admitting that it was the Muslims who destroyed what used to be there. That further suggests that they had committed brutal crimes and that they ought to be held accountable for their wartime conduct alongside the other communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, instead of receiving a generous amnesty and being treated as the victims of that war. Unfortunately, there are those who find the truth unacceptable and who will, therefore, firmly shut their eyes to the suffering of the Serbian people. Whose interest dictates that Serbs must not be mentioned in the context of victims? Why is it that, in disregard of obvious and dismaying facts, the burden of guilt for the ravages of war must be borne exclusively by Serbs?
Whatever the answers may be, the future of Serbian villages and their inhabitants is uncertain. As photographic evidence demonstrates, their condition shows no measurable improvement in relation to the turbulent war years. Except for patience and hope, these people do not have much else. As they themselves put it, what they find the most offensive is the fact that not only during the war, but also in the period of peace that followed, they did not receive a fair hearing from anybody. They find it incomprehensible that anyone would attempt to turn them into war criminals and that the international public knows next to nothing about their plight.
Whoever would bother to take a closer look at the photographs will immediately grasp what misery those people have had to endure.
It is unfortunate that to this day not a single individual among those who were burning and pillaging Serbian villages was made to face justice. In a few sporadic cases, when that was attempted, punishment was successfully evaded. It seems that collective guilt with which an attempt is being made to burden one people does not leave much room even for symbolic punishment of individual perpetrators from the ranks of the other. It therefore remains a very acute question whether justice will ever make itself felt here. Abandoned and left to their own devices, local Serbs have but slight prospects to right the injustices which have been inflicted upon them. Their cries are not even capable of reaching the other shore of the Drina River, let alone some more distant audience.
Their survival presents a great challenge for future generations. That is one of the reasons this travelogue was written: to wrest those obliterated villages from oblivion, to convey the unjust suffering of their inhabitants to the world, and to tear down the walls of silence by which they have been surrounded all these years and to which human injustice has condemned them.
That, precisely, is our goal and raison d’être of “Srebrenica Historical Project”. It is to comprehensively, factually, and empirically confront and deconstruct the myths about Srebrenica disseminated during the last two decades.
Dr. Ljubiša Simić
