Читать книгу Crimes That Shocked The World - The Most Chilling True-Life Stories From the Last 40 Years - Danny Collins - Страница 15

‘I do not know how Mr Krajišnik or Mr Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide’

– General Ratko Mladiç, on receiving his orders to eliminate the Muslim population.

When Slovenia and Croatia declared their sovereignty in 1991 it was clear to political observers that Yugoslavia was about to fall apart. Fighting began almost immediately as the new republics voiced their independence from Yugoslavia, where ethnic hatred had festered during the 46 years of enforced national republicanism under Marshal Tito. It was the beginning of the bloodiest war of attrition in Europe since World War II. The result was a bitter conflict between the main ethnic groups of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as the competing nationalisms found the territory too small to be divided between the three.

Hatreds that had festered since 1945 between the Croats and Serbs – when the fascist Usta?e sought to create an ethnically pure Croatian state entailing the elimination of all Serbian and Muslim minorities in Croatia – rapidly rose to the surface. They found a ready home in the minds of ethnic groups manipulated by those who sought to gain power and prominence as nationalist leaders, such as Serbian power-players Ante Pavić Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosević. The latter had risen to the presidency of Serbia and Yugoslavia and of the Social Republic of Serbia and Federal Serbia in 1987; Radovan Karadžić was a family doctor until he was elected to the presidency of the Republika Srpska in 1992.

The first to break away from the disintegrating Yugoslavia was Slovenia. Its departure occurred with little incident and the new republic was recognised as an independent state by the United Nations and European Community in 1992. Slovenia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004. Such a peaceful transition would not be the lot of Croatia where a non-communist government under Franjo Tudjman had been elected in 1990, a move prompted by the election of Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosević as Serbian Communist Party leader. Milosević harboured dreams of a ‘Greater Serbia’ and his rise to power within the powerful communist sector was seen by Croatia as a precursor of the implementation of a harsh communist rule over what remained of the Yugoslavian Republic under his presidency, with the result that Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991.

Fighting broke out immediately between Serbs living in the Krajina region of central and north-west Croatia, and Croatian forces and the Serbs declared the region as the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The territorial loss was a damaging blow to the Croat nationalists, not only because of its strategic value but also to their recently declared but long-nurtured national pride.

In 1992 the United Nations succeeded in brokering a peace between the warring factions and deployed its United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Serb advances up to that time had taken 30 per cent of the former Yugoslav Republic of Croatia and the line was frozen by the UN, leaving many Croatians victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region. The remaining 70 per cent of Croatia was recognised by the UN and the European Community as an independent state in January 1992.

In 1995, after nearly four years of smouldering resentment at the Serbian gains, Croatian forces launched an all-out offensive against the Serbs in Krajina, killing an estimated 14,000 Serbian civilians and creating more than 300,000 Serb refugees. Serb homes were burned, Serb property and businesses looted, and elderly Serbs dragged from their homes and shot where they stood. In retaliation, the Serbs launched a rocket attack on the Croatian capital of Zagreb, which caused a few deaths and injuries. But the most infamous of the spreading conflict was the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina where the sheer brutality and horrific campaigns of ethnic cleansing drew the attention of the world’s media.

Bosnia had always been a multi-ethnic state with a considerable portion of the region shared by Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims known as Bosniaks. There were no clear geographical divisions between the groups and no one ethnic group held a clear majority. This meant that in order to create Slobodan Milosević dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’ – his favourite line was: ‘Wherever there is a Serb, there is Serbia’ – would mean the removal of all other ethnic groups in the area. As General Ratko Mladić would warn both Milosević and Radovan Karadžić co-founder of the Serbian Democratic Party and president of the Republika Srpska during the Srebrenica massacres: ‘That is genocide’.

The Republika Srpska was created in 1992 with the aim of creating an ethnically pure Serbian enclave in northern and eastern Bosnia. The Croats meanwhile founded the Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna – Bosnia-Herzegovina – in much the same region. Fighting in the area occurred at first between Muslim forces and Bosnian Croat troops which were supported by the Croatian government in Zagreb. In 1994, Croatian forces were fighting in direct support of the Bosnian Croats until a ceasefire was agreed later that year with the foundation of the joint Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war with the Serbs continued and the new federation of Croats and Muslims now fought together against the Serbian forces.

Of these conflicts, the fighting between the Serbs and Bosnian Muslims was the most widely reported of the entire war and seemed to many European observers to be the whole crux of the conflict. The Serbs of Radovan Karadžić Republika Srpska, spurred on by Slobodan Milosević dream of a Greater Serbia, were set on the creation of a Serb homeland in an extended and ethnically pure Republika Srpska, but large Muslim minorities, especially in the cities, made it difficult for the Serbs to achieve their aim. As a result the Republika Srpska forces under General Ratko Mladić were committed to a policy of ethnic cleansing against Muslim communities on what the Serbian government considered as Serb lands. This included the reappearance of concentration camps in Europe, the first since World War II, rape and sexual assault against Muslim women and girls to ‘breed out’ the ethnic strain, and the mass executions of men and boys of military age.

The most infamous of these was the massacre in 1995 in the city of Srebrenica where, under the eyes of the Dutchbat UNPROFOR force, 7000 Muslims were killed by Serbian forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić It was a massacre of such immense proportions that the world paused to take breath. Srebrenica was a blood bath committed with such bestiality that its reverberations are felt across Europe today as a war crime that shocked the world.

In July 1995, soldiers of the Vojska Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić also conducted the massacre of 30,000 refugees in the area of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Eight thousand male Bosnians of all ages died in a campaign of ethnic cleansing more savage than that inflicted by the forces of Hitler’s Third Reich on the Jewish population of Europe between 1933 and 1945. Also playing its part in the blood bath that shocked modern Europe was a feared Serbian paramilitary unit labelled The Skorpionis, named for its ability to strike rapidly and rid an area of its Muslim occupants, the hated Bosniaks, before forces of the United Nations, which had declared Srebrenica a UN-protected zone, could intervene. The Skorpionis operated as a paramilitary arm of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991.

Following the de facto dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence, sparking off a fierce struggle for territorial control within the republic among its three major ethnic groups. These were Bosnian Muslims known as Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats. Of the three warring groups, the Croats tended to side with the Muslims, while the Serbs and Muslims engaged in a fierce war of attrition.

Srebrenica, located in Central Podrinje, was a strategically important region to the Serbs since it formed an integral part of their newly declared Republika Srpska. Possibly adhering to the well-worn maxim that a new broom sweeps clean, the Serbs decided the solution to the problem would be to eliminate the Bosniaks from their ethnic territories of Eastern Bosnia and Central Podrinje.

The ethnic cleansing of these areas, while not declared an official aim of the Bosnian Serbs at that time, began with attacks on Bosniak villages by paramilitary bands of local Serbs, resulting in the burning of Muslim homes and the slaughter of the Muslim population. Meanwhile, the Serbian Army prepared for its invasion of the territory and the capture of Srebrenica. The town fell to the Serbs in the early spring of 1992 and was recaptured by the Bosnian government forces a few months later.

Throughout 1992 the warring forces lost and regained territory. By Christmas of that year the Bosniak Army had fought through the divided territory to link up with Bosniak forces defending Žepa and Cerska, villages that would soon fall into the hands of the advancing Serbs as Mladić Serb Army advanced to capture the Muslim villages of Konjević Polje and to retake Cerska, effectively cutting the road to Žepa and reducing the size of the besieged region of Srebrenica and its environs to a mere 150 square kilometres. The Bosniak population fled east to Srebrenica and the population of the town almost doubled.

Siege conditions prevailed in Srebrenica as more and more Bosniak refugees sought shelter from the advancing Serbs.

The Serbs were determined to continue with their plan to take the town and cleanse the area of Muslims. On 13 April 1993 the Serb government told the UN High Commission for Refugees that it would attack the town within 48 hours unless the Muslim population surrendered and agreed to evacuation. Muslims in the town, by now having a good idea of what a Serbian-controlled ‘evacuation’ would entail, refused.

The Serb declaration, made in the face of the UN’s declared state of Srebrenica as a safe area, prompted an emergency meeting of the United Nation’s Security Council in New York to pass Resolution 819, which declared that: ‘All parties and others concerned treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any hostile act’. On 18 April the UN deployed its first batch of UNPROFOR troops to the region. The troops, and those that followed over the next 24 months, had a difficult task of keeping the two sides apart. Both Serb and Bosnian forces took advantage of the uneasy mandatory truce to launch attacks on each other. The Serbs blamed the UN. The Bosniaks blamed the UN. The penetration by the Serbs created a virtual blockade on the Dutch peacekeeping force. UN Dutch soldiers who went out of the enclave on leave were not allowed back in, reducing the number of standing UN forces within Srebrenica to less than 400. Food, medicine, equipment, and ammunition were also denied passage and within a few weeks the Dutch, under Dutchbat Commander Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Karremans, were dangerously short of supplies. The resulting lack of materials made peacekeeping increasingly difficult for the Dutch, who were now having to contend with Bosnian forces which, aware of the Serb build-up, were using the UN-declared safe area as a base to launch attacks against the Serb Army.

In the spring of 1995 Radovan Karadžić the then president of the rogue Republika Srpska, ignored directives from the UN and ordered the Serb Army to penetrate deeply into the Srebrenica enclave. The mission task given to Serb commanders was to wipe out the Muslim population and gain as much territory as possible before the UN could force through its peace plan. The area was policed by a depleted UN Dutch peacekeeping force of 400 that now found itself overrun and threatened when the troops of Mladić closed in on the region and trapped the peacekeepers between opposing Serb and Bosnian forces.

By the summer of 1995 Bozniak civilians and military trapped within Srebrenica were dying of starvation. Sensing that the town’s defences were demoralised, and with no sign of action from the international community, Serb president Karadžić ordered the forces of General Mladić to take the town. The vastly outnumbered Dutchbat UN troops either retreated into the town or surrendered as their observation posts came under fire. The defending Bosniak forces, low on men and ammunition, also retreated into the town. As a Swedish complex housing refugees was overrun by the Serbs, the 4000 Bozniak residents attempted to flee north into the town but many were cut down and massacred by the advancing Serbs. The UN peacekeeping force, outnumbered and trapped between the advancing Serbs and the Muslim defence perimeter, was powerless to help.

An incident which highlights the tenuous position of the Dutch was when a UN armoured vehicle attempted to withdraw after coming under fire from Serb tanks. An argument developed between the Dutch crew and the Bosniak defenders who insisted the UN vehicle remain in line. A hand grenade thrown by a Bosniak soldier exploded on the vehicle and killed a Dutchbat soldier. At the same time the Dutch were facing Serb heavy armour and their meagre force was harassed by Bosniak anti-tank fire from the rear.

By 10 July Serb forces of the Drina Corps were at the gates of the town and the Dutch UNPROFOR contingent, reluctant to engage in battle with such an obviously superior force, fired token warning shots over the heads of the advancing Serbs and withdrew behind the town’s tottering defences. From there the Dutch commander sent urgent requests for NATO air support but throughout the day the skies above Srebrenica remained silent as NATO hovered on the brink of declaring full-out war on the Serbs. On 11 July, NATO rattled a feeble sabre when two Dutch F-16s, guided by the laser pointers of the British SAS, roared in to bomb Serb heavy armour as it advanced on the town, but the welcome, if frail, air support had to be cancelled due to poor visibility. In any event, a threat by Karadžić to order the execution of Dutch soldiers and French pilots captured by the Serbs led to a stand-down of the NATO air attacks.

With the town in the hands of the Serbs, Ratko Mladić now turned his Drina Corps under its commander, General Živanović north towards the UN compound of Potocari where an estimated 30,000 Bosniak civilians had fled with the fall of Srebrenica. In the UN, frantic negotiations had broken out to secure the safety of the Muslim population in the Serb occupied territory but Radovan Karadžić had other plans. Along with presidential associate Momčilo Krajišnik he ordered Serb General Ratko Mladić to ensure that the region be ‘swept clean’ of the former Bosniak population, to which the general replied: ‘People are not little stones, or keys in someone’s pocket, that can be moved from one place to another, just like that… Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr Krajišnik or Mr Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide.’

As Mladić received his orders and UN negotiations continued, the 30,000 civilians who had fled the Serb advance were now crowding into the UN compound at Potocari. Two thousand succeeded in gaining entry to the compound while others camped in neighbouring fields. The refugees were mainly made up of the elderly, women, and children, with a small minority of men, later estimated by the Dutch at around 1200. Food and water was at a premium and people among the crush of frightened refugees were dying of heat exhaustion as the fierce conditions took their toll.

By now the advancing Drina Corps had linked up with the main body of the Serbian Army and elements of the Skorpionis had surrounded the Potocari compound, clearing buildings of refugees and summarily executing the occupants. No discrimination was made between the old and the young, and babies barely out of the womb died with their skulls crushed against walls or under rifle butts. Old men and women were eviscerated by bayonets and young boys and girls submitted to multiple rapes before being despatched with a bullet to the head. The main target of men and youths of military age was forgotten among the carnage. Some refugees were seen to hang themselves or cut their own throats in terror of a more painful death at the hands of the rampaging Serbs.

Many reports would later circulate of the inaction of the Dutch peacekeepers to prevent the blood bath, one witness reporting the murder of a baby that was torn from its mother’s arms and had its throat slit when a Serb objected to the infant’s frenzied crying, this atrocity done under the eyes of Dutch soldiers who did nothing; but one would have had to be in the position of the Dutchbat soldiers to realise that they were a hair’s breadth away from death themselves and that their lives depended on the whim of the blood-crazed Serb army.

On the morning of 12 July, agreement had been reached that buses would ferry the refugees north to Kladanj in Bosniak-held territory but as queues formed, Serb forces entered the Potocari compound and separated men and boys of military age into groups that were then marched away at rifle-point. The selection was purely arbitrary, with some elderly men and younger teenage boys ordered out of the line for the buses. The selected men and boys were taken to a holding point in Potocari where Dutchbat soldiers reported hearing occasional gunshots. A UN military observer who attempted to approach the holding area was turned back by Serb troops who made it clear he would be shot if he attempted to approach further.

The mass executions at Potocari were carried out blatantly in full view of the UNPROFOR contingent. At night, arc lights illuminated a scene reminiscent of the Nazi death camps as industrial bulldozers pushed the bodies of the dead and dying into mass graves. The rank smells of blood and putrefaction clung to the throats of those forced to witness the scenes and many of the Serb execution squads wore rags tied around their mouths and nostrils to avoid the stench of death. Streets were littered with corpses as the Serb forces continued with their rape and torture that had developed into a rage of ethnic hate. Noses, ears, and lips were cut from their victims as trophies, and parents were forced to watch their children murdered before their eyes. Many of the buses carrying women and children to Bosniak territory failed to reach their destination, the occupants ordered out of the vehicles en route and executed at the roadside.

It was clear that the Serbs were embarking on genocide on a massive scale, with reports that a column of 15,000 male refugees, who had attempted to break out of the Potocari perimeter to Tuzla on the night of 11 July, prior to the arrival of the Serbs, were ambushed by Serb artillery at Kemanica Hill between Konjević Polje and Nova Kasaba. Five thousand survivors of the shelling who had been at the rear of the column took to the woods alongside the road, where they hid from the Serb searchers.

Gradually, as thirst and hunger overcame them, the survivors of the artillery bombardment began to surrender or were captured by Serbs who promised their exchange for Serb PoWs. Some Serb soldiers were even reported to be wearing UN uniforms in an effort to get the Muslims to come out of hiding. The ruse worked and close to Sandići 300 surrendering Muslims were lined up in ranks before being mown down by machine-gun fire.

Only a few survived to tell their stories to the War Crimes Commission at The Hague. Among those killed were the political leaders of the Srebrenica enclave, medical staff of the local hospital at Potocari, and members of prominent Srebrenica families. Also killed were a number of women, children, and elderly who had chosen to accompany the column.

Reports of the Srebrenica massacres gradually filtered back to UN observers as the war continued through to the fall of 1995. At the end of August of that year NATO launched a bombing campaign that lasted until 20 September. NATO was aware of the criticism that its negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs had shown it to be weak and without conviction while thousands died, calling for the observation by one shrewd political observer that ‘More might have been done if the Bosniaks’ lifeline had been oil rather than beetroot soup…’. The war ended with the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995.

In the aftermath of the peace agreement the Dutch government accepted responsibility for the failure of the under-resourced Dutchbat mission to defend the population of Srebrenica and the cabinet resigned in 2002. A Serbian report issued in the same year and endorsed by leading Bosnian Serb politicians claimed that 1800 Muslim soldiers had died in combat, adding that ‘the number of Muslim soldiers killed by Bosnian Serbs out of personal revenge or lack of knowledge of international law is probably around 100…’

In 2004 a disputed Republika Srpska committee formed at the request of the international community’s High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, released the names of 8731 persons confirmed missing or dead from the Srebrenica enclave. However, a resolution passed by the US House of Representatives a year later made it clear that the world saw the actions of the Serbs in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1995 ‘as genocide as defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide created in Paris on December 9 1948 and entered into force on January 12 1951’.

By the fall of 2005, possibly demonstrating an anxiety to be accepted as part of the international community as well as that of the expanding EEC, the Special Bosnian Serb Government Working Group stated that 25,083 people were involved in the massacre at Srebrenica, including 19,471 members of Bosnian Serb armed forces that actively gave orders or directly took part in the massacre, claiming to have identified 17,074 by name. Eight hundred and ninety-two of those named still hold positions at, or are employed by, the government of the Republika Srpska. The names have not been revealed.

Up to 2006, 42 mass graves had been discovered around Srebrenica and 22 more are believed to exist in the area. The number of victims identified totalled 2070, with more than 7000 bags of body parts awaiting identification. At Kamenica Hill, site of the Artillery bombardment of a refugee column escaping from Potocari, another 1000 body parts were exhumed.

In May 2007 former Serb general Zdravko Tolimir was arrested by Serbian police and transferred to the International Criminal tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Radovan Karadžić was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosević was accused of complicity in genocide in Srebrenica but died in March 2006 during his trial in The Hague before a verdict was returned.

Radovan Karadžić dubbed ‘The Beast of Bosnia’, was discovered working as a homeopathic doctor in Belgrade 13 years later. His face was almost covered by a long white bushy beard and side whiskers and his trademark bush of hair had been tamed into plaits. Karadžić went on trial at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide in October 2009, refusing to recognise the authority of the court. The trial continued in his absence.