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.
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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 s
ecret. This was where Srebrenica’s lifeline began. If the Sapna Thumb fell, then the smuggling route in and out of Srebrenica would be closed.
The secret was kept and the lifeline remained open, right up to the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, so it was the obvious route for the escape column to attempt. The route had worked for years, so it made sense to use it to save as many people as possible. But the smugglers had only ever travelled in small groups, with never more than a few dozen individuals, which were relatively easy to conceal. With Bosnian Serb forces descending rapidly on the pocket, the escape column gathering for the off had already grown to well over 10,000, mostly men, but with a scattering of female medical staff tending the wounded and the occasional woman desperate not to be split up from her menfolk. It would take twelve hours after the head of the column left the pocket for the tail to begin marching. What happened next has entered legend, being commemorated each July by the Marš Mira, or Peace March, when several thousand young Bosnians walk the lifeline route in reverse, from the Sapna Thumb back to Srebrenica. I was in time to join the Marš Mira of 2012.
The walk combined the youthful enthusiasm of a music rock festival with an undertow of horror reminiscent of an Auschwitz memorial service. Cheerful groups of young Bosnian men and women lugged rucksacks crammed with camping gear and food, their cooking pots clanking as they swung from strings knotted to the outside. Flags were borne proudly by some of the groups, bearing memorial messages for the victims of Srebrenica, the task of carrying the poles being rotated among the walkers. The occasional ghetto-blaster boomed raucous tracks of Balkan turbo-folk and all the time the mood was contagious in its spirit of focused determination.
The three-day route took us through countryside every bit as beautiful as the terrain I had crossed in the earlier part of my journey through western Bosnia. We crossed the occasional asphalt road, but for the most part the trail followed footpaths and farm tracks through landscape that in many places was just as wild as the wolf country I had already visited. There were pastures where the grass had been scythed and gathered up into ricks as tall as houses. There were mountain streams where my fishing radar twitched, glistening reaches of clear water rich in the promise of wild trout. There were forest glades offering shade against the strong summer sun, and moments when the tree cover broke to give tumbling views of hills growing ever paler as they fell away to the Drina River valley far off to the east. There were climbs so steep that in places we had to grab onto tree trunks to stop ourselves sliding back down on sledges of muddy, matted leaves.
Every few miles we would come to another mountain village. These were Bosnian Muslim homes, but they were indistinguishable from Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat farmhouses I had already visited on my journey. In the spirit of the London marathon, locals set up tables of water cups for the marchers and, in one memorable instance of history’s loop, a group of aid workers from Austria – the modern remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – enthusiastically handed out bananas from crates they had arranged to be driven to the summit of one of the longer climbs. With so many people taking part in the march, police vans, ambulances and other emergency vehicles were deployed here and there. A fire engine caught my eye, donated from Britain, the name of the East Sussex Fire Brigade still stencilled on its side.
Snapshots from Bosnia’s history littered the trail. In one section of forest we passed a stećak, one of the medieval box-like Bosnian tombstones that date from the era when the various eastern and western forms of Christianity struggled for supremacy among the south Slavs living here before the arrival of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. The centuries had knocked it askew, but the surface of the grey rock bore circular repetitive carvings, hallmarks of an ancient south-Slav culture that is still the focus of academic study. Later I saw something that needed no explanation, a Wehrmacht steel helmet dating from the German occupation of Yugoslavia. It was rusted to a wafer and nailed to the top of a fence post, but the shape was easily recognisable from the long schoolboy hours I had spent playing with Second World War models.
At the end of each day we stopped en masse at a pre-arranged location, the marchers dispersing into nearby villages, settling down for the night in barns and outhouses, where blistered feet received attention, food was prepared and bedrolls were spread out. Farmers’ wives gave me burek prepared not quite in the same vast cartwheels as Sarajevo’s restaurants, but in more modest swirls the size of a baking tray. I ate contentedly, cross-legged on the ground, flakes of thin pastry drifting onto my lap, eagerly wolfing down the cheese-and-spinach stuffing to restock my energy levels. It was the raspberry season, and several times I was able to pick fruit from farmers’ gardens before a thimble of coffee was proffered as a digestif. Tired enough to fall asleep quickly each night in my tent, I was woken early in the morning by the Muslim call to prayer from mosques rebuilt after the war. Throughout the walk there was joshing and high spirits, with one particular farmer’s wife reminding me of a word learned earlier on my journey when she insisted jokingly that I leave her my šator as a gift. On another occasion when a local man, a shopkeeper called Mirza, found out I was British, he looked me straight in the eye and said in south-London-accented English: ‘Next year we are going to be millionaires, Rodney.’ He was a great fan of the British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which is so popular across the Balkans that it is repeated endlessly on local television. The name of the show here is Mućke, a word that translates as ‘wheeler-dealers’, a concept that resonates strongly with Bosnians from all three ethnic groups.
These should be my dominant memories from the walk: natural beauty, local generosity and rural simplicity. But they are not. My overwhelming memory is that I was dancing on graves.
The route followed by the escape column from Srebrenica is today shown not by normal road signs. Instead it is marked by mass graves, one after another: the smaller ones where half a dozen bodies were uncovered, the larger ones found to contain more than 500 corpses. Over the three days of walking I recorded passing twenty mass graves, although there were some points where I was so exhausted that I might have missed a few, my eyesight not what it should have been because of sweat in my eyes. Each of the mass graves I did see had a sign that gave the name of the site and the coding used by the war-crimes investigators who have spent the years since 1995 exhuming bodies, gathering evidence and arranging for the remains to be moved to a proper graveyard near Srebrenica itself. And each had a photograph: one showing an investigator’s gloved hand holding a skull; another showing a skeleton’s hands still tied with wire; another an identity card displaying a man’s sober-faced passport photograph peering out through a smear of mud. Many of the bodies in the graves lay exactly where they had been killed during the escape. Others were brought from where they had been hurriedly buried elsewhere after execution, then were driven here and hidden among the woods in what war-crimes investigators called ‘Secondary Graves’ – places so far off the beaten track that the Bosnian Serb authorities hoped they would never be found.
The spirit of the march was at once respectful towards these sites and yet businesslike. For many of these young people a fifty-mile hike represented the greatest physical challenge they had ever attempted, so while acknowledging the mass graves, they did not dawdle, pressing on instead with the next section of the challenge. Next to one of the mass graves that we passed on the first day an ice-cream stall had been set up by a local man – one that did great business.
Over the days it took me to walk the hills into Srebrenica I built up a picture of what had happened from one of the survivors of the escape column. It took some time to win the confidence of Džile Omerović, a bearded, barrel-chested bear of a man in his mid-thirties who had ended up as a refugee in Switzerland after making it out from Srebrenica alive. Each evening we would chat in French, and to begin with he displayed the same survivor’s guilt as Arnie – a reluctance to make a ‘fuss’, to highlight his own plight when death denied so many others the chance to voice properl
y their suffering. But after spending some time together he began to let go, offering up threads of his story.
Džile was born of farming stock in the village of Pobudje, a Bosnian Muslim hamlet about a day’s walk north of Srebrenica. He was seventeen when the war began, eagerly joining a community defence force that was commanded by his father, Musa, the headman of the village.
‘To begin with, in that first summer, we were well organised and the Serbs left us alone,’ he said. ‘There were shelters for the children and we had enough food as a community to survive. My father was in charge and things were peaceful enough here, even though the main road the Serbs were using was just two miles down the hill at the bottom of the valley. At one point an order came to try and block the road, so one night the guys went down there to try and blow up the bridge where the road crosses a river. All of us know the area, so we waited for a misty night and then we dragged down gas canisters to use as explosives – the tanks of gas you use for a welding torch. They stuffed them under the bridge and blew them up. There was a great big flash and a lot of smoke, but it did not make any bloody difference. The bridge was still there in the morning.’
A wry smile crept across his face at the recollection of these early amateur attempts at warfare and then, looking earnest once again, he said something with echoes of Princip’s young life. ‘My great love was reading, and in that first year the thing I missed most was books. All I wanted was books. Anything to read, anything to keep my mind going. I knew nothing about the world, so it was through books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn that I was able to escape. I was only a teenager then, and that book is all about the thing teenagers are most interested in – sex.
‘I took part in another raid and found myself down in the valley near a school. It was night-time, and when I saw a window had been left open I climbed inside. I had no idea if there might be any Serbs there, but all I wanted to do was find some books. I crept up the stairs in the dark and found a lot of places where intravenous drips had been set up. They had been using it as a field hospital to treat their wounded, right there in the school library.