“My Mama Would Never Know Where I Am"
[Excerpted from Chapter 11: Genocide]
B-1401 was a seventeen-year-old refugee when he and his family were
caught in the maelstrom of war, ethnic cleansing, and mass executions that
became known to the world as "Srebrenica." When the Bosnian Serbs attacked
the UN safe area on 6 July 1995, B-1401, along with other able-bodied Muslim
men and boys, was faced with the decision to seek shelter at the UNPROFOR
base in Potocari among the women and young children or flee into the woods.
Understandably lacking confidence that UNPROFOR would protect them, B-1401,
his father, uncle, and other male relatives headed for the woods.
They joined a column of fifteen thousand men led by one to three thousand
Bosnian army troops, heading toward Bosnian-controlled territory. In fierce
fighting the Bosnian soldiers broke through enemy lines, leaving civilians
and some of the soldiers behind. When Milošević questioned the witness about
the army's abandonment of civilians, he responded, "They had to save
themselves. If they'd taken us, no one would have survived." The remaining
civilians spent the night in the woods under heavy shellfire. B-1401
described a scene of extraordinary chaos. Men were wounded and dying. Some
were hallucinating and a few killed themselves rather than surrender. They
did not know where they were. The witness lost contact with his father and
never saw him again.
Next day the shelling let up and Serb forces demanded the column
surrender. While some men headed deeper into the woods, many thousands
walked toward Serbian forces with their hands raised. B-1401 described
walking over corpses, seeing men with their faces and hands blown off from
shells. He estimated about five hundred men were killed in the woods. After
demanding that the men throw down their weapons, valuables, and German
marks, their Serb captors crowded them onto trucks, where they spent the
night without food or water. The following morning, the men were crammed
into a school building in Petkovci under even worse conditions and forced to
repeat, "This is Serb land. It always was and always will be." The men were
so thirsty they drank their own urine.
As night fell they were taken out in groups of three to five, followed by the sound of gunfire.
None returned. Soldiers later led the remaining men out, tying their hands and loading them onto a
truck. The witness described feeling a sticky substance on his foot and seeing a large pile of
corpses in front of the school. After a five- to ten-minute ride the truck stopped. Men were unloaded in groups of five.
Each time the men remaining heard shots. B-1401 said they
tried to avoid getting off the truck, knowing they were
going to be executed. Many begged for water. They did not
want to die thirsty. The witness said he tried to hide too.
"I just wanted to live another minute or two."
When it was his turn, Serb soldiers ordered his group to
find a place to lie down among the dead bodies. "Everything
happened so fast," he told the court. "I thought I'd die
soon and not suffer any more, that my mama would never know
where I am." The soldiers opened fire. B-1401 was shot in
his right side. When the next group came and the shooting
resumed, he was wounded again -- in his left foot. Later he
was hit once more. He was suffering so much from his wounds,
he testified, that he wanted to cry out and beg to be
killed. The moaning of the man next to him elicited a bullet
in the head. The killing continued for another hour.
His pain was so excruciating that B-1401would never have
tried to escape had it not been for another survivor. The
two untied each other's hands with their teeth, crawled on
their stomachs across the field of corpses, and reached the
top of a hill. Next morning they saw a yellow loader
collecting a "very large pile" of dead bodies. Speaking of
the trek through the woods with the other survivor, B-1401
testified, "He was the only one who knows how badly I
suffered. I couldn't walk. He would leave me, then come back
and beseech me to go on. I hurt so badly." After four days
of traveling they reached safety.
Milošević questioned the witness about the nature of the
column of men -- how many were armed, how many were
soldiers, how many in the woods were killed in combat. The
accused was seeking support for his defense that a large
number of the Srebrenica dead had died while fighting. Yet,
if 500 men died fighting in the woods, at least 6,500 more
remained to be accounted for. When Milošević questioned the
young man about apparent discrepancies in identifying the
execution site, B-1401 responded, "It happened during the
night. You'll never be able to understand the feeling when
one is taken out to be executed." As one of the prosecutors
later wrote, “When this boy testified something happened in
the courtroom. We were all – judges, prosecutors, amici
choking back emotion. It was [as] if his having passed
through that experience imparted a quality to him that
impacted us all."i
_____________________________
i Dermot Groome, 13 November 2007
correspondence with author.
© Duke University Press, 2010
All rights reserved
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