Srebrenica: Thirty Years of Denial 

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“We were beautiful and as such we should be remembered.”

Her green eyes beam. Tea Tupajić looks at the man sitting next to her and her face is aglow. She is a Bosnian theatre director, who experienced the siege of Sarajevo as a child. His name is Olaf Nijeboer, and he is the chairman of the assocation Dutchbat III. Back in 1995, he was 19 when he joined the Dutch batallion of blue helmets, who were supposed to protect Srebrenica. Before being sent off, he was trained to stay strictly neutral and to avoid any personal contact with the local population. Their major warned the young conscripts, a random sample of boys and girls from all over the country who were looking for adventure, a decent paycheck or to make the world a better place, that the Bosnian Muslims were “pure scum”. 

Two days before the thirtieth commemoration of the genocide when Serb troops killed 8372 Bosniaks, mostly boys and men, we gather in an Amsterdam theatre. Olaf is here because he participated in a performance directed by Tea, in which eight Dutchbat veterans spoke about their experiences of guilt, indifference and shame. The occasion: the publication of her book Black Summer. Tea has transformed the Dutchbat stories into a composition of poetic, chilling effect. 

As the host of this talk, I witness the trust that they have established among each other, and how they agree that nobody who survived Srebrenica emerged as a complete human being.

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Last year, the United Nations designated 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. These days, an exhibition at the headquarters in New York shows 200 portraits of those killed, alongside their personal belongings that were found in the forests surrounding the town. Down the road from Srebrenica, newly found human remains will be buried at the sprawling cemetery in Potocari, facing the former battery factory that served as the Dutchbat compound. During those sweltering days of the black summer, thirty years ago, this was where the men were separated from the women, children and elderly, never to be heard from again. Today, it is the home of the Memorial Centre. 

Dutchbat has long gone. On the walls of the compound, it left behind graffiti, now carefully preserved, like: No teeth…? A mustache…? Smel like shit…? Bosnian girl!

For over thirty years now, Srebrenica has been a story of insult, neglect and denial. Both within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and between the country of the 8372 and the country of Dutchbat. It is a story of trauma passed on across generations, of deprecation and desperate warnings not to look the other way. A blueprint for what awaits new generations of genocide survivors. 

Sitting on the other side of Tea Tupajić, in the Amsterdam theatre, is another Dutchbat veteran: Alice Schutte. Today, she is a cheerful public transport consultant with a blonde cowlick. Back then, she took pictures of Srebrenica citizens crawling, almost swimming through the garbage heap outside the UN compound. The Eaters, is what she used to call those people. “There is a photo of me. I am just twenty years old, but my eyes are empty and ice cold. I frighten myself. I was there and what I did was take pictures.”

The first time she recounted this memory, Tea gazed at her in shock. “Those people could have been my family,’ she said. ‘We were not animals. We were beautiful.”

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Her face is smooth, her smile white and the fragrance of her perfume subtle. She is a Bosnian girl. Anything but pure scum. How do you reclaim your image, take back your place in the visible world, when the stereotype that represents you in the public sphere is so ugly and clearly untrue? 

On the morning of 11 July, genocide survivor Midheta Husejnović and Dutchbat chairman Olaf Nijeboer, wearing his military blue cap, unveil the location for a future Srebrenica monument: in front of the building that used to house the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where the architects of the war, such as Mladić, Karadžić and Milošević, were tried and sentenced. A very Dutch-Bosnian moment: respectful, solemn and incredibly slow. Thirty years to designate the potential location for a potential monument? The negotiations about the exact place, the design and the financing are sure to take more long years. 

The commemoration itself takes place next to the Dutch parliament. On this sunny Friday afternoon, tourists enter the Escher Museum, office workers take over the terraces, ready for their summer holiday, barely aware of the ceremony that is happening on the square next to them. Undeniable, though, is the turn-out. I’ve been here when there were a couple of hundred people. Today, the crowd numbers over a thousand. And many of them are young: the determination not to be forgotten in the country that left them to their fate in 1995 has clearly been passed on by parents to their children. 

Five years ago, for the project Srebrenica is Dutch history too, I interviewed 25 Bosnian-Dutch 25-year-olds. Ambitious, educated, outspoken young people representing the easily most integrated migrant community in the Netherlands. Many of them carried a hereditary melancholia: most visit Bosnia and their remaining family members each summer, and it is not rare for them to spend their holiday searching for traces of lost loved ones in the wild nature still hiding mass graves. What they also have in common: a smouldering rage about the omission of Srebrenica in their school curricula. All too often, they themselves had to stand up and educate both their classmates and their teachers about what happened in 1995. 

As always, the commemoration is a ritual of speeches, prayers and songs. The language of never forget is limited. There are, by definition, no words for the unspeakable. And very few, in all too familiar phrases, for stating the obvious. That takes nothing away from their value. 

The awkward silence, after it had been my turn to speak, will stay with me. I had taken the liberty to imagine what the lives of some of the victims would have looked like today, had they not been killed. Naturally, not all of those boys and men from an unremarkable, industrial town in a north-eastern corner of the country would have gone on to live the life of saints and angels. But that is how the community of survivors remembers them. Portraying them as average human beings, including their flaws and mistakes, I hoped, might be a way to bring them closer. To prevent them from disappearing into a kind of sanctity. I understand now that the way for survivors to cope is to preserve the missing in a permanent, lovingly polished stand-still. 

One of the few Bosniak soldiers who managed to flee to safety is Fahrudin Alić. He was reunited with his wife in a refugee camp in Tuzla. His father, brother and cousin were nowhere to be found. After studying political science in Sarajevo, he moved to the Netherlands with his family, after being threatened for criticizing the lack of support by the Bosnian army when Srebrenica fell. Here, it took the authorities five years to decide if he, as a former military commander, should be granted asylum. His academic degree was not recognized. Because he had trouble learning the language, after he was finally allowed to do so, he was not accepted into his former job as a policeman. A job in security ended when the boss judged him to be too traumatized.

The book he wrote on life in Srebrenica during the war was denied by publishers because it was deemed uninteresting for a Dutch audience. Finally, Fahrudin gave up a stint as deliveryman and quit volunteering at the local football club when he became too depressed. His old country had thrown him out. His new one never accepted him. Today, he is portrayed at the impressive exhibition 11 Voices from Srebrenica in the Vught memorial centre in the south of the country. I meet him in Rotterdam, where he is one of the survivors speaking at the publication of Dragi moji. Letters from Srebrenica. The book, compiled by my sweet and troubled friend Mustafa Hadziibrahimović, contains 41 letters by Bosnian Dutch brothers, mothers, wives, sisters and children to those who stayed behind forever. 

Fahrudin, a tall and handsome presence, reads a letter to his older brother Bajro, who always looked out for him while they grew up in Srebrenica. Bajro appears to have been a pure saint. The only thing Fahrudin wishes, and just for a moment his voice breaks, is for his brother to be proud of who he has become today. Walking off stage to a warm applause, he cuts a very lonely figure. 

The book, the exhibition, they are attempts to claw back territory in a Dutch environment that prefers to forget about these voices, that does not want to be pulled back into the real lives of real saints in a town somewhere far away, a town with a name that we couldn’t even pronounce, a name that is synonym to a guilt we have never wanted to recognize. 

In the meantime, large crowds have gathered under the beating sun in Potočari, for the annual commemoration at the cemetery. As always, the human remains that have been identified this year will be buried. This time, there are seven, ranging from a boy of 19 to a lady of 67. Over a thousand of those missing have still not been found. After the genocide, the Bosnian-Serb leaders ordered for the existing mass graves to be bulldozered and the mangled bodies to be spread across new graves all over the territory. 

Srebrenica has been a part of Republika Srpska since the Dayton Agreement, a separate entity within the new state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Milorad Dodik, Srpska’s strong man since 2010, always threatening to secede, no longer recognizes the federal courts and police. He denies the genocide. It was a mistake, he has said, nothing more, and many of those missing are actually still alive. The current mayor of Srebrenica belongs to his party. Posters honoring general Mladić, who masterminded the deportation and killing of civilians and bullied Dutchbat into submission, adorn the town. On their way to the cemetery, the thousands who come to mourn the victims of the genocide are confronted by large pictures of the Serbian dead lining the road.

Absent Voices

Serbian voices have always been completely absent in the discourse about justice and recovery after Srebrenica. All responsibility is dismissed. After the war, there were countless initiatives for dialogue and reconciliation. No country received more financial support per capita than Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some of the money was put to good use. Running water was restored to Srebrenica. The houses of the handful of survivors who chose to return were reconstructed. Civil servants, police and firemen of mixed origin were trained by their colleagues in Dutch towns of similar scale. The assocations of survivors have received support. Dutchbat veterans are accompanied on their first return trips, including to the Memorial Centre in the former UN compound. But all around, the Serbian silence, personified by the surly men walking the empty streets, who might well have been among the killers, is intimidating.

During my last visit, two summers ago, I was warmly welcomed by two bookkeepers in Srebrenica city hall, a Serb and a Bosniak, who had fond memories of the football match when they defeated their Dutch counterparts. But the town felt spooky. The youth centre was empty. The so-called Embassy of Peace turned out to be a modest flat on the fourth floor of a non-descript apartment building, inhabited by a single mother, piles of firewood on her balcony to heat the place in winter. Looking out over the deserted marketplace on the central square of Brotherhood and Unity, the editor (and presenter, reporter and business manager) of the local radio station laughed: ‘”I did the math. If we had divided all that international money among the remaining citizens, we would all have been able to buy a hotel.”

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Before the war, the municipality counted some 40.000 residents. Today, maybe 2.000 remain. And the two hotels that still exist open only during the period of commemoration. 

Silence and denial have solidified. Attempts to commemorate in dignity, to reconstruct, to legally enforce reparations, to heal the mental and practical damage done to the survivors, both locally and in diaspora – it has always been an uphill struggle, and now, the outside world seems to have lost its patience. Interest has dwindled, as has the political energy to correct the stifling status quo, and, as a result, the money. 

Two families, Nuhanović and Mustafić, who had lost fathers and brothers when they were expelled from the Dutchbat compound during those days in July, spent long years in court accusing the Dutch state of negligence and complicity. Finally, the judges decided that the men would have had a 30% chance to survive had they been allowed to stay on the compound, and the families should be compensated accordingly. The state appealed. A higher court then adjusted the verdict: the chance of survival was dialled down to 10%, as was the compensation to the families. 

As a result, the Dutch state made similar calculations to offer compensation to others. Last winter, a total of 25 million euros was made available to 2300 relatives of 612 victims who had sought safety on the compound. Some 10.000 euros per person, for a life that was upended in 1995 and has been burdened down ever since. 

This might well be the last gesture the Netherlands agrees to make, before finally burying this troubled episode. The chilling arithmetic somehow reminds me of the painstaking search for human remains before they can be laid to rest on the cemetery. It took twenty years for the bones of Kadrija Musić to be found and identified, spread across five different mass graves, some of them twenty miles apart. 

The Memorial Centre in the former Dutchbat compound is led by Emir Suljagić, who grew up in Srebrenica, survived thanks to his employment as a UN interpreter, lost numerous family members, curses like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, hulks above you like an MMA fighter and published two almost unbearably beautiful books about his life during the war. The Memorial Centre’s main exhibition opened in 2017: financed by the our foreign ministry, it tried to tell the story of Srebrenica both from a Bosnian and a Dutch perspective. Emir has changed that. His aim is to reconstruct the lives of all the 40.000 people who lived here before the war. In the end, this should be the place where the Bosnians reclaim their own place in history. Where they are responsible for their own image and take back their place in the visible world. 

Not for his own sake. He has emerged as a shattered human being. “It would have been better,” he writes, “if I had not survived. Because I was dead anyway. My life had already ended when it was suddenly returned to me and I had no idea what to do with it.”

The uphill struggle for recognition remains vital. The cemetery and the Memorial Centre are priceless. The theatre performances, books, exhibitions and documentaries count. As do the legal battles and the civic initiatives. For the survivors, the witnesses, the bystanders, the perpetrators and the next generations. In spite of the insults, the neglect and the denial. Because this is what happens if a genocide is not prevented. The aftermath is endless and will continue to haunt the societies that choose to look the other way.