Mothers of Srebrenica

The last meeting we had today was one of the most intense emotional experiences of my life. We visited a women´s group called Mothers of Srebrenica (recall that in Srebrenica 8,000 Muslim men were slaughtered in the largest genocide in Europe since the Holocaust-- AND it occurred within a UN ´safe zone´ under the supposed ´protection´ of the Dutch batallion).

They have a small office in Tuzla, which has photographs of their murdered sons covering one whole wall. During the meeting, Nura (the woman with whom we met) brought out a thick photo album with more photos of sons, husbands, and brothers who will never be seen again. She said they have 6 more albums full of photos in the back and that is not even the beginning of all the men who were missing or killed (because many women do not even have a picture of their fallen sons since their belongings were destroyed or they had to flee their homes in such a rush they could not take memorabilia with them).

She was so candid and open with us, telling us about a woman she knows who was raped in the camps during the war (who was only 16 and a virgin at the time). This woman met a Bosnian man and they escaped the camp and made their way (over about a year) to Hungary. During this time, the woman gave birth to 2 baby daughters. The family could not assimilate in Hungary, so they returned to Bosnia, and the husband divorced her, saying he could not stay with her because she had been raped. At the end of the meeting, Nura gave us this woman´s phone number and said we could talk to her if we told her Nura sent us. She also gave us contact information for a few other women in Tuzla and showed us how to contact the women living in refugee camps nearby.

She invited us to come to a special gathering that they have on the 11th of every month with survivors and mothers of Srebrenica. July 11th, 1995 was the starting day of the Srebrenica genocide so that is why they get together on the 11th of the month.

She told us, while showing us the pictures of the murdered men, that the Chetniks (Serb soldiers) did not care about the men´s age; they just killed every man who looked like he was strong. Old men, young men, were separated from the women (while the Dutch soldiers watched and even helped the Chetniks to separate out the men). The women and children (under age 12) were sent away on trucks and buses. The men were summarily shot and put in to mass graves. The mass grave site I visited 2 weeks ago at Potocari was one of these sites. When she was telling us about this, tears streamed down my face, and I could see Sarah was crying too. As Lejla translated, her eyes were also full of tears.

When we left, we told Nura we did not even know how to thank her, and she gave us hugs and kisses on both cheeks.

We bought a book of testimonies from 104 survivors of Srebrenica that the Mothers put together to document the complicity of the UN/Dutch batallian forces in the genocide. The money supports the work of the organization and it is in English and Bosnian. I read several of the testimonies and they were so powerful.

It made me so angry. Again and again the women testified that the Dutch soldiers would not let them inside the building where civilians could have been kept safe and where there was room for thousands more refugees who were left outside. They also described how the Dutch soldiers celebrated and drank with the Chetnik soldiers when they came down from the hills to massacre the Muslim population. The Dutch soldiers were seen (this is reported by at least 20 witnesses) giving their uniforms and guns to the Chetniks, so that later it was hard to tell whether the soldiers were Chetniks or Dutch.

But the worst thing is that at a certain point, the roughly 2,000 civilians who had been allowed to stay inside the factory building with the Dutch soldiers were forced out. They were made to walk in a corridor created by 2 ´yellow tapes´, at the end the women and children were separated from the men and the Dutch soldiers would not let the families stay inside the building or stay together once they had walked through this corridor. The women testified that the Dutch soldiers even threatened them with guns if they tried to help their fathers or husbands in to the trucks where only the women and children were supposed to be.

The book is called, ´The United Nations on the Srebrenica´s Pillar of Shame: 104 testimonies about the role of the UN in genocide against the population of the UN ´Srebrenica Safe Haven.´´ As I was reading, I found Nura´s testimony (the woman with whom we met earlier today). It made me cry all over again and my anger was subsumed by sadness and horror. This did not have to happen.