“I am in peace, I turned the page”: it was 30 years ago, the former Nice police officer who revealed the horror of Srebrenica returns to the genocide in Bosnia

It was in November 2022. We contacted Jean-René Ruez to evoke the Boutcha massacre in Ukraine, perpetrated by the Russian army. Still a police officer at the time, the interested party had kindly declined the proposal. Perhaps by decency, not feeling sufficiently legitimate … But he had vaguely left the door ajar to speak of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later…

At the beginning of June, a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, the contact is resumed. Jean-René Ruez, a retired divisional commissioner since November 2023, is not a man to get out of herself, and gives us an appointment, not at his home (he does not want us to know his address), but at the restaurant of the Grenoble cable car (Isère). A neutral place.

Thirty years after the horror, the one who contributed to the arrest and the conviction of the main leaders of the genocide of Srebrenica, in which 7,000 to 8,000 Bosnians were summarily executed, would he fear for his life? “No, I am not paranoid. Even if those responsible for the massacres, these war criminals, undoubtedly have a pack of followers who persist in glorifying them”answers Jean-René Ruez, visibly relaxed.

“I feel like it was yesterday”

Question endangering his life, the interested party has, it is true, a lot. “During the six years when I was chief of the Srebrenica investigation group of the international criminal tribunal for the ex-Yugoslavia (ICTI), when we left in the morning on the field with colleagues, we were not sure to return with our two guiboles. There were mines everywhere. I laugh today, but it’s nervoushe says. You had to be a little crazy, but if we had to wait for the passage of the deminers, it would have taken too long. However, as with any crime scene, time plays against us, making evidence disappear “.

Evidence, Jean-René Ruez has found it. Until nausea. Thirty years later, he is still amazed at what he heard, seen and discovered in this remote corner of the northeast of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “War is disgusting by nature. So we expected that acts of revenge were committed. But which could have imagined that such massacres were perpetrated after the fall of the Srebrenica enclave?”

With method, coldly, almost clinically, Jean-René Ruez then recounts these six years which left him “On the ball joints, exhausted nervously”. To the point of requesting three years of availability (he will finally take only two) to rebuild himself. From the chronology of events, places of detention and execution, to the common pits, he has not forgotten anything: “I remember everything. I have the impression that it was yesterday. I put myself in the place of those who survived, or the families of the victims. For them, all this is still very alive. Live!”

Precious aid of aerial imaging

The land being inaccessible until the signing of the Dayton agreements which, in December 1995, officially ended the Bosnia-Herzegovine War, Jean-René Ruez must, at first, “Content” to collect testimonies. “At the very beginning, on July 20, 1995, I went to Tuzla to verify rumors mentioned by the press. And I find it hard to believe what I hear, these witnesses who tell how they survived massive executions. Especially since these people have already been heard by the Bosnian police”recognizes the former police officer. Everything is unfortunately true. In abomination, reality will even go far beyond the stories hitherto gathered. By entering an old agricultural hangar in Kravica, Jean-René Ruez discovers “What looks like a hell of a butcher”. Everywhere on the walls, ball impacts are visible. But not only. We also distinguish black squirts of dried blood, hairs, and even pieces of flesh. The analyzes will confirm that their origin is very human. “It made me think of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviets in the Katyn forest in 1940. You see a horror film of the Second World War, but in Technicolor!”he sums up.

The moved bodies

Same scene of dread in the farm of Branjevo, or at the Maison de la culture de Pilica. “When I hear the word culture, I take out my revolver!”slips Jean-René Ruez. A benchmark for the Nazi regime, to demonstrate all the monstrous cruelty of the Serbian leaders and soldiers of Bosnia.

It only remained to find the remains of the tortured. The start of research is complicated. To the point that the American magazine Newsweek titrate: “A genocide without body”. This is where the air imagery provided by the United States will play a fundamental role. “We were not at all in friends at all. Whether for fear of reprisals or in solidarity with the authors of the massacres, no one was talking. The aerial photos were a chance. From the moment we knew what we were looking for and approximately when, we had everything in our eyes: the bulldozers, the earth returned synonymous with a common pit”. To one detail. Once there, teams often only find a fairly small number of bodies. Much less important in any case than the estimates made from the testimonies collected.

Jean-René Ruez explains the reasons: “Knowing that the international community was investigating, the genocidaires clearly sought to erase the evidence by moving the corpses in secondary common pits. A crime in crime! But we did not drop anything, and we found several rosaries of secondary common pits, twenty-eight in total, distributed over a large area from Srebrenica. And thanks to scientific work (analysis taken from the bodies), we managed to make the link between these secondary cavities and the primary pits “.

“I am at peace today, I turned the page”

The searches in the various brigades, the seizure of documents, sometimes as simple as the registers of the drivers, on which appear the dates, the places and the names of the officers transported, the auditions of the military personnel of the involved units, but also the transcripts of the interceptions of radio communication carried out by the Bosniac army, will allow to confuse the donors of the massacres and TPIY.

In twenty-two years, until the trial of Ratko Mladic-the “Boucher des Balkans”-in 2017, the former leader of the band of banditry to the Nice Judicial Police (1992-1995) will have testified to nine trials. Thirty years later, Jean-René Ruez, born of a French father and a German mother, and who absolutely wanted to participate in this “genre de Nuremberg” So did not forget anything, but he affirms: “I am at peace today, I turned the page. I am no longer obliged to think of the horrors of Srebrenica”.