Srebenica: Thirty years after the massacre, the impossible common memory

“I fight for this country!” I fight for all its inhabitants: the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Croats … I fight for a Bosnia Multiethnic, multicultural! ” Little, in its small office located on the ground floor of the town hall of Srebrenica, Muhizin Omerovic strives to remain optimistic. Imposing build and childish smile, this survivor of genocidethat everyone calls “Djilé”, wants to believe in living together between Muslim Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs, three decades after the end of a war which left more than 100,000 dead and 2 million refugees.

July 11, 1995, “the enclave” of Srebrenicayet declared “UN security zone” two years earlier and protected by a Dutch peacekeepers battalion, falls into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs. Women and children are expelled, and 8,372 men and adolescents are massacred in a few days by the army of General Ratko Mladic. For two months, Djilé hides in the dense forests of the region before reaching the area controlled by the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Places still marked by the genocide

Three decades later, ruined houses are always visible between orchards and family farms, but Serbs and Bosnians live again side by the hills around Srebrenica. “People are well aware that we cannot live other than together,” wants to believe Djilé, 50, in a perfect Frenchman, he who was refugee in Switzerland after the conflict. “We have no other options because there are no” ethnically pure “countries. It is the mixture that makes the richness of a nation. ” Like most of the Bosnians chased by the ethnic cleaning of 1992, Djilé returned to live on his land in the 2000s with his family.

The beginnings were not easy in a Serbian Republic of Bosnia (RS) then largely hostile to the return of refugees. The RS is one of the two political entities created by the Dayton agreements which ended hostilities in 1995. Its flag with Serbian colors is displayed everywhere along the roads overlooking the Drina. It floats in particular a few hundred meters from the Potocari Memorial and its thousands of Muslim white steles.

At the entrance to the cemetery, Fadila Efendic, 74, holds a small kiosk of memories. “I first buried my husband there, we found his remains in a first common pit, but not his skull. We found his head that two years later when a second pit was opened. From my son, I only found two legs of the legs. ” President of the association of mothers of Srebrenica, Fadila Efendic has been fighting for years to exhume the truth of the mass graves who have multiplied in the region in the summer of 95.

A genocide not recognized by Serbia

In the weeks following the massacre, the Serbian forces try to make up their crimes and bury the remains in different common pits along the Drina. Even today, hundreds of people are still missing, and the remains of the victims identified during the past year are buried every July 11, in the Potocari cemetery. “It was not easy to fight our fight for the truth because the authors of the genocide deny it, and they make an intense propaganda against us,” says Fadila Efendic, the hands joined and a clear scarf on the hair. They would have liked the truth to never be revealed … but as long as I live, as long as I can walk, I will always say the truth. I’m afraid of anyone. “

More important massacre perpetrated on European soil since the Second World War, the Srenica killing was described as genocide by the International Court of Justice in 2006. But in Serbia A neighbor as in the Serbian Bosnian entity, the leaders reject the conclusions of international justice, which also sentenced the Bosno-Serbian war officials to life. Some Serbian colleagues from Djilé share this rereading of history. “Western embassies and media say that General Ratko Mladic is a war criminal, but he is a hero! Branimir Kojic, also employed at the town hall of Srebrenica. Muslims had a plan to ethnically clean the whole region. If Ratko Mladic had not been there, there would be no Serbs here. ” Nicknamed at the time “Le Boucher des Balkans” by the press, Mladic has been held in The Hague since 2011.

Battle of memory

In power for almost twenty years, the leader of the RS, Milorad Dodik, openly denies the genocide and he regularly threatens to implode the fragile Bosnian federal state. His negationist speeches are widely shared within the Serbian population, which cultivates another memory than that of the Bosnians. “Srebrenica is not a genocide, science has proven that it was not a genocide,” says Branimir Kojic, who presides over an association of Serbian civilian victims. Some 3267 Serbs were killed by Muslims in the region. As long as Muslims have not recognized that my father was also murdered, and as long as we do not look at all the victims in the same way, there will be no future in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ”

This battle of memories moves the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina a little more every day. Absent from the RS textbooks, the genocide of Srebrenica is denied or minimized almost every day in the local media. Many Bosnians accuse the current Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, of stirring Serbian nationalism throughout the ex-Yugoslavia by pressing the poorly healed wounds of conflicts. “We have no problem with our Serbian neighbors, but with politics, lasted Djilé. Vucic’s policy is the same as that of Milosevic in 1992: the idea of ​​Greater Serbia. The key to all our problems is Belgrade. ”

Thirty years after the genocide of Srebrenica, political divisions prevent all reconciliation of the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina around a common memory.

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