by Emir SULJAGIC
The following day a small convoy arrived. That convoy forever changed the history of this small town. Several tens of green trucks and white armored troops-carriers with Canadian flags parked behind each other in the main town street. They were interesting for the locals to the extent that the locals were interesting for the crews of the vehicles. Thousands of people gathered around the vehicles and everyone wanted to touch someone in a baggy uniform, convinced that these men were their saviors. It was a painfully logical end of the illogical survival of one of three enclaves.
When the war started that winter, 1993, Oric's forces on the Eastern Orthodox Christmas [January 7], with huge losses, managed to liberate Kravica. Earlier almost the whole Drina valley had been liberated and Bratunac was empty. However, instead of inflicting a final blow on the Serbs, Oric followed the advice of his collaborators and turned south towards Jezero, a big area on the very border with Serbia which included the hydroelectric plant Bajina Basta. There were even more casualties, the best soldiers died, but captured weapons were not worth the losses. Several grenades fell into Serbia, which was a sufficient excuse to move the Uzice Corps. In less than two weeks Serbs recovered the lost territory. Soon their winter offensive followed. One after the other, Cerska, Konjevic Polje, Kravica fell. The Serb noose around Srebrenica became increasingly tight and they were approaching the town. When the last attacks were repelled in April 1993, the free area included about 140 kilometers square.
On that day Fikret C set in his bunker and watched Serb positions in Zalazje. He heard an explosion and immediately thought that yet another Serb attack had begun. When he got closer to the barricade, a log placed across the road and several carefully hidden anti-tank mines, he saw a white armored troops-carrier in smoke. The then UNPROFOR commander General Phillipe Morillon was in the second vehicle in the column. Fortunately, there were no victims. The barricade was moved and the General could continue to the town, about ten kilometers further up the road.
At the very entrance to the town, thousands of people slept in the streets. Refugees expelled from Cerska cooked under the cloudy skies last leftovers of food carefully collected in bags before the escape. People jostled under half-burnt cellar walls. A day later a placard appeared on the same spot. It was written on cardboard and arched over the road: Welcome to the biggest concentration camp in the world.
Morillon met the mayor, his deputy, and the chief of staff. He slept in the Post Office building, on the floor in a sleeping bag and communicated with Sarajevo using an ordinary ham-radio link. Only he knew how long he planned to stay in the town. However, he gave during those days so many promises and all of us felt that he would leave the town soon. That would be a death sentence for all of us.
It was too early that morning for a phone to ring in the office of the local council president Hamdija Fejzic (the town had a functioning local phone network connecting the main institutions - the hospital, the military headquarters, and the town hall). The news could not have been good. The caller was one of the postal workers, who reported in panic that the General's escort had started the engines and that the convoy was getting ready to leave. Fejzic quickly got to work. He organized "spontaneous" demonstrations that would keep Morillon in the town. Fejzic called the people to gather in front of the Post Office and prevent the departure of a small group of persons on whose presence, that was the opinion in the town at the time, the fate of the town depended. General's reaction was unexpected. He climbed the roof of the building and hung the blue United Nations flag. Tired, sleepy, dirty and mostly uneducated audience could hardly understand that history was taking place in front of them. Later, Morillon left the town, this time based on a mutual agreement, leaving behind himself his military escort and a team of observers, promising to later return to Srebrenica. A Canadian observer later sent out to the world one of the most important news of the whole war: aircraft that had taken off from Serbia, the airport on the Tara Mountain, bombed Srebrenica.
That was not the end of our troubles. Serb attacks continued unabated. About a hundred people died on a school soccer pitch in only one of the artillery attacks on the town, and blood flew from the troop-carriers of confused and terrified Canadian soldiers while they drove the wounded with broken limbs to the hospital. A first foreign journalist showed up. He was a freelancer from Germany and came to the town on foot, from Tuzla, walking through forests under Serb control and snow banks. He was brought to Srebrenica by late Senad Alic, who had convinced the journalist that people in Srebrenica and Zepa were turning to cannibalism?! One of the following days, Senad, somewhat dressed up, wearing a green beret, Ray Ban sun glasses, and a spotlessly clean American uniform, stood in the Post Office yard looking around. One of the young men from the crowd, called him over the barbed wire and asked in a stuttering voice:
"Excuse me, where are you from?"
"From Srebrenica," Senad responded not missing a beat.
"Stop screwing around!" his interlocutor was surprised. The young man later also became a translator for the UN forces in the enclave.
When the last Serb attack was stopped, and my neighbor again wrapped his unused, clean and shiny rifle in rags and put it back in the cellar, the new chapter in the life of the town began. This chapter would not last for a long time and will be marked by survival. Tens of thousands of people survived in the next two years between infrequent and increasingly smaller deliveries of humanitarian assistance on the one hand and smuggling with the UN forces in Zepa and Serbs stationed around the town on the other, between daily danger that threatened from the surrounding hills and the power struggle in the town itself. And the time was almost up.
Father: "Although reluctantly, I will describe for you my last meeting with my father. Not because it was unique, not because we told to each other words that someone else will remember because of their importance or wisdom, but exactly because it was only one of hundreds of thousands of similar meetings of fathers and sons in those years and because we told to each other what every father would say to every son, not knowing, but fearing that that could be their last meeting. Actually, the two of us never really said good bye. Once I saw him off to the battle from which he returned. The other time I watched him leave to never come back.
"That winter, in 1992, because of food and ammunition, our only military goals, we liberated villages around Bratunac. And Bratunac, we quietly hoped. In Srebrenica, in the streets everything and nothing was already known about the important forthcoming action that was supposed to liberate the suburbs of Bratunac, the Drina River valley, all the way to the zinc and lead mine in Sase, a seemingly impenetrable fortress. Naser [Oric] decided not to attack them and spare his soldiers but to simply go around them. We would cut their supply chain, their links with Bratunac. We left them only one way out.
"On December 13, early in the morning, exactly six months after the last Bosniak left the Drina valley in front of Serb gins, Srebrenica was teeming with soldiers. Most of them were armed, some of them showed off in the town, others set in front of building entrances and worriedly counted their bullets. Although unarmed, my father was among them that morning. He kept repeating that he could not allow that other people's children die to defend his home. I followed him from the house in which we lived to the center of the town, where the soldiers were supposed to gather before their departure. We talked and he told me something along the lines of 'you are a smart lad, study hard, because one day this state will need you' and added: 'Obey your mother if something happens to me.' A few days later he came back, exhausted and dirty, but alive and happy. He stayed at home for only three days. He had to go back to the front and promised to spend the New Year's eve with us. I remember that the day was Tuesday and I remember that through a fogged over window I watched him disappear at the bottom of the hill, going towards the town. I am certain about only one thing about his death, about which I found out two days later, trying to pick up a girl for the first time in my life. At the moment when a rocket fired from Serbia, from Nijemci, exploded next to him, he had nothing of his own on him. He was buried in a shallow grave, quickly dug up, in the orchard of a house in which he hadn't grown up. His friends saved and brought back his watch, bought before the war for about $50, in Istanbul [Turkey]. A day later, Serbs walked over the unmarked grave."
Hunger: By July 1992 hunger became daily presence in the life of every inhabitant of the enclave. Most inhabitants had one, sometimes two meals a day. The town was full of exhausted people, who spent days wondering around aimlessly. Late in the day, they would gather in small groups in front of buildings and engage in heated discussions. Then, they would go home.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, were privileges for the soldiers, but not all of them, only commanders and a crafty commando who managed to bring back a load of food from his action, instead of ammunition. Ordinary people were hungry. They ate twice a day, once in the morning and that meal was referred to as lunch. Then, as late as possible in the day they would have a bite or two, so that hunger would not keep them up at night. During the summer days were longer and the sunset was awaited as an invitation to a slim dinner. The afternoons were the worst. Hunger was turning into a stomachache that had to be neutralized somehow. Everyone pretended that they did not notice that their acquaintances were skinnier with every new day. Their faces grew darker, lost their natural complexion and simply everyone slowly became the same, bloodless, almost without personal characteristics.
A thin soup or last reserves of beans were the most frequent menu; sometimes someone would only mention potato soup, while meat was a "privilege of the wealthy", better said unscrupulous class of war profiteers that had already been formed in the enclave. While the refugees in the town suffered from hunger, villagers living around Srebrenica did not have trouble securing food. They continued to till their fields ignoring the newcomers, poor hungry people who overnight lost everything they had had. The villagers would quip: "You should have defended yourselves!" When the hunger became unbearable and when those who were suffering the most started pulling out the last long time ago saved German Marks and family jewelry from well hidden bundles to buy food, the villagers used their misery to make profit. "I've bartered my wedding ring for several pounds of peppers," and older acquaintance once told me. He was not the only one who exchanged the last of his possessions for some flour or a few eggs and some cheese. An army of those similar to him scoured the villages: some begged, others traded with remains of their lives. Soon a specific market was established, mostly based on barter since no one believed in money any more.
Traders usually bartered cigarettes and matches from pre-war reserves for potatoes and flour. Soon they switched from white flour to brown flour, then to corn meal and finally to barley that could never be ground down properly and, besides being bitter, tore at the sore throat; mills ground even inedible plants. When in March 1993 General Phillipe Morillon came to Srebrenica, he was offered hazelnut tree bread so that he could taste for himself the type of "food" eaten by the inhabitants of Srebrenica. After tasting a slice of bread, Morillon only said that it was "healthy and good for digestion".
By the winter of 1993 everything in that market had changed. The Chetniks were advancing and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages had started arriving to the town with whatever they could carry on their backs. With bundles on their backs or possessions quickly stuffed in a horse drawn carriage they came down to the town bringing with them their cattle. They had lost their land and harvest. The cattle had to be slaughtered after a few days and bartered for wheat at the town market. At first the ratio was one to one, but with every Serb attack and with every burnt down Bosniak village, the price of meat went down. After several weeks two pounds of corn were worth six to eight pounds of meat.
At that time cigarettes had already reached unbelievable $75 or even $100 a pack, usually miraculously saved packs of "white" "Drina" from Sarajevo. One, perhaps the only source of cigarettes before the Serb winter offensive was a house of a certain merchant form Gostilj, a village on the road between Srebrenica and Potocari. Cigarette traders had to repeatedly go to his house avoiding grenades, usually waiting for dark before setting out for the house. They would return late at night or the following morning to sell a few packs at the market. Those who did not have money tried to get tobacco in different ways. Some grew tobacco in flower pots and kept it on balconies, every morning carefully picking leaves going from the top of the plant down, drying them on the cooker and then grinding the leaves into the newsprint. Those who could not afford even that, smoked quince, apple, nettles, or leaves of any other plant.