Srebrenica survivors say arrest is too little too late

AFP/Sarajevo

Hatidza Mehmedovic, a Bosnian Muslim survivor of the Srebrenica atrocities in July 1995, prays yesterday in front of the memorial wall in Potocari, near Srebrenica, with the names of victims of the Bosnian Serb offensive. Hatidza buried her husband and two sons in the memorial cemetery in Potocari after 10 years of searching for their remains amongst those gathered from various mass graves in eastern Bosnia

Survivors of Sarajevo’s 44-month siege said yesterday that the arrest of Ratko Mladic, who masterminded the brutal campaign that reduced the thriving city to a medieval hell, was too little too late.“Today, 17 years after the massacre, his arrest is not a big deal for me. I don’t care and I think he does not care either,” Hajra Zulcic, who sells vegetables at the Markale market in downtown Sarajevo, told AFP.The 60-year-old was at the Markale market selling flour in February 1994 when a shell fired from Serb positions hit during the siege, killing 67 people.“I was in the middle of the market. There were a lot people. And then I heard a deafening sound of a blast, I saw people falling, throwing themselves on the ground, one on top of the other, or running in all directions,” Zulcic remembered.“I was near a woman whose head was almost completely cut off by a shell. I will never forget the scene. I started to scream and run away,” she added.Zulcic was not hurt, but her two brothers were killed in the war.One was killed by a shell that fell while he was queuing for bread, not far from Markale, the other was killed on the frontline.“What will they do with Mladic, who is 69? It seems that he is ill. Will it be possible to try him?” she asked.Esad Pozder, at his stand with strawberries and cherries, explained how “only a miracle” had saved him.“I was selling cabbage. When I bent down to look for something underneath the stand the blast echoed,” the 70-year-old remembered.“First I ran towards the entrance of a building to hide. I saw dead and wounded all around me, the streams of blood, bodies in pieces.”“And then, I thought about my sister who was selling socks on the other part of the market. She died on the spot, wounded in the head,” Pozder said with tears in his eyes.Although 17 years have since passed, the scene still crosses his mind several times a day.“It is because I see this monument all the time,” he added, gesturing to a red wall with the names of 67 massacre victims written in white letters at the back of the market.“It’s great that Mladic was arrested, to get to the truth. But we waited for too long,” Pozder lamented.For Faris Omeragic, 36, who helped carry the dead and wounded to a hospital following the attack, Mladic’s arrest after so many years is a “circus”.“It was a big bloodbath. And why should we be grateful since the butcher was arrested while he is almost 70? It is sad.”Rasim Kalaca, who told AFP he was held in a Bosnian Serb detention camp for 15 months, meanwhile said it was “useless” to arrest Mladic.“Anyway he will die soon,” the 55-year-old, who sells coffee, murmured.“This arrest does not make me happy at all,” Hatidza Mehmedovic, a Muslim whose two sons and husband were killed in the July 1995 massacre, said. “It is only a drop of justice and I’m certain that it could have been done a long time ago.”In the yard in front of her house in Srebrenica, where she returned nine years ago, Mehmedovic looks at a fir that her younger son Almir had planted just before he was brutally killed by Mladic’s troops, at the age of just 17.“I found this fir when I returned to Srebrenica,” the 59-year-old sighed. “It was almost dead and I prayed for it to survive. Apart from some photographs, it is the only thing that I have left from my men.”On July 11, 2010, on the 15th anniversary of the massacre, Mehmedovic buried her three men, whose remains were found in mass graves, at a memorial cemetery in Potocari, just outside Srebrenica.So far, some 4,500 massacre victims have been buried at the Potocari memorial.Mehmedovic goes there there almost every day.“These are homes of my children,” she said gesturing to the vast field of white grave stones.“It was this butcher who built them,” she said, referring to Mladic.The Bosnian Serb war-time army chief is known as the “Butcher of the Balkans” for his role in the Srebrenica massacre. The atrocity was the only episode in the bloody 1992-95 war in Bosnia to have been ruled genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).Mladic was captured in Serbia on Thursday after almost 16 years on the run.The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has charged him notably for the Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, and his leading role in the siege of Sarajevo.The siege – the longest such blockade in post-World War II Europe – began in April 1992 and lasted until November 1995 and is considered one of the darkest periods of the Bosnian war.Bosnian Serb troops shelled the city and used snipers against civilians, spreading terror among Sarajevans as they queued for bread, went to the market or were simply walking with their children.The bloodshed played out in front of television cameras, with UN peacekeepers unable to stop the horror.Some 10,000 civilians, including 1,500 children, died in the Sarajevo siege, making the city synonymous with the 1992-95 Bosnian war.Mehmedovic remembered Mladic’s arrival in Potocari, on July 11, 1995, where tens of thousands of people gathered in a UN military base hoping they would be rescued with the peacekeepers.“Only one metre and a ribbon separated us. He had a megaphone and he told us, in front television cameras, ‘Don’t be afraid, all of you will be transferred’,” she said. “Once the cameras were turned off, they started to separate men from women.”Fahreta Dudic’s three brothers were killed in the massacre. “No sentence could bring them back,” she said.“I feel no satisfaction at all. Our souls are empty,” she added, in tears.Her 30-year-old niece Alma, expelled from Srebrenica in July 1995, who now lives in the US, was equally bitter. “The world should be ashamed for allowing the victims’ families to wait for years for the arrest of the butcher of their relatives,” she said.“Numerous mothers, who remained alone, who were awaiting eagerly the day of Mladic’s arrest, have died since,” she added.But Suhra Malic, whose two sons were killed in Srebrenica and buried in 2010 in Potocari, made no effort to hide the satisfaction she felt at still being alive “to finally see Mladic on the accused’s bench”.“But I don’t know if I’ll be still alive when he will be sentenced since the trials in The Hague are too long,” Malic, in her 70s, added.“I would like them to bring Mladic to the Potocari memorial to us women, mothers, who have no men anymore, to be his judges,” she concluded.