Srebrenica: Prologue, Chapter 1, Section 1
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Srebrenica: a ‘safe’ area Appendix IV History and Reminders in East Bosnia 2 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter 1 Serbs and ‘Turks’ – The Ottoman Heritage ..................................................................................... 7 The first Serbian uprising (1804-1813) ............................................................................................................ 7 The Drina River: a frontier ............................................................................................................................. 12 Rising Serb-Muslim antagonism..................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 2 The Austro-Hungarian Period And World War One ................................................................... 20 Under Austro-Hungarian Rule ....................................................................................................................... 20 The Balkan Wars and World War One ......................................................................................................... 23 Land Reforms between the two World Wars .............................................................................................. 27 Chapter 3 World War Two, 1941–1945 ............................................................................................................ 29 The onset of the war and of Ustashe terror ................................................................................................. 29 Partisans and Chetniks organise the resistance ............................................................................................ 33 Chetnik terror against Muslim villages .......................................................................................................... 36 Ustashe extermination campaigns against the Serb population ................................................................ 40 Chapter 4 Under Communist Rule .................................................................................................................... 47 Srebrenica in Tito’s time ................................................................................................................................. 47 Economic decline during the 1980s .............................................................................................................. 57 Eastern Bosnia becomes a ‘second Kosovo’ ................................................................................................ 61 Chapter 5 The Nationalist Take-Over ............................................................................................................... 70 Election year 1990 ............................................................................................................................................ 70 Nationalist parties in power ............................................................................................................................ 80 SDA hardliners govern Srebrenica ................................................................................................................ 83 The Kravica killing ........................................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 6 War In Eastern Bosnia ...................................................................................................................... 97 Recognition of Bosnia’s independence and fights in Bijeljina ................................................................... 97 The Drina valley campaign ........................................................................................................................... 101 Srebrenica on the brink of war ..................................................................................................................... 104 Bratunac and Srebrenica are taken by Serbs ............................................................................................... 110 Ethnic cleansing by Serbs and first acts of Muslim resistance ................................................................ 113 Chapter 7 The Rise of the Muslim Enclave of Srebrenica ........................................................................... 118 The assassination of Goran Zekic ............................................................................................................... 118 First wave of coordinated Muslim attacks on Serb villages ..................................................................... 122 The Muslim territory expands ...................................................................................................................... 125 Bratunac comes under Muslim threat ......................................................................................................... 130 Final Remarks ...................................................................................................................................................... 136 3 Introduction “If people in Bosnia cannot reach consensus on how to remember the past, the country will have no right to exist. In fifty years time, there will be either one Bosnia or no Bosnia”. Jakob Finci, President of the Jewish Community of Bosnia- Hercegovina, NIOD interview 24/10/2000 “If the identity of a nation lies upon its memory, then the memory that makes the foundations of the Bosniak people is made of the chain of genocides and innumerable crimes committed against it”. Smail Èekic, History of genocide against Bosniacs, p.47 On the eleventh of July 1995 the Bosnian Serb Army conquered Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in Serb- held eastern Bosnia which had been proclaimed a ‘safe area’ by the United Nations two years before. When the Serbs marched into Srebrenica’s town centre, general Ratko Mladic, who led the operation, gave a brief statement in front of a Bosnian Serb television camera: “Here we are in Srebrenica on the eleventh of July 1995, on the eve of yet another great Serbian holiday. We present this city to the Serbian people as a gift. Finally, after the rebellion against the dahis, the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region”.1 The events that followed are all too well-known: under the eyes of Dutch UN peace-keepers, hundreds of Muslim men were separated from their women (at the Dutchbat base in Potoèari), while thousands of others decided to try to escape through the forests to Bosnian-held Tuzla. Most of them disappeared: they died or were executed by the Serbs in the aftermath of the fall of the Srebrenica enclave. From Mladic’s statement – he was referring to events two centuries ago – it is clear that history played a prominent role in the Bosnian war, in a way that was often hard to accept for outside observers, and often led to reactions of sheer disbelief and exasperation on their part. One can still hear the complaints of Western journalists, diplomats and UN personnel, who had to listen to endless ‘history lessons’ presented to them by politicians, intellectuals, soldiers, and ordinary peasants, about battles that took place centuries ago and the ultimate wrongs their nation had suffered in a recent or more distant past. As Nena Tromp notes in her contribution (see appendix), history was used extensively at the negotiation table, not only to justify political demands, but also to outmanoeuvre foreign diplomats who had no grasp of the region’s complicated history. For some the surplus of history that seems to exist in the region became an obstacle to peace: in the final stages of the Bosnian war, US envoy Richard Holbrooke, for instance, refused to attach special importance to historical claims, which he thought obstructed any attempt to come to a settlement of the conflict. In his memoires he writes that he put the Bosnian Serbs one important condition for negotiations: “(...) they must not give us a lot of historical bullshit, as they have with everyone else. They must be ready for serious discussions”.2 It is clear that ‘history’, or rather the various strands of national histories, were conducive to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and it is therefore understandable that Holbrooke refused to take them into account in his attemps to find a settlement to the Bosnian conflict. His objective was not to grasp 1 David Rohde describes this episode in his book A safe area. Srebrenica: Europe’s worst massacre since the Second World War (p.167). See also Stover and Peress, The graves, p.122. The televised images of Mladic’s entry into Srebrenica were included in the British tv documentary A cry from the grave (1999). The holiday Mladic is refering to is Petrovdan, the Serbian-Orthodox St Peter’s Day (12 July), which the Serbs have now proclaimed the town’s official patron saint’s day. 2 Holbrooke, To end a war, p.148 4 the historical ramifications of the conflict but to bring an end to it in a swift and pragmatic manner. Our aim here is quite different, i.e. to develop a deeper understanding of the conflict and its specific characteristics, and the starting point is that we cannot fully understand the war, and particular events such as the Srebrenica massacre, if we leave history aside, or more particularly, if we ignore the living historical memories and perceptions of history that exist among local players.3 In Bosnia