The Trigger (28 page)

‘So when the crisis came and the Serbs were advancing, it was Senad who led the head of the convoy. You’ve got to remember, if you stretch out 13,000 people in a line, that line will reach for miles and miles, so the decision was taken to put the best fighters at the front with Senad, the guys with the best guns, the guys with at least some ammunition. But you have got to remember these are all hungry men, people who have not eaten properly for years, who are wearing civilian clothes because their uniforms have become rags, whose guns might not even work. Many did not have boots. It was not a column of American troops from the 101st Airborne. By that time I was wearing scraps of clothes, some of which were bits of uniform stolen on raids into Bosnian Serb territory. I had with me only a pistol and a grenade, and I was ordered to the back of the column to protect the civilians.’

After days of attacks the pocket of Srebrenica fell to the Serbs on 11 July 1995, when their forces swept up the main roads leading into the town from the south and the north. Unknown to them, the escape column was that same day mustering in the village of Šušnjari, which lay a few miles away from the main roads over to the west.

‘It was around midnight on the eleventh that the column began to move. Silence was imperative, so the order was given for no one to speak as they set off in the dark heading north, to begin with over the hills towards my village of Pobudje. For those first few hours the guys at the front were able to move quite quickly and they even got across the main road near my house. But then the Serbs discovered what was happening and they sent everything they had to stop us.

‘By the time we got to the top of Bulim mountain, which comes before Pobudje, the Serb shells were landing among us. It was chaos. I carried a wounded man up to where I thought we would be safe, but then we saw Serbs coming up the hill and we fled and hid in the trees.

‘It was like being trapped in hell,’ he said, ‘I know no other word for it.’ He quietly repeated the word ‘hell’. This was where his survivor’s guilt comes from: the knowledge that many did not make it out alive, the nagging worry that he might have done more to save others.

A few thousand men fought their way all the way up to the Sapna Thumb, led by Senad past minefields and booby-trapped bridges, through ambushes set up by the Bosnian Serbs. I met a few of these men just after they arrived, their faces cadaverously thin, their feet bloody with blisters, their gaze unnervingly distant. They were reluctant to speak to reporters, fully aware that those further back in the column were still stumbling through the woods like hunted prey. On several occasions large numbers of Bosnian Muslim men in the escape column surrendered, after finding themselves trapped. The Bosnian Serbs disarmed them, drove them by truck to remote locations and executed them. Some were shot where they were found, among the same trees that all these years later gave me and my fellow marchers the sanctuary of shade on the Marš Mira.

In 1996, a year after the pocket fell, I returned to the area. At that time the Bosnian Serb side still denied that any atrocities had occurred, sticking to the story that the only killings that took place were the result of regular combat. I was about ten miles north of Srebrenica when I turned off the main road and drove down a track that first crossed a small stream and then climbed up a hillside. A clearing in the forest opened out, and suddenly I found myself driving through a field of human bones. I stopped the car and got out. All around lay skulls, vertebrae, femurs, rotting scraps of clothes, footwear and a few personal possessions. So thick lay the bones on the ground that, when I turned the jeep, I remember the back wheels lurching over a ribcage. I took photographs, but from nowhere a man appeared carrying a shotgun and told me to leave. I still feel guilty for panicking that day, for fleeing that crime scene, relying on the presumption that it would one day be found by war-crimes investigators and the human remains properly identified.

That field turned out to be a mile or so from Džile’s home.

‘All around here there was killing,’ he said as we walked. ‘There were moments when I saw the Serb forces coming through the woods as if they were out hunting birds – a long line of them, all carrying weapons and sweeping through the grass to kill whatever they could find. I hid in a tree and they passed close by, without looking up. I could hear words relayed by loudspeaker, with messages like “Give Yourselves Up” and “You Will be Treated Properly”.’

The situation he described was one of worsening chaos and feral survival. Moving only at night, he soon got lost as the rear column splintered, and he would walk in circles for hours through the forests and fields, terrified every time he bumped into other shadowy figures, for he could not be certain if they were friend or foe. ‘One man I came across was completely naked, shouting and shouting into the darkness. I begged him to be quiet, but he had lost his mind. I would hear shooting down in the valley or over on the other side of a hill and I would run in the opposite direction. When morning came, I did not know where I was.

‘At one point I came across ten men in uniform with guns. First, I thought they were Serbs as they ordered me to come forward. I can remember the sound of them cocking their weapons as I approached, my hand behind my back holding my pistol, ready to shoot myself if they turned out to be the enemy. Then I saw several of them wore nothing but wool socks on their feet. They were our side. But they did not know who I was, and when they saw that some of my uniform was Serb they demanded proof. They made me drop my trousers to show I was circumcised.’

The hours turned into nights, and the nights into weeks, and the weeks into months. In all Džile spent two months surviving in the forests of eastern Bosnia, eating snails for sustenance, drinking from mountain streams and moving only at night. On 11 September 1995 he finally made it to friendly territory – a dirty, bearded, half-starved scarecrow staggering out of the woods.

The Marš Mira hike is timed so that participants can attend the commemoration service held for the dead of Srebrenica each year on 11 July, the anniversary of the day the pocket fell. It takes place not in the town itself, but at a huge graveyard laid out a few miles to the south, next to the disused factory where the UN peacekeepers had their base. The scale of the killings was such that even after all these years, the service allows for the burial of human remains newly identified by war-crimes investigators sifting through evidence recovered from mass graves. With my rucksack on my back and my clothes still mucky with sweat, I joined mourners visiting the old factory where the caskets of those to be buried at the service of 2012 were laid out. There were 520 of them.

Each casket was made of wood, but had been covered in green cloth trimmed with gold, and shaped to the same elegant fluted design that was a little smaller than a normal coffin. The passing of the years had left at most a skeleton, perhaps some scraps of clothing, a wristwatch or other non-perishable recognisable possessions, so a narrow casket was all that was needed for that load to be borne. The cold science of war-crimes investigation allows for the DNA of human remains to be matched against that of surviving family members. So it was with scientific certainty that the relatives of the 520 were summoned to the cemetery for a service that allowed some sort of closure for a trauma reaching back seventeen years.

More than 20,000 people gathered for the lengthy service. Speeches were made by local Muslim clerics and Bosnian politicians. The ambassador corps from Sarajevo attended in strength, and a rabbi from New York gave an oration in which he compared the genocide endured at Srebrenica to the depravity of the Holocaust. It was a cloudless summer day of ferocious heat, yet my arms dimpled with goosebumps as the names of those to be finally buried were read out. Families wept as the caskets were hoisted head-high and processed through the crowd, a scattering of green flotsam on a sea of grief. Within minutes the whole scene was smoky with dust thrown up by family members wielding shovels to fill in the graves newly dug alongside those of thousands of other victims buried in earlier years. Each headstone bore the same epitaph:

And don’t say for those

Who died on the road of Allah:

‘They are dead.’

No, they live on

Even if you cannot see them.

I let the crowds disperse and then walked along footpaths looping past row upon row of graves, thinking about the ‘Known unto God’ epitaph I had seen on graves from the First World War.

Reporting on the Bosnian War has left me troubled by a persistent sense of shame. It cannot be dignified by being described in the same terms as the survivor’s guilt felt by genuine victims such as Džile. It is more a feeling of being ashamed at witnessing a war voyeuristically, unable to influence events, powerless to do anything more than passively report the atrocities. And for me, the fall of Srebrenica is the strongest source of that shame.

I got as close as any reporter to the pocket when it fell, rushing to the city of Tuzla, which was under Bosnian Muslim control, the fields outside its airport overrun by Srebrenica survivors: women, pensioners and infants so beat that they had passed the night on the ground curled up against the hedgerows. Most were still sleeping when I got there at dawn, but a young boy caught my attention and beckoned me over to a nearby stand of trees. From a distance it looked like a bundle of rags caught in the branches, but close up I found myself looking at a woman who had hanged herself with her Muslim headscarf. So tormented was she by what the enemy did to her husband in Srebrenica that she stole away in the night, abandoned two young children and took her own life.

The image of her purpling face, unflinching as flies settled on lifeless lips moist with dew, troubles my sleep still. It became my symbol of private shame for bearing journalistic witness to – but not being able to influence – a conflict, my totem of personal failure. Within days the treadmill of news drew us off elsewhere: to Mount Igman, where NATO artillery units were about to attack Bosnian Serb forces for the first time; to the area around Obljaj, where the army from Croatia was preparing to launch its decisive coup, Operation Storm. And yet, at the time when our attention was being drawn away, men like Džile were still struggling for their lives in the woods around Srebrenica.

Seventeen years later, as the memorial service wound up, I walked through the cemetery to where the names of those known to have died in the Srebrenica killings have been carved on tablets of granite. There are thousands of them, ordered alphabetically on tabletops of stone that are arranged around a huge circle. My heartbeat surged when I found a name that I had written down in my notebook all those years ago: Selman Osmanović. The body I had found hanging in the tree was that of his wife, Ferida.

Before leaving Srebrenica I asked Džile what he felt about Princip. ‘He was the Serbian guy who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, right?’ he checked, before giving his answer. ‘Well, if he had anything to do with the sort of Serbs who attacked Srebrenica, then I would say I have to hate him. But did he have anything to do with the guys who attacked Srebrenica?’

It remained the key question, and one that I could only answer if I continued along Princip’s trail to Belgrade. Džile gave me a lift down to the main road below his house, the one that was the scene of so much skirmishing back in 1992, and left me to make my way onwards to Serbia. He shook my hand and, with a cheerful wave, drove back to the farm where his father lies buried on the hill and where the fields were so recently sown with the bones of the dead.

The only known photograph of Princip, right, during his time in Belgrade, 1914

Police sketch of the Drina River crossing used by the assassination team covertly entering Bosnia from Serbia, May-June 1914

Two days of hitch-hiking took me across the Drina River frontier from Bosnia into Serbia, the landscape easing all the time as the mountains on the western side of the river gave way to a plain that was tabletop-flat reaching east all the way to Belgrade. Travellers in the early twentieth century knew from afar when they were approaching the city from the sight of the great fortress built on the high rocky promontory that towers over the junction of the Sava and Danube Rivers. It would have been visible from miles away, dominating unchallenged what was otherwise a classic central-European flatland of forest, field and marsh.

The urban sprawl of modern Belgrade, with its ranks of electricity pylons, tower blocks and red-and-white-chequered factory chimneys, rather diffused the sense of drama when my last lift dropped me in the city. But soon enough I was back on the trail of my quarry, as the road I found myself walking up near Belgrade’s railway station was named Gavrilo Princip Street.

The capital city reached by Princip in 1912 was new and still very small, although growing rapidly in a rush of nationalist awakening. The rebirth of Serbia, a nation that had not known independence since the Middle Ages, had been a slow and bloody process that lasted almost the entire nineteenth century. Rebellions against Ottoman occupiers that began as far back as 1804 had eventually led, through a series of brutal reprisals and counter-attacks, to the establishment of a new Serbian state around a capital city that for centuries had consisted of little more than the hilltop Turkish fortress above the river junction, and a modest local community serving the needs of its garrison. In 1838 the population of Belgrade stood at just 13,000, and by the time Serbia’s independent status was formally recognised at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 it was not much larger.

As the twentieth century began, Serbia was still a work in progress, its rulers deeply divided over how to deal with their powerful neighbours, not least Austria–Hungary, which controlled both Bosnia to the west of Serbia and a section of territory that reached all the way to the opposite banks of the rivers just across from Belgrade. With a pair of binoculars it was then possible to see from the fortress the black-and-yellow imperial standard bearing the Habsburg eagle flying a few hundred yards away over the water – a chastening reality for Serbian rulers unsure of how to preserve the long-term security of their infant country. While many insisted that Austria–Hungary was an enemy to be confronted, others accepted the rationale of accommodating such a strong, martial neighbour – a difference of opinion that led to fierce disagreement within the Serbian ruling classes. When the Serbian king was murdered by officers of the Serbian army in 1903, part of the motivation for the attackers was his perceived willingness to develop closer links to Vienna. Unanimity among Serbia’s leaders was proving to be a myth, with plots, coups and political assassination now routine.