Waiting for a Funeral in Srebrenica

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"We should pity God who sees us the way we are."
-- Highway sign in Vlaslenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- It is now nearly ten years since the night of July 7, 1995, when Hatidja Mehmedovic said goodbye to her husband and two high-school-age sons as they fled into the forests overlooking Srebrenica and became three of the 8,106 persons missing in the town's massacre. "What other mother can say this," she asks me, "that what she wants for her two sons are not wives for them or even grandchildren for me but coffins. Yes, what I want are coffins to bury my two sons."

Hatidja Mehmedovic, Srebrenica

On July 11, the tenth anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serbs, at least 50,000 visitors and representatives of 42 countries around the world are expected to come to Srebrenica to witness the burial of another 500 bodies alongside the 1,300 victims already interred at the memorial cemetery in the nearby village of Potocari. The guests will mark the anniversary by visiting a new Memorial Center, attending seminars, and even, if they wish, visiting the site of a mass grave left over from the savagery of ten years ago.

Every June for the past three years, I have come to visit Hatidja in her old house in the hills overlooking Srebrenica. She is entirely alone -- not just without her family, but without her old neighbors who either perished or fled a decade ago. They left behind their war-scarred homes as an inadvertent gift for the Serbian refugees from the other corners of Bosnia who now make up the core of Srebrenica's population. When I ask if she is frightened to be there alone and with unsympathetic strangers for neighbors, she replies: "How could I be afraid, when the worst things that I ever feared have already happened to me?" For us, Bosnia is old news. For Hatidja Mehmedovic and the other survivors, mostly women now living alone who lost a husband, child, parent, or -- as is often the case -- an entire family in that brutal conflict of the last decade, the wounds of the war are constantly reopened.

One egregious example is the exploitation of a videotape shot in 1995 by a Serbian paramilitary unit, the Scorpions. On June 1 of this year, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague released to the public video showing the execution of six Bosnian men. Hatidja and the other survivors of the lost have watched the daily re-broadcasts of the video on Bosnian television, each time showing a bit more footage and giving them the cruel hope that they might see the execution of their husbands, sons or brothers. At least, then they'd know.

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