Waiting for a Funeral in Srebrenica

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In the village of Liplje, about an hour's drive from Srebrenica, I found the some of the same eyes that repeatedly searched this video. A Bosnian woman and her daughter sat by a newly excavated mass gravesite, watching silently -- as they had for two weeks since the grave was opened -- in the hope that among the 134 bodies found so far there would be some evidence of the boy lost from their family ten years ago.

Bosnians at Liplje Grave

In fact, the war is not really over. It's just that during the past decade it's evolved from a war of ethnic cleansing against the living to a war over the remains of the dead. This second phase began after the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995 provided for the prosecution of war crimes. As The Hague handed down indictments, the Serbian perpetrators hastened to re-bury the corpses. According to Emir Ibrahimovic, a local prosecutor investigating the grave site at Liplje, the Serbs had at first been rather careless with the evidence. "In July 1995, near Srebrenica and along the Drina River," he told me, "bodies had been left in ravines along the roadsides. Some were lightly buried under a thin layer of dirt, and others had bones sticking up into the air."

From 1992 to 1995, the Serbian paramilitaries had turned the war crimes of Bosnia into public spectacles not unlike the lynchings in the American South. Like the Klansmen and the local whites in the South who had their pictures taken beside the tortured and hanging victims of a "Negro barbeque," there was nothing discreet about the Bosnian Serbs. They wanted you to know. Spray-painted slogans or initials on the walls of one destroyed house after another remain visible today, taking credit for the various Serbian paramilitary units. A victim's family members or neighbors were often forced to watch tortures, gang rapes and executions while the perpetrators occasionally photographed or videotaped themselves with the victims. For the Serbian paramilitaries -- Arkan's Tigers, the Frankies, or the now famous Scorpions -- these were trophy crimes to be saved for the record and shown off to the folks back home.

Until I visited my first mass gravesite near Vlaslenica in the summer 2003, my thoughts on the war in Bosnia were focused primarily on that defiant sense of impunity that had characterized Serbian conduct. The Vlaslenica grave forced me to comprehend the heart of a much deeper darkness. The grave divulged a cruelty that had extended genocide beyond crimes against the Bosnian people to crimes against their dead.

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