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Several mass graves, once hastily planned, dug and
intricately camouflaged, are now being gradually identified and
exhumed, driven by a fortuitous mix of long suppressed witness
testimony, outside political pressures and newly forthcoming
evidence. Even the recent unprecedented flooding has loosened long
hidden bones and skulls from nearly forgotten massacres.
For most of us, such mass grave scenarios are the
stuff of our worst nightmares. But for grieving family members,
these ongoing discoveries and exhumations offer flickers of renewed
hope for a long awaited if bittersweet reunion with beloved, long
missing family members. In that context, I like to say that mass
graves are the surreal “gifts” that keep on giving.
The latest mass graves are by no means new in any
historical sense of the word. The huge site in northwestern Bosnia,
for example, is located in the village of Tomasica, and probably
dates from 1992 or 1993. It lies very near to Prijedor, one of the
main centers of Nazi-style concentration camps and mass killing
organized by Bosnian Serb forces in the early 1990s, generously
funded and supplied by the Milosevic regime from Belgrade, in his
monomaniacal campaign for a Greater Serbia.
So far, some 430 victims have been exhumed from
the Tomasica site - a vast, cavernous pit about 30 feet deep and
covering some 54,000 square feet. This mass grave, like many
hundreds of others throughout the Bosnian terrain, contains victims
of Serb units who killed thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and
also Bosnian Croats in hopes of creating an “ethnically pure”
region.
Originally, the Tomasica site is believed to have
held the remains of up to 1,000 men, women and children, suggesting
that some of the bodies were later dug up and moved, all of which
complicates the efforts to identify the dead. Forensic teams also
discovered bullets inside the grave, strongly indicating that
Tomasica served as a site of execution as well.
Deeply disturbing details have emerged on how
bodies came to Tomasica. According to a recent investigation,
prisoners were taken from the infamous Serb-run concentration camps
in Trnopolje and Omarska, and forced to unload bodies from the
trucks and toss them into the grave. After finishing their tasks,
they were shot on the spot.
The Tomasica grave was found covered by several
yards of high artificial mounds, under which another layer of “soil”
was discovered, consisting of piled-up earthly remains. The first
bodies were found at the depth of some 23 feet. Due to specific soil
content, the natural process of decomposition was significantly
delayed, and some corpses were found in a bizarrely mummified state.
After the grave was unearthed, the stench of death reportedly began
spreading throughout the area.
According to Bosnian officials, the site was
originally identified last April by two former Bosnian Serb soldiers
who helped to determine the exact location of the gravesite. One of
the men, presumably suffering ongoing pangs of guilt and remorse,
subsequently jumped off a bridge to his death, another senseless
victim of the mass murders and genocides.
Ironically, at the very same time the Tomasica
site has been yielding up hundreds of long hidden corpses, another
long-awaited mass gravesite, some 400 miles to the southeast, is
spawning a totally separate but intimately related exhumation. This
site at Rudnica is situated by the Serbian town of Raska in the far
southern region of the predominantly Bosniak-populated region of
Sandzak, not coincidentally just miles from Serbia’s border with
Kosova, independent since February 2008.
As of this writing, the remains of some 50 people,
all Kosovar Albanians, have been exhumed from the Rudnica site, but
scores more are certain to surface. It’s believed the site will
eventually yield from 250 to 500 bodies. Unlike past exhumations
inside Serbia, this undertaking is being supervised by officials of
the International Red Cross, Eulex (European Union Rule of Law), and
Kosovar Albanian representatives. It all means no more tricks, no
more obfuscation. Despite the superficial transparency, however, no
independent media is allowed at the site.
The history of this particular site, actually a
complex of sites, is a fascinating one, and an especially sensitive
one for this writer. It turns out that the location was known about
by NATO officials since 1999, during or shortly after the NATO armed
intervention that forcefully ended Milosevic’s brutal crackdown
against the ethnic Albanians of Kosova.
At that time, some 800,000 Albanian civilians were
driven from their homes and forced to flee. It was a time of mass
killing and systematic mass rape on a horrifying scale, involving
Serbian army units, “paramilitaries”, police, sympathetic civilians
and state security forces. At some point, the order was given from
Belgrade to dig up Albanian corpses from hastily created mass graves
inside Kosova, and ship them in refrigerator trucks into Serbia
proper. Units of Serbian special forces went to work. (Serbian
Documentary)
These macabre convoys of corpses made their way
across the border and to a variety of ad hoc destinations - some
were initially plunged into rivers or lakes, others dumped their
loads of human cargo into industrialized furnaces like the factory
complex at Mackatica, hastily arranged mass graves like the ones on
police-training grounds just outside of Belgrade, or sites like this
one at Rudnica. Over the past decade, the remains of nearly 1,000
men, women and children have been gradually returned to Kosova. That
group included small babies, some with pacifiers still in their
mouths.
Since 1999, successive regimes in Belgrade managed
to keep the Rudnica gravesite unmolested and unexamined. The most
egregious cover-up episode occurred in 2010, after the BBC and other
prominent news sources exposed the suspected site in some detail,
describing how “a small building stands directly over the bodies -
its foundations deliberately constructed to hide the site.”
The following month, my Albanian colleague and I
wrote an article entitled “The Dead Bear Witness” (Mass Grave
Report) detailing specifics of the mass grave and demanding that a
proper, internationally-supervised exhumation be immediately
undertaken. Instead, Serbian authorities sent in their own “expert”
team that allegedly undertook a soil sampling from nearby the
building and promptly declared the results “negative” for organic
matter.
The Serbian alternative press Pescanik offers a
slightly different version of events. They claim that following the
soil pseudo-analysis, a 50-page study was submitted by the Faculty
of Civil Engineering in Belgrade, which “allegedly proved beyond any
doubt that there are no bodies on that location.” Belgrade’s
notoriously sycophantic mainstream media quickly trumpeted the
propaganda triumph: “Only mass lies,” it declared, “were dug out.”
Knowing Serbia’s less than candid modus operandi,
my colleague and I were determined not to let things end there. We
proceeded to push our case to various Eulex officials in Kosovo, and
then to fellow journalists, first in Belgrade and then in Pristina.
No one seemed particularly interested or moved by our entreaties or
reports.
We eventually took our case directly to Belgrade,
using a lucky invitation extended to my colleague by a sympathetic
Serbian journalist. In the summer of 2011, we attended a press
conference at Belgrade’s impressive new media center, focusing on
Serbia’s controversial negotiating team with Pristina. In a
memorable scene of cinematic-like high drama, after we dared to
introduce a copy of our latest war crimes report, dozens of
assembled journalists suddenly began treating us like dangerously
contagious lepers. (War Crimes Report)
One audience member, presumably a hard-core
Serbian nationalist, immediately rose to denounce us: “They were
recently spotted with an Albanian irredentist,” she declared in
Serbian, pointing to the two of us. (We had just come from a series
of meetings with Albanian politicians in Preseva, in southern
Serbia).
It suddenly felt as though we’d just been
denounced at a central committee meeting of the Serbian Communist
party. Needless to say, copies of our report were never picked up by
any of the assembled journalists or politicians. My colleague’s
journalist friend mysteriously disappeared. Lesson learned: telling
the truth about Serbia’s onerous past will not make you popular in
Belgrade.
I have no doubt that Eulex officials could have
applied stronger, more vigorous pressure on Belgrade officials; the
media in either Serbia or Kosova could also have launched
appropriate public informational campaigns. Instead, we came up
against a broad apathy bordering on moral acquiescence. I found
myself trapped in a kind of Balkan Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass
nightmare. Following the May 2010 breakthrough, it took another
three and a half years for a serious exhumation of Raska to finally
begin.
But that’s not quite the entire story. According
to Pescanik, before the exhumation could actually commence, Serbian
authorities hit up Kosovar authorities for 300,000 euro - over
400,000 US dollars - for ‘financial coverage’ of the investigation,
including the funds for demolition of the building constructed to
camouflage the mass grave. Talk about adding insult to injury. With
the expenses pre-paid and additional, significant EU pressures
gradually brought to bear, Serbia was finally read to act. In
November 2013, the current exhumation process began to proceed.
At the very time Tomasica and Raska were still
being exhumed, yet another troubling and unexpected discovery
occurred, this time in eastern Bosnia. The recent, unprecedented
flooding had unearthed another secret mass grave, this one
containing the remains of at least six people, including four
complete bodies whose hands were found tied behind their backs. Once
again it is believed these victims are Bosniaks, this time from
around the town of Doboj, part of a long sought after group of
massacred civilians.
All in all, some 100,000 people died in the
Bosnian war, the majority being targeted Bosniak civilians. At
Srebrenica alone, 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were hunted down and
butchered like animals. Even the ever-cautious Hague tribunal
officially classifies Srebrenica as a genocide.Thousands of Bosnians
remain missing, and many will never be found.
In Kosova, from 1998 - 1999, up to 13,000 ethnic
Albanians were killed, along with over 1,000 members of other ethnic
groups. Some 1700 persons still remain missing, mainly ethnic
Albanians, but also Serbs, Roma and members of other minority
groups. All of their surviving loved ones still await some kind of
closure - each family has the right to a respectful and dignified
funeral, even if they are burying only long-degraded skeletal
remnants and bone fragments.
With all of these seemingly endless mass grave
exhumations and discoveries, it would seem next to impossible for
anyone to still pretend that during the 1990s, no genocide occurred
targeting Bosniaks or ethnic Albanians in Kosova. The mounds of
physical evidence, of corpses and fragmented skeletons, not to
mention testimony from multiple war crimes trials, is absolutely
overwhelming.
Of course members of all ethnic groups suffered
terribly, and isolated crimes were committed by all sides. “No
side,” one Bosniak survivor of a concentration camp insisted to us,
“has completely clean hands.” But that does not erase the underlying
genocide - nor allow the perpetrators some kind of free moral pass.
Ever.
A group of colleagues and I, deeply frustrated by
the seemingly endless genocide denial, have begun early, tentative
preparations for the creation of a special peace center in the
Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, dedicated to the robust documentation
of past genocides, and to the prevention of genocide around the
world. We plan to name the center after Anne Frank, a universally
beloved figure, and a potent symbol of resistance to tyranny. For my
own family, Polish Jews hunted down and murdered by the Nazis during
the Holocaust, the insistent act of remembrance and the struggle to
prevent future such horrors bears a powerful resonance.
For people the world over, so many indelibly
affected by the twin evils of genocide and genocide denial, a peace
education center in multicultural Sarajevo could be the greatest
gift of all. |
