By the summer of 1995, the Serb offensive in the Drina valley in eastern Bosnia was almost complete. The Army of the Republika Srpska controlled almost the whole valley. Their aim had been to ethnically cleanse it: to expel or murder the non-Serb population, so that a geographically contiguous and ethnically pure Serb state could be created that bordered Serbia to the east. They had achieved that aim with a swiftness and an effectiveness that was frightening: by early July, the primary holdout across the whole region was a small town of about 6,000 people in the north of the Drina valley, that had been declared a UN “safe area” in 1993: Srebrenica.
On 6 July, the Serb forces launched an offensive aimed at finally capturing the town that had eluded them for three years. Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers, ostensibly there to protect the civilian population, retreated into their base or surrendered into the custody of the Serb attackers; even in the first days of the offensive, there were reports of Bosniak homes being burned down. By 11 July, the town had fallen completely. General Ratko Mladić, still on the run from the Hague tribunal, took a now infamous triumphal march through the eerily quiet city streets that was filmed in its entirety by a Serb news camera. “I stand here in Serb Srebrenica,” he told the camera. “I claim it for the Serb nation.”
Chaos ensued following the town’s fall. 25,000 civilians crammed into the Dutch UN base in the old battery factory in Potočari, just north of Srebrenica; when it could hold no more, they filled the fields and streets around it. Serb soldiers were everywhere; the UN peacekeepers did nothing as men were seized from the crowd and executed, women were raped, children murdered—just a prelude to the coming days’ events, in which 8,000 people would be murdered. There was seemingly no escape: Serb forces had the town and the surrounding area completely encircled.
Late in the evening of 11 July, though, a column of 15,000 Bosniak men including some 5,000 soldiers decided to take a risk. Rather than face certain extermination by remaining in Srebrenica, they decided to form a column and try to break through the encirclement, concentrating themselves on a tiny section of the Serb perimeter to the north. From there, they could trek the gruelling distance—45 miles as the crow flies, almost 70 accounting for the terrain—to the territory controlled by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
5,000 of them never made it to Tuzla, as the column was hounded by Serb ambushes and artillery attacks. Reports of those who finally made it describe an ashen army of shambling, ghost-like figures, their feet bloodied and wrapped in plastic bags or paper, reduced to eating slugs and leaves, hallucinating from exhaustion and thirst and terror.
In 2005, to commemorate the marchers and the thousands of others murdered during that bloody July in 1995, the inaugural Marš Mira (“Peace March”) was held. Tracing a route from Nezuk in the north to Potočari, the site both of the original Dutch UN base and of the cemetery for the victims of the massacre, it symbolically reverses the path taken by the original column: a return, if you will, on behalf of those who can never return to their towns and villages.
I leapt at the chance to go on the 2010 march. I hadn’t expected it to be a happy experience, of course, but I had not prepared myself for quite how physically and emotionally draining it was. 68 miles is a long distance to walk; spread it over a mere three days, though, and set it in the rugged, mountainous terrain of eastern Bosnia, and it begins to look like insanity.
By the end of the march, I was exhausted. The soles of my feet burned with every step I took, covered in blisters and aching from every upturned rock that jabbed through even the thick soles of my boots. The sun was blazing, drenching me in sweat and delighting the mosquitos that had covered my arms and legs in myriad, itching bites. Suddenly, limping, I crested a hill and saw below me an unmistakable sight: the uniform white rows of the cemetery at Potočari.
Nothing filled me with more relief than that view. I surged forward on a second wind, descending the hill faster than I had walked for days. When I finally collapsed onto the pavement outside the cemetery I felt more exhausted and drained than I have in my entire life, barely capable of cogent thought, let alone physical movement.
Each night, in villages along the route, as I had nursed my feet from the day’s walk and relaxed in the generous hospitality of the families who had put us up for the night, I had thought of the original column. When I did, my heart filled with a mixture of gratitude and shame: gratitude at how comparatively easy my experience was, and shame at how difficult I had found it. How dare I complain about my blistered feet and aching muscles! How dare I imagine my experience was difficult, with its first aid support and its food stations and its plentiful water!
As I sat there in Potočari at the end of my journey, I watched as a column of people assembled in silence. Standing side-by-side in two rows facing each other, they formed a long line that snaked from the old battery factory, across the road and into the cemetery. Then, slowly and methodically, they raised their hands and passed along above their heads a procession of green-draped coffins, each numbered individually.
I sat in silence, watching the numbers progressively increase. 50, 100, 200, 300. Not a word was exchanged by the members of the line: their deathly consignment said more than words ever could. 400, 500, 600, 700. I had known, of course, just how many victims had been murdered in Srebrenica in July 1995; the figure of 8,000 is burned indelibly on my mind. But seeing the coffins pass by, all 775 recently identified victims, hit me on a visceral level that no book ever could. There, right in front of me, were the victims of the crimes about which I had read so much, held aloft in remembrance by their relatives and their former community, before my very eyes.
I felt suddenly as though I was imposing. This was not my grief to share: how could I possibly stand here in sadness, as though I had even the beginnings of an understanding of what these people were going through? How could my presence possibly help assuage these unhealed wounds? What was I doing here?
My presence couldn’t help, of course. I could not heal the wounds of this tortured place, nor did I in some misplaced arrogance seek to try. No, the point of the march and of the ceremony was not healing. Only time can heal wounds as deep as these, and time’s advance is inexorable; with it, the pain will, gradually but unavoidably, grow less agonising. The danger, though, is that with a dulling of the pain comes a dulling of remembrance—that events which do not live so vividly, so sharply in our collective consciousnesses are apt to be forgotten. For as long as 10,000 people are prepared to march 68 miles in commemoration, though, and for as long as 50,000 people are prepared to attend the memorial ceremony, it seems that Srebrenica will never be forgotten.
More of my photos from the march are available here.
Dear friend, I took a freedom to call you like this, since you have felt, and simpathised the pain I had been through on that unforgettable, surreal eleventh of July 1995. Your sincereness touched the deepest parts of what people like to call “soul”. You are a friend I have to meet with. Please, if you are still here, contact me via e-mail I provided. Let’s have a good old BOsnian coffee and chat.