Memorial pays tribute to genocide victims in Srebrenica

The war could have just ended yesterday in Srebrenica, a village 150 km northeast of Sarajevo. Apartment buildings and houses are cracked, bullet-ridden, barely hanging on to their foundations. How can people forget about the war when it looks them in the face every single day?

In 1995, Serbians murdered 8000 Bosnian Muslim men following Bosnia’s declaration of independence. It was the worst massacre committed in Europe since World War II. Genocide.

Six kilometers from Srebrenica, a memorial honors the murdered. All the names are listed on a long, semi-circular structure. White, vertical gravestones spread across the fields around it, the color almost blinding in the sun.

I spoke to Fetija, a young mother, during the four-hour bus ride from Sarajevo to Srebrenica. She was breast-feeding her blond-haired, blue-eyed, calm baby. She was in Srebrenica during the massacres.

My Bosnian wasn’t good enough to ask her sensitive questions, but one thing is sure: there was not a trace of hate in her eyes. She expressed anger against the perpetrators, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, who are still on the loose, hiding somewhere in Serbia. They are wanted by authorities at the Hague.
“But I cannot hate Serbian children,” she said. She refuses to generalize against an entire nation. After all, Serbians, Croats, Muslims have lived together in peace for centuries in Bosnia.