HARI
SREENIVASAN: For tonight’s Signature Segment, we return to the civil war in the
former Yugoslavia that began 25 years ago and saw a nation break apart. This
week, the United Nations war crimes tribunal at the Hague, in the Netherlands,
is expected to deliver a verdict in the trial of Ratko Mladic. He’s the former general of Bosnian Serb
forces who carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina
in the 1990s. After the war ended,
Mladic was a fugitive for 14 years until his arrest in 2011. He’s accused of orchestrating the massacre of
thousands of men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the worst atrocity
in Europe since World War II. NewsHour
Weekend Special Correspondent Malcolm Brabant covered the Bosnian war for the
BBC and returned to Sarajevo for this report.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Almir Garbo is on a pilgrimage to Mojmilo on the outskirts of Bosnia’s
capital Sarajevo. He doesn’t see a
bucolic mountain landscape, but a slaughterhouse. Garbo joined the Bosnian army
when war broke out. He was 14-years-old.
ALMIR
GARBO, FORMER CHILD SOLDIER You simply cannot imagine that someone who you
shared a piece of bread with is no longer here.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: This was Garbo’s first frontline.The Muslim-led Bosnian army, fighting
to defend Sarajevo, was in trenches by the greenhouse. The better equipped
Serbs, led by General Ratko Mladic, were 200 yards away on the ridge.
ALMIR
GARBO: The mortar blew my friend to pieces. There was blood everywhere, Human
remains covered my face. We collected parts of his body so we could bury
something. That was the first time I realized the true meaning of war.”
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Bosnians may have gained their independence in the three-year civil
war, but many have struggled to cope during the 22 years of peace. Today, Garbo
is one of an estimated 400,000 Bosnians -- soldiers and civilians -- suffering
from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
ALMIR
GARBO: Nobody won the war. We are all suffering, We are all sick, mentally and
physically. Those who lost someone endure pain and emptiness. Nothing can cure
us.
I
feel so miserable. In moments like this, I feel like committing suicide,
because I’m missing people I want to be with. The only way I can reunite with
them is in the next world. I simply can’t bear this any more.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: After the war, Garbo married Enisa, the sister of his dead friend.
ENISA
GARBO, SISTER OF BOSNIAN SOLDIER: Another of my brothers was killed and he took
his last breath in my arms. I was just nine-years-old.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Today, the Garbos live in a 90 square-foot apartment with their
10-year-old son.
ENISA
GARBO: There is no work. There is nothing. There is nothing to believe in. It’s
impossible to get a job unless you know the right people. In order to survive,
you have to do all manner of things like Almir is doing to provide for the two
of us. But his efforts simply aren’t enough for us to live like normal people.
It’s just impossible.”
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Garbo scrapes a living doing construction jobs in the underground
economy, but he can’t work right now, because he recently fell three storeys
and fractured two vertebrae and a number of ribs.
The
illusion of a booming economy has been generated by this new mall on what was
Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley But almost 40
percent[2] of Bosnians are out of
work. The Youth unemployment rate is the
world’s worst: more than 67 percent.[3] [4]
The country is riddled with corruption and hobbled by political
stagnation,
Away
from the bright lights of her job, television host Vanja Semic says her
ex-husband battled PTSD, and she struggles with depression.
VANJA
SEMIC 41, TV HOST: We are surrounded by people with huge psychological problems
that are not being treated effectively. They in turn are creating more problems
for the people around them. There’s widespread depression. Even if you manage
to deal with all of this inside you, and you find inner happiness, the majority
of people around you are depressed and unsatisfied. So your happiness is
undermined by all the people around you, because their depression makes you
feel guilty.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Bosnia’s collective sense of anger and sadness will be amplified next
week with the conclusion of the war crimes trial of Bosnian Serb General
Mladic, who’s now 76 .
At
a United Nations tribunal at the Hague, in the Netherlands, Mladic faces a
possible life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity. The most
notable charge is ordering the massacre of nearly 9-thousand Bosnian men and
boys in the town of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.
The
remains of hundreds of Srebrenica victims are in this facility run by the
International Commission of Missing Persons.
Identifying the fragments is a laborious process, and the remains of
about a-thousand of those slaughtered at Srebrenica are yet to be found.
Forensic
anthropologist Dragana Vucetic happens to be a Serb, and, thus, she says, in a
small way she’s atoning for what her fellow nationals did at Srebrenica.
DRAGANA
VUCETIC, SENIOR FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST: I don’t feel any kind guilty, because
some group of people did that. It’s not complete nation guilty for this. But
I’m also very proud that I am in this process, that I can help, and that I am
positive example that we are not all bad.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: This emplacement is a reminder of international guilt over Srebrenica.
It’s a relic of a Dutch peacekeeping battalion, which abandoned its U.N. base
as the Serbs overran the town.
A
Dutch court ruled in 2014 that the Netherlands was responsible for 300 deaths of men turned away from the Dutch
base, but was not culpable for the
remainder of the deaths, after thousands of Bosnians who fled into the woods
were rounded up by the Serbs.
Dragana
Jovanovic, runs a group that campaigns for reconciliation. She too, is a Serb.
DRAGANA
JOVANOVIC, FRIENDS OF SREBRENICA: We have to talk and to do something about
reconciliation as human beings that are going to share this space for next and
following centuries, and we have to prevent that future generations suffer from
the same things.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: But the carnage inflicted by the Serbs was not restricted to
Srebrenica. This ironically named Sarajevo Rose is the mark of a mortar that
killed 26 people lined up for bread during the siege of 1992. Like many other
later atrocities, it didn’t trigger an international military intervention to
protect the predominantly Muslim-Bosnian government side.
The
Srebrenica massacre was the last straw for the United States, and it led to the
NATO intervention against the Serbs, which eventually brought the war to an
end. And then the United States hammered out the deal at Dayton, Ohio, which
has ensured that peace has lasted until today. But now there are new appeals
for the United States to take the lead to try to break the stagnation, which is
preventing Bosnia from becoming a fully functioning nation.
With
its imperative to stop the bloodshed, Dayton imposed a constitution that gave
equal weight to Bosnia’s prevalent ethnic groups -- the Muslims, who now prefer
to be called Bosniaks, the Catholic Croats, and the Orthodox Christian Serbs.
The system enabled any one group to veto the other, and 22 years after the
armistice, there’s political stalemate. For example the Serbs, who have spiritual
ties to Orthodox Russia, want to stop Bosnia acceding to NATO.
The
political inertia troubles university chancellor Ejub Ganic, Bosnia’s wartime
Vice President, partly because it deters international investment that might
salve Bosnia's collective depression. He was at Dayton, with its architect,
American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and says Bosnians are incapable of
resolving their differences without international help.
EJUP
GANIC, WARTIME VICE PRESIDENT: Americans are architects of the Dayton peace
agreement, and this is the only success story of America, where they didn’t
lose a single soldier, where they get all the credit for stopping the war.
Maybe they should make one more step and help this constitution to be
simplified, streamlined, so the country can proceed.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: But Ganic’s former party, the Bosniak SDA, is still a powerful force,
as are the Serb and Croat wartime equivalents. All are predicated on
nationalism. And that’s a core problem, says Kevin Sullivan a veteran Sarajevo based
advisor, speechwriter, and novelist.
KEVIN
SULLIVAN, AUTHOR, ‘THE LONGEST WINTER”: We have a professional class, which has
essentially been there for the last 20 years, and we see this in other
countries, where you have a political issue that has not been resolved, and the
parties that are incapable of resolving it have remained in power.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: But in this cabin near the Srebrenica memorial site, love has
conquered ethnic hate. Almir Salihovic and his wife, Dusica, were the first
mixed couple to marry after the massacre. He’s a Muslim. She’s a Serb.
DUSICA
SALIHOVIC: We didn’t think about what others would say. We really didn’t think
about it. After some time, I asked, ‘What will your parents say?’ And he said,
‘What will your parents say?’ And
then we decided to let time to do its work, and that’s what happened. Time did
its work, and it’s great.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: Their son, Yusuf, is being raised as a Bosniak, at his mother’s
insistence.
ALMIR
SALIHOVIC BOSNIAK: I am only interested in my life. I don’t care what others
are saying. I’m only looking toward the future, and others’ opinions aren’t
important.
YUSUF
AND AMLIR GARBO: This young Bosnian faces an uncertain future. But hopefully, it won’t be as traumatic as
growing up was for former child soldier Almir Garbo. At 41, he writes poetry as therapy,
ALMIR
GARBO: Why am I dreaming only about the war, why am I dreaming about it every
night. Will a better dream ever come? Every night brings a nightmare, and I
surrender to the dream, because tonight I’m praying for my friend.
MALCOLM
BRABANT: And he shares a cigarette with his fallen comrade.
ALMIR
GARBO: It is very hard to move on, because of the memories. Some of the places
that we visit bring us to the past. We are living our lives in our dreams. We
are reliving the nightmare that happened to us. None of the war criminals
convictions, or their life sentences or millions of dollars, could replace a
lost human being.
ONLY
1 LOWER THIRD @ 5:53:
SREBENICA,
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
MALCOLM
BRABANT
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT