Video Alters Serbs’ View of Bosnian War

As the 10th anniversary of the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica approaches, human rights groups are pressing the Serbian government to confront the atrocities committed during the Bosnian war. Until very recently, they have had little hope of success.

But the surprise disclosure of a nearly decade-old video that shows Serb forces executing six unarmed, emaciated Bosnian Muslims has altered the public debate in ways nothing else probably could have. Nearly two weeks later, the graphic images continue to shake the two communities.

For Serbs -- who heard their former president, Slobodan Milosevic, deny for years that troops from Serbia had even participated in the war in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, let alone committed war crimes -- the images came as a shock. They showed men in what appeared to be the black uniforms worn by Milosevic’s special police units being blessed by an Orthodox priest in a Serbian town before setting out on their cold-blooded mission.

The tape’s emergence could affect the trial of Milosevic and some of his associates, since it appears to link wartime atrocities to paramilitary units believed to have been controlled by the upper reaches of the Serbian government. Milosevic, who has challenged the authenticity of the tape, is on trial in The Hague before the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is prosecuting war crimes suspected to have been committed in the 1990s during the bloody breakup of the Yugoslav federation.

But the effect in Serbia, once the dominant constituent republic of Yugoslavia, seems likely to outstrip its potential influence in The Hague. The video has prompted at least the beginning of a reappraisal of Serb responsibility for war crimes in Bosnia.

Ljiljana Smajlovic, a Serbian political analyst, likened the video’s effect to the photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib. “These pictures were shocking to Serbs because the images of the killers -- completely cold, no emotion -- clashed profoundly with the way Serbs see themselves.

“We saw these young men” -- the Bosnian Muslim victims -- “thin, frail, beaten up, horrible,” Smajlovic said. “The video has changed the public mood.”

Since the tape’s broadcast this month, government officials in the ethnically Serb portion of Bosnia have admitted that forces from Serbia were active on Bosnian territory during the war.

And in Serbia, citizens horrified at the images even seemed ready to accept the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who has remained a venerated figure for years, despite his indictment for war crimes by the international tribunal. A day after the video was shown at The Hague, 10 of the men believed responsible for wartime atrocities were taken into custody, some of them alleged to be members of the unit shown on the tape.

It remains unclear the extent to which recent developments will further the reconciliation process in Serbia and Bosnia, once also part of the former Yugoslav federation. But the story of how the tape finally came into the hands of a human rights activist and an international prosecutor demonstrates that the walls of silence and denial are starting to erode.

The video, shown at the Milosevic trial June 1, appeared on national TV news in Bosnia and Serbia later that day with an introduction by an announcer saying, “Now a mother will recognize a son; a sister will recognize a brother.”

One of the mothers who did was Nura Alispahic, a Bosnian Muslim from the town of Srebrenica with intense blue-gray eyes and dark hair.

She and her daughter Magboula, 39, had turned on the 10 o’clock evening news. “I immediately recognized Azmir” -- her son -- Alispahic recalled, tears coming to her eyes as she sat in the cramped living room of her small house on the edge of Tuzla, the northeastern Bosnian town where she now lives.

“There were six prisoners. First they [the Serbian forces] killed four of them, then they said, ‘Take them away,’ and my son and another had to carry the bodies to a small ravine. Then they killed the fifth one, and after that my son turned toward the camera and he was looking around as if he was looking for someone, for some help.”

Azmir was 16, the youngest of her four children, the one who wanted to become a doctor. On July 11, 1995, Alispahic had urged him to leave Srebrenica. Serbian forces were at the gates of the city, which the United Nations had designated as a safe haven for Muslims who had been forced from their homes elsewhere in eastern Bosnia, and there was widespread fear that all the men and older boys would be killed.

Azmir went off with a small group, but then suddenly was back on his mother’s doorstep. “ ‘I didn’t kiss you goodbye; I want to kiss you goodbye,’ ” she remembered him saying. She kissed him and then hurried him off. Somewhere in the forest outside the city, he was captured.

Alispahic had long ago accepted that her son was dead; excavators had found his bones in a mass grave and matched his DNA to hers. She had never wanted to know, however, how he died.

“After they shot him the first time, his body was trembling, and they shot him again -- in the back. It was the worst moment of my life,” she said.

Public airing of the video put the focus on the Scorpions, a shadowy Serbian paramilitary unit. Human rights activists allege that the Scorpions worked with two other special police units, the Red Berets and the Serbian Voluntary Guard, whose members have also been implicated in war crimes.

The video begins at a monastery in Sid, a town in western Serbia where the Scorpions were headquartered, with footage of a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing Scorpion members. They are young men, and the priest is heard on the tape making an appeal to God: “Give your [blessing] to your army of faithful believers [so that] they can subdue the enemy people.”

The “enemy people” the Serbian forces were setting out to subdue had been their countrymen until a few years before. The Serbs and Bosnian Muslims who had lived together in the Yugoslav federation are Slavic peoples, many sharing the blue eyes and light hair common in the region, and their language is almost identical. The key difference between them is religion.

Following the blessing, the portions of the video broadcast on television show the prisoners and their executioners near a truck. The killers are now wearing camouflage uniforms, and many are wearing maroon berets with Serbian flags embroidered on them.

A few moments later, the prisoners, walking with their hands bound behind their backs, are shot -- as some of their executioners chew gum.

To the amazement of many in the human rights community, who had condemned the Srebrenica massacre and war crimes for years without getting much response in either Serbia or the Serb-majority areas of Bosnia, broadcast of the video appeared to have jolted and even horrified Serbian politicians known for their nationalism and failure to acknowledge Serb responsibility for war crimes.

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica described the video as showing a “brutal, callous, shameful crime committed against civilians.”

Serbian Justice Minister Zoran Stojkovic said the footage “was extremely important for the attitude of citizens toward war crimes. As a human being I’m truly shaken by viewing these images.”

Serbian journalists contacted the families of some of the Scorpions shown on the tape in their hometown of Sid. The relatives acknowledged that the men were members of the unit and expressed shock and dismay at their role in the killings. In subsequent days, however, some Serbs sought to diminish the effect, arguing that the killers on the video were simply psychopaths acting on their own and that Serbs were victims of similar crimes by Muslims which were not being shown.

Belgrade human rights activist Natasa Kandic, who helped bring the video to light, said the broadcast had allowed people to judge for themselves.

“The main result of the videotape is that people stopped denying that the Srebrenica [killings] happened,” said Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center, a research organization in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, that has been gathering information for the war crimes trials in The Hague.

“Before the videotape, we heard daily of people saying, ‘Srebrenica didn’t happen.’ This is a climate in which Karadzic and Mladic are heroes,” Kandic said, referring to Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs, and Mladic, his top general.

Mladic is widely believed to have either ordered the massacre in Srebrenica or failed to stop it. He was present in the town at the time of the killings.

Both men remain at large. One test of the tape’s effect and that of other evidence emerging in The Hague trials will be whether the Serbian government arrests Mladic, who is believed to be hiding in Serbia. Karadzic, meanwhile, is believed to be hiding in the rugged Bosnian mountains.

The story of how the video came to light seems to reflect a crack in the Serb code of silence about Bosnian war crimes.

The tape appears to have been shot by a member of the Scorpions so that copies could be made as mementos for the participants. According to Kandic, the activist, at least 20 copies were handed out before the unit’s commander realized that the images could be incriminating and ordered copies returned.

Most Serbs had never heard about the Scorpions, much less their violent missions. No one talked about the unit, its activities or the video until some Scorpion members were put on trial in Serbia in 2003 for the killing of 19 ethnic Albanians during the war in Kosovo province in the late 1990s. During the course of the trial, a Scorpion testified against others for the first time.

Kandic, recognizing that the testimony provided an opening to question other Scorpions not directly involved in atrocities, visited Sid. While there, she learned of the existence of the video.

She eventually obtained a remaining copy and made more duplicates, which she distributed to the Serbian state prosecutor for war crimes and to the Serbian police investigator for war crimes. She pressed them to make arrests. Meanwhile, investigators for the Hague tribunal also obtained a copy.

In Bosnia, where so many atrocities occurred, excerpts of the tape continue to be broadcast. The video has been greeted with a mixture of pain and relief by Bosnian Muslims, who see it as long-awaited proof of the atrocities.

But it remains unclear whether it will have a long-term effect. In a country where Serbs and Muslims used to live in the same village, intermarry and share holidays, they no longer appear to share any common ground.

“We were so close to our Serb neighbors that they knew how many spoons we had, we were so often in each other’s houses,” said Alispahic, the Muslim woman whose son was killed.

Now when she goes back to look at her old house in Srebrenica, she said, none of her former neighbors will even look her in the eye. Serb, Muslim and Croat children go to separate schools, where they learn separate histories.

“The footage will bring us two things: getting closer to the truth and to the responsibility of those who committed the crime,” said Mirko Pejanovic, 58, a Serb who is a professor of political science at the University of Sarajevo in the Bosnian capital. “But in the beginning it will raise tensions because the feelings will be stirred up on both sides.”

Srdjan Dizdarevic, a Muslim who is director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia, had a bleaker view. “Part of the healing is to face the past as it is; the truth must be established, and then there must be reconciliation,” he said.

But will reconciliation take months or decades? Dizdarevic shook his head: “No one knows how long it will take.”