Our shame over Srebrenica

July 2001: Robert Fisk returns to the town where General Ratko Mladic reassured the women no harm would come to their men

Refugees from the fallen Bosnian ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed, at a camp set up by the UN in Tuzla, 15 July 1995 (AFP/Getty)

The trees were heavy with rain and ice when I stopped the car a few miles from Srebrenica. I could hear the wind seizing the branches, shaking them until the water riffled off in a thick spray over the road. Bosnia often presented beauty in places of horror. When I turned to Liljana and asked if she could imagine how many bodies lay under the snow, she shuddered.

“Do you know why they opened the graves of the murdered Croats in 1991?” she asked me. “They wanted us to hate the Serbs who had killed the Croats in the Second World War. That’s why they opened those old graves – to pour more blood into them.” Now it was 1996 and the bodies of the Muslims of Srebrenica had lain beneath the snow – and in the mass graves beneath – for more than a year. I knew why Liljana did not want those graves opened. They would reveal not just the Muslim dead but the shame of the Serb murderers. Our shame, too.

Srebrenica in 1996 was a sinister, haunted place. After the Muslims of the town had been murdered and raped and the survivors trucked to the Muslim lines opposite Tuzla, Serb refugees had taken their place, stuffing their families into the smashed homes of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, living on hand-outs and loot and UN funds. The Serb police – the same “police” in their dark blue cars and little blue flashing lights who had driven through the fields of corpses in 1995 after Ratko Mladic’s boys had left the dead to bloat amid the July corn – now moved through the town.