Bosnia remembers massacre

Muhamed Omerovic points to the tops of the steep hills surrounding the Liplje valley in eastern Bosnia. Ten years ago, in the last months of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, he says, the hills were held by Bosnian Serbs, who were killing Muslim men in this valley just a few miles from Muslim-held territory.

"They let us all into this valley to finish us off," says Mr. Omerovic, who survived a 45-mile trek from Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia that fell to the Serbs 10 years ago Monday. After six days of hiding and eating grass, and six nights of walking through minefields and countless ambushes, he and a few friends were able to sneak through the Serb lines to safety. Others didn't make it, and Muslim men who'd stayed behind, in what had been a UN-designated "safe area," were executed by Serb troops, police, and paramilitaries. The final tally: some 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed.

Omerovic is one of several hundred survivors making a symbolic three-day trek back through the woods to Srebrenica. There, organizers expect some 50,000 people Monday for the 10th anniversary commemoration and burial of remains of 583 massacre victims. Security for the ceremony will be tight. Acting on a tip, police last week removed almost 80 pounds of explosives near the memorial where about 2,000 identified victims have already been buried. European Union (EU) peacekeepers will be backing up the 1,500 local police securing the ceremony.

For survivors of what's been deemed "genocide," the commemoration is vital. The head of Bosnia's Islamic community, Mustafa Ceric, issued a decree on Friday that no one should forget what happened here, he wrote, so that "genocide will never happen to anyone, anywhere, ever again."

But it also highlights the rifts that still remain. In a country that was divided politically into a Muslim-Croat Federation and Serb Republic by the US- brokered peace agreement, Serbs and Muslims in this part of the Serb Republic tend to see things differently.

Ten years on, Srebrenica is Bosnia's flashpoint of pain and blame. Back then, the UN's several hundred lightly armed Dutch troops, who were supposed to protect the Muslims, offered little resistance to the Serb offensive. Omerovic could be speaking for thousands of Muslims here when he says: "I blame the Serbs and the Serb military for everything that happened, but after that I blame the UN - I don't trust them."

The town's unemployment rate - in a country where 4 in 10 people are out of work - hovers around 70 percent. In many Bosnian towns, pockmarks on buildings and bomb craters on streets are slowly disappearing; but in Srebrenica, many houses remain riddled with bullet fire and have smoke scars above their boarded-up windows.

But Serbs in the village of Kravica, 10 miles northwest of Srebrenica, say that their victims and their pain have been forgotten in light of the focus on the 10th anniversary of the massacre.

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