Survivors of Bosnia massacre grapple with horrors, deniers
SREBRENICA, BosniaHerzegovina — Through tears and in between fraught silences, Devla Ajsic refuses to remain quiet any longer.
Ajsic was 21 years old and three months pregnant in July 1995 when she was repeatedly sexually assaulted in Srebrenica while her fiance and thousands of other mostly Muslim men and boys were taken away and executed in Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since World War II.
For decades, Ajsic did not talk openly about the horrors she endured after Bosnian Serb forces stormed the eastern Bosnian town in the waning months of the Balkan country’s 1992-95 war.
“I locked it all inside for 26 years and suffered in silence. I had no one to confide in, no one to share my pain with. … I cannot take it any longer,” said the now 47-year-old Ajsic, steeling herself as she finally spoke publicly of her ordeal on the eve of the 26th anniversary of the massacre Sunday.
When Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica, which had been declared a U.N. “safe haven” for civilians in 1993, about 30,000 of its terrified Muslim residents rushed to the U.N. compound at the entrance to town in the hope that Dutch U.N. peacekeepers there would protect them.
However, the outgunned and outnumbered peacekeepers watched helplessly as Serb troops took some 2,000 men and boys from the compound for execution, raped the women and girls, and then bused the women, children and elderly to Bosniak Muslim-held territory.
Ajsic said she was sexually assaulted and tortured for three days before departing Srebrenica in one of the last buses packed with refugees.
“The things they did to me, they tied me to a desk, my neck and my chest were blue from bruises, I was sprawled naked on that table,” she recounted, sobbing. The Associated Press typically doesn’t name sex abuse victims except in cases where they opt to speak publicly.
Ajsic said the Serb soldiers drugged her, clouding her mind, but even so she was acutely aware she was not the only woman kept bound and subject to horrific abuse in a hangar of the then-U.N. compound.
There are no words to describe their “screaming, their cries for help,” she said of the women. “What could we do when [the soldiers] came through that door unzipping their pants and walked toward us? We were like lambs, like sacrificial lambs waiting for a knife to slaughter us.”
And yet, she believes her personal nightmare, including the loss of the fetus she had to abort after fleeing Srebrenica, is dwarfed by the weeklong Bosnian Serb killing spree in which more than 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys from the town perished.
Most of the victims were hunted down and summarily executed as they tried to flee into nearby forest. Their bodies were plowed into hastily dug mass graves and then later excavated with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide evidence of the crime.
Many wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of those killed in Srebrenica have dedicated their lives to fighting for the truth about what happened to their men and searching for their remains. And yet, in over a quarter-century, only a handful have publicly spoken of the sexual abuse they suffered during the fall of Srebrenica.
The women stubbornly stood their ground when confronted with political opposition to their request to set up a memorial cemetery across from the former Dutch U.N. base, where on every July 11 since 2002 they have reburied the remains of their loved ones.
So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been exhumed from mass graves, identified by forensic analysis and reburied at the site. The remains of 19 more victims will be laid to rest there Sunday.