Bosnia massacre survivors grapple with horrors
SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — 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 the 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.
And yet, she believes her personal nightmare is dwarfed by the weeklong Bosnian Serb killing spree in which over 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys from the town perished.
Most of the victims were hunted down and summarily executed. 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.
So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been exhumed, identified by forensic analysis and reburied at the site. The remains of 19 more victims will be laid to rest at a memorial cemetery across from the former Dutch U.N. base Sunday.
Although the Srebrenica massacre was branded genocide by international and national courts, Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials still downplay or deny the crime.
“We have to keep fighting for truth and justice in order to prevent the young generations (in the Balkans) from being infected by hate, from seeking revenge,” said Munira Subasic, who lost her husband, a son and 22 other male relatives in the massacre.