Srebrenica

I felt antsy for a few days like I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't seeing anything new anymore or I was just not going to where I needed to go and not seeing the things I am suppose to see. I decide to take a day trip, I could have gone to many cities and stayed a night but I only had one real choice, Srebrenica.

July 2nd 1995, a day that will never be forgotten by the people who experienced it and survived. Forces under the control Ratko Mladic having surrounded Srebrenica, A UN Safe-Area, move in and remove over 7,000 mainly Muslim men and boys. They would never been seen again alive.

I asked around in the hostel the day before I left to go to Srebrenica and no one would come. I will be honest; when I got up in the morning I was nervous, and scared to a degree, that I was going to a place that I once again knew nothing about. It is quite remote by Bosnia standards. There is only one bus every day leaving Sarajevo going to Srebrenica and one bus coming back to Sarajevo, I was to ride both of them.

Leaving the station at 7:10am on a half filled bus I leave for this destination. Along the way I was blessed with seeing some of the more rural parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I found the hills, mountains, valleys and rivers to be gorgeous.

What was't so beautiful was the many destroyed and abandoned houses everywhere. You could still see the damage as if it was done last week, the charred remains of the walls, the caved in roofs, and the empty windows. It was en-route when I realized that no one around me spoke English, which was an odd but comforting thought.

All I did while I was there was just walk around and see. A funny thing happened when I stopped at a small café and had lunch. The people just assumed I was Dutch and working for the UN but we all had a laugh when I explained where I was really from, Texas and especially from Dallas. One of the greatest exports from the US that everyone knows about are TV shows and yes, they had seen the TV show Dallas with JR and the whole group and they also wanted to know if I was a cowboy. I did say yes because for them what was more interesting some guy from Texas or a cowboy from Texas.

Srebrenica still holds and shows visibly its scars from the past. Many buildings in the center are being fixed or have been, like in Sarajevo, but the many that haven’t been are what moves you. After wandering the small town I start my journey for why I came, to head to the Potocari/Srebrenica Memorial and Cemetery.

When I arrived after my hour or more walk I come upon the memorial just as a pair of old women are leaving. I am then at that moment alone in this place. I just walk though its paths and take a seat upon on a bench near the field of green wooden grave markers. Each one holds a name on a black metal plate with the year of the birth and 1995, the year of their death. The mounds of dirt now properly cover these bodies who were denied a proper Muslim or even a simple dignified burial originally. In many of them silk flowers have been placed and around the wooded grave makers are necklaces of beads.

As I sit upon that bench a car pulls up and a family gets out; a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, and an uncle. That day they made a journey, how many times they have made it I know not but I did experience them on this one. They walk through the grave makers looking for a name they know and then they find one. The two older men stop at one and hold their hands palms upward in front of them and then cover their face with them. The woman beings to try but is unable because she breaks into tears. The two children just stand there; I don’t think they understand exactly why they are there or whom these people are that they have come to see. The men continue on to five or six more grave markers but the woman couldn’t get past the first one.

I was caught in something that I never expected, I am sitting there not watching but hearing and glancing and trying to experience what I have been fortunate to be allowed into. I know I invaded their space by just being there but I couldn1t move nor get up, I couldn’t even breathe it seemed. The men then go wash their hands in the water fountains provided around park and then they return to where they came from and I am still sitting there….

Even if I would have had someone to talk to on the four-hour bus ride back to Sarajevo I don’t think I would have been able to. All I could think about was Srebrenica and how I was leaving it behind but those there will never be able to leave it behind…..