A Long Trail of Tears
Remembering Srebrenica's massacred
The last time Sejdefa Dozic saw her father, she was 10 years old. Her hometown of Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in the former Yugoslavia, had been invaded by Bosnian Serb forces, the men and boys surrounded and executed. That was a decade ago, but Dozic still vividly recalls the fear she felt as Bosnian Serb soldiers took positions in the hills ringing Srebrenica while Dutch United Nations peacekeepers--arms too light and troops too few--stood helplessly by. "A few days before Srebrenica was attacked, shells were exploding all over the city. It was horrible," says Dozic, now a Georgia Tech student. "We went to the center of town where the U.N. troops were stationed. We hoped they would protect us."
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overtook the 370 Dutch peacekeepers and stripped them of their uniforms, vehicles, and weapons. And what was supposed to have been a U.N. safe haven became the site of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, a bloody extermination of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbs. "These past 10 years, we've been looking for the answer to why the U.N. didn't protect us," Dozic says. "We never believed they would allow the Serbs to come in."
Shallow mass graves where the dead were dumped are still being discovered; so far, only 2,000 bodies have been identified and given proper burials. Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, President Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, who are wanted on charges of genocide in connection with the massacre, continue to elude capture. Last week, world leaders offered apologies, during a somber 10th-anniversary memorial in Srebrenica, for failing to have stopped the killings. "We were betrayed by those who came to protect us," Dozic said quietly. "We can never remain silent in the face of murder and injustice."
This story appears in the July 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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