The video camera has provided the “smoking gun” to shock Serbs — and the world — into witnessing the horrors of the executions of six thin Bosnian Muslim teens by sometimes sneering and cursing Serb paramilitaries.
The result: the nightmare-inducing video 1995 is making Serbs take notice of their country’s role in Europe’s worst massacre since the days of the Nazis in War War II.
After World War II, many looked at what the Nazis did and used the slogan: “Never again.”
But there clearly was another “again.” As the AP reports:
The video, apparently made by Serb troops, shows men in camouflage uniforms wearing red berets emblazoned with the Serbian flag taking the six prisoners — some still in their teens — from a truck, hands tied behind their backs.
Four were then shot, one by one, in the back. They slumped into the tall grass, and the two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a barn where they, too, were killed. At times, the Serb troops cursed and sneered at the prisoners.
And what’s the impact of this video proof of how humans can view other human beings as things to be simply broken (shot) and thrown away (buried or burned) while seemingly not having reservations about snuffing out the lives of young people who’ve not had a chance to live?
The video of the July 1995 killings near Srebrenica mark the first time most Serbs have seen such images and could change the way the nation thinks of the slaughter in Bosnia, where Serb troops overran the enclave and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
The images prompted Serbian officials to acknowledge publicly that war crimes were committed by Serbs during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.
“Everything burst — the whole bubble of hiding evidence and denying crimes — within the 10 minutes it took to broadcast the video,” said Natasa Kandic, a human rights activist from the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Fund.
The video brought the message home so people could almost FEEL what was happening. It surfaced on Wednesday at the UN war-crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Prosecutors showed the tape during the trial of Mailosevic, who is being tried on charges for his alleged role in atrocities during the Balkan wars, including the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica.
A woman in Belgrade turned on her TV — and watched her son die:
On 1 June, Nura Alispahic turned on the television to watch the evening news in the Bosnian city of Tuzla.
What she saw was the execution, 10 years ago, of her teenage son, Azmir.
“It was the same as if he was killed that very moment in front of my eyes,” Alispahic said. “When he was shot and fell I started shouting: ‘My son, they’ve killed you! They’ve killed him in front of my eyes.'”
Her son was one of the six Bosnian Muslim youths butchered in the video, filmed near the site of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Serbian President Boris Tadic somberly told the nation the images were “proof of a monstrous crime committed against persons of a different religion. And the guilty had walked as free men until now, walked among us.”
Police arrested 10 suspects after the images were shown on Belgrade television. Four remained in custody Friday.
They will most assuredly end their lives with less horror than the teens who were tied up, forced to knee then shot apparently because they were viewed as subhumans of another religion by their captors.
Given the video proof it’s likely the arrested suspects’ trials will end in justice being served. Almost….
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.