The Trigger (27 page)

The secret was kept and the lifeline remained open, right up to the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, so it was the obvious route for the escape column to attempt. The route had worked for years, so it made sense to use it to save as many people as possible. But the smugglers had only ever travelled in small groups, with never more than a few dozen individuals, which were relatively easy to conceal. With Bosnian Serb forces descending rapidly on the pocket, the escape column gathering for the off had already grown to well over 10,000, mostly men, but with a scattering of female medical staff tending the wounded and the occasional woman desperate not to be split up from her menfolk. It would take twelve hours after the head of the column left the pocket for the tail to begin marching. What happened next has entered legend, being commemorated each July by the Marš Mira, or Peace March, when several thousand young Bosnians walk the lifeline route in reverse, from the Sapna Thumb back to Srebrenica. I was in time to join the Marš Mira of 2012.

The walk combined the youthful enthusiasm of a music rock festival with an undertow of horror reminiscent of an Auschwitz memorial service. Cheerful groups of young Bosnian men and women lugged rucksacks crammed with camping gear and food, their cooking pots clanking as they swung from strings knotted to the outside. Flags were borne proudly by some of the groups, bearing memorial messages for the victims of Srebrenica, the task of carrying the poles being rotated among the walkers. The occasional ghetto-blaster boomed raucous tracks of Balkan turbo-folk and all the time the mood was contagious in its spirit of focused determination.

The three-day route took us through countryside every bit as beautiful as the terrain I had crossed in the earlier part of my journey through western Bosnia. We crossed the occasional asphalt road, but for the most part the trail followed footpaths and farm tracks through landscape that in many places was just as wild as the wolf country I had already visited. There were pastures where the grass had been scythed and gathered up into ricks as tall as houses. There were mountain streams where my fishing radar twitched, glistening reaches of clear water rich in the promise of wild trout. There were forest glades offering shade against the strong summer sun, and moments when the tree cover broke to give tumbling views of hills growing ever paler as they fell away to the Drina River valley far off to the east. There were climbs so steep that in places we had to grab onto tree trunks to stop ourselves sliding back down on sledges of muddy, matted leaves.

Every few miles we would come to another mountain village. These were Bosnian Muslim homes, but they were indistinguishable from Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat farmhouses I had already visited on my journey. In the spirit of the London marathon, locals set up tables of water cups for the marchers and, in one memorable instance of history’s loop, a group of aid workers from Austria – the modern remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – enthusiastically handed out bananas from crates they had arranged to be driven to the summit of one of the longer climbs. With so many people taking part in the march, police vans, ambulances and other emergency vehicles were deployed here and there. A fire engine caught my eye, donated from Britain, the name of the East Sussex Fire Brigade still stencilled on its side.

Snapshots from Bosnia’s history littered the trail. In one section of forest we passed a stećak, one of the medieval box-like Bosnian tombstones that date from the era when the various eastern and western forms of Christianity struggled for supremacy among the south Slavs living here before the arrival of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. The centuries had knocked it askew, but the surface of the grey rock bore circular repetitive carvings, hallmarks of an ancient south-Slav culture that is still the focus of academic study. Later I saw something that needed no explanation, a Wehrmacht steel helmet dating from the German occupation of Yugoslavia. It was rusted to a wafer and nailed to the top of a fence post, but the shape was easily recognisable from the long schoolboy hours I had spent playing with Second World War models.

At the end of each day we stopped en masse at a pre-arranged location, the marchers dispersing into nearby villages, settling down for the night in barns and outhouses, where blistered feet received attention, food was prepared and bedrolls were spread out. Farmers’ wives gave me burek prepared not quite in the same vast cartwheels as Sarajevo’s restaurants, but in more modest swirls the size of a baking tray. I ate contentedly, cross-legged on the ground, flakes of thin pastry drifting onto my lap, eagerly wolfing down the cheese-and-spinach stuffing to restock my energy levels. It was the raspberry season, and several times I was able to pick fruit from farmers’ gardens before a thimble of coffee was proffered as a digestif. Tired enough to fall asleep quickly each night in my tent, I was woken early in the morning by the Muslim call to prayer from mosques rebuilt after the war. Throughout the walk there was joshing and high spirits, with one particular farmer’s wife reminding me of a word learned earlier on my journey when she insisted jokingly that I leave her my šator as a gift. On another occasion when a local man, a shopkeeper called Mirza, found out I was British, he looked me straight in the eye and said in south-London-accented English: ‘Next year we are going to be millionaires, Rodney.’ He was a great fan of the British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which is so popular across the Balkans that it is repeated endlessly on local television. The name of the show here is Mućke, a word that translates as ‘wheeler-dealers’, a concept that resonates strongly with Bosnians from all three ethnic groups.

These should be my dominant memories from the walk: natural beauty, local generosity and rural simplicity. But they are not. My overwhelming memory is that I was dancing on graves.

The route followed by the escape column from Srebrenica is today shown not by normal road signs. Instead it is marked by mass graves, one after another: the smaller ones where half a dozen bodies were uncovered, the larger ones found to contain more than 500 corpses. Over the three days of walking I recorded passing twenty mass graves, although there were some points where I was so exhausted that I might have missed a few, my eyesight not what it should have been because of sweat in my eyes. Each of the mass graves I did see had a sign that gave the name of the site and the coding used by the war-crimes investigators who have spent the years since 1995 exhuming bodies, gathering evidence and arranging for the remains to be moved to a proper graveyard near Srebrenica itself. And each had a photograph: one showing an investigator’s gloved hand holding a skull; another showing a skeleton’s hands still tied with wire; another an identity card displaying a man’s sober-faced passport photograph peering out through a smear of mud. Many of the bodies in the graves lay exactly where they had been killed during the escape. Others were brought from where they had been hurriedly buried elsewhere after execution, then were driven here and hidden among the woods in what war-crimes investigators called ‘Secondary Graves’ – places so far off the beaten track that the Bosnian Serb authorities hoped they would never be found.

The spirit of the march was at once respectful towards these sites and yet businesslike. For many of these young people a fifty-mile hike represented the greatest physical challenge they had ever attempted, so while acknowledging the mass graves, they did not dawdle, pressing on instead with the next section of the challenge. Next to one of the mass graves that we passed on the first day an ice-cream stall had been set up by a local man – one that did great business.

Over the days it took me to walk the hills into Srebrenica I built up a picture of what had happened from one of the survivors of the escape column. It took some time to win the confidence of Džile Omerović, a bearded, barrel-chested bear of a man in his mid-thirties who had ended up as a refugee in Switzerland after making it out from Srebrenica alive. Each evening we would chat in French, and to begin with he displayed the same survivor’s guilt as Arnie – a reluctance to make a ‘fuss’, to highlight his own plight when death denied so many others the chance to voice properly their suffering. But after spending some time together he began to let go, offering up threads of his story.

Džile was born of farming stock in the village of Pobudje, a Bosnian Muslim hamlet about a day’s walk north of Srebrenica. He was seventeen when the war began, eagerly joining a community defence force that was commanded by his father, Musa, the headman of the village.

‘To begin with, in that first summer, we were well organised and the Serbs left us alone,’ he said. ‘There were shelters for the children and we had enough food as a community to survive. My father was in charge and things were peaceful enough here, even though the main road the Serbs were using was just two miles down the hill at the bottom of the valley. At one point an order came to try and block the road, so one night the guys went down there to try and blow up the bridge where the road crosses a river. All of us know the area, so we waited for a misty night and then we dragged down gas canisters to use as explosives – the tanks of gas you use for a welding torch. They stuffed them under the bridge and blew them up. There was a great big flash and a lot of smoke, but it did not make any bloody difference. The bridge was still there in the morning.’

A wry smile crept across his face at the recollection of these early amateur attempts at warfare and then, looking earnest once again, he said something with echoes of Princip’s young life. ‘My great love was reading, and in that first year the thing I missed most was books. All I wanted was books. Anything to read, anything to keep my mind going. I knew nothing about the world, so it was through books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn that I was able to escape. I was only a teenager then, and that book is all about the thing teenagers are most interested in – sex.

‘I took part in another raid and found myself down in the valley near a school. It was night-time, and when I saw a window had been left open I climbed inside. I had no idea if there might be any Serbs there, but all I wanted to do was find some books. I crept up the stairs in the dark and found a lot of places where intravenous drips had been set up. They had been using it as a field hospital to treat their wounded, right there in the school library.

‘I grabbed as many books as I could carry and then spotted a typewriter. God knows why I did this, but I sat down, grabbed a piece of paper and typed out really carefully DO NOT BURN. The typewriter was one of those fancy ones with three colours, so I made sure the letters were as visible as possible. It made no difference. Some stupid guy from my side then came in and torched the place. He was carrying a bottle of brandy and was half-drunk, one of those stupid Bosnians from the old joke, the one where one guy says to the other, “Would you like to buy a book?” and the other says, “No thank you, I already own one.”’

When the Serbs launched their operation to neutralise the threat from the Srebrenica pocket in spring 1993, Džile’s village found itself on the frontline. Its proximity to the main road made it a target for the standard Bosnian Serb tactic, which was to shell an area intensively for days in the hope of driving out the population and then send in their ground troops. ‘It was Henry Miller who saved my life. I had gone to my grandfather’s house, so I could read my book in peace when the shelling began. The first blast landed right next to the house I was in and the wall was blown open. Luckily there was a large cupboard that took the blast and I was saved. But then a second shell landed right next door near where my family lived, and I heard the voices screaming. “Musa is dead, Musa is dead.” We buried my father on the hill behind the house.’

It was no longer safe to stay in the village, so the surviving members of the Omerović family trekked on foot into Srebrenica, part of the refugee influx that threatened to overwhelm the town. Džile’s mother and sister were allowed to leave on convoys arranged by the UN, but men of fighting age like him, then eighteen, had to stay. He spent the next two years surviving as best he could.

‘I remember going to the library in Srebrenica and asking if I could borrow some books. Do you know what they said? They said I was not originally from Srebrenica district and so I must go to the library in my home district. Bloody idiots! My district town was in the hands of the Serbs. That’s the only time in my life I stole a book.’

Over the years since the war ended some have sought to project an image of undiluted heroism on Srebrenica during this period, a picture of stalwart defence by courageous fighters of the highest moral purity. Džile’s account was much more honest. The scenario he described was one closer to rats trapped in a sack, occasionally turning on each other to survive. ‘There are some things that are difficult to think about even now after all these years,’ he said. ‘Things like soldiers from our side caught dealing with the other side. There was a guy I know about who was caught doing this in a village out near where I am from. The commanders had him marched back into Srebrenica, but somehow on the way back before he got to the town he was shot dead. Did he know too much? Were there senior officers who were in on the smuggling deals who wanted him silenced? I don’t know. But I do know that while most of us went hungry, there were some inside the pocket who made money. Those guys made me sick.’

Our conversation moved on to what Džile viewed as firmer moral ground when we talked about the crisis of July 1995 and the final advance of the Bosnian Serbs. He was one of the 13,000 who refused to hand themselves over to the enemy and took part in the escape column. ‘It was all down to a man called Senad,’ he said. ‘Now there is a true hero, a true patriot. He’s not some guy who shoots a gun four times in the air and is promoted to Brigadier; no, he is the reason any of us got out alive. Did he ask for any recognition? Of course not. All he wanted to do was to go back to a life growing vegetables in his market garden.

‘It was Senad who opened up the route from here all the way to Tuzla. Udrč mountain is enormous, but he knew every stream and every gully like the back of his hand. Twenty-seven times during the war he led small groups of guys to bring in ammunition along that route. More than anyone else, he kept the pocket alive.