MASSACRE OF CHILDREN & YOUTH IN SREBRENICA (1993)

Photo de la ville de Srebrenica avec un terrain de jeux cimenté (p.542). View of Srebrenica, photo courtesy: Hague Tribunal. Exhibit P4/1  •  Date: 13/03/2000  •  By: Prosecution, Krstic trial.

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Reprint courtesy: Daniel Toljaga

Catastrophe in Srebrenica:
“They can now be transported like cattle or slaughtered like sheep.”

Slaughter of Defenseless Refugees Shakes U.N. Aid Officials

By John Daniszewski

Associated Press Writer

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p.A4

14 April 1993.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The Serb shelling of women and children in Srebrenica has infuriated international aid officials, who urge greater U.N. involvement to prevent further slaughter.

“I wonder how much longer we can stand by and try to help, like a sticking plaster on a wound which is just killing the patient,” Dr. Simon Mardel of the World Health Organization said yesterday.

As a result of the Bosnian Serbs’ unrelenting advances in eastern Bosnia, Bosniaks there now face a choice: “They can now be transported like cattle or slaughtered like sheep,” said Larry Hollingworth of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The powerlessness of U.N. workers to prevent catastrophe in Srebrenica was brought home Monday when Bosnian Serbs unleashed a ferocious artillery barrage — minutes after their commander swore in Sarajevo to respect a cease-fire.

Shells exploded over a school packed with refugees and a football field where children played, raining down a shower of hot shrapnel that severed limbs amid hellish scenes of panic, according to U.N. workers. Fifty-six civilians, including 15 children, died immediately, and 90 people were wounded.

“It’s typical of what will occur when large artillery shells fall on a densely packed town filled with displaced people from neighboring villages and towns,” said Mardel. “Casualties are reaching and will continue to reach astronomical proportions.”

Most of the wounds outstrip the medical facilities of Srebrenica, a town of 6,5000 people that has been overwhelmed by tens of thousands of Bosniak refugees fleeing the Bosnian Serb army.

Four local doctors and a small French team are coping with more than 600 wounded in a makeshift hospital without electricity, water or sufficient food and medicine.

“Yesterday, when I heard what was happening, I first of all thought about the military commander that ordered the fire on Srebrenica, and I personally hope that he burns i the hottest corner of hell,” said Hollingworth, a former British Army officer.

His UNHCR colleague, John McMillan, was scarcely less restrained: “Apparently, in their pathological drive to acquire territory, the Serbs are willing to kill anybody.”

In the past two weeks, United Nations military forces and relief organizations have been repeatedly thwarted and humiliated by Serbs in their attempts to save the people in Srebrenica.

A bid to ferry out the wounded by helicopter was disrupted by shelling, an attempt to bring in a French field hospital was refused, and the U.N. force commander in the republic, Maj. Gen. Philippe Morillon, was forced to turn back when 300 Serbian women blocked his road.

A U.N. Security Council instruction that the 14 U.N. troops in Srebrenica be reinforced had gone unfulfilled, also due to Serb opposition.

Although the Srebrenica district once was 70 percent Bosniak and the international peace plan conceives it as remaining under Bosniak control, Serbs claim they must keep fighting to protect Serb lives and Serb land.

They also are motivated by what they claim are past atrocities against Serbs, and accuse the Bosniaks of launching new offensives now. [op/ed note: this is a common rhetoric employed by Serbian ultra-nationalists who, to this day, refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for massacring thousands of Bosniak inhabitants of eastern Bosnia in the first weeks of a brutal 'ethnic cleansing' campaign, more than three years before the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide]

Cmdr. Barry Frewer,, spokesman for U.N. forces in Sarajevo, said the United Nations lacks the mandate to do much more for the people than try to bring the sides together for discussion, deliver aid, call attention to atrocities and “count the victims.”

“It’s a limited mandate which only allows us to go so far, without the use of force,” he said.