The New York Times
Note: Copy of the article from October 29, 1995.
Republished for Fair Use Only
The following article is by Stephen Engelberg and Tim Weiner with further reporting from Raymond Bonner in Bosnia and Jane Perlez in Serbia.
On the afternoon of July 10, soldiers of the Bosnian Serb army began storming Srebrenica, a city of refuge created by the United Nations, where more than 40,000 people sought shelter from war. A United Nations officer in the town hunched over his computer and tapped out a desperate plea to his leaders in Geneva:
"Urgent urgent urgent. B.S.A. is entering the town of Srebrenica. Will someone stop this immediately and save these people. Thousands of them are gathering around the hospital. Please help."
Nobody did. As the Western alliance stood by, the eastern Bosnian city was overrun. What followed in the towns and fields around Srebrenica is described by Western officials and human rights groups as the worst war crime in Europe since World War II: the summary killing of perhaps 6,000 people.
As recounted by the few Muslims who survived, the killing was chillingly methodical, part mass slaughter, part blood sport.
The Muslim men were herded by the thousands into trucks, delivered to killing sites near the Drina River, lined up four by four and shot. One survivor, 17-year-old Nezad Avdic, recalled in an interview this week that as he lay wounded among the dead Muslims, a Serbian soldier surveyed the stony, moonlit field piled with bodies and merrily declared: "That was a good hunt. There were a lot of rabbits here."
Serbian civilians interviewed this week in the villages around Srebrenica confirmed for the first time the mass killings carried out in their midst.
They pointed out the schools that were used as holding pens for the doomed Muslims -- including the schoolhouse in Karakaj where young Mr. Avdic said he was taken. They reported seeing bodies all along the roads and fields outside Srebrenica. One man said he had been stopped by soldiers who asked for help loading the bodies onto trucks for burial.
A reconstruction of the fall of Srebrenica and the ensuing massacres, based on survivors' accounts, NATO and United Nations documents and interviews in Bosnia, Serbia, Washington and New York, leaves little doubt about what happened. The question of Serbian accountability promises to haunt the Bosnian peace talks that are to begin Wednesday at an Air Force base in Ohio.
The role of the outsiders who were sworn to protect the town but did not -- the United Nations, NATO and the United States -- is not so stark. But the massacre of thousands of men ostensibly under international protection is regarded by many officials as the low point of Western policy in the Balkans, a time of impotence if not acquiescence.
Before the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica, some calls for help were ignored, some rejected. Gen. Bernard Janvier, the United Nations commander for Bosnia, vetoed the air strikes that Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica requested to defend the town. United Nations officers said he had little enthusiasm for protecting an enclave widely viewed as an indefensible impediment to ending the war.
After the town was overrun, the Dutch soldiers failed to relay crucial information to the United Nations, including a threat by the Bosnian Serb commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, to massacre the Muslims.
American officials say they had no warning the town would fall and no way to save its people. After the Serbs swept in, the Americans did little more than urge Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, to restrain the Bosnian Serbs and allow relief supplies to reach Srebrenica.
An American reconnaissance satellite photographed hundreds of Muslim men held in fields at gunpoint on July 13 -- evidence of a crime in progress. But those riveting photos, and shots taken by a U-2 spy plane two weeks later of freshly turned earth in the same fields, were first shown to President Clinton's top advisers on Aug. 4, long after the victims were dead and buried.
Those advisers said that they had no options short of sending the 82d Airborne, and that seeing the satellite photos of Muslim men in fields the day they were taken would not have changed their minds.
The deaths of thousands gave life to a moribund diplomacy. The testimony of despairing refuges from the enclave caught Mr. Clinton's attention. Pushed by the United States, NATO adopted a more aggressive military stance and staged the most punishing air strikes of the war. A new American peace plan became the basis for a cease-fire and the Ohio talks.
But the mass killings may not have ended with Srebrenica. This month thousands more men and boys captured by the Serbs in and around the town of Banja Luka have disappeared. There is no word yet on their fate. The Attack NATO's Warnings Ignored by Serbs
At 3:15 A.M. on July 6, Srebrenica exploded. The Bosnian Serbs fired rockets into the United Nations compound and shelled a village to the south, sending 4,000 more people fleeing into the enclave.
For weeks the Serbs had been tightening their noose on Srebrenica. They had weakened the Dutch force, allowing troops to leave on regularly scheduled rotations, but blocking their replacements, slicing the size of the battalion from 450 to 300. They confiscated spare parts for the peacekeepers' anti-tank missiles and waylaid fuel shipments.
Col. Ton Karremans, the Dutch peacekeepers' commander, warned senior United Nations officers in May of signs that the Serbs were preparing to conquer the enclave, according to the Dutch Defense Ministry. Nothing was done in response to this message, United Nations officials said.
"We had indications in June that the Serbs might be concentrating on the enclave," an American intelligence official said. "But it was unclear what the scope of the action was."
As the Serbian assault continued on July 7, the Dutch peacekeepers asked their United Nations superiors to call in NATO warplanes against the attacking artillery and armor. The request was rejected by United Nations officers in Sarajevo. They saw the attack as mere "probing." And they did not want to undermine the peacemaking efforts of Carl Bildt, the European negotiator, who had just arrived in the region.
Over the next 48 hours, the attack stepped up. On July 8 the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, spoke on the Sarajevo radio, saying the people of Srebrenica faced "massacres and genocide" if the town fell. He said he had delivered this warning to the United States, Germany, England, France, the United Nations and NATO.
By July 9, the safe area was under attack, with shells sometimes falling every minute. The Dutch peacekeepers set up a blockade of four armored personnel carriers on the road entering Srebrenica from the south, in a desperate attempt to stop the Serbian advance.
At 10:35 P.M., Gen. Herve Gobillard, the acting United Nations commander, faxed a letter to General Mladic. "This attack against a United Nations 'safe area' is totally unacceptable," it said. "The advance must stop where it is."
The letter explicitly said an assault on the peacekeepers' blockade would be met by an attack with warplanes. It promised "grave consequences" if the Serbs ignored the warning.
The Serbs ignored it. The next morning, July 10, they drove toward the center of Srebrenica. Late that afternoon, a single tank and about 100 Serbian infantrymen approached the Dutch blockade and fell back under a hail of .50-caliber machine-gun fire.
In Zagreb, the Croatian capital, General Janvier, the United Nations commander for Bosnia, convened his top military advisers at 8 P.M. It was a tense meeting, repeatedly interrupted for updates from the Dutch troops. The general asked for advice. The response was nearly unanimous: air strikes. The United Nations' credibility was at stake. Srebrenica was a safe area. It had to be defended.
"We need F-16's swooping down now," said a Dutch officer, according to a participant at the meeting. General Janvier was unpersuaded. He announced that he would sleep on it. He left his aides "aghast," as a United Nations official put it.
General Javier, a United Nations officer said, did not believe that the Serbs would take the town. American military and intelligence officials shared that belief.
The Dutch officers in Srebrenica were even less well-informed. Lacking links to outside intelligence, they had no way of knowing how many Serbs were attacking. Worse, they mistakenly believed that General Janvier had approved overwhelming air strikes for the next morning.
At midnight, Colonel Karremans, the Dutch commander, met at the Srebrenica post office with the Mayor, the local military commander, the town's leading citizens and United Nations officers. According to a participant in this meeting, the colonel said the United Nations had delivered an ultimatum to General Mladic: Pull back by 6 A.M. or face a "massive" NATO air strike. And he told Srebrenica's leaders that "everything that moves, whether on two legs, four legs or on wheels, will be destroyed, erased from the ground," if the Serbs did not withdraw, the participant said.
As Colonel Karremans went to sleep, "he expects that there will be a massive air attack" on 30 Serb targets in the morning, said Bert Kreemers, a spokesman for the Dutch Defense Ministry.
At this crucial juncture -- which in hindsight, American, United Nations and NATO officials said, was the moment of Srebrenica's downfall -- Washington was on the sidelines. Clinton Administration officials said they did not believe that the town was in imminent danger; nor did they know that General Janvier was balking at air strikes.
That night in the Netherlands, the Dutch Defense Minister, Joris Voorhoeve, assured the American Ambassador that the situation was stabilizing. General Mladic, he said, had told General Janvier that the Serbs had no intention of taking Srebrenica. The Fall 'Serbs Have Won' In Srebrenica
"The situation this morning has been unusually, but creepily, calm and quiet," United Nations military observers in Srebrenica reported at 7:55 the next morning, July 11. "The usual hail of shells that have been greeting our mornings is surprisingly absent today. We view this as a positive change in the current circumstances, which undoubtedly have come from the NATO ultimatum, even though it has not been implemented yet."
Five minutes later, the Dutch renewed their request for air attacks on the Serbs, who had not withdrawn. None came. At 11:10, the Serbs resumed their assault on Srebrenica.
With that, General Janvier finally gave the go-ahead -- but limited the targets to tanks or artillery seen firing on United Nations troops. The air strikes finally began at 2:40 P.M., as tanks rolled toward the Dutch blockade. Four planes, two Dutch and two American, took aim at the tanks. They damaged one.
It was far too little, too late. The Bosnian Serbs brushed off the largely symbolic strike. Thousands of Serbian infantrymen joined the attack, flanking the Dutch armored vehicles and streaming into the city.
After the NATO warplanes bombed the tank, the Serbs threatened to kill 32 Dutch peacekeepers they had taken hostage after seizing the battalion's observations posts. They had used the tactic with brutal efficiency in May and June, when they terrorized NATO into halting air strikes by taking 400 other peacekeepers hostage.
It worked again. The Dutch Defense Minister, Mr. Voorhoeve, asked for a halt to the air strikes. The United Nations and NATO concurred.
"The Serbs have won," Mr. Voorhoeve announced.
By 4 P.M. the Dutch were hurriedly retreating two miles north to their base camp, at a factory in a small town called Potocari. Some 20,000 terrified people joined them.
The Serbs secured the town and disarmed the Dutch. They placed the Potocari camp and the refugees gathered there in the cross hairs of their tanks, artillery and rocket launchers.
At 6:27 P.M., United Nations headquarters in Sarajevo faxed new orders to the beleaguered Dutch battalion. The mission had changed. The Dutch commander, Colonel Karremans, and his sector commander, Col. Charlie Brantz, read that the battalion was ordered to "take all reasonable measures to protect refugees and civilians in your care."
"Not possible," Colonel Brantz scribbled in the margin. They were in General Mladic's hands now.
At nightfall, the swaggering General Mladic -- who was about to be indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague on charges of ordering savage ethnic purges in other conquered towns -- met with Colonel Karremans. He set his terms "in the most threatening way," as the colonel later described it: no more air strikes, or the refugees huddled at Potocari would be shelled and shot.
To illustrate his plans, according to eyewitnesses, the general ordered one of his men to slit the throat of a pig and declared, "This is what we're going to do the Muslims."
The colonel sent a message to his superiors at the United Nations and the Dutch Defense Ministry when the meeting broke up after midnight. His official report made no mention of the Serbian general's ghoulish threat, but he wrote, "I am not able to defend these people." The Refugees 'Don't Be Afraid,' Mladic Says
As General Mladic made his threats, 15,000 people -- mostly the men, including the local soldiers -- gathered on the outskirts of Srebrenica, not willing to trust their lives to the United Nations or to the Serbs. Safety lay a three-day trek away, through Serb-held territory. The long march began just before midnight.
The remaining refugees, as many as 25,000 jammed into the Dutch camp in Potocari, were seized with panic. Some of the women were abducted by Serbian soldiers and raped, witnesses have said. On the night of the 11th, United Nations soldiers heard screams and gunshots. Later, they found the bodies of at least nine men, shot in the back of the head.
General Mladic arrived at Potocari on the morning of Wednesday, July 12, with a convoy of 40 trucks and buses and a video crew. His soldiers ordered the refugees aboard, separating the men from the women. The peacekeepers stood by.
"No panic, please," the general said, smiling, handing a child a candy bar, in a video clip broadcast around the world. "Don't be afraid. No one will harm you."
Another tape made the same day but never shared with the world's networks showed a more chilling scene. In it, a Serb soldier shouts at the male refugees: "Come on, line up, one by one! Come on! Faster, faster! Go, go, go!"
One witness who recorded the fear of the town that day was Christina Schmidt, a German-born nurse who led the Srebrenica team from the French group Doctors Without Borders. She sent her account by radio to her organization's Belgrade office, which relayed it to the world press.
"Everybody should feel the violence in the faces of the B.S.A. soldiers directing the people like animals to the buses," she wrote in her journal for July 12, referring to the Bosnian Serb Army. "Everybody who could have stopped this mass exodus should be forced to feel the panic and desperation of the people."
"A father with his one-year-old baby is coming to me, crying, accompanied by B.S.A.," she continued. "He doesn't have anybody to take care of the baby and B.S.A. selected him for . . . ? It's a horrible scene -- I have to take the baby from his arm -- writing down his name and feeling that he will never see his child again." The Killing A Survivor, Saved by Bodies
Hurem Suljic, an invalided 55-year-old carpenter with a withered right leg, thought the Serbs would allow him on the buses taking the women, children and elderly to safety at a United Nations air base at Tuzla, 50 miles away. But when he and his wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and 7-year-old granddaughter approached the buses through a corridor of Dutch peacekeepers, he was snatched by a Serbian soldier. He was taken to a partly finished house jammed with men the Serbs had pulled out of the lines.
About 7 P.M., General Mladic appeared. "Good day, neighbors," he said cordially. The men demanded to know why they were being held. The general said he was going to trade them to the Bosnian Government for Serbian soldiers who had been captured.
The men were taken outside, led past United Nations peacekeepers and loaded onto buses again. They went to Bratunac, on the border with Serbia. There they were put into a dilapidated warehouse, about 50 feet by 25, with a dirt floor. Several more busloads of men arrived, until about 400 men were crammed in.
A Serbian soldier began shining his flashlight into their faces. "He would shine his light around, then pick on one person," and order him outside, Mr. Suljic said. "He seemed to pick the younger and stronger men."
Screaming -- "a specific sound, like the sound when you slaughter an animal" -- came from outside the warehouse, Mr. Suljic said. He said 40 men were taken out and beaten. Ten were thrown back. In the morning, five were dead.
That morning, the 13th, the prisoners heard vehicles approach. A Serbian soldier demanded 10 volunteers from the group. No one spoke up; the men were sure that they would be forced to bury the bodies of those beaten to death, Mr. Suljic said. The Serbs then picked 10 men for the task. They went outside. They did not come back.
Then the beatings and killings started again.
Later in the day, Mr. Suljic heard more vehicles arrive. Again came a demand for 10 volunteers. Again the vehicles left, and the 10 did not return.
Early in the evening, General Mladic appeared again. "We yelled at him, 'Why are you holding us here, why are you killing us?' " Mr. Suljic recalled. The Serbian military leader replied that it had taken him a while to reach an agreement on the exchange of prisoners, but that it had been arranged.
The men were taken outside and loaded onto buses. Mr. Suljic saw General Mladic giving orders to the soldiers. After dark, the buses headed headed toward Zvornik, also on the border with Serbia. Just before Karakaj, the buses turned left and stopped at a school, probably near a town called Krizevici.
The men were taken into the gymnasium. Soon another vehicle came and more men were shoved into the gym. They kept coming -- perhaps 2,500 in all, Mr. Suljic said.
About noon on the 14th, General Mladic came again. He told the men that he had not been able to work out a deal with their Government to trade them for Serbian prisoners. He left, and soldiers began taking the men out of the gymnasium in groups, blindfolding them as they were led out. Mr. Suljic was taken out at nightfall. He was the last of the 25 or 30 men to board his truck.
The truck moved slowly along a dirt road. Mr. Suljic said he had pushed up his blindfold and had seen a field filled with bodies. Around the bend, more bodies. Then the truck stopped. The men were ordered out.
They were put in rows four abreast. From behind, the Serbian soldiers began shooting. Men fell on top of Mr. Suljic, who escaped being hit. As he lay on the grassy field under the bodies, trucks kept coming, each with 25 or 30 more men. The men were taken out, lined up and shot. Mr. Suljic said he had seen it all clearly under the full moon.
General Mladic returned, stood by while a fresh truckload of men was shot, and left, Mr. Suljic said. More groups of men were brought and killed. Finally, Mr. Suljic said he heard some Serbs saying, "Everything is finished; nobody is left."
Then he saw heavy machines working. They were backhoes, digging big graves. The Hunt Refugees Killed From Ambush
The column of refugees that fled Potocari on foot stretched for mile after mile through Serbian-held land. They were hunted like game in the woods, ambushed, shelled and shot. They were captured, and their throats were slit. Uncounted numbers died in the woods and fields.
Mr. Avdic, the 17-year-old, joined the exodus from Srebrenica on July 11. After two nights of walking, he said he had surrendered along with at least 1,000 others in his group. It was near Kravica, on the road to Konjevic Polje.
The men were loaded onto trucks and taken to Bratunac. They spent the night in the truck, and the next day, the trucks went toward Zvornik, a town just across the border from Serbia. After Karakaj, the trucks stopped at a school. As the men entered the school, a Serbian soldier, holding his rifle by the barrel and swinging it like a baseball bat, hit them with the butt. Another Serbian soldier told the captives to move slowly, so the soldier with the rifle could hit everyone.
Mr. Avdic was taken to the second floor and put in the last room at the end of a hallway. It was already so full that he could barely squeeze in. During the day, the Serbs took men out of the rooms, sometimes two at a time, sometimes 5 or 10. If two men were ordered out of a room, soon after there would be two shots; if five, five shots.
"At that moment, I knew they would probably kill us," Mr. Avdic said. His account of what followed has been corroborated in detail by other survivors interviewed by human rights groups.
That night, the soldiers tossed him into a truck with 100 or more other men, drove down a dirt road, and yanked them out, five at a time. Shots. Another five, and more firing. Then it was Mr. Avdic's turn.
He emerged and saw, under the full moon, a field covered with dead bodies. The men were told to lie down. With his hands tied, Mr. Avdic found it difficult to do so. As he was falling the shooting started. He felt a terrible pain in his right arm and right side of his stomach. He had been shot.
As he lay on the killing ground, he heard the Serbs check the bodies.
"I saw a boot near my head," he said. "He stepped over me. The guy next to me was badly wounded; he was screaming. He shot him, several times. I don't know how the stones did not hit my face. I just closed my eyes. I wanted him to kill me. I thought it would be better for me to call him. But I changed my mind." The Warehouse 'Everybody Is Dead In Here'
Hakija Huseinovic, a 52-year-farmer and father of four -- a 14-year-old daughter was killed when Serbs shelled their village in 1992 -- also joined the thousands of men who fled when Srebrenica fell.
His section of the long column was ambushed the next day by the Serbs at a hill called Bulje. Scores of men were killed and wounded -- "nobody counted," Mr. Huseinovic said. Then they were ambushed near Konjevic Polje, when he believes that at least 1,000 men were killed or wounded. The Serbs called for them to surrender, and about 2,000 did, Mr. Huseinovic among them. They were marched to a big valley at Lolici, where the Serbs robbed them.
On the 13th, General Mladic came. "You know it's not pleasant to make war with Serbia," Mr. Huseinovic quoted the general as saying.
Then a Serbian commander marched the men, in a column about a third of a mile long, toward Bratunac. At Kravica, near Mr. Huseinovic's village, they were jammed into an agricultural warehouse. Then the Serbs began shooting through the windows, with automatic rifles, and firing shoulder-held grenade launchers.
They were "playing with us," he said. They would shoot for a while and then stop. When they would hear moaning, they would come back and shoot some more. One man, delirious, kept calling a friend's name. A Serbian soldier shouted an obscenity about the man's "Turkish mother" and shot him. Another man was crying for water. A Serb shouted an obscenity about Muslims, and shot him.
"Some of us yelled, 'Why don't you just kill us all?' " Mr. Huseinovic said. He saw about 20 bodies in the room; he covered himself with two of them. He heard a Serbian soldier say, "Everybody is dead in here."
The next morning, the 14th, the Serbs called into the warehouse and said that anybody who was not wounded should come out and would become part of the Bosnian Serb army. Some men did go out. They were put on trucks. The Serbs then said the wounded should come out, and they would be taken to a hospital. Some men did.
"I heard shooting," Mr. Huseinovic said. "I heard screaming. Then it was silent. They killed them all."
No one is sure precisely how many people died in the fields and woods surrounding Srebrenica. American intelligence analysts estimate the number at between 5,000 and 8,000. The Reaction Serbian Villages Know of Killings
The fact that thousands were killed is plain fact in the Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica on the west bank on the Drina River.
People interviewed in those villages this week said it was well known that Muslims were held captive in schools along the 13-mile stretch from Zvornik to Sepak were before they were killed.
Bratislav Grubacic, editor in chief of the VIP Daily News Report in Belgrade, said he was in Bratunac and Potocari in mid-July. "It is common knowledge in eastern Bosnia about what happened," he said Friday. His reporters said there were as many as 10 mass graves in the area, each containing several hundred bodies. He said the public reaction to the killings was "shock, fear and shame."
Those feelings are not universal. A priest near Sepak confirmed that the schools had been used to imprison the Muslims and that the prisoners had been shot. He expressed no remorse at the killings, but regretted the style in which they were conducted.
"I would kill a Turk, but I wouldn't torture them," the priest said. The Americans Washington Slow To Understand
The understanding that something unspeakable was happening dawned slowly in Washington.
Officials at the highest levels of the Clinton Administration said they had not foreseen the fall of Srebrenica. At the State Department, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, the consensus was the Bosnian Serbs did not want to conquer the town. Nor were there signs that the Serbs would commit mass slaughter. In hindsight, the officials say, their best information came from human rights groups, the United Nations and the press, not from spies, satellites or eavesdropping.
American officials worried mainly about the Srebrenica refugees' lack of food and provisions. On July 12, the senior American diplomat in Belgrade asked President Milosevic to use his influence with the Bosnian Serbs to avert a "humanitarian disaster." That day, he also pressed Mr. Milosevic to help international observers gain access to the men who had been rounded up.
After the fall of Srebrenica, senior officials said they turned their attention toward creating a new policy -- using air power to protect the remaining safe havens, particularly Gorazde.
On July 13, as the press reported refugees' accounts of mass killings, an American spy satellite passing over Bosnia recorded pictures of two fields in which hundreds of prisoners were guarded by gunmen. One of these was the stony field of the "rabbit hunt," where the 17-year-old Mr. Avdic was shot.
But no one saw that picture for three weeks.
Techno-thriller readers think spy satellites make the C.I.A. all-seeing and all-knowing. In fact, American intelligence collects far more data than it can analyze. One former National Security Agency director said gleaning hard facts from the avalanche of information was like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose.
An intelligence official familiar with the Bosnia photos said that "if you saw an overhead photograph of all New York City, and there was a bank robbery going on somewhere, and nobody reported it," detectives would have a hard time finding the scene of the crime. Throughout July, he said, the C.I.A. lacked "information regarding specific places and atrocities."
The Western allies gathered in London on July 21 and adopted a much tougher stance toward the Bosnian Serbs. After balking at punishing air strikes for three years, the Europeans finally agreed: Further Serbian attacks on the safe havens would be met with exactly the sort of withering response that Colonel Karremans, the Dutch commander in Srebrenica, had asked for, but never received.
On July 27, two weeks after the first published accounts of mass killings from survivors of the fall of Srebrenica, a U-2 spy plane passed over the sites of the slaughter and recorded images of newly turned earth. That film was shipped to Washington on a regular military flight on July 30.
That day, John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, was in Tuzla, interviewing furious and stunned refugees -- among others, Mr. Avdic, the teen-ager, and Mr. Suljic, the invalid carpenter. His reporting helped give the C.I.A. a push.
By Aug. 2, "enough information had come to us that allowed us to hone in" on the killing grounds, an intelligence official said. An analyst with the C.I.A.'s Balkans Task Force stayed up all night, looking through thousands of images, until he matched the men in the fields with the corresponding shot of freshly dug graves.
The pictures landed at the White House on Aug. 4. They were riveting. Here was evidence, Mr. Shattuck said later, of "direct acts of genocide." Madeleine K. Albright, the chief American delegate at the United Nations, successfully argued that they be made public.
That same day, Croatia's Army -- aided by the advice of retired American generals -- opened an offensive that tilted the balance of power in the Balkans. The Croats re-conquered the Krajina region of Croatian, dealing the Serbian forces their first major defeat.
On Aug. 8, as the Serbs streamed out of Croatia, Ms. Albright stood before a closed session of the Security Council and told the story of Srebrenica. She said the photos and the accounts by witnesses were "compelling evidence that the Bosnian Serbs had systematically executed people who were defenseless" -- thousands of them -- "with the direct involvement of high-level Bosnia Serb officials."
"The perpetrators of these atrocities have -- literally -- not covered their tracks," she said. "The physical evidence of what they have done -- the bodies discarded in their fields -- will bear silent witness."
In September, General Mladic confronted the West by refusing to pull his heavy weapons back from Sarajevo. This time, NATO warplanes pummeled his forces. Those attacks, and the Croatian offensive in the Krajina, persuaded the Bosnian Serbs to agree to peace talks, which open this week in Ohio.
All is calm now in Srebrenica. The grass is still green, though covered with frost in the morning. The leaves are turning red and brown. The village is now home to thousands of Serbs driven from the Krajina.
Republished for Fair Use Only
The following article is by Stephen Engelberg and Tim Weiner with further reporting from Raymond Bonner in Bosnia and Jane Perlez in Serbia.
On the afternoon of July 10, soldiers of the Bosnian Serb army began storming Srebrenica, a city of refuge created by the United Nations, where more than 40,000 people sought shelter from war. A United Nations officer in the town hunched over his computer and tapped out a desperate plea to his leaders in Geneva:
"Urgent urgent urgent. B.S.A. is entering the town of Srebrenica. Will someone stop this immediately and save these people. Thousands of them are gathering around the hospital. Please help."
Nobody did. As the Western alliance stood by, the eastern Bosnian city was overrun. What followed in the towns and fields around Srebrenica is described by Western officials and human rights groups as the worst war crime in Europe since World War II: the summary killing of perhaps 6,000 people.
As recounted by the few Muslims who survived, the killing was chillingly methodical, part mass slaughter, part blood sport.
The Muslim men were herded by the thousands into trucks, delivered to killing sites near the Drina River, lined up four by four and shot. One survivor, 17-year-old Nezad Avdic, recalled in an interview this week that as he lay wounded among the dead Muslims, a Serbian soldier surveyed the stony, moonlit field piled with bodies and merrily declared: "That was a good hunt. There were a lot of rabbits here."
Serbian civilians interviewed this week in the villages around Srebrenica confirmed for the first time the mass killings carried out in their midst.
They pointed out the schools that were used as holding pens for the doomed Muslims -- including the schoolhouse in Karakaj where young Mr. Avdic said he was taken. They reported seeing bodies all along the roads and fields outside Srebrenica. One man said he had been stopped by soldiers who asked for help loading the bodies onto trucks for burial.
A reconstruction of the fall of Srebrenica and the ensuing massacres, based on survivors' accounts, NATO and United Nations documents and interviews in Bosnia, Serbia, Washington and New York, leaves little doubt about what happened. The question of Serbian accountability promises to haunt the Bosnian peace talks that are to begin Wednesday at an Air Force base in Ohio.
The role of the outsiders who were sworn to protect the town but did not -- the United Nations, NATO and the United States -- is not so stark. But the massacre of thousands of men ostensibly under international protection is regarded by many officials as the low point of Western policy in the Balkans, a time of impotence if not acquiescence.
Before the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica, some calls for help were ignored, some rejected. Gen. Bernard Janvier, the United Nations commander for Bosnia, vetoed the air strikes that Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica requested to defend the town. United Nations officers said he had little enthusiasm for protecting an enclave widely viewed as an indefensible impediment to ending the war.
After the town was overrun, the Dutch soldiers failed to relay crucial information to the United Nations, including a threat by the Bosnian Serb commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, to massacre the Muslims.
American officials say they had no warning the town would fall and no way to save its people. After the Serbs swept in, the Americans did little more than urge Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, to restrain the Bosnian Serbs and allow relief supplies to reach Srebrenica.
An American reconnaissance satellite photographed hundreds of Muslim men held in fields at gunpoint on July 13 -- evidence of a crime in progress. But those riveting photos, and shots taken by a U-2 spy plane two weeks later of freshly turned earth in the same fields, were first shown to President Clinton's top advisers on Aug. 4, long after the victims were dead and buried.
Those advisers said that they had no options short of sending the 82d Airborne, and that seeing the satellite photos of Muslim men in fields the day they were taken would not have changed their minds.
The deaths of thousands gave life to a moribund diplomacy. The testimony of despairing refuges from the enclave caught Mr. Clinton's attention. Pushed by the United States, NATO adopted a more aggressive military stance and staged the most punishing air strikes of the war. A new American peace plan became the basis for a cease-fire and the Ohio talks.
But the mass killings may not have ended with Srebrenica. This month thousands more men and boys captured by the Serbs in and around the town of Banja Luka have disappeared. There is no word yet on their fate. The Attack NATO's Warnings Ignored by Serbs
At 3:15 A.M. on July 6, Srebrenica exploded. The Bosnian Serbs fired rockets into the United Nations compound and shelled a village to the south, sending 4,000 more people fleeing into the enclave.
For weeks the Serbs had been tightening their noose on Srebrenica. They had weakened the Dutch force, allowing troops to leave on regularly scheduled rotations, but blocking their replacements, slicing the size of the battalion from 450 to 300. They confiscated spare parts for the peacekeepers' anti-tank missiles and waylaid fuel shipments.
Col. Ton Karremans, the Dutch peacekeepers' commander, warned senior United Nations officers in May of signs that the Serbs were preparing to conquer the enclave, according to the Dutch Defense Ministry. Nothing was done in response to this message, United Nations officials said.
"We had indications in June that the Serbs might be concentrating on the enclave," an American intelligence official said. "But it was unclear what the scope of the action was."
As the Serbian assault continued on July 7, the Dutch peacekeepers asked their United Nations superiors to call in NATO warplanes against the attacking artillery and armor. The request was rejected by United Nations officers in Sarajevo. They saw the attack as mere "probing." And they did not want to undermine the peacemaking efforts of Carl Bildt, the European negotiator, who had just arrived in the region.
Over the next 48 hours, the attack stepped up. On July 8 the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, spoke on the Sarajevo radio, saying the people of Srebrenica faced "massacres and genocide" if the town fell. He said he had delivered this warning to the United States, Germany, England, France, the United Nations and NATO.
By July 9, the safe area was under attack, with shells sometimes falling every minute. The Dutch peacekeepers set up a blockade of four armored personnel carriers on the road entering Srebrenica from the south, in a desperate attempt to stop the Serbian advance.
At 10:35 P.M., Gen. Herve Gobillard, the acting United Nations commander, faxed a letter to General Mladic. "This attack against a United Nations 'safe area' is totally unacceptable," it said. "The advance must stop where it is."
The letter explicitly said an assault on the peacekeepers' blockade would be met by an attack with warplanes. It promised "grave consequences" if the Serbs ignored the warning.
The Serbs ignored it. The next morning, July 10, they drove toward the center of Srebrenica. Late that afternoon, a single tank and about 100 Serbian infantrymen approached the Dutch blockade and fell back under a hail of .50-caliber machine-gun fire.
In Zagreb, the Croatian capital, General Janvier, the United Nations commander for Bosnia, convened his top military advisers at 8 P.M. It was a tense meeting, repeatedly interrupted for updates from the Dutch troops. The general asked for advice. The response was nearly unanimous: air strikes. The United Nations' credibility was at stake. Srebrenica was a safe area. It had to be defended.
"We need F-16's swooping down now," said a Dutch officer, according to a participant at the meeting. General Janvier was unpersuaded. He announced that he would sleep on it. He left his aides "aghast," as a United Nations official put it.
General Javier, a United Nations officer said, did not believe that the Serbs would take the town. American military and intelligence officials shared that belief.
The Dutch officers in Srebrenica were even less well-informed. Lacking links to outside intelligence, they had no way of knowing how many Serbs were attacking. Worse, they mistakenly believed that General Janvier had approved overwhelming air strikes for the next morning.
At midnight, Colonel Karremans, the Dutch commander, met at the Srebrenica post office with the Mayor, the local military commander, the town's leading citizens and United Nations officers. According to a participant in this meeting, the colonel said the United Nations had delivered an ultimatum to General Mladic: Pull back by 6 A.M. or face a "massive" NATO air strike. And he told Srebrenica's leaders that "everything that moves, whether on two legs, four legs or on wheels, will be destroyed, erased from the ground," if the Serbs did not withdraw, the participant said.
As Colonel Karremans went to sleep, "he expects that there will be a massive air attack" on 30 Serb targets in the morning, said Bert Kreemers, a spokesman for the Dutch Defense Ministry.
At this crucial juncture -- which in hindsight, American, United Nations and NATO officials said, was the moment of Srebrenica's downfall -- Washington was on the sidelines. Clinton Administration officials said they did not believe that the town was in imminent danger; nor did they know that General Janvier was balking at air strikes.
That night in the Netherlands, the Dutch Defense Minister, Joris Voorhoeve, assured the American Ambassador that the situation was stabilizing. General Mladic, he said, had told General Janvier that the Serbs had no intention of taking Srebrenica. The Fall 'Serbs Have Won' In Srebrenica
"The situation this morning has been unusually, but creepily, calm and quiet," United Nations military observers in Srebrenica reported at 7:55 the next morning, July 11. "The usual hail of shells that have been greeting our mornings is surprisingly absent today. We view this as a positive change in the current circumstances, which undoubtedly have come from the NATO ultimatum, even though it has not been implemented yet."
Five minutes later, the Dutch renewed their request for air attacks on the Serbs, who had not withdrawn. None came. At 11:10, the Serbs resumed their assault on Srebrenica.
With that, General Janvier finally gave the go-ahead -- but limited the targets to tanks or artillery seen firing on United Nations troops. The air strikes finally began at 2:40 P.M., as tanks rolled toward the Dutch blockade. Four planes, two Dutch and two American, took aim at the tanks. They damaged one.
It was far too little, too late. The Bosnian Serbs brushed off the largely symbolic strike. Thousands of Serbian infantrymen joined the attack, flanking the Dutch armored vehicles and streaming into the city.
After the NATO warplanes bombed the tank, the Serbs threatened to kill 32 Dutch peacekeepers they had taken hostage after seizing the battalion's observations posts. They had used the tactic with brutal efficiency in May and June, when they terrorized NATO into halting air strikes by taking 400 other peacekeepers hostage.
It worked again. The Dutch Defense Minister, Mr. Voorhoeve, asked for a halt to the air strikes. The United Nations and NATO concurred.
"The Serbs have won," Mr. Voorhoeve announced.
By 4 P.M. the Dutch were hurriedly retreating two miles north to their base camp, at a factory in a small town called Potocari. Some 20,000 terrified people joined them.
The Serbs secured the town and disarmed the Dutch. They placed the Potocari camp and the refugees gathered there in the cross hairs of their tanks, artillery and rocket launchers.
At 6:27 P.M., United Nations headquarters in Sarajevo faxed new orders to the beleaguered Dutch battalion. The mission had changed. The Dutch commander, Colonel Karremans, and his sector commander, Col. Charlie Brantz, read that the battalion was ordered to "take all reasonable measures to protect refugees and civilians in your care."
"Not possible," Colonel Brantz scribbled in the margin. They were in General Mladic's hands now.
At nightfall, the swaggering General Mladic -- who was about to be indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague on charges of ordering savage ethnic purges in other conquered towns -- met with Colonel Karremans. He set his terms "in the most threatening way," as the colonel later described it: no more air strikes, or the refugees huddled at Potocari would be shelled and shot.
To illustrate his plans, according to eyewitnesses, the general ordered one of his men to slit the throat of a pig and declared, "This is what we're going to do the Muslims."
The colonel sent a message to his superiors at the United Nations and the Dutch Defense Ministry when the meeting broke up after midnight. His official report made no mention of the Serbian general's ghoulish threat, but he wrote, "I am not able to defend these people." The Refugees 'Don't Be Afraid,' Mladic Says
As General Mladic made his threats, 15,000 people -- mostly the men, including the local soldiers -- gathered on the outskirts of Srebrenica, not willing to trust their lives to the United Nations or to the Serbs. Safety lay a three-day trek away, through Serb-held territory. The long march began just before midnight.
The remaining refugees, as many as 25,000 jammed into the Dutch camp in Potocari, were seized with panic. Some of the women were abducted by Serbian soldiers and raped, witnesses have said. On the night of the 11th, United Nations soldiers heard screams and gunshots. Later, they found the bodies of at least nine men, shot in the back of the head.
General Mladic arrived at Potocari on the morning of Wednesday, July 12, with a convoy of 40 trucks and buses and a video crew. His soldiers ordered the refugees aboard, separating the men from the women. The peacekeepers stood by.
"No panic, please," the general said, smiling, handing a child a candy bar, in a video clip broadcast around the world. "Don't be afraid. No one will harm you."
Another tape made the same day but never shared with the world's networks showed a more chilling scene. In it, a Serb soldier shouts at the male refugees: "Come on, line up, one by one! Come on! Faster, faster! Go, go, go!"
One witness who recorded the fear of the town that day was Christina Schmidt, a German-born nurse who led the Srebrenica team from the French group Doctors Without Borders. She sent her account by radio to her organization's Belgrade office, which relayed it to the world press.
"Everybody should feel the violence in the faces of the B.S.A. soldiers directing the people like animals to the buses," she wrote in her journal for July 12, referring to the Bosnian Serb Army. "Everybody who could have stopped this mass exodus should be forced to feel the panic and desperation of the people."
"A father with his one-year-old baby is coming to me, crying, accompanied by B.S.A.," she continued. "He doesn't have anybody to take care of the baby and B.S.A. selected him for . . . ? It's a horrible scene -- I have to take the baby from his arm -- writing down his name and feeling that he will never see his child again." The Killing A Survivor, Saved by Bodies
Hurem Suljic, an invalided 55-year-old carpenter with a withered right leg, thought the Serbs would allow him on the buses taking the women, children and elderly to safety at a United Nations air base at Tuzla, 50 miles away. But when he and his wife, daughter, daughter-in-law and 7-year-old granddaughter approached the buses through a corridor of Dutch peacekeepers, he was snatched by a Serbian soldier. He was taken to a partly finished house jammed with men the Serbs had pulled out of the lines.
About 7 P.M., General Mladic appeared. "Good day, neighbors," he said cordially. The men demanded to know why they were being held. The general said he was going to trade them to the Bosnian Government for Serbian soldiers who had been captured.
The men were taken outside, led past United Nations peacekeepers and loaded onto buses again. They went to Bratunac, on the border with Serbia. There they were put into a dilapidated warehouse, about 50 feet by 25, with a dirt floor. Several more busloads of men arrived, until about 400 men were crammed in.
A Serbian soldier began shining his flashlight into their faces. "He would shine his light around, then pick on one person," and order him outside, Mr. Suljic said. "He seemed to pick the younger and stronger men."
Screaming -- "a specific sound, like the sound when you slaughter an animal" -- came from outside the warehouse, Mr. Suljic said. He said 40 men were taken out and beaten. Ten were thrown back. In the morning, five were dead.
That morning, the 13th, the prisoners heard vehicles approach. A Serbian soldier demanded 10 volunteers from the group. No one spoke up; the men were sure that they would be forced to bury the bodies of those beaten to death, Mr. Suljic said. The Serbs then picked 10 men for the task. They went outside. They did not come back.
Then the beatings and killings started again.
Later in the day, Mr. Suljic heard more vehicles arrive. Again came a demand for 10 volunteers. Again the vehicles left, and the 10 did not return.
Early in the evening, General Mladic appeared again. "We yelled at him, 'Why are you holding us here, why are you killing us?' " Mr. Suljic recalled. The Serbian military leader replied that it had taken him a while to reach an agreement on the exchange of prisoners, but that it had been arranged.
The men were taken outside and loaded onto buses. Mr. Suljic saw General Mladic giving orders to the soldiers. After dark, the buses headed headed toward Zvornik, also on the border with Serbia. Just before Karakaj, the buses turned left and stopped at a school, probably near a town called Krizevici.
The men were taken into the gymnasium. Soon another vehicle came and more men were shoved into the gym. They kept coming -- perhaps 2,500 in all, Mr. Suljic said.
About noon on the 14th, General Mladic came again. He told the men that he had not been able to work out a deal with their Government to trade them for Serbian prisoners. He left, and soldiers began taking the men out of the gymnasium in groups, blindfolding them as they were led out. Mr. Suljic was taken out at nightfall. He was the last of the 25 or 30 men to board his truck.
The truck moved slowly along a dirt road. Mr. Suljic said he had pushed up his blindfold and had seen a field filled with bodies. Around the bend, more bodies. Then the truck stopped. The men were ordered out.
They were put in rows four abreast. From behind, the Serbian soldiers began shooting. Men fell on top of Mr. Suljic, who escaped being hit. As he lay on the grassy field under the bodies, trucks kept coming, each with 25 or 30 more men. The men were taken out, lined up and shot. Mr. Suljic said he had seen it all clearly under the full moon.
General Mladic returned, stood by while a fresh truckload of men was shot, and left, Mr. Suljic said. More groups of men were brought and killed. Finally, Mr. Suljic said he heard some Serbs saying, "Everything is finished; nobody is left."
Then he saw heavy machines working. They were backhoes, digging big graves. The Hunt Refugees Killed From Ambush
The column of refugees that fled Potocari on foot stretched for mile after mile through Serbian-held land. They were hunted like game in the woods, ambushed, shelled and shot. They were captured, and their throats were slit. Uncounted numbers died in the woods and fields.
Mr. Avdic, the 17-year-old, joined the exodus from Srebrenica on July 11. After two nights of walking, he said he had surrendered along with at least 1,000 others in his group. It was near Kravica, on the road to Konjevic Polje.
The men were loaded onto trucks and taken to Bratunac. They spent the night in the truck, and the next day, the trucks went toward Zvornik, a town just across the border from Serbia. After Karakaj, the trucks stopped at a school. As the men entered the school, a Serbian soldier, holding his rifle by the barrel and swinging it like a baseball bat, hit them with the butt. Another Serbian soldier told the captives to move slowly, so the soldier with the rifle could hit everyone.
Mr. Avdic was taken to the second floor and put in the last room at the end of a hallway. It was already so full that he could barely squeeze in. During the day, the Serbs took men out of the rooms, sometimes two at a time, sometimes 5 or 10. If two men were ordered out of a room, soon after there would be two shots; if five, five shots.
"At that moment, I knew they would probably kill us," Mr. Avdic said. His account of what followed has been corroborated in detail by other survivors interviewed by human rights groups.
That night, the soldiers tossed him into a truck with 100 or more other men, drove down a dirt road, and yanked them out, five at a time. Shots. Another five, and more firing. Then it was Mr. Avdic's turn.
He emerged and saw, under the full moon, a field covered with dead bodies. The men were told to lie down. With his hands tied, Mr. Avdic found it difficult to do so. As he was falling the shooting started. He felt a terrible pain in his right arm and right side of his stomach. He had been shot.
As he lay on the killing ground, he heard the Serbs check the bodies.
"I saw a boot near my head," he said. "He stepped over me. The guy next to me was badly wounded; he was screaming. He shot him, several times. I don't know how the stones did not hit my face. I just closed my eyes. I wanted him to kill me. I thought it would be better for me to call him. But I changed my mind." The Warehouse 'Everybody Is Dead In Here'
Hakija Huseinovic, a 52-year-farmer and father of four -- a 14-year-old daughter was killed when Serbs shelled their village in 1992 -- also joined the thousands of men who fled when Srebrenica fell.
His section of the long column was ambushed the next day by the Serbs at a hill called Bulje. Scores of men were killed and wounded -- "nobody counted," Mr. Huseinovic said. Then they were ambushed near Konjevic Polje, when he believes that at least 1,000 men were killed or wounded. The Serbs called for them to surrender, and about 2,000 did, Mr. Huseinovic among them. They were marched to a big valley at Lolici, where the Serbs robbed them.
On the 13th, General Mladic came. "You know it's not pleasant to make war with Serbia," Mr. Huseinovic quoted the general as saying.
Then a Serbian commander marched the men, in a column about a third of a mile long, toward Bratunac. At Kravica, near Mr. Huseinovic's village, they were jammed into an agricultural warehouse. Then the Serbs began shooting through the windows, with automatic rifles, and firing shoulder-held grenade launchers.
They were "playing with us," he said. They would shoot for a while and then stop. When they would hear moaning, they would come back and shoot some more. One man, delirious, kept calling a friend's name. A Serbian soldier shouted an obscenity about the man's "Turkish mother" and shot him. Another man was crying for water. A Serb shouted an obscenity about Muslims, and shot him.
"Some of us yelled, 'Why don't you just kill us all?' " Mr. Huseinovic said. He saw about 20 bodies in the room; he covered himself with two of them. He heard a Serbian soldier say, "Everybody is dead in here."
The next morning, the 14th, the Serbs called into the warehouse and said that anybody who was not wounded should come out and would become part of the Bosnian Serb army. Some men did go out. They were put on trucks. The Serbs then said the wounded should come out, and they would be taken to a hospital. Some men did.
"I heard shooting," Mr. Huseinovic said. "I heard screaming. Then it was silent. They killed them all."
No one is sure precisely how many people died in the fields and woods surrounding Srebrenica. American intelligence analysts estimate the number at between 5,000 and 8,000. The Reaction Serbian Villages Know of Killings
The fact that thousands were killed is plain fact in the Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica on the west bank on the Drina River.
People interviewed in those villages this week said it was well known that Muslims were held captive in schools along the 13-mile stretch from Zvornik to Sepak were before they were killed.
Bratislav Grubacic, editor in chief of the VIP Daily News Report in Belgrade, said he was in Bratunac and Potocari in mid-July. "It is common knowledge in eastern Bosnia about what happened," he said Friday. His reporters said there were as many as 10 mass graves in the area, each containing several hundred bodies. He said the public reaction to the killings was "shock, fear and shame."
Those feelings are not universal. A priest near Sepak confirmed that the schools had been used to imprison the Muslims and that the prisoners had been shot. He expressed no remorse at the killings, but regretted the style in which they were conducted.
"I would kill a Turk, but I wouldn't torture them," the priest said. The Americans Washington Slow To Understand
The understanding that something unspeakable was happening dawned slowly in Washington.
Officials at the highest levels of the Clinton Administration said they had not foreseen the fall of Srebrenica. At the State Department, the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, the consensus was the Bosnian Serbs did not want to conquer the town. Nor were there signs that the Serbs would commit mass slaughter. In hindsight, the officials say, their best information came from human rights groups, the United Nations and the press, not from spies, satellites or eavesdropping.
American officials worried mainly about the Srebrenica refugees' lack of food and provisions. On July 12, the senior American diplomat in Belgrade asked President Milosevic to use his influence with the Bosnian Serbs to avert a "humanitarian disaster." That day, he also pressed Mr. Milosevic to help international observers gain access to the men who had been rounded up.
After the fall of Srebrenica, senior officials said they turned their attention toward creating a new policy -- using air power to protect the remaining safe havens, particularly Gorazde.
On July 13, as the press reported refugees' accounts of mass killings, an American spy satellite passing over Bosnia recorded pictures of two fields in which hundreds of prisoners were guarded by gunmen. One of these was the stony field of the "rabbit hunt," where the 17-year-old Mr. Avdic was shot.
But no one saw that picture for three weeks.
Techno-thriller readers think spy satellites make the C.I.A. all-seeing and all-knowing. In fact, American intelligence collects far more data than it can analyze. One former National Security Agency director said gleaning hard facts from the avalanche of information was like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose.
An intelligence official familiar with the Bosnia photos said that "if you saw an overhead photograph of all New York City, and there was a bank robbery going on somewhere, and nobody reported it," detectives would have a hard time finding the scene of the crime. Throughout July, he said, the C.I.A. lacked "information regarding specific places and atrocities."
The Western allies gathered in London on July 21 and adopted a much tougher stance toward the Bosnian Serbs. After balking at punishing air strikes for three years, the Europeans finally agreed: Further Serbian attacks on the safe havens would be met with exactly the sort of withering response that Colonel Karremans, the Dutch commander in Srebrenica, had asked for, but never received.
On July 27, two weeks after the first published accounts of mass killings from survivors of the fall of Srebrenica, a U-2 spy plane passed over the sites of the slaughter and recorded images of newly turned earth. That film was shipped to Washington on a regular military flight on July 30.
That day, John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, was in Tuzla, interviewing furious and stunned refugees -- among others, Mr. Avdic, the teen-ager, and Mr. Suljic, the invalid carpenter. His reporting helped give the C.I.A. a push.
By Aug. 2, "enough information had come to us that allowed us to hone in" on the killing grounds, an intelligence official said. An analyst with the C.I.A.'s Balkans Task Force stayed up all night, looking through thousands of images, until he matched the men in the fields with the corresponding shot of freshly dug graves.
The pictures landed at the White House on Aug. 4. They were riveting. Here was evidence, Mr. Shattuck said later, of "direct acts of genocide." Madeleine K. Albright, the chief American delegate at the United Nations, successfully argued that they be made public.
That same day, Croatia's Army -- aided by the advice of retired American generals -- opened an offensive that tilted the balance of power in the Balkans. The Croats re-conquered the Krajina region of Croatian, dealing the Serbian forces their first major defeat.
On Aug. 8, as the Serbs streamed out of Croatia, Ms. Albright stood before a closed session of the Security Council and told the story of Srebrenica. She said the photos and the accounts by witnesses were "compelling evidence that the Bosnian Serbs had systematically executed people who were defenseless" -- thousands of them -- "with the direct involvement of high-level Bosnia Serb officials."
"The perpetrators of these atrocities have -- literally -- not covered their tracks," she said. "The physical evidence of what they have done -- the bodies discarded in their fields -- will bear silent witness."
In September, General Mladic confronted the West by refusing to pull his heavy weapons back from Sarajevo. This time, NATO warplanes pummeled his forces. Those attacks, and the Croatian offensive in the Krajina, persuaded the Bosnian Serbs to agree to peace talks, which open this week in Ohio.
All is calm now in Srebrenica. The grass is still green, though covered with frost in the morning. The leaves are turning red and brown. The village is now home to thousands of Serbs driven from the Krajina.
For more current reporting, visit Srebrenica Genocide Blog.
