By Patrick McCarthy
The long-awaited final verdict in the genocide trial of Bosnian Serb military leader General Ratko Mladic was announced last week. The guilty verdict rendered by the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague has special resonance in St. Louis. Our city is home to the world’s largest community of Bosnians who sought refuge from Mladic’s war crimes of the 1990s.
Hatida Salihovic already knew the verdict in her own life. A former resident of Srebrenica — the Bosnian town that witnessed the worst atrocities in Europe since the end of World War II — Salihovic now lives in south St. Louis County, among a community of former Bosnian refugees in the St. Louis area estimated at more than 50,000.
Salihovic was six months pregnant when Mladic appeared at the United Nations base near Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. He reassured the terrified population there that no one would be harmed. All who wanted to leave would be evacuated on buses. Mladic handed out candy to children to add to the deception of his false promises.
The United Nations-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica was nominally under the protection of Dutch United Nations troops. After his assurance of safety, forces under Mladic’s personal command proceeded to slaughter the male population of Srebrenica — including Salihovic’s husband and brother among 8,372 men and boys who perished in the genocide at Srebrenica.
“When I was leaving, there was a woman who had a 12-year-old son, and as he got on the bus, the Serbs took the boy,” Salihovic recalled. “The woman was screaming, ‘Let him go! Let him go! I don’t have anyone else left.’”
Despite her insistent pleas, a Serb soldier kicked the woman, and she hit the side of the bus, Salihovic recalled. The woman’s son was taken away.
Twenty-six years later, Salihovic still has nightmares about what happened in Srebrenica. Her daughter, Dzenana, born a month after the fall of the UN safe area, never saw her father. Their story, and others like it, could be repeated in living rooms throughout St. Louis.
For 3½ years, Mladic’s troops rampaged across Bosnia-Herzegovina. International media broadcast the world’s first televised genocide and CNN reported live on the siege of Sarajevo. Less noticed were the towns and cities along the Drina River, like Srebrenica, as they were ethnically cleansed. Likewise, in the city of Prijedor, on the other side of the country, Bosnian Muslims and Catholics were herded into concentration camps and murdered. Survivors from all of these places came to St. Louis.
In St. Louis, Bosnians have done well. They started their lives over at the bottom. They worked hard, opened businesses, bought homes, and sent their kids to college. In many ways, they embody the American Dream. But they also carry the heavy burden of history, with huge personal losses and traumatic wartime memories.
Long-delayed justice has finally been rendered in the case of Mladic, and he has exhausted his appeals. In homes across St. Louis, Bosnians heard the verdict and no doubt remembered the moments in their lives when outside help mattered most. The world, with its powerful institutions and armies, turned away. That ultimately will be the verdict of history on the Bosnian war, and on all of us. It is a lesson St. Louis should never forget.
Patrick McCarthy is the author of “After the Fall: Srebrenica Survivors in St. Louis.” He is associate dean of libraries at St. Louis University.
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