..
But it is not difficult to find. A field of white
Marble obelisks, one top one tail, in lines.
Some 5000 names, dates of birth
All different. Just the date of death the same.
July 1995
..
Some 400 fresh white stones stand out
This years mass grave unearthed, remains now named.
And some 3000 mothers, daughters,
Sons and wives still wait. There is some empty
Field for them.
..
The young Dutch soldier sleeps uneasily still
He remembers the pledge of a safe haven
Our United Nations gave. He remembers
The thousands who descended from villages around
The chaos of finding space and food amid fear
And under siege.
..
He remembers the day the Serbs arrived
In Russian tanks to his check post,
Seven men, one gun, no instructions.
Taken prisoner, he watched from his prison window,
The men of Srebrenica, segregated,
Loaded into busses, driven off.
He remembers seeing from his prison window
The trucks returning, human legs and arms
Dangling. He knew.
..
The blue UN building is fenced off, empty still
The compound, an old industry that once
Manufactured, now disintegrates
A complex of pipes and pistons, valves and tanks
Now ooze their padding from rusting joints,
Now drips water, feeds weeds and
Hazel saplings flourish.
..
The warehouse where thousands then had lived,
Is an empty monument. A single shovel
leans against a wall, as if just resting
Waiting for the next. A lectern stands
Ready for the human form and notes
Least we forget.
..
Inside another dark and empty space
Dwarfed on an industrial wall are photographs,
A picture board, colours fading: unearthing
A mass grave. Boots outline the form.
A dozen random lives described,
With objects of their every day
A watch, a childs’ school book, a knife
The young and fit, it seems, had fled
Up to the woods where ambush lay.
Life culled.
..
The tree clad hills, that look so stunning
In their autumn clocks of bronze and gold
Are now proposed as tourist trails.
And bird watching is on the list
Of things to do in Srebronica.
Perhaps one day, not now, when homes
Still bullet pock marked line the streets.
When more woman in the streets than men,
With looks that never meet your eye,
Of ghosts of lives that would have lived
Prevail.
…
July 1995.
8,000 people, mostly men, massacred
….
Slobodan Milošević President of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. Milošević was arrested by Yugoslav federal authorities on 31 March 2001 and extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to stand trial for charges of war crimes instead. Milošević conducted his own defense in the five-year long trial, which ended without a verdict when he died in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006.
Radovan Karadžić is a former Bosnian Serb politician. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, Karadžić, as President of the Republika Srpska, sought the direct unification of that entity with Serbia. He is detained in the United Nations Detention Unit accused of war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats during the Siege of Sarajevo, as well as ordering the Srebrenica massacre.
Ratko Mladić is a Bosnian Serb former military leader accused of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. On 31 May 2011, Mladić was extradited to The Hague, ICTY His trial formally began in the Hague on 16 May 2012. As the top military general with command responsibility, Mladić was accused by the ICTY of being responsible for the Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre—the largest mass murder in Europe since the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Kalikellett 