The vacant house was a godsend to 31-year-old Branko Kapul when he saw it in January.
It was a brick structure with two floors and a shed in the back. On every side there was land, lots of it, for corn and potatoes once the planting season began.
For Kapul, a Bosnian Serb soldier recovering from wounds suffered in fighting around Sarajevo, the farm promised a dramatically better future.
But when the snow began to thaw in Orahovac, a horrific sight was revealed outside his window–human bones protruding from the earth. Then men in blue uniforms arrived in United Nations trucks. They sifted through his dirt with gloved hands and marked off his newly claimed farm with yellow crime-scene tape. Piles of blindfolds were found in the nearby woods.
Far from being a new start for Kapul and his family, the farm proved to be a place of infamy and ghosts. Now known as the Sahanici gravesite, it is believed to hold the bodies of thousands of Muslims executed after they fled Srebrenica, the UN-declared “safe area,” last July.
It was a cruel twist to a wretched life. Kapul, who said he had obtained permission from Bosnian Serb authorities to inhabit the farmhouse formerly occupied by Bosnian Muslims, had brought his family to Orahovac after fleeing Ilijas, the Bosnian Serb suburb outside Sarajevo just before it was turned over to the Croat-Muslim federation under the Dayton peace accord.
“I don’t mind them here, because the investigators have all been nice and the reporters have brought the kids sweets,” said Kapul, standing beside his wife and three small children.
“But they’ve had these helicopters flying low over my property recently, and it scares the children. We just want to fix the place up and make it nice. And it’s hard to do with all this going on.”
Kapul’s farm has become the key to an international war crimes investigation emanating from The Hague. A substantial number of the estimated 8,000 missing Muslims are thought to be buried there after being executed by Bosnian Serbs who had overrun Srebrenica, 36 miles from Kapul’s farm. Three survivors of the executions have placed Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic at the scene of the massacre.
It’s difficult for most Serbs to muster the thought that their military leaders could be involved in such a bloodbath. But with so much evidence at hand, they aren’t so skeptical that the massacres occurred.
Kapul conceded the possibility that a massacre had occurred, but “of course . . . I can’t imagine it.” He added that the 8,000 figure seemed too large.
“Whenever we captured soldiers, we treated them correctly and we even took two to the hospital once,” he said. “And when Mladic visited our forces in Ilijas, he always said we should defend our homes and shoot if we were attacked. He never said that we should kill everyone or slaughter them–just to kill if you have to kill.”
Most residents who have lived around Orahovac during the war are more close-lipped. They become tense when asked what they might have heard in the nights after Srebrenica’s fall. Most said they were out of town.
“I was in Serbia with my children,” said Koviljka Ivanovic, 31, a neighbor of Kapul.
“I was visiting my sister in Belgrade, and only my husband was here,” added her mother, 58-year-old Ivanka. “But he’s sick . . . and deaf. So he couldn’t hear anything. And he’s in bed all the time, too.”
Whether there are bones in Kapul’s land or not, he has few other options for a home.
Bosnian Serb territory is flooded with refugees from the formerly Serb-held land around Sarajevo. While his new house still may not be complete–he installed doors, windows, electricity and running water–it is a better foundation for a life than many other Serbs have found.
Thousands are living in collective centers outside Sarajevo. Others are rebuilding apartments and homes from scratch, since Bosnian Serb forces had destroyed most of the Muslim homes around Srebrenica in 1992.
Most residents of Orahovac say the soldiers came from outside and expelled their Muslim neighbors but they had no part in the brutality.
Kapul’s wife, Petra, 35, said she misses her Muslim neighbors. The war was something out of their control, like the graves outside their new house. Kapul added that the Muslims “aren’t any worse than any other people, and there are good ones like anywhere else.”
Kapul said he worries that the Muslim owner of his home might someday turn up and cause trouble, and he has no money to move should it come to that.
“I would prefer to stay here so that we are not homeless,” he said. “Then next year we can level out that field and start planting. Hopefully things will get better. They can’t get much worse.”
