For two years, I’ve been sitting in a courtroom in The Hague, listening to testimony about destroyed homes and ruined lives in the former Yugoslavia.
At the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, where one-time hospital directors go on trial for genocide, I heard how women and children were set on fire and how men were tortured and starved in prison camps.
To see for myself how the people of Bosnia feel about the court proceedings, I recently went to Ahmici, a village in the lush Lasva Valley. This used to be home to generations of Muslims and Croats, but that all changed on the morning of April 16, 1993.
Prosecutors in The Hague say that on that day, Croats attacked their Muslim neighbors, forcing every one out of the village and killing over 100. Prosecutors say every Muslim home was destroyed. And they say six Bosnian Croats from this village–who are now on trial–are responsible.
The first thing I notice when entering Ahmici is the toppled Minaret of a village mosque. The only standing houses belong to Croats; the rest, all Muslim-owned, have been reduced to rubble.
Junuz Berbic camps outside his former house. He’s in his early 60s, but like almost everybody here, he looks about 10 years older than he really is. The former economist belongs to one of 50 Muslim families who have been returning to Ahmici since May to rebuild their homes.
“We have to come back,” he tells me. “I was given an apartment in another town. But I prefer to live here, even like this. This is my home.”
Berbic’s house is on the top of the hill town, so he didn’t witness the shootings and burnings that began at the bottom. “At the time, I had no idea that Croats were slaughtering people down there,” he explains.
But one of his neighbors, who doesn’t want to be identified, did know. Today he’s dressed in work gear, but the next time I will see him, he’ll be wearing a suit and be inaccessible to me, testifying on the other side of the glass partition against his former neighbors in The Hague.
For now, he’s living in his former garage with his wife and 4-year-old son. Carpet-covered wood planks make do as seats. His wife, even in these makeshift surroundings, serves us Turkish coffee in porcelain cups and cookies on a flowered tray.
He says that just a few feet away, in another space like this, 100 of his Muslim neighbors took shelter for about 12 hours from a Croat attack before fleeing to a neighboring town. He was awakened on the morning of April 16 by shooting, grabbed his gun and started shooting back.
“They were about 30 meters from my home,” he says. “It was complete panic in here. We saw them (the attackers) in uniforms, but they had black paint on their faces, so I couldn’t recognize them.”
He may not be able to point his finger at specific men, but tribunal prosecutors have. They say Vlatko Kupreskic is one of six men who helped plan the attack. Kupreskic’s house is only a little way down the hill, but the contrast is striking. It’s a two-story structure, completely intact, with every modern convenience. While Kupreskic stands trial in The Hague, his wife, Ljubica, takes care of the house and runs the family’s convenience store.
Reluctant to talk about that day in April 1993, she concedes she’s sorry “such horrible things” happened but insists that her husband had nothing to do with them.
She says he was with her and their two children before the attack and not on their porch shooting at fleeing Muslims as prosecutors charge.
She says her husband was a successful businessman and maybe it’s his success that made their Muslim neighbors falsely accuse him.
Her Croat neighbors next door, Mirko Santic and his family, talk about how Muslims attacked them and how no one wants to hear their story. “I think The Hague investigators charged Croats for war crimes just because of Muslim propaganda,” says Santic’s mother. “Neighbors find neighbors guilty.”
I go to visit Sakib Ahmic in the nearby city of Zenica, where many of Ahmici’s former residents now live. Like so many people I’ve met in Bosnia, Ahmic is living in someone else’s house.
Standing in his doorway, the television audible from inside, he doesn’t want talk about the killings. I know some of the details from tribunal indictments: He watched as his entire family was killed–his son and daughter-in-law and their two young children, one 4, one 3 months old. Ahmic managed to escape the house but was severely burned.
“I think about it every day when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep,” he tells me. “I don’t want to awake my memories now.”
But Ahmic is scheduled to take the witness stand Tuesday at the tribunal. He almost seems indifferent to the legal process, unsure if its worth: “It’s not good or bad,” he says. “People must answer for what they did. But even a guilty verdict won’t ease my suffering. My family will not come back.”
Yet Ahmic wants to go back to Ahmici. “It’s my land, my family’s land, my home” he says, echoing most other Muslims with whom I spoke.
Back in Ahmici, Berbic says returning Muslims expect justice from the tribunal, even though no punishment could ever fit the crimes. He is not convinced the court process will get Croats and Muslims living together again in Ahmici, where the day before the attack, Kupreskic had invited him for coffee.
“If they sentence (Kupreskic) to 5 years like they did with Erdemovic, then there’s no justice. It’s ordinary farce,” he says, referring to the 5-year sentence given earlier this year to Bosnian Croat Drazen Erdemovic, who admitted killing up to 100 Muslims after the fall of the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica.
Atif Ahmic, who lives across the street and lost his parents in the April 16 attack, speaks of “temporary provocations” that still occur.
“The Croats don’t like that we’re coming back because they have to face their crimes again,” he says. “We don’t want another war with them. But if they want a war, they will disappear forever from Ahmici.”
In the meantime, Ahmici’s children come down daily to take the bricks from the pile of rubble that used to be their school. “We need old bricks to build our house,” 12-year-old Selvedin Ahmic tells me. “We’d like to build a veranda out front.”
The kids of Ahmici are great soccer fans, says young Selvedin. I ask him if he had wanted the Croatian soccer team, which placed third in this year’s World Cup, to lose.
“Oh, no,” Selvedin says. “They were good. Those players didn’t burn down our houses and kill our grandfathers and relatives and friends. I’m only angry at the Croats here.”
Selvedin says that he’s happy there’s a tribunal and that he hopes the Croats from Ahmici are sentenced. “If they punish them,” he says, “they will never do the same thing again.”
It’s a view shared by many older Muslims as well. They all agree that jailing the men they hold responsible for Ahmici’s crimes is crucial for any kind of reconciliation.
The other thing everyone here–even the Croats–agree on is that nothing will ever be the same in this village.
“I will never drink a cup of coffee in their homes,” says Berbic of his former neighbors. “They will never eat bread or cookies in mine. We’ll have no choice but to say hello, but we’ll never be neighbors. We will be strangers.”
