Srebrenica Video Vindicates Long Pursuit by Serb Activist
This government refuses to break with Milosevic’s criminal state.
- Natasa Kandic
Natasa Kandic is a persistent sort. A Serb and a human rights activist (and yes, this makes her a pronounced minority among Serbs), Kandic has spent most of the past 15 years investigating atrocities committed in the wars following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The recent release of the Srebrenica video is a vindication of Kandic’ persistence in the face of substantial risks she faced from her own people.
What is truly impressive about Kandic’ work is that she has travelled throughout Serbia without bodyguards. In a country where the criminal element is a virtual shadow government, Kandic’ willingness to risk her own safety in pursuit of justice is not a prescription for a long lifespan. If there is anyone out there deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize, Kandic would have to be at the top of the list.
A sociologist and the founder of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Kandic is proof that not all Serbs are murderous nationalists willing to countenance all manner of oppression that can be justified as the protection of the Serb nation. In a small state with a tightly-controlled media, it can be difficult to get a sense that Serbs are anything but paranoid, self-absorbed nationalists who feel that the ends justify the means as long as it benefits Serbs. Though there is that element, there are also a large numbers of Serbs ashamed of what has been done in their name of the past 15 years. They’ve just learned to keep quiet and keep their heads down, if for no other reason than it’s safer that way.
BELGRADE — Human rights sleuth Natasa Kandic, a wisp of a woman with a boyish haircut, spent hours in the cafes of Sid, a town in northern Serbia, listening to whispered tales of Balkan war killings. Then one day, she heard about the videotape.
It showed the summary executions in 1995 of six Muslim men and boys from the Bosnian city of Srebrenica. It had been passed around as a war souvenir among members of a shadowy Serb military unit called the Scorpions. Its commander had ordered copies destroyed, but one, she was told, still existed, held by a dissident member of the unit.
Since that day in 2003, she searched until she found the video. She gave it to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is on trial, and to television stations in Serbia, where it triggered a sudden self-examination in a society that viewed itself as the prime victim of the Balkan war atrocities of the 1990s.
On the tape, burly Serbs dressed in camouflage, with cigarettes dangling from their lips, order bound prisoners into a small meadow, then shoot four of them in the back, at a time. The remaining two are ordered to carry the corpses into a wrecked white house. “You’re the winners,” one Scorpion barks at the body bearers, who are then also gunned down.
This incident was hardly out of the ordinary. The fact that it was captured on tape has provided documented evidence of what so many of us knew to be the truth for so long. The airing of the Srebrenica videotape earlier this month has forced ordinary Serbs to come to grips with the brutality that was being committed in their name. The tape was hardly news, of course. Most every Serb either knew someone or had heard of people who went into Bosnia on weekend to hunt Muslims. Nonetheless, the power of denial on a national level is truly formidable. The airing of the Srebrenica tape puts the lies to the government-inspired delusion that the war in Bosnia was an anti-Serb conspiracy by the West.
Kandic should be rewarded for having the courage to pursue the truth for 15 years. In large part due to her persistence and fearlessness, ordinary Serbs are being forced to confront the ugliness and murderous brutality of their recent past.
How will we know when things have truly begun to change in Serbia? Well, if the government can find it within itself to turn over war criminals, beginning with Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, perhaps then we can begin to believe there is hope. Until then, it appears that Natasa Kandic still has much work ahead of her.
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