Then the lights went out

It all began on 11 July 1995. 12 years have passed since then. The massacre of Srebrenica (Bosnia-Herzegovina) is considered one of the bloodiest mass exterminations to have happened in Europe since the Second World War. A genocide and war crime, consisting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnians by the Bosnian Serb troops led by General Ratko Mladi? in the protected zone of Srebrenica which was then under the protection of the UN. According to official sources, there were some 7,800 victims of the massacre, though some associations for the victims and their families say there were over 10,000. The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established by the UN, has, in the light of the events in Srebrenica, accused General Mladi? and other Serb officers of various war crimes including genocide, persecution and deportation. Most of those held mainly responsible for the massacre are still at large. A video purportedly showing the “evidence of the facts” was found in the possession of Natasha Kandic, an inhabitant of the town; it has been shown by the media and used as proof in the trial against Milosevic. We publish a text written for the anniversary of the massacre by Elvira Mujcic who lost her father at Srebrenica. It is published and distributed by “Infinito edizioni”. I glance through the letters of the Red Cross. I don’t always read them. There are days when I feel able to do so and days when the idea becomes insupportable. The most horrible thing are the letters that are sent back, undelivered, those written by our mother in the period from June 1995 onwards. Father never received them. Our words, our thoughts, our questions never reached him. They were returned to us, as if they had rebounded from a wall of death. On the packet of letters ‘returned to sender’ is written: “We apologise, but we were unable to deliver the letters, the person you seek is momentarily missing. If you receive news of him, please advise us”. After 11 July 1995, our mother continued to tune into the amateur radio frequency and to broadcast messages into the void, amid the indifference of the radio transmitter, on which the voice of my father and my uncle were never to be heard again. Another year will shortly be added to the years that have elapsed since then; once again someone will recall the anniversary of the massacre. The “observers” always remember the day of the anniversary but nothing more: the day on which our dead may be a news story. Throughout the rest of the year they are forgotten; only we remember them. For me the 11 July sometimes falls in the midst of autumn, when something of my life abroad takes me back and causes me suffering. Sometimes it falls in the midst of winter, when the words in my father’s letters are materialized in the icy air and it still seems to me impossible that he’s no longer with us. His words of hope in the approaching end of the war, his plans for the future, his dream of being able to eat once again the cakes baked by our mother, everything becomes so vivid in those pieces of paper that his death becomes even more unacceptable. The 11 July is the day of collective grief, the day on which the images transmitted by some television news bulletins show so many people burying the bones found in the course of the year. The individual grief is that of all the other days of the year, once the television cameras have been switched off. The 11 July is the day of promises, excuses and accusations. It’s the day when revisionism is silenced by the coffins borne in procession, the coffins in which a few fragments of bone perhaps repose. It’s the day when the whole world expresses its indignation for what happened, but if by chance some sentence is issued in March, no one cares, because 11 July is far away. And if some war criminal is still a free man and a venerated member of the community, only on 11 July will someone dare to promise that he will soon be arrested. Then the spotlight is turned off and the violence is returned to oblivion; injustice becomes tolerable once again and other sensational deaths fills the pages of the papers instead, until they too become boring, but there’s no shortage of deaths to take their place in turn. And so, after Argentina came Rwanda in 1994, and then Srebrenica in 1995; and after Srebrenica other wars, other massacres, other atrocities, other indifference, other oblivion. And so on ad infinitum , while the children of those victims continue having to live in a world of injustice. And perhaps, now that 11 July is approaching, we would need to remind someone of the date, we would need for the umpteenth time to ask for justice, and wait, wait to find the bones, wait to bury the dead, wait to see our broken lives recognized and, at least in part, compensated. And who knows if, in a year’s time, on 11 July 2008, I will once again find myself thinking the same thoughts, and wondering why justice is nothing more than an unrealisable utopia.