A cycle of retaliation

BY MATTHEW MCALLESTER | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

March 13, 2006

HRANCA-REPOVAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Mladen Blagojevic's father walked through his muddy garden with a hammer in his left hand and a cigarette drooping from his lips. He wore an old military jacket, heavy black boots and a black woolen hat to keep Bosnia's piercing winter cold off his head.

He had visited his son in Phoenix for three months about five years ago, he said. So how did he find America and the desert?

"It's OK," he said. "It's nice. It was good."

Just about the only other things Radisav Blagojevic would talk about were his goats, apricots, cherries, plums and apples. As he stood beside the small white house where his son Mladen, now an electrician in Phoenix, grew up, he had only one answer to every other question: the Serbian word for "nothing."

What had his son done in the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was asked. "Nothing."

What did he think of his son's legal difficulties? "Nothing."

What happened in Bratunac during the war? "Nothing."

Bratunac and its surrounding villages, including Hranca-Repovac, are places of secrets, silence and ghosts.

Most Serbs here, when asked, say they know nothing of what happened here during the war - a claim that makes Bosnian Muslims and war crimes investigators scoff.

The few Muslims who have returned live among Serbs who forced them from their homes and killed their relatives. Tormentors and victims even work in the rundown town hall, resentment and suspicion barely constrained. Muslim returnees stick to themselves. Some stare each other down when they pass on the street. Others avoid eye contact.

There are few places in Bosnia that saw such violence and brutality during the war, culminating in Bratunac's becoming the base of operations for Serb commanders during the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995.

The minority Serbs of Bratunac felt they had scores to settle. As the war started, they forced their Muslim neighbors out at gunpoint, making many flee to nearby Srebrenica. There were killings and disappearances. There was torture and rape. And there followed three years during which the Bosnian Serb Army encircled Srebrenica, allowing almost no supplies through to tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, some of whom suffered malnutrition and many of whom were later massacred. Those days of violence cemented an especially visceral hatred between the Serbs of the ethnically cleansed Bratunac and the Muslims of Srebrenica, which sits several miles to the south.

Muslim soldiers strike back

Between 1992 and 1995 - the year the Srebrenica massacre took place - the Muslim soldiers based in Srebrenica retaliated by launching brutal waves of attacks on Bratunac and especially its surrounding villages, killing civilians as well as Serb soldiers.

The Bosnian commander in the area, Naser Oric, is on trial at the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague, facing charges that include murder, cruel treatment and the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, not justified by military necessity" in the Srebrenica region. His indictment reads that between May 1992 and February 1993 his forces "burnt and otherwise destroyed a minimum of 50 predominantly Serb villages and hamlets ... thousands of Serb individuals fled."

Avenging those attacks became a compulsion with many of Bratunac's Serbs, war crimes investigators say.

"You'd be very hard-pressed to talk to people in Bratunac who did not have immediate family members killed" during the 1992 to 1995 period, one investigator said.

Mladen Blagojevic, then a member of the Bratunac Brigade's Military Police platoon, lost people he loved in the years before he took part in the operation to seize Srebrenica.

"In my city, about 2,000 die," he said in an interview at his house in a northern neighborhood of Phoenix in November. "By Muslims. Some soldiers but mostly friends, family, neighbors. By Muslims. Two of my best friends were killed. A lot of people. Every day some die. The Muslims come from Srebrenica and attack on Serbs."

Srebrenica war crimes investigators say the 2,000 figure is probably too high but there is barely a family in the Bratunac area that did not suffer a loss.