David ROHDE

The Fall of Srebrenica
part II

     In Washington, domestic politics increased the pressure on President Clinton. A measure supported by Senate Majority Leader and presidential candidate Bob Dole that would lift the arms embargo passed the Senate by a 69-29 vote. The measure had already been overwhelmingly passed by the House. The Senate vote was a direct repudiation of the White House'' Bosnia policy. Clinton promised to veto it, but Dole, for now, appeared to have the votes for a humiliating override. With the summer recess ahead, it would be early September before an override vote could take place. With Clinton'' approval, frantic, efforts to launch the new diplomatic initiative envisioned in Lake's endgame strategy began.

     On July 27, Zepa commander Avdo Palic met with General Mladic and two UN officials to negotiate the surrender and withdrawal of his approximately 3,000 men. Palic, though despised by the Serbs, had volunteered to come to the talks with no security guarantees. Following the meeting, the Muslim commander was led away by two of Mladic's bodyguards as UN officials stood nearby. The next morning, when the UN officials asked Mladic where Palic was, the general replied, "I shot him".

     When the UN negotiators returned to the area on July 29, most of the Bosnian Serb military units they had seen in the town were gone, even though Zepa's 3,000 men had not surrendered. Usually confident, Mladic seemed to be off balance.

     The Bosnian Serb general had been outmaneuvered. Thou-sands of Serb troops from across the country carried out the Srebrenica manhunt and Zepa attack, leaving Serb lines on the opposite side of Bosnia - the western front - desperately weak. More importantly, the powerful Croatian Army had carried out a lightning maneuver while Mladic laid siege to Zepa.

     In a classic flank attack that left Knin - the self-declared capital of Serb nationalists in Croatia - nearly surrounded, Croatian forces crossed into Bosnia and surged toward the Bihac enclave. By July 29, Glamoc and Bosansko Grahovo, strategic and traditionally Serb towns, had fallen and 10,000 Serb civilians fled toward Banja Luka, the largest Serb-held city in Bosnia. Over fifty square miles of Serb territory had been taken.

     Croat forces were now to the east, south and west of Knin, only twenty miles away from Bihac, and could attack the portion of Croatia still in Serb hands from three directions. Western analysts noted that the Croat attack followed classic NATO strategy, not the Warsaw Pact strategy used by officers in the former Yugoslav National Army. The Croats were learning from the retired American generals advising them.

     Two days later, the Serbs suffered a blow they would feel weeks later. On August 1, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck, on a mission prompted by Ambassador Galbraith's cable, finished two days of interviews with survivors from Srebrenica and Zepa. Shattuck spoke with Hurem Suljic, Smail Hodzic and the teenage boy from the mass execution at the Red Mud Dam.

     When Shattuck returned to Washington, the State Department again asked the CIA to begin scanning aerial photos of the Srebrenica area. The U.S. ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, and the U.S. ambassador in Sarajevo, John Menzies, had turned over tips from Bosnian authorities of rumored mass executions in the Bratunac soccer stadium two weeks earlier, on July 13. But the CIA said they had no photographs that corroborated the claims. On July 17 the CIA's Bosnia Task Force wrote in its classified daily report that numerous refugee accounts "provide details that appear credible" but added that "we lack authoritative, detailed information to substantiate this information". Armed with the accounts Shattuck heard, an analyst began a new search on August 2. The focus was on two towns - Nova Kasaba and Karakaj.

     Over the next two days, the evacuation of Zepa's women, children and old men was completed, but Zepa's 3,000 men were trapped. Roughly 800 men opted to cross the Drina River and surrender in neighboring Serbia. The remaining 2,000 began a perilous fifty-mile journey to Muslim-held central Bosnia.

     Among them were several dozen men from Srebrenica who had given up when they reached the Serb-filled asphalt road near Nova Kasaba. They returned to Srebrenica for food and then went on to Zepa, hoping that safe area would be defended. One of them was Hakija Husejnovic, the survivor from the warehouse. He decided that crossing the road in Nova Kasaba was too dangerous. His fellow survivor, Ramiz, pushed on. Husejnovic returned to Srebrenica, and then traveled the familiar route to Zepa. He belived that the UN would defend the safe area, but was cruelly disappointed once more. He didn't know it, but Ramiz - the only other warehouse survivor - had died in an ambush on the other sied of the asphalt road. Husejnovic was the only witness left.

     On August 3, war spread to Croatia. The long-awaited Croatian Army offensive was launched. In a stunning rout, the Croats regained in only four days nearly all of the 400 square miles of territory Serb nationalists had seized in 1991 and 1992. Storming areas from which Croats had been brutally expelled in 1992, they exacted vengeance, burning houses and killing Serb civilians.

     The Serb stronghold of Knin fell on August 5, and on August 6, after three years of siege, the Muslim enclave of Bihac was liberated. Serbs put up little resistance. In the largest single refugee crisis of the war, 120,000 Serbs from Croatia retreated into neighboring Bosnia. The retrained and rearmed Croatian Army had made Serb nationalist forces in Bosnia and Croatia look like paper tigers. Serbian President Milosevic, who had urged Serbs in Croatia to rise up and declare their own state in 1991, now did nothing to aid them. With his economy ruined by UN economic sanctions, Milosevic was focused on cooperating with the West, ending the war, getting UN economic sanctions lifted and shoring up his own power base in Serbia.

     European and UN officials harshly criticized the offensive, claiming a diplomatic solution was possible, but U.S. criticism of Croatia was muted. The fall of the Croatian Serbs helped create a balance of power in the region, and Bihac's endgame concept of a peace settlement based on simpler borders and no enclaves was moving forward.

     On August 8, UN Special Representative Yasushi Akashi and Force Commander Janvier met with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. The meeting focused on the UN's role in the one remaining piece of Croatia held by Serb nationalists - eastern Slavonia - an oil-rich strip of territory which bordered Milosevic's Serbia. They feared a final Croat offensive to retake the area.

     Near the end of the meeting. Akashi brought up Mladic's promise from the July 15 meeting, which he then gave in writing on July 17, to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross access to prisoners from Srebrenica. "The agreement was not implemented", Akashi said. "There are many questions regarding the missing. Mladic should give access to them".

     "He must stick to his promises", replied the Serbian Presi-dent, whose extensive state security apparatus was probably well aware that the prisoners were already dead. "I'll do everything I can to make him respect his promises".

     Milosevic then asked the UN to help provide supplies for the 800 Muslim men from Zepa who had crossed the Drina River and entered Serbia. They were being well treated, he assured Akashi and Janvier. In truth, the imprisoned Muslims were being beaten and were rarely fed.

     After the meeting, the group retired to a hunting lodge out-side Belgrade where Milosevic frequently took visiting dignitaries. They had lunch on a deck overlooking the forest and Milosevic insisted everyone have a traditional sip of sljivovica, or plum brandy. Milosevic, Akashi, Janvier and their senior aides filled the table.

     "Do you see bear and deer from the deck we're on?" Akashi asked.

     "Yes, from time to time", Milosevic replied. "But there's no hunting next to the lodge. You have to go one or two kilometers away".

     "A safe area for animals", Akashi joked. The entire table burst out laughing.

     The following day, August 9, Clinton finalized Lake's diplomatic initiative and the National Security Adviser departed for a seven-country European tour. Lake was to present, not propose, the initiative. Clinton would be going ahead with or without European support.

     The next day, the initiative received a crucial boost. The ad-ministration produced dramatic evidence of mass executions after the fall of Srebrenica. The CIA analyst had stayed up all night on August 2 poring over U.S. aerial photos of the Nova Kasaba area. He found what appeared to be mass graves. One spy photo showed several hundred prisoners gathered on the Nova Kasaba soccer field. Several days later, the prisoners were gone and four areas of fresh digging appeared conspicuously nearby. The evidence was reported in the National Intelligence Daily on August 4 and Al-bright lobbied for its release. She unveiled the evidence at a closed session to the UN Security Council on August 10. The photos served a dual purpose. Powerful evidence of Serb atrocities, U.S. officials hoped they would convince Europeans, still skeptical that one side was worse than the other, that the Serbs should be bombed.

     In Europe, Lake's initiative met with mixed reviews. The Europeans were thrilled to have Clinton put his personal prestige behind a new diplomatic initiative, but they opposed the plan's punitive measures - bombing the Serbs if they failed to cooperate and lifting the arms embargo.

     On August 14, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Hol-brooke took over for Lake. Holbrooke had a reputation for being overbearing, but he was also viewed as the one negotiator who might be able to outmaneuver the Serb, Croat and Muslim leaders who had frustrated so many past envoys.

     Holbrooke was given an unusual degree of latitude in the negotiations and he quickly objected to one of the central tenets of Lake's proposal. The proposed settlement maps divided Bosnia between a Muslim-Croat federation that controlled 51 percent of the country and a Bosnian Serb "entity" that held 49 percent. The proposed borders were relatively simple and no enclaves existed. Gorazde, the only remaining enclave in eastern Bosnia, was to be traded for the Serb-held suburbs around surrounded Sarajevo. Holbrooke said that after the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa it was immoral to ask Gorazde's 65,000 people to abandon the town. The maps were later modified and the Gorazde trade proposal dropped.

     Holbrooke's first foray ended tragically on August 19. After visiting Belgrade and Zagreb, a French APC rolled off the narrow, winding dirt track that led into Sarajevo over UN-controlled Mount Igman. Thre key members of Holbrooke's negotiating team died: Robert C. Frasure, a career diplomat who was Clinton's special representative for Bosnia and laid much of the groundwork for Holbrooke, Dr. Joseph Kruzel from the Pentagon's Balkan Task Force and Colonel S. Nelson Drew from Lake's National Security Council staff. Holbrooke's group had been forced to drive into the city because General Mladic refused to guarantee their plane's security if it flew into the then closed Sarajevo airport. Mladic said he couldn't promise that the Muslims wouldn't shoot at the plane.

     The cost of the war in Bosnia had been brought dramatically home to the White House.

     After the funerals, Holbrooke began frenetically shuttling between Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb.

     In Holland, Srebrenica was quickly turning into a national scandal. The U.S. spy satellite photos confirmed suspicions of mass executions. There were damaging interviews with Dutch peacekeepers who said they saw dozens of bodies in Nova Kasaba and witnessed executions in Potocari. Other stories reported the Dutch dislike of the enclave's Muslim soldiers.

     The Dutch Ministry of Defense then revealed that the roll of film containing photographs of the nine dead Muslim men found near the stream had been "accidentally" destroyed in a filmprocessing lab. Outraged members of the Dutch parliament accused the Defense Ministry of a cover-up.

     Embarrassing information continued to leak. The statement the Dutch deputy commander, Major Robert Franken, had signed declaring that the evacuations accompanied by the Dutch were carried out according to international law was disclosed. A story then appeared that exposed the list of 239 men kicked off the Dutch base. At an initial press conference responding to the story, Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve denied that the list existed. One day later, Voorhoeve admitted there was a list, but said senior officers in the Dutch Army had not informed him of its existence.

     The debriefing of Dutch peacekeepers finally began in September. More than six weeks had passed and the peacekeepers and their superiors in the Ministry of Defense failed to sound the alarm about the atrocities and evidence of mass executions witnessed by the Dutch. In hindsight, the Dutch failure to speak out after they left the enclave was as derelict as their conduct during the Serb offensive.

     On October 30, the Dutch Ministry of Defense issued its final report on the debriefing. Dated October 4, it was an exercise in obfuscation. Much of what the Dutch saw was in the report, but what occurred was vastly played down or distorted. Throughout the report, references were made to UNPROFOR commanders turning down requests for Close Air Support. The reference appears at first glance to be to General Janvier - but was actually referring to UNPROFOR chief of staff Dutch general Nicolai, who turned down the first two requests.

     Sergeant Mulder being forced to "hunt Muslims" was refe-rred to as follows: "Both Dutchbat soldiers were ordered to go and sit on top of an [APC]. They were given hand-held weapons with the advice that, for their own safety, they would do well to shoot any BiH soldiers on sight. After a while, the Dutchbat soldiers turned back without a shot having been fired and without having seen any BiH soldiers". All of the captured Muslims were referred to as Bosnian "soldiers".

     The report exonerated the Dutch and blamed UN commanders hesitant to use NATO airpower for the fall of the enclave. Defense Minister Voorhoevs said only a public commitment by the inter-national community to unleash massive air strikes could have saved Srebrenica. The blame for the fall of the enclave, Voorhoeve said, lay with the many nations that refused to contribute the 30,000 troops needed to defend the safe areas when they were created in 1993.

     But the controversy refused to die. A play later debuted in Holland that portrayed the Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica as cowards and racist toward Srebrenica's Muslims. Other branches of the military and units in the Dutch Army privately criticized the 13th Air Mobile Battalion, the unit that served in Srebrenica, for hurting their reputation.

     Embittered by their experience in Bosnia and their treatment after returning to Holland, some of the Dutch who served in Srebrenica left the Dutch Army. Many of the Dutch compared their experience to that of American soldiers who were sent to Vietnam. They were sent on an impossible mission, they said, and then blamed for its failure.

* * *

     In Bosnia, the Serb attack on Gorazde never materialized. With the London ultimatum and the 12,000-troop Rapid Reaction Force in place, the Serbs appeared to back off and wait for Western unity to dissolve again.

     But on August 28 a shell landed near a Sarajevo open-air market, killing thirty-seven and wounding eighty-eight. The Serbs-as was their custom-accused the Muslims of firing the shell on their own people to create a pretext for NATO bombing. But a UN crater analysis ruled that the deadly shell and four others fired in the same volley came from Serb positions.

     The UN commander in Sarajevo, British general Rupert Smith, now had the pretext he needed to launch air strikes. The London Declaration's earlier promise to defend Gorazde had been extended to Sarajevo, Bihac and Tuzla. Neutralizing the hostage threat, peacekeepers had been steadily leaving Gorazde over the last few weeks. After three and a half years of war, Washington, Paris and London unanimously supported intensive NATO air strikes against the Serbs. All pretense of neutrality was gone. Janvier, who could have blocked the strikes, was at his son's wed-ding. The last British peacekeepers leaving Gorazde arrived safely in Serbia on August 28. At 2:10 a.m. on August 30th ground began shaking in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale. The first ammunition dump had been hit.

     For the next three days, NATO planes and the new Rapid Reaction Force - which had positioned heavy artillery on Mount Igman above Sarajevo - pounded Serb positions around the besieged city. Janvier returned from leave and agreed to meet with General Mladic. Janvier's instructions were to stick to the preagreed UN-NATO ultimatum: the air strikes would halt only if Mladic withdrew his heavy weapons from around Sarajevo.

     Over the course of a grueling eleven-hour meeting in the town of Mali Zvornik, Mladic complained that withdrawing his weapons would leave the Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo vulnerable to a Muslim attack. Janvier held firm at first but eventually compromised. At 4:08 a.m. Mladic signed a letter that did not meet the specific conditions of the UN-NATO ultimatum. Because of the letter, a temporary pause in the bombing was extended.

     The following day NATO's governing body, the North At-lantic Council, ruled that Mladic's letter did not meet the ultimatum. Janvier argued that the halt in the bombing should be extended and the UN should force the Muslims to promise not to launch an offensive if the heavy weapons were withdrawn. But the rare consensus among Washington, London and Paris on the use of force prevailed. Mladic was given forty-eight hours to start withdrawing his weapons. Serb guns stayed in position. The bombing resumed on September 5.

     Holbrooke continued his tireless shuttle diplomacy. The day before the bombing began, Holbrooke achieved a major break-through. On August 29, the Bosnian Serbs gave in to intense pressure from Serbian President Milosevic and said he could represent them in negotiations. In the past, Milosevic agreed to peace deals but the Bosnian Serbs refused to accept them.

     As NATO planes knocked out Serb communications systems, Bosnian and Croatian armies took advantage of it with the tacit approval of the United States. A joint Muslim-Croat offensive swept across western Bosnia. Bosnian Serbs appeared to be in complete disarray. After two years of stalemate or Serb victories, over 100 square miles of Serb territory fell in a week.

     On September 10, Janvier, under strict orders not to bend, met with Mladic in Belgrade. The Serb general demanded that the air strikes end before negotiations could begin. Janvier was instructed to leave. Minutes after Janvier's plane took off, thirteen Tomahawk missiles were fired from U.S. ships in the Adriatic at Serb SAM missile sites around Banja Luka. The NATO bombing and Muslim-Croat advances continued.

     With their holdings in western Bosnia crumbling, Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic signed an agreement drafted by Holbrooke's team on September 14. They promised to withdraw their weapons from around Sarajevo and begin peace talks immediately. There was a pause in the NATO attacks. Then Mladic conveniently entered a Belgrade military hospital for treatment of a kidney stone. The heavy weapons were finally withdrawn from around Sarajevo.

     In the largest operation in NATO's history, planes had flown 3,400 sorties and 750 attack missions against 56 targets including ammunition bunkers, SAM missiles and communications centers. The Bosnian Serbs were capitulating. After three and a half years, the siege of Sarajevo was over. The use of large-scale NATO air strikes in Bosnia proved to be devastatingly effective once potential hostages were removed from Serb territory.

     Holbrooke suddenly found himself confronted by another problem. Muslim and Croat forces were racing across western Bosnia - and they refused to stop. At one point, Holbrooke had color maps produced twice a day by the UN intelligence unit in Sarajevo showing the percentage of territory held by the Muslims and Croats versus the Serbs. When the balance of territory exceeded 51 - 49 percent on Septembeer 19, Holbrooke and other U.S. officials ordered the Muslims and Croats to halt. In a meeting with Bosnian President Izetbegovic and Croatian President Tudjman, Holbrooke cited an intelligence assessment stating that Serb lines were solidifying and a counterattack was possible.

     But UN officials estimated that Croat tank columns were only seventy-two hours away from taking Banja Luka - the largest Serb-held city in Bosnia. If the city fell, the hundreds of square miles of flat plains around it in western Bosnia were expected to follow, which would leave the Bosnian Serbs with only their holdings in eastern Bosnia. The fall of Banja Luka would send over 200,000 Serbs fleeing toward Serbia, potentially threatening Milosevic's power and derailing the U.S. peace initiative.

     Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, whose forces were finally winning after three years, was less willing to relent. In the end, the Bosnians - who relied on the Croats' tanks and artillery for support - had little choice. On October 5, Holbrooke secured a sixty-day cease-fire. Fighting flared for another week. Two more towns fell to the Muslims and Croats, while the Serbs retook some territory near the Una River. On October 12, a country-wide cease-finally took hold. The Muslims, Croats and Serbs had "fought" to the lines more of less outlined in Lake's endgame strategy.

     On November 1, Bosnian President Izetbegovic, Croatian President Tudjman and Serbian President Milosevic arrived in Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks. Twenty-one days of intense negotiations followed. Milosevic, eager for a deal, made several concessions. Holbrooke and Secretary of State Christopher finally persuaded the deeply divided Bosnian government to accept the agreement on November 21, when the talks were on the verge of collapse.

     Under the agreement, Gorazde remained Bosnian government territory and was linked to Sarajevo by a thin corridor. The Serbheld suburbs that ringed Sarajevo during the war were turned over to the Bosnian government in exchange for a chunk of territory gained by the Bosnian Army in western Bosnia. Srebrenica and Zepa remained in Serb hands. The Serbs, who made up only 31 percent of the country's population, would get 49 percent of Bosnia's land and the de facto "ethnically pure" state they had brutally created. Croats, who comprised only 17 percent of the population, received nearly 25 percent of the land. Bosnia's Muslims, who constituted 44 percent of the population, were allotted only 25 percent of the land, and were the war's clear losers. The governments of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia all promised to hand over all indicted war criminals.

     President Clinton, invoking images of marketplace massacres in Sarajevo and mass graves in Srebrenica, announced the dispatch of 25,000 American soldiers to oversee the implementation of the peace agreement. The majority of American's opposed the deployment.

     By the time the Dayton peace accord was formally signed in Paris on December 14, a systematic effort by the Serbs to destroy evidence of the Srebrenica massacres was already under way. On September 29, spy planes had spotted heavy equipment at work on the farm in Pilica where Drazen Erdemovic and his unit had carried out one of the final mass executions. The Bosnian Serbs weren't trying to bury their victims; they were exhuming them.

     Apparently tipped off by the August 10 release of the Nova Kasaba satellite photos, the Serbs began unearthing bodies. My own trip to Nova Kasaba on August 16 may also have unintentionally prompted the Serbs to destroy evidence. After the Pilica farm, digging was then seen at an apparent mass grave in Glogova - three miles from the site of the Kravica warehouse massacre - on October 28.

     Later that week, a Washington - based U.S. intelligence official leaked the locations of the suspected graves in Glogova, Grbavci and the Red Mud Dam to me.

     Entering Serb territory without permission, I reached Grbavci and the Red Mud Dam on October 29. Everything matched exactly what Mevludin Oric, Hurem Suljic, Smail Hodzic and the two survivors told me. Both sites appeared not to have been tampered with. But a watchman at the dam arrested me and the documents I had found and pictures I had taken of the graves, civilian clothes, human bones and three old men's canes were seized.

     Over the next few months, the destruction of evidence would continue.

     With peace and the onset of the harsh Balkan winter, hopes of more men emerging from the woods faded. Approximately 3,200 men crossed with the lead section of the column on July 16, 17 and 18. After that, only small groups, ranging from three Srebrenica emerged from the woods by late October.

     Almost all of Zepa's men survived. In a testament to the im-portance of leadership, Avdo Palic's deputy commanders let civilians leave for Muslim-held central Bosnia only in groups of 300. Most groups were accompanied by soldiers and guides and traveled only through isolated territory. Special commando groups from Zepa made up of volunteers also ventured back into Serb territory to gather men hiding around the fallen enclave. One commando returned with 97 men in October.

     But Zepa's men also had an enormous advantage over Sre-brenica's - the Croatian Army. The Croat attack in western Bosnia forced General Mladic to send most of his units there instead of using them to hunt down men from Zepa.

     In prisoner exchanges carried out as part of the Dayton peace accord, the 800 men from Zepa who had surrendered in Serbia were released. Several dozen men from Srebrenica were among them. The Serb prisoner-of-war camp in Batkovic also emptied, producing several dozen more Srebrenicans, including some of the wounded men who were seized in Bratunac. But the officer who wrote "30 Dutch equals 30,000 Muslims" and the four men who held off the Serb tank with Ibran Malagic were still missing.

     The International Committee of the red Cross collected a new list in February 1996 - eight months after the enclave's fall. Over 6,600 men from Srebrenica were still missing.

     The arrival of American troops in Bosnia in December 1995 raised expectations among Srebrenica's survivors. The Dayton peace accord called on all parties to turn over indicted war criminals to the War Crimes Tribunal. Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic were indicted by the tribunal for the Srebrenica massacres on November 18 and hopes were high for an arrest. It was hoped, too, that much-rumored secret prison camps filled with the missing men would be found by American or NATO troops. On January 21, 1996, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck visited the warehouse Hakija Husejnovic survived. Accompanied by investigators from the tribunal and a slew of reporters, Shattuck called for the exhumation of the apparent mass graves.

     But almost from the outset of the mission, President Clinton and his advisers ruled out any attempt to arrest Karadzic or Mladic. With the administration still haunted by the disastrous experience in Somalia, hunting war criminals was ruled not to be part of the new NATO force's mandate. The White House had neutralized Bosnia as an election issue. American troops had a far safer mission than leading a UN withdrawal, but keeping casualties low remained a priority.

     NATO troops were ordered to arrest indicted war criminals only if they ran into them by chance on patrol or at a checkpoint. If the troops felt it would be unsafe to arrest the indicted war criminals, they could, according to the policy, let them go, With Mladic ad Karadzic constantly surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, arrests were essentially precluded.

     On February 2, survivors' hopes turned to frustration and then violence. Women from Srebrenica stormed the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Tuzla, shattering windows and occupying offices. They demanded that more efforts be made to find their missing sons, husbands and fathers. The ICRC had already inspected existing Bosnian Serb prisons as part of the peace settlement and found no men from Srebrenica. Rumors of slave labor on farms or in mines in Serbia persisted, but unannounced ICRC visits to mines produced no men or traces of men from Srebrenica.

     In March, a panicked Drazen Erdemovic had one of his fri-ends call the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. Relations between Erdemovic and some members of his unit had steadily deteriorated after the mass execution. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Milorad Pelemis, threw him and his family out of his house in January 1996. The low point came in February when Erdemovic got in an argument and was shot by Stanko Savanovic - the member of his unit who bragged about how many Muslims he had killed in Pilica.

     Erdemovic's friend, twenty-nine-year-old Radislav Kreme-novi Erdemovic, told the U.S. embassy that Erdemovi Erdemovic would be willing to testify before the War Crimes Tribunal in exchange for guarantees of safety for him and his family. An embassy switchboard operator thought it was a crank call and sent him a list of media organizations. Kremenovi Erdemovic called ABC News. Serbian secret police were tapping ABC's lines. After an interview with ABC and the French newspaper le Figaro, Erdemovic was arrested and ABC's tapes were seized by Milosevic's secret police. Under intense pressure from the United States, Milosevic handed Erdemovic over to the tribunal after one month. CIA analysts checked old aerial photos of the Pilica area after Erdemovic's story broke. Photographs showing bodies strewn across the ground and a grave being dug on July 21 corroborated his account. Albright visited Pilica with tribunal investigators in March.

     In April 1996, Mevludin Oric's half brother Dasan was one of six men from Srebrenica to emerge from the woods nine months after Srebrenica's fall. After seeing that the road in Nova Kasaba was blocked, they had returned to Srebrenica and decided to wait. The group hid in the hills around Lehovici, sleeping and lighting fires in small caves they dug in a hillside. Food from the village's abandoned houses kept them alive. Serbs intermittently scavenging the area were avoided.

     A second group of men from Srebrenica were less lucky. In May, they headed for central Bosnia after hiding in the caves around Zepa for the winter. Four miles from crossing into Muslim-held central Bosnia, they were spotted by Serbs. Fired on, they ran to a nearby American patrol and surrendered. Serb police quickly arrived. The Muslims were carrying two pistols, some hand grenades and a small amount of explosives. The Serb police insisted the men were Muslim commandos carrying out a raid from Tuzla. The American officer - after deliberating for two hours - turned the Muslims over to the Serb police. After being tortured by the Serbs, the Muslims signed confessions stating that they killed four missing Serbs who were out cutting wood near Zepa. As of January 1997, they were in a Serb jail waiting to be tried on murder charges.

     When a team of investigators from the War Crimes Tribunal arrived for a three-week inspection of the massacre sites in April 1996, a bizarre arrangement was worked out with the U.S. forces patrolling the area. U.S. commanders - fearing "mission creep", or being slowly drawn into more and more duties - provided only "area security" for tribunal investigators and refused to clear mines from sites. No soldiers guarded the sites, so it was possible the Serbs had laid mines. Avoiding American causalities remained the Clinton administration's priority.

     Investigators traveled to the sites anyway. I returned to Grbavci with them on April 2. Nearly 70 percent of the grave had been recently dug up. My October 20 trip had prompted the Serbs to destroy the evidence. Everything I had taken photos of - including the three canes - was gone.

     But the cleanup had been sloppy. A decomposed body was found near the grave. A pile of identification cards from Srebrenica was found in the woods along with several dozen strips of cloth - the blindfolds Mevludin and Hurem had described.

     Bureaucratic delays at the War Crimes Tribunal and the process of hiring a hiring a nonprofit mine-removal agency delayed the exhumation of the suspected mass graves until July. The first grave, near Cerska, produced 150 bodies - far more than expected. Most victims had their hands tied behind their backs and had been shot from behind.

     After a group of mine-sniffing dogs were accidentally sent to Mozambique instead of Bosnia, the exhumation in Nova Kasaba began in late August 1996. Two of the four suspected graves were exhumed and only thirty-three bodies were discovered. There was no evidence of tampering. The CIA's loose estimate of 600 bodies, which was based on the surface area of the graves, appeared inaccurate.

     The leg I had found jutting from the ground near the graves a year earlier was still there. One man, buried in a shallow grave, lay alone.

     In early September, with winter approaching, investigators moved to Grbavci. They only dug up the grave Mevludin Oric and Hurem Suljic had eluded. The grave that Smail Hodzic survived would be dug in the spring of 1997. Investigators found 160 bodies, most with their hands tied behind their backs and wearing blindfolds, confirming Mevludin's and Hurem's stories.

     But bodies were also clearly missing. The top nine feet of soil contained no corpses. Extra limbs and body parts were found mixed in with the topsoil, indicating that bodies had been removed and broken apart in the process.

     In Pilica, 116 bodies as well as 14 extra body parts were found at the farm where Drazen Erdemovic served as an executioner. As Erdemovic said, they wore civilian clothes. Tribunal investigators believe that grave was also tampered with. Erdemovic's rough estimate of 1,000 victims may also be high.

     When the exhumations around Srebrenica were halted for the winter, more than one-third of the known graves had been dug up, but fewer than 550 corpses had been found. If bodies were to be found at roughly the same ratios next summer, approximately 1,650 victims of mass executions would be located, a fraction of the 7,079 men reported missing to the Red Cross. According to the ICRC, 2,935 of the missing were last seen in Serb custody.

     The discrepancy can be attributed to two things - Serb tam-pering and inaccurate estimates from survivors. Considering the extent of the tampering, finding fewer than 2,943 bodies in the mass graves once the exhumations are completed is to be expected. Investigators said survivors experience severe stress and often unconsciously the size of crowds and number of bodies. In Rwanda, far fewer victims than survivors described were found in graves. Some exaggeration is conscious.

     Several Muslim men interviewed for this book appeared to have made up their accounts of atrocities or exaggerated them. None of their stories were used. Hurem Suljic, Mevludin Oric and other survivors may have overestimated the number of victims, but the overwhelming amount of physical evidence found at the sites corroborated their account of a mass execution. Drazen Erdemovic, an executioner, had little reason to exaggerate.

     The Bosnian government claims that over 10,000 men from Srebrenica are missing, but the figure that appears most reliable is the ICRC total of 7,079 missing. The ICRC has gone through an exhaustive process of checking that the list is accurate. After the ICRC took an initial list of the missing when the women and children arrived from Srebrenica in July, the entire process was started over again and families were forced to submit a report of someone missing for a second time.

     The updated ICRC list of missing was compiled eight months after Srebrenica's fall and did not come from the Bosnian government, which has been accused of inflating casualty figures in the past. For a listing to be accepted, a close relative had to submit an individual's full name, father's name, date of birth, place of birth and date and place they were last seen. The list was repeatedly cross-checked for redundancies.

     Some of the reports may be false. But it is unlikely that the Bosnian government could convince or organize hundreds of people to submit thousands of detailed, nonredundant false reports of missing people that would wildly inflate the total. The ICRC, which has specialized in gathering accounts of missing persons during its 113-year history, stands by the figure of 7,079 missing.

     The majority of the missing men - approximately 4,000 - appear to have been killed in lopsided firefights or ambushes. Only 30 percent of the fleeing Muslims were armed. Bosnian Serb police who were involved in "cleansing the terrain" operations told acquaintances that when they returned with small groups of prisoners, their commanding officers ordered them to take the prisoners into the woods and shoot them. As part of an exchange of remains between Serbs and Muslims in the summer of 1996, Bosnian government investigators found over 150 bodies strewn across the hillside where the column was ambushed and split in two in Kamenica. Around the ambush site, bodies were intermittently scattered in the woods. Along the route men took to Tuzla, skeletons dotted the path.

     As many as 4,000 corpses are scattered across the forests and fields of eastern Bosnia. With UN, tribunal and Bosnian efforts to recover the bodies moving slowly, most of the bodies are already badly decomposed. The vast majority will never be identified.

     As of January 1997, the fall of Srebrenica appeared to in-volve the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II. Barring secret labor camps and the Bosnian government massively inflating the ICRC missing figure. Bosnian Serb soldiers systematically slaughtered 7,079 mostly unarmed Muslim men in ambushes and mass executions between July 12 and July 16, 1995.

     Based on the ICRC figure, the killing spree carried out by General Ratko Mladic's troops over the five-day period was the most systematic and intense of Europe's worst conflict since World War II. After nearly fifty years of superpower-imposed peace interrupted primarily by the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Stalin's intermittent postwar purges, between 150,000 and 200,000 and 200,000 people are believed to have died in the war in Bosnia.

     Other Bosnian Serb campaigns - such as the "ethnic clean-sing" of northern and eastern Bosnia in 1992- involved larger numbers of people, but appear not to match Srebrenica in the intensity of the bloodletting. The number of victims in 1992 is also unclear, but thousands were beaten, tortured or killed and tens of thousands of Muslim prisoners were placed in concentration camps. Exactly how many perished during the campaigns or in the camps may never be known, but large numbers of prisoners were at least kept alive. In Srebrenica, virtually none was spared.

     Srebrenica accounts for an astonishing percentage of the number of missing from the brutal conflict. Of the 18,406 Muslims, Serbs and Croats reported still missing to the ICRC as of January 1997, 7,079 are people who disappeared after the fall of Srebrenica. In other words, approximately 38 percent of the war's missing are from Srebrenica.

     Based on the ICRC figure, nearly 3,000 men were summarily executed and over 4,000 hunted down like animals. But even if the number of victims proves to be no higher than the roughly 500 found so far at four execution sites and 150 found to date at one ambush site, what occurred in Srebrenica was unprecedented in postwar Europe. Srebrenica is unique because of the international community's role in the tragedy.

     The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies. Srebrenica was not simply a case of the international community standing by as a far-off atrocity was committed. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided and emboldened the executioners.