By Enver Robelli
“The situation this morning was unusual, but eerily calm. The usual barrage of shelling that greeted us each day was absent—strangely so. We see this as a positive shift in current circumstances, undoubtedly caused by NATO’s ultimatum, even though it has yet to be enforced.”
It was Tuesday, July 11, 1995, when this report was written.
At 07:55, the UN blue helmets sent their first dispatch from Srebrenica to their central command in Sarajevo. It was an optimistic report. It was summer. People across Europe were preparing for beach holidays, to enjoy the sun, the blue sea, and cold beer. It was July 1995.
Slobodan Milošević and his generals—Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić—along with their butcher squads, had no vacation plans that summer. They had a different agenda: to carry out the first genocide in Europe since 1945. The first since Adolf Hitler.
Tens of thousands of people in Srebrenica were waiting for NATO’s intervention to stop the Serbian army’s advance toward the town in eastern Bosnia. That’s why the UN troops stationed in Srebrenica were still hopeful. But NATO jets were nowhere to be seen in the sky. Ratko Mladić was free to proceed with his plan to seize Srebrenica.
A Dutch major stationed in Srebrenica as part of the UN battalion told the Bosniak defenders that he would only request NATO air strikes once he physically saw a Serbian soldier in the town. The Bosniaks replied: the Serbs are already in the outskirts.
Meanwhile, over the Adriatic, NATO warplanes launched from Italian bases circled, awaiting orders to strike. But among the ranks of UN officers stationed in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Srebrenica, a bizarre bureaucratic cacophony was unfolding. One blue helmet officer in Srebrenica phoned his counterpart in Tuzla to request air support. The officer in Tuzla replied that such requests couldn’t be made by phone. The call ended. A fax was sent. No one responded.
The deputy commander of the Dutch battalion made another attempt—he called Tuzla. A UNPROFOR lieutenant colonel from Pakistan answered. The response: the Dutch had used the wrong form.
The Dutch resent the request by fax, this time with a revised form. Again, the Pakistani officer replied: only 10 of the required 15 fields had been filled in. While officers tangled themselves in UN bureaucracy, Serbian forces were preparing to begin the selection process: women and girls to one side, boys and men to the other—for execution.
Seconds passed. Then minutes. Then hours—each one heavier than lead. Eventually, UN headquarters acknowledged the looming threat from the armed Serbs. But from Zagreb came a fatal message: air strikes could not be authorized unless the Dutch UN battalion itself came under attack. The bureaucratic drama dragged on. NATO planes returned to their bases. Later in the afternoon, the jets came back and carried out limited airstrikes—ineffective at best. Some didn’t even hit their targets—perhaps because earlier that day Ratko Mladić had ordered haystacks to be set ablaze. The smoke “masked” the targets.
When Mladić threatened to attack the UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, the NATO air operation was called off. The mission was named “Operation Deliberate Force.” But the blade of that sword was blunt.
In the days that followed, Serbian forces executed around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. “It’s time to take revenge for the Serbs,” Mladić thundered. “For every Serb killed, we’ll kill 100 Muslims,” shouted a young Serbian MP—Aleksandar Vučić. Young in age, but seasoned in the dark arts of hate.
Years later, during a war crimes trial in The Hague, a witness described the afternoon of July 11, 1995, as follows:
“People were crying and screaming. You could hear gunfire constantly. Someone tried to comfort us, saying: ‘Srebrenica won’t fall. Don’t take it so tragically. Just don’t panic.’ […] Some had improvised radios. They tried to catch signals. People were clinging to hope. Then someone said, ‘We heard it on the radio. They’re sending planes. They’re coming to rescue us.’”
The planes never came.
The people were slaughtered.
Their bodies thrown into mass graves.
Later, to cover the crime, the corpses were exhumed and reburied in secondary mass graves. A leg here, an arm there. Not all the dead have been found to this day.
Ratko Mladić—now sentenced to life in prison as a war criminal—paraded through Srebrenica that day, July 11, 1995. The town had been ethnically cleansed. A stocky, fascist Serb with a machine gun in hand, sleeves rolled up, proudly spoke to cameras about his “triumph.” He said Srebrenica had been taken and gifted to the Serb people—now that it was time “to take revenge on the Turks in this region.”
He barked orders, gave commands:
“Leave the town center as it is! Move forward with your men, tell them I’m here! I want them to march to Bratunac! Move! Exploit the panic among the Turks!”
And so, the genocide began.