War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [53]
The return of historical memory restores a common language to the one usurped by war. The 1991 exhumations in the Katyn Forest outside Kalinin for the thousands of Polish officers executed by the Soviets in World War II permitted an historical narrative that could be accepted by the Russians and the Poles. What followed, once the truth was exposed, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The exhumations in Cambodia, El Salvador, and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica are part of the same process. It is these exhumations, these final acknowledgments, that bring down regimes and force the restoration of history. But until such a moment happens, the wartime regimes zealously guard the lie.
During conflicts, these hidden burial places are spoken of in hushed and nervous whispers. As wars wind to a close the killers make frantic and often futile efforts to hide their crimes. They bulldoze fields where bodies are buried, as they did in Srebrenica, dynamite mine shafts where bodies were dumped, or dissolve the corpses in acid. But the industrial-scale killing of the twentieth century makes such erasure difficult. And years later there often is a dogged and methodical effort, usually by lonely dissidents, to uncover the past. These statisticians wield with index cards the fate of despots, the return of historical memory and, finally, hope.
I was taken to a school in northern Iraq days after Iraqi soldiers withdrew from the region following the Gulf War. Kurdish rebels there told me that under the concrete in the schoolyard were hundreds of bodies. They vowed to smash through the concrete and dig them up.
When I moved across central Bosnia with advancing Muslim troops after the NATO bombing campaign of 1995, survivors would enter villages even while the fighting was still dying down and point out burial sites. These sites, one sensed, were as important as their houses and personal property. Muslim officials who traveled with the army carried long handwritten lists of names of missing from the war. They began, even amid the skirmishes, to hunt for the graves that held the bodies of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims massacred when the Serbs swept through this area to drive out the Muslims years earlier. I drove with them to several sites. I watched as they marked them off with rope for excavation. Near a hamlet called Pudin Han, we found a cave that had human bones poking up out of a large circular depression. Another site, known as Crvena Zemlja, or “red earth,” had already given up bones and clothing. In Prhovo, a vacant ruin perched on a hillside about five miles north of Ključ, a man who witnessed a mass killing led these authorities to a spot where he told us dozens of victims of the massacre lay buried.
Senad Medanović, twenty-five, a factory worker turned soldier, returned to his home with us after three years. He climbed the steep dirt track leading to his village, in the company of three other Muslims. All were armed with AK–47 assault rifles. The men scanned the dense undergrowth for the pockets of Bosnian Serb soldiers who were still hiding in the rolling, pine-forested hills.
Medanović, ignoring the periodic crackle of small-arms fire, headed for the spot, a rough plot of land across from the gutted remains of his two-story house. He stood there and told me about the day the Serbs came. It was on the morning of June 1, 1992. He saw several hundred Bosnian Serb militiamen and Yugoslav Army troops surround the village of about two dozen houses. They herded the families into the center of the village and opened fire with automatic weapons and heavy machine guns. Mingled with the group were Muslim families from some neighboring villages.
“I was over here,” said he, standing near the edge of a field. “I did not trust the Serbs, and I stood as far away as I could. I told my family they would kill us, but they did not believe such a thing was possible. When they started to shoot I ran. I could hear the screams of the women