War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [54]
The Serbs spent the night drinking and looting the houses in the village, he said, and the next morning he watched as they searched the woods for any survivors. They rounded up about forty men, stripped them, and marched them down the road with their hands tied.
“I saw them shoot two at the edge of the village,” he said. “When I was captured six days later, on the run, and taken to the Manjaca concentration camp, I found nine of the forty who had survived, including one of my brothers. The others had been murdered. The survivors told me where the mass grave was. They told me my mother, and the rest of my family, were dead. We ten are all that remain from Prhovo.”
Lanky and bearded, he climbed through the window of his former house and began to search among the blackened debris. He pulled out the tattered remains of a blue shirt and hugged it.
“This belonged to one of my nephews,” he said, “one of the twins.”
The bloody campaign by the Bosnian Serbs to rid this part of Bosnia of Muslims, who had lived here for more than 500 years, left survivors vowing to take revenge. Medanović said he would hunt down the two Serbian commanders whom he said led the massacre.
“The two beasts who directed this slaughter were Marko Adamović and Ratko Buvac,” he said. “We all knew the Serbian nationalists from Ključ before they came to kill us. We heard them preach hatred against the Muslims. And we saw them as they entered the village that morning to direct the killings.”
But tempering his hatred was his relief at the chance to at least honor the memories of the family he lost, his mother, five of his six brothers, his only sister, his uncle, and two nephews.
He stood over the field that held the bodies.
“Here is where my family and my village lie now,” he said. “And God has permitted me to survive to come back and give them a decent burial.”
It was dusk and we were a small group, lightly armed, on a hill that still had bands of fleeing Serb soldiers. We started down the dirt track. But when Medanović saw the shattered black granite tombs of his father and grandfather, who died before the war, he knelt. He tried to arrange the pieces of the headstones to spell out their names once again.
“Can you read their names now?” he asked me. “Can you see who was buried here?”
Wartime leaders, who know that exposing the murders means the loss of their own legitimacy and discrediting of the myth, harass and denounce the Cassandras who cry out for justice and historical accountability. The effort to give a name to the victims and killers begins a collective act of repentance, a national catharsis. The process, as seen in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is the only escape. And while justice is not always done—in South Africa the full admission of crimes saw killers granted an amnesty—dignity, identity, and most important, memory are returned. This, for many families, is enough.
Only rarely do some of the top leaders end up in jail. Usually those who pay the price—if there is one to be paid—are the lowly gunmen who are tried and imprisoned to take the heat off of their commanders. Most of those who carry out war crimes, however, are never punished. They are allowed to fade away in retirement, whispered about but never finally condemned. There are powerful institutions, security services, armed forces, and ministries of the interior, that may permit some facts to be exposed but will rarely permit a society to ascribe any responsibility to the actual state organs that directed the killings. Yet despite the inevitable injustice of any investigation, the power it has to restore memory is vital for recovery from war.
“The struggle of man against power,” wrote the novelist Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”1
I walked one afternoon over the cavernous pits and gorges scattered throughout the hills above