It’s 1996.

The Serbian nationalist party, the SDS, had lost the war. After four years of the merciless siege of Sarajevo, its forces were required to withdraw from the ring around the Bosnian capital.¹

It is a long and painful story, but a lot had already happened by then. When the war began in 1992, Bosniaks and Croats in the areas surrounding the city were rounded up, expelled, and imprisoned in concentration camps. By the end of the war, thousands of them had been killed through massacres and systematic persecution in those territories.

Throughout the nearly four-year siege, Serb forces shelled and destroyed thousands of homes, along with infrastructure worth millions of dollars. From the surrounding hills, they subjected the streets of Sarajevo to shelling and sniper fire, day after day, for years.^{2 3}

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As you can see from the map above, Bosniacs were the majority in Sarajevo and its suburbs, except in Ilijaš municipality, which had a slight Serb plurality.⁴

In the video, Serb residents accept that the period in which their military held the upper hand is over, but categorically refuse to remain. Their nationalist party, the SDS, had called on them, even had intimidated many into leaving.

Even though the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had guaranteed their safety, under the supervision of NATO-led forces in Bosnia, they chose to obey the SDS.⁵

They even exhumed their own dead to take them elsewhere. ⁶ The answers they give the reporter are astounding. They do not want to live with the “Muslims”, and they do not want to live under “Alija” – Alija Izetbegović, the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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They knew, of course, that their newly established parastate and its military had attempted to remove their Bosniak and Croat neighbors through murder, imprisonment, and forced expulsion. Now that the surviving inhabitants were returning to their homes, they chose to leave them behind forever.

In many places in Bosnia, during the war, local Serbs dug up entire Bosniak cemeteries with bulldozers, ⁷ simply to erase any trace of Bosniak existence and culture. To see these people now persuaded to exhume their own dead is both ironic and terrifying.⁸

The scenes are eerily reminiscent of Germany in 1945: a defeated nationalist apparatus urging civilians to retreat with it rather than remain among the people it had taught them to fear, as the territory under its control collapsed.

Many of the Serb residents left for Bratunac and Srebrenica, the very area where Serb forces had committed genocide in 1995, setting in motion a chain of events that accelerated their military and political defeat.

References:

1. Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1035 – S/1996/210, 29 March 1996 ↩︎
2. OPENING REMARKS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 30 YEARS LATER – SARAJEVO ↩︎
3. ICTY – Prosecutor v. Stanislav Galić – Judgement ↩︎
4. Map of Bosnia-Herzegovina Census 1991 – Wikipedia ↩︎
5. Serbs’ Exodus From Sarajevo: Another ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ By DEAN E. MURPHY Feb. 22, 1996 12 AM PT ↩︎
6. YouTube: “BOSNIA: BRATUNAC: SERB REFUGEES RE BURY THEIR DEAD” ↩︎
7. Killing the dead: The logic of cemetery destruction during genocidal campaigns, Noa Krikler, 18 May 2023 ↩︎
8. FROM THE ASHES: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF BOSNIA’S CULTURAL HERITAGE András J. Riedlmayer (Harvard University), 2002 ↩︎