A family of women from Srebrenica tell MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, of their reaction to the arrest
THE NEWS that Ratko Mladic had finally been apprehended triggered bittersweet emotions for one family of women who moved from Bosnia to Ireland after the war.
Zejna Ademovic and her three daughters, Sanela, Senada and Zejnija, are among the women of Srebrenica who lost fathers, husbands, brothers and sons when Bosnian Serb troops under Mladic’s command overran the besieged Muslim town in July 1995. More than 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in fields, schools and warehouses, despite the fact the United Nations had declared the enclave a “safe area”.
Among the atrocities recounted at a subsequent war crimes tribunal was the story of an elderly man who was skewered to a tree by a knife and forced to eat his grandson’s entrails. “Truly scenes from hell,” said the judge, “written on the darkest pages of human history.”
Some 60 men from the extended Ademovic family perished in the massacre, including Zejna’s husband, Suljo, and sons Mesud and Senad. Zejnija and Senada also lost their husbands, Munib and Meho Delic, two brothers whose hands were still bound with wire when their bodies were exhumed from mass graves years later.
The women moved to Ireland in the late 1990s, joining Zejna’s son Mirsad, one of the first Bosnian refugees to arrive here in 1992. Zejnija’s son Mohammed, a boy when he escaped the massacre with his mother, is the only male left in his family to bear the Delic name. Everyone else was killed.
Yesterday, the family gathered at Sanela’s home in Dublin to watch the news of Mladic’s arrest on TV. They cried together, and remembered those terrible summer days 16 years ago when the picturesque valley they called home rang with the sound of gunfire, shelling and screaming.
“It is a strange day for us because of course we are so very happy to hear the good news that Mladic has been caught after all these years,” said a tearful Sanela. “But it is a very sad time for us too because the news has brought all those memories flooding back.
“My mother was speechless today. She just watched the old footage of Srebrenica on TV and cried and cried.” There were times over the years when the Ademovic women, like many other Srebrenica survivors, despaired and thought Mladic would never be arrested. “We want to see him standing in court in The Hague,” said Sanela. “He is responsible for the deaths of so many in our family, in hundreds of Bosnian families. We want to see Mladic and Radovan Karadzic in jail for the rest of their lives because of what they did.”