Postcards from the Grave, then and now

After the break-up of Yugoslavia, the people of Srebrenica found themselves in an area that Serbian nationalists wanted to integrate into their own state. Serb forces surrounded the town in 1992, restricting food, water and other supplies, subjecting it to relentless sniping and bombardment.

In 1995, the Bosnian Serb army led by General Ratko Mladić forced its way into Srebrenica, despite it being designated a safe haven by the United Nations. The town’s women and children were expelled and the men and boys massacred. Well over 8,000 were killed in the brutal end of the siege, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Suljagić's Postcards from the Grave is an unvarnished, unsentimental account of those nightmarish years. Srebrenica, he writes, was a place which “tells us everything about our convictions, beliefs, the choices we made and stood by right until the end, until death caught up with us”.

He chronicles his own experiences as well as the stories of others he came across, those who survived and those who did not. The narrative is a stark reminder of the perils of rampant nationalism and bears witness to both atrocity and resilience.

“We observed each other,” Suljagić writes, “convinced that it was highly probable we would not see each other next day, and defeated by the feeling that this would not change anything”. As one of his relatives comments: “We called it cauldron, world’s end, appendix, probably because those words better described how we felt. What we were going through every day was inaccessible to the rest of the world.”

The town was full of exhausted people who spent their days wandering aimlessly or resting in hiding places. Suljagić observes power being parcelled out and shared among local chieftains and profiteers. Cigarettes become sought-after currency and he himself becomes “aggressive and unscrupulous” in barter and exchange. This torments him: “I had violated the only principle one could believe in those days, namely that one should not make profit out of other people’s sorrow.”

Within months, hunger becomes a central factor in citizens’ lives. “Everyone pretended not to notice that each day the others looked thinner than the previous day…everyone simply started to look like everyone else, bloodless and almost featureless.” They adopt whatever means they can, making wholemeal from rotten apple skins and scraping salt off frozen roads.

In passage after unbearable passage, Suljagić recounts worsening circumstances. “We woke up miserable, in cold rooms with window-panes made out of plastic bags in windows covered by split logs protecting us against shell shrapnel. We woke up exhausted and lice-ridden, without the desire and most often without even the strength to move, without families, alone and abandoned, humiliated, our past violated and our future slaughtered, our present defeated and defeating.”

He comes to believe that the hostilities were not simply about two clashing communities: “No — it was a war in which one community was sentenced to death in advance.” Under this sentence, they stoically endure the sight of demolished buildings, cratered roads, and bodies shredded by bombs.

Suljagić survived the eventual massacre because he was working as a translator for UN military observers in the area and, at the time, was at a Dutch base registering the names of men gathered for safety in a nearby factory. However, the lives of nearly every person he had ever known were wiped out.

“The betrayal I saw was different from the one that survivors of the massacre saw,” he remembers. “They watched humankind sinking to unprecedented depths (but) what I saw was a cold, almost bureaucratic indifference, and a betrayal by educated and, by any standards, of intelligent people.”

In an afterword to the book, Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy observes that Srebrenica is today synonymous with the wilful inaction of the international community to stop the butchery. Serbian leaders went on to become wanted war criminals, “but on the eve of the Srebrenica massacre the world’s diplomats and political leaders were happy to entertain them”. Another unsettling resonance with the situation in Gaza today.