BETRAYAL IN THE BALKANS 29did not permit any outsiders near their killing fields. All non-Serb witnesses
were killed. Or so they thought.
As is always the case, one or two intended victims would play dead or
otherwise use their wits, luck, and determination and manage to escape. In
the early 1990s, the US government helped set up the Refugee Debriefing
Center in Croatia to question these survivors and collect evidence for use
by the future War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
Initially I tended to believe Serb assertions that the Bosnians exag-
gerated or fabricated their tales of Serb torture and murder. Sometimes
they did. Over time, however, I became convinced of the veracity of the
Bosnian Muslims’ seemingly implausible claims. When two refugees would
show up at different sites, relating identical details of a particularly ghoulish
act committed by identified Bosnian Serbs in a particular village on a par-
ticular date, we knew it was impossible for them to coincidentally fabricate
the same unique details.
To this day I am awed by the Serbs’ evil creativity when devising
methods of torture and humiliation for their Bosnian Muslim and Kosovo
Albanian victims. A small sampling of their grisly crimes against humanity,
which turn the stomach and are literally inconceivable for most civilized
human beings, are discussed in chapter 3.
Incidentally, it was later confirmed that over forty thousand Bosnians
were “ethnically cleansed” from Srebrenica, and at least eight thousand
men and boys were indeed executed or gunned down by the Serbs as they
attempted to flee through the woods. The fall of Srebrenica was the final
straw for the Clinton administration, and it led to the long-overdue NATO
intervention to stop the Serb rampage in Bosnia.
My daily meetings, at the oft targeted Bosnian interior ministry building
at ground zero in downtown Sarajevo, were intense. I would drive at high
speed to and from the meetings to decrease my chances of being hit by
sniper fire. Seat belts were left unused in Sarajevo in case you needed to
make a hasty escape from your vehicle. Random artillery shells were a
constant threat, shattering the calm just when you got comfortable with
the quiet.