THE CHILD-RAPE ASSEMBLY LINE

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, the lone whistleblower among the Satmar, a powerful Hasidic sect, who recently was the victim of a bleach attack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. All photos by Christian Storm.

IN RITUAL BATHHOUSES OF THE JEWISH ORTHODOXY, CHILDREN ARE SYSTEMATICALLY ABUSED

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg—who is 63 with a long, graying beard—recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a “child-rape assembly line” among sects of fundamentalist Jews. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to be graphic,” he said.

A member of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim fundamentalist branch of Orthodox Judaism, Nuchem designs and repairs mikvahs in compliance with Torah Law. The mikvah is a ritual Jewish bathhouse used for purification. Devout Jews are required to cleanse themselves in the mikvah on a variety of occasions: women must visit following menstruation, and men have to make an appearance before the High Holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many of the devout also purify themselves before and after the act of sex, and before the Sabbath.

On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighborhoods in the city, Mea She’arim. “I opened a door that entered into a schvitz,” he told me. “Vapors everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapors. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.”

Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: “This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face – fear. The old man [looked at me] without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn’t stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, ‘It’s a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy’s soul? You’re destroying this boy!’ He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen.”

The child sex abuse crisis in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, like that in the Catholic Church, has produced its share of shocking headlines in recent years. In New York, and in the prominent Orthodox communities of Israel and London, allegations of child molestation and rape have been rampant. The alleged abusers are schoolteachers, rabbis, fathers, uncles – figures of male authority. The victims, like those of Catholic priests, are mostly boys. Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community – the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world – have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders. Ben Hirsch, director of Survivors for Justice, a Brooklyn organization that advocates for Orthodox sex abuse victims, thinks the real number is higher. “From anecdotal evidence, we’re looking at over 50 percent. It has almost become a rite of passage.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak out about these abuses are ruined and condemned to exile by their own community. Dr. Amy Neustein, a nonfundamentalist Orthodox Jewish sociologist and editor of Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals, told me the story of a series of Hasidic mothers in Brooklyn she got to know who complained that their children were being preyed on by their husbands.

In these cases, the accused men “very quickly and effectively engage the rabbis, the Orthodox politicians, and powerful Orthodox rabbis who donate handsomely to political clubs.” The goal, she told me, is “to excise the mother from the child’s life.” Rabbinical courts cast the mothers aside, and the effects are permanent. The mother is “amputated.” One woman befriended by Dr. Neustein, a music student at a college outside New York, lost contact with all six of her children, including an infant she was breastfeeding at the time of their separation.

Rabbi Rosenberg inspects a ritual purification bath, known as a mikvah. In 2005, he witnessed a young boy being raped inside a similar bath.

Seven years ago, Rabbi Rosenberg started blogging about sex abuse in his community and opened a New York City hotline to field sex abuse complaints. He has posted appeals on YouTube, appeared on CNN, and given speeches across the US, Canada, Israel, and Australia. Today, he is the lone whistleblower among the Satmar. For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared. He receives death threats on a regular basis. In Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, advertisements taken out by the self-described “great rabbis and rabbinical judges of the city of New York” have denounced him as “a stumbling block for the House of Israel,” “a public rebuker and preacher of ethics” who “persists in his rebelliousness” and whose “voice has been heard among many Jewish families, especially young people in their innocence… drawn to listen to his poisonous and revolting speeches.” Leaflets distributed in Williamsburg and Borough Park, the centers of ultra-Orthodoxy in Brooklyn, display his bearded face over the body of a writhing snake. "Corrupt Informer," reads one of the leaflets, followed by the declaration that Rabbi Rosenberg’s “name should rot in hell forever. They should cut him off from all four corners of the earth.”

When Rabbi Rosenberg wants to bathe at a mikvah in Brooklyn to purify himself, none will have him. When he wants to go to synagogue, none will have him. “He is finished in the community, butchered,” said a fellow rabbi who would only talk anonymously. “No one will look at him, and those who will talk to him, they can’t let it be known. The pressure in our community, it’s incredible.”

The powerful men – and it is worth noting that this community is regulated by men only – who govern the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism would rather their adherents be blind in their faith, their eyes closed to the horrors Rabbi Rosenberg is exposing. Like the Catholic establishment, the rabbinate seeks to cover up the crimes, quiet the victims, protect the abusers, and deflect potential criticism of their institutional practices. Those who speak out are vilified, and the faithful learn to shut their mouths. When the father of the seven-year-old boy whom Rabbi Rosenberg rescued from the Jerusalem bathhouse showed up to collect his son, he couldn’t believe his son had been raped. Trembling, terrified, he whisked his son away to get medical help, but was still too scared to raise a formal complaint. According to Ben and Survivors for Justice, “The greatest sin is not the abuse, but talking about the abuse. Kids and parents who step forward to complain are crushed.”

As for Rabbi Rosenberg, when he voiced his concerns to the rabbinate in Israel, he was brought up on charges by the mishmeres hatznuis, the archconservative Orthodox “modesty squad,” which regulates, often through threats of violence, proper moral conduct and dress in the relations between men and women. The modesty squad is a sort of Jewish Taliban. According to Rabbi Rosenberg, the rapist he caught in the act was a member of the modesty squad, which charged him with the unconscionable offense of having previously been seen walking down a street in Jerusalem with a married woman. “But it’s OK to molest children,” he adds.

The abuse and its cover-up are symptoms of wider political dysfunction – or, more precisely, symptoms of socially disastrous political control by religious elites.

“This isn’t a problem about a few aberrant cases or an old-fashioned community reluctant to talk to police about sexual matters,” said Michael Lesher, a practicing Jew who has investigated Orthodox sex abuse and represented abuse victims. “This is about a political economy that links Orthodox Judaism with other fundamentalist creeds and with aspects of right-wing ideologies generally. It’s an economy in which genuine religious values will never really rise to the top, so long as they’re tied to the poisonous priorities that elevate status and power over the basic human needs of the most vulnerable among us.”

Michael, who is completing a book on the topic, noted that the infamous Rabbi Elior Chen, convicted in 2010 in what was arguably Israel’s worst case of serial child abuse, is still defended in public statements by leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Among other legal and moral crimes, the rabbi forced his victims to eat feces, claiming that this cruelty was necessary to “purify” the children he abused.

According to Ben, the ultra-Orthodox community has never been as repressive as it is today. The repression, as he describes it, stems from the burden of having too many children. Huge families are encouraged: every child born to a Hasid is seen as “a finger in the eye of Hitler.” Ben also told me that the average family size among Williamsburg Hasidim is nine, and that some families include more than 15 children.

Mikvah Israel of Boro Park, one of the many mikvahs in Brooklyn that no longer accept Rabbi Rosenberg.

Families saddled with an increasing number of children soon enter into a cycle of poverty. There is simultaneously an extreme separation of the sexes, which is unprecedented in the history of the Hasidim. There is limited general education, to the point that most men in the community are educated only to the third grade, and receive absolutely no sexual education. No secular newspapers are allowed, and internet access is forbidden. “The men in the community are undereducated by design,” Ben said. “You have a community that has been infantilised. They have been trained not to think. It’s a sort of totalitarian control.”

The rabbis, dominating an ignorant and largely poverty-stricken flock, determine the fate of every individual in the community. Nothing is done without the consent of the rabbinical establishment. A man wants to buy a new car – he goes to the rabbi for counsel. A man wants to marry – the rabbi tells him whether or not he should marry a particular bride. As for the women, they don’t get to ask the rabbi anything. Their place is beneath contempt.

Michael told me that current Orthodox leadership, accruing wealth from the tithes of subservient followers, is “drifting to the right, politically as well as religiously.” Many rabbis in New York City have taken up the banner of neoliberalism. “Every English-language Orthodox publication I know embraced Romney during the 2012 elections, decried national health insurance, blamed liberals for bribing the lower classes,” he said. “In Orthodox society, just as in America at large, the financial mismatch between the elite and the rest of us is ominously large.”

Michael also notes that the problem is not confined to the extremists. “The same patterns of victim-blaming, covering up, idealising the rabbis so that cover-ups aren’t even acknowledged, are found all across the spectrum of Orthodoxy,” he told me. “The Orthodox left was shamefully slow to react to Rabbi Baruch Lanner’s abuse or to the similar case of Rabbi Mordechai Elon.” Rabbi Lanner, a former New Jersey yeshiva high school principal, was found guilty in 2000 of sexually abusing dozens of teenage students over the decades of his tenure. Rabbi Elon, who had publicly denounced homosexuality, was convicted last August on two counts of forcible sexual assault on a male minor, following several years of reports of his abuse of young boys.

“I have children come to me with their parents, and the blood is coming out of the anus,” Rabbi Rosenberg told me when we met. “These are zombies for life. What are we to do?”

This of course is the key question, and no answers are forthcoming. Michael holds out little hope that the situation will change. “If Orthodox institutions continue on their current trajectory,” he said, “I’d say things could get worse before they get better.”

A few weeks after our interview, Rabbi Rosenberg was walking through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn when an unidentified man rushed up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and threw a cup of bleach in his face. He went to the hospital with facial burns and was temporarily blinded. Such is the measure of justice among the Satmar that a once-respected rabbi, now amputated from the community, should find himself chemically burned on a street in a neighborhood considered holy.

Later Rabbi Rosenberg told me a story of being surrounded by young boys in Williamsburg. The boys cursed him, laughed at him, threatened him, and spat at him. He wondered how many of them would end up molested.

[By Christopher Ketcham]

American WWII GIs Were Dangerous Sex-Crazed Rapists

The French Feared American GI's As Much As The Germans

• - Book 'debunks myth that the GI were manly and always behaved well'

• - By 1944 women in Normandy 'filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers'

• - Debauchery, lawlessness and institutional racism are chronicled in book

• - Penned by Mary Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin

• - Veterans Affairs rep says there is 'no way' to reprimand the U.S. soldiers

• - Comes just after Sexual Assault Prevention Month in the U.S., where the military is under fire for string of high-profile assault cases

• - Japanese politician also just claimed that American soldiers used their women as 'sex slaves' during WWII

By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE

Swapping stockings for kisses and teaching girls how to jive, American GIs were meant to be a welcome ray of sunshine in war-torn Europe.

But a new book has revealed the dark side of Europe’s liberation after the Second World War. 

Professor Mary Louise Roberts, from the University of Wisconsin, said within months of D-Day ordinary French women came to fear their American ‘liberators’.

American soldiers seen here (who are not related to the book's content) disembarking from Coast Guard landing craft at the shores of Normandy. In an explosive book, Roberts claims that some soldiers terrified French citizens

The professor said previous historical research on the subject paid little attention to this 'dark side' of Europe's liberation. The people in this picture are not related to the book's content

She tells how, by the summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers.

And their arrival prompted a wave of crime all over France, with American soldiers caught committing robberies and petty thefts. 

Professor Roberts said: ‘My book seeks to debunk an old myth about the GI, thought of as a manly creature that always behaved well. The GIs were having sex anywhere and everywhere.

‘In the cities of Le Havre and Cherbourg, bad behaviour was common. 

‘Women, including those who were married, were openly solicited for sex. Parks, bombed-out buildings, cemeteries and railway tracks were carnal venues.

‘People could not go out for a walk without seeing somebody having sex.

‘But the sex was not always consensual, with hundreds of cases of rape being reported.’ 

The locals of Le Havre were shocked by the soldiers’ behaviour and wrote letters of protest to their mayor.

Mary Louise Roberts on rape, race and the American GI

One complaint, from October 1945, said: ‘We are attacked, robbed, run over both on the street and in our houses. 

ONGOING PROBLEM: SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN THE MILITARY

The book, which was released in June, focuses specifically on the soldiers of World War II and their interaction with the French people, but problems of sexual assault in the military persist to today, though now the victims are those in uniform as well. 

The Pentagon is reeling from a series of sex-related scandals in recent weeks, including cases in which military advocates for victims of sexual assault were themselves accused of sex crimes.

Figures from the Department of Defense show a 37 per cent increase in reports of unwanted sexual contact, from groping to rape, last year. About 26,000 cases were reported in 2012. 

'Sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military are a profound betrayal - a profound betrayal - of sacred oaths and sacred trusts,' Mr Hagel said. 'This scourge must be stamped out.'

His comments came a day after President Barack Obama delivered a similar message to graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, saying sexual assault threatened to erode trust and discipline in America's armed forces.

‘This is a regime of terror, imposed by bandits in uniform.’

Le Havre’s mayor, Pierre Voisin, complained to Colonel Thomas Weed – the commander of US troops in the region.

‘Scenes contrary to decency are unfolding in this city day and night,’ Voisin wrote, adding it was ‘not only scandalous but intolerable’ that ‘youthful eyes are exposed to such public spectacles’. 

The mayor suggested the Americans set up a brothel outside the city to avoid public outrage and contain the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. However although US officers publicly denounced the behaviour they did little to curtail it. 

The book also claims the US army ‘demonstrated a deep and abiding racism’, suggesting they pinned a disproportionate number of rapes on black GIs. 

Documents show that of 152 troops disciplined by the army for rape, 130 were black.

Professor Roberts said: ‘American propaganda did not sell the war to soldiers as a struggle for freedom but as a sexual adventure.’

She points out that The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the US armed forces, taught soldiers German phrases like ‘waffen niederlegen’ meaning ‘throw down your arms’.

However the French phrases it recommended to soldiers included ‘you have charming eyes,’ ‘I am not married’ and ‘are your parents at home?’ US magazine Life even fantasised that France was ‘a tremendous brothel’ inhabited by ‘40,000,000 hedonists, who spend all their time eating, drinking and making love’.

A cafe owner from Le Havre said at the time: ‘We expected friends who would not make us ashamed of our defeat. Instead, there came only incomprehension, arrogance, incredibly bad manners and the swagger of conquerors.’

The author claims that when the first soldiers swarmed ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy (pictured) on D-Day, it was 'a veritable tsunami of male lust'

Controversial: Mary Louise Roberts wrote the book to uncover the reality about some GI soldiers

WIDESPREAD PROBLEM: JAPANESE MAYOR CLAIMS AMERICAN SOLDIERS USED WOMEN IN JAPAN AS 'SEX SLAVES' DURING WWII

Controversial: Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that soldiers used 'comfort women' as ways to release tension during WWII

The book comes just one day after a Japanese politician sparked an international row after claiming the use of sex slaves during WWII was justified has tried to shift the blame by accusing other country's of using the same practice. 

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, co-leader of an emerging nationalist party, argued Japan's wartime practice of forcing Asian women into prostitution was necessary to maintain military discipline and provide relaxation for soldiers.

But following the public outcry over his comments, the mayor has attempted to deflect criticism by accusing America and Britain of using sex slaves for its own soldiers.

He said: 'It is a hard truth that even these nations used local women for sexual reasons. This is a historical fact and there is hard evidence that proves it was true.'

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels. While some other World War II armies had military brothels, Japan is the only country accused of such widespread, organized sexual slavery.

Sarajevo My Love

The Story Of Jovan Divjak, An Ethnic Serb Who Defended Sarajevo Against Serb Forces During The Bosnian War.

Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

In Bosnia he is a hero and humanitarian who, since the war, has worked to improve the lives of citizens - Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs alike. But his native Serbia accuses him of being a war criminal and has sought his extradition.

As a young conscript, Divjak served in the elite guard of Yugoslavia’s first president, the country’s founding father Josip Broz Tito.

Under Tito’s rule, Yugoslavia’s ethnic divisions were kept in check and Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Slovenians came together to establish the Republic of Yugoslavia on November 25, 1942. 

But war changed all that and nationalist parties rose to power and fought each other for dominance.

Amidst the conflicts of the 1990s Radovan Karadzic’s propaganda was that co-existence with Bosnian Muslims was impossible.

For Divjak, a Serb who had made Sarajevo his home, there was a hard choice to be made.

On May 3, 1992, Divjak played a role in one of the war’s most bitterly contested incidents, a role which was to stain his reputation.

Serbian forces had taken the Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian president, hostage in a bid to secure the release of a Serbian general. But the exchange went awry and Divjak, a deputy commander who has been handling the operation, was accused of betraying his cause. 

Years later after a forced exit from the army and an end to war, Divjak found solace in helping the children who were scarred by the atrocities of war through his NGO, the 'Education Builds Bosnia’. But this newfound peace was interrupted one day in March 2011 by his sudden arrest in Vienna airport, and request for his extradition to Serbia.

Two decades later, Serbian authorities still held him responsible for the deaths of their soldiers in the bungled hostage exchange but a surprise campaign by locals Serbs who championed his release vindicated him and he was released without charge.

The siege claimed the lives of over 10,000 people, mostly Bosnians, and is often considered the worst act of genocide in Europe since World War II.

Divjak’s NGO work with children victimised by the war is motivated by his belief in a multi-ethnic Bosnia and his own childhood loss of a father figure. And for many in Sarajevo, this has shown that Divjak not only fought to protect them in times past, but is also helping rebuild their future.

The solider who became a husband, a father and then grandfather reminices about the legacy the conflict has left and his part in it: "I never hated the ‘other’. I have created a link and a love bond with the ‘other’. At my age, I try to understand the harm that has been done."

Sarajevo My Love, a film by Eylem Kaftan, profiles the retired Bosnian army general and offers a poignant insight into the painful healing process under way in Bosnia today.

The House Fata Didn't Build

Fata Orlovic is a 70-year-old Bosnian widow. Hers is one of the most intriguing and dramatic war stories of modern times.

Fata's suffering reflects the plight of many Bosnian war refugees still fighting for justice.

Her hometown of Konjevic Polje was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. Her family was separated and decimated in the fighting.

When she returned in 1999, her house had been occupied by an Orthodox priest and a church had been built on her front lawn.

Though the priest has left, the church remains.

She has been fighting to have the church removed ever since. She even won a court ruling agreeing that the church should be removed.

Fata's continued fight to get her land back has even seen her accused of disturbing the religious harmony of the area. She has been beaten and stabbed, and is constantly threatened.

Yet she fights on, determined to get justice or die trying.

Through her story, Al Jazeera presenter Sami Zeidan exposes the ongoing tensions in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.

Srebrenica: A Town Still Divided

A Srebrenica man weeps among hundreds of coffins in Potocari 2011.


Mina Subasic slowly walks with a cane into the missing persons' identification centre in Tuzla, northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the table in front of her is a handful of bones. Her face frozen with pain, Subasic listens to a forensic expert who explains why it would be good if the remains of her 20-year-old son, Mesud, were buried on July 11, along with those of 519 other victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide - a massacre described by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

"I came once more to see him, so I, too, can cross over to the other side. If I could, I would lie down next to these bones right now and never wake up," Subasic says. Mesud's remains were located in two mass graves in the Srebrenica area. The remains of his 18-year-old brother Nermin were buried two years ago.

Wednesday marks the 17th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in which Serb forces reportedly under the command of General Ratko Mladic killed more than 8,000 people, mainly Bosniak Muslim men and boys. While the figure on the headstone at the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre is 8,372, the number of missing persons, experts say, may never be discovered. At midday, an estimated 30,000 people will gather at the centre for the burial of the remains of 520 victims. Among them will be those of six 15-year-old boys, and the oldest genocide victim, a 94-year-old woman. Two Srebrenica families will pay their final respects to three brothers each lost from their homes.


Forensic Pathologist Rifat Kesetovic examines the skulls of Srebrenica genocide victims at the Tuzla Hospital in 1997.


Road To Justice

In Apil 1993, the United Nations declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, in north-eastern Bosnia, populated by 36,000 people (27,000 Bosniaks and 8,000 Serbs) a UN "safe area". In July 1995, a 400-member contingent of Dutch peacekeepers from the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) failed to prevent the capture of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces, assisted by irregular fighter units from Serbia, nor the subsequent mass atrocity.

In a unanimous ruling in 2004, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, ruled that the Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide. Three years later, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concurred with this judgment.


The funeral of Srebrenica man Rudolf Hren in 2010, one of four Catholic genocide victims and the only one to be buried among thousands of Muslim Srebrenica citizens


The then-Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was cleared of direct responsibility for, or complicity in, the massacre, but was found responsible for not doing enough to prevent it and not prosecuting those responsible.

The entire government of the Netherlands resigned in 2002, upon publication of an international report on Srebrenica, which blamed Dutch officials and Dutch soldiers for not preventing the mass killings. In 2005, Kofi Annan, the then-UN Secretary-General, noted that, while the blame lay first and foremost with the perpetrators, the tragedy of Srebrenica would haunt the UN. It has been documented that more than 25,000 people participated in the atrocities in Srebrenica in July 1995. So far, more than 30 people accused of war crimes have been sentenced at the ICTY and at Bosnian war crimes courts. General Mladic and Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic are currently on trial in The Hague, accused of genocide and war crimes.




Srebrenica refugees on the way to Tuzla after the town was captured by Serb forces, July 1995.



Survivors' Tales

When the 520 coffins are laid to rest this afternoon, about 7,000 participants of the annual March of Peace will be present to lend a hand. The 120 kilometre (74 mile) walk marks, in reverse, the path which 10,000 citizens of Srebrenica passed in 1995 on their way to free territory. There are no definite figures on the number of those ambushed and killed by Serb forces during what was then known as the March of Death, but it is estimated that more than two thirds were slaughtered.

Al Jazeera reporter Almir Seckanovic, who has been live blogging from the three-day march, which ended Tuesday night, said only a few women survived the trek in 1995, through inhospitable mountainous terrain in the searing July heat.

"Among them was Fatima Dautbasic-Klempic, a Srebrenica doctor, who was 30 at the time," reported Seckanovic. "During this year's march, at Mt Udrc, she remembered constant grenade attacks, spies who tried to lead the marchers to ambushes, the crashing of booby-trapped trees.

"Today, she is married to Smajo Klempic, a fellow marcher whom she didn't know 17 years ago. He separated from the line at Kamenica Hills and roamed through the forest for 20 days before making it to safety."

After the war, 15 secondary mass grave sites were found in the village of Kamenica - containing the remains of bodies previously buried elsewhere, exhumed, then broken up and reburied. The site is now known as the Valley of Mass Graves.


Family members gather to pay final respects to a genocide victim ahead of a mass burial in 2011


"Marchers this week found several human bones in the valley and they have been handed over to authorities for identification," said Seckanovic. At Mt Udrc, which overlooks the valley, 65-year-old Muharem remembered how he made it to freedom in 1995 after a 10-day trek. "Here, at this turf, I found two potatoes. I had separated from the line and accidentally walked towards these meadows," said Muharem. "Do you know what those potatoes meant to me? Life. For days, I had been eating just fruits and leaves."

This year, one of the speakers at the commemoration will be Holocaust survivor and New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier, one of the leading world figures in the field of inter-religious dialogue.

Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, told Al Jazeera there was no greater evil than nationalism.

"If you want to bring about a reconciliation, there is no shortcut," Schneier said. "There has to be an admission, and also [a recognition that] the present generation is not responsible for the brutality of what happened in the past."

Many of the genocide survivors gathered at the memorial have participated in the Cinema for Peace (CFP) foundation's project in Bosnia and Herzegovina, entitled Genocide Film Library. Inspired by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, CFP aims to record 10,000 video testimonies of Srebrenica genocide survivors over five years. The online archive will be made available to relevant museums and universities worldwide.

"About 95 per cent of those we have contacted have wanted to tell their story," says project director Selma Hadzic. "Some people have found it too traumatic to participate and we fully understand and respect that. We always underscore that this is a volunteer project which exists in memory of those whose voices will never again be heard."


Every year in July 11, citizens of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo place flowers on trucks carrying hundreds of coffins to Srebrenica.


Ethnic Tensions

In Srebrenica, survivors' families have slammed plans for a concert which is to be held at the town's central Serb Orthodox church during the "Days of St Peter" festival, on the same day as the mass burial.

Hatidza Mehmedovic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica group, who lost her husband and two sons, said that such provocation on July 11 were common in a town that remains deeply divided along ethnic lines.

"In previous years, there were songs celebrating Mladic and Karadzic," she said. "We don't expect anything good this year. After all that happened, letting such songs to be sung from year to year... the international community is to blame."

Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of two separately governed units, or entities, the Bosniak-Croat-dominated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS). There is also an overarching state government.

As Srebrenica is part of the RS, whose government does not recognise the genocide, July 11 is not considered a day of mourning as it is in the FBiH.

Srebrenica's primary and secondary schools follow the RS curriculum, which means Serb and Bosniak children, who make up roughly half each of the school's population, are taught that Srebrenica was "freed" in 1995. In a petition currently before the RS Education Department, Bosniak parents are requesting that a joint, more acceptable curriculum is developed for subjects such as language and history.

The ethnic divide is most pertinently felt in activities surrounding the local elections, to be held on October 7. The central fight in these elections is not over which candidate would bring economic prosperity to a war-ravaged town without a bakery, health centre other basic services - but whether they will be Bosniak or Serb.

During the 2008 local elections, a legal exception was made for thousands of displaced Srebrenica citizens to vote in Srebrenica, despite their address at the time of the elections.

Srebrenica's Bosniaks view the removal of this exception as the continuation of ethnic cleansing, says Bosniak candidate for mayor, Camil Durakovic, the current acting mayor and a survivor of the March of Death.

A citizens' group "I'll Vote for Srebrenica" was formed, aimed at lobbying as many displaced Srebrenica citizens as possible to register their residency in the town and vote there. Bosniaks claim they are allowed to work in only one of a handful of local factories, while Serbs say they would be threatened if a Bosniak were mayor.

Durakovic, an independent Bosniak candidate, is backed by 13 citizens groups and the four most influential political parties in the FBiH. His opponent, council head of commerce Vesna Kocevic, a Serb, has the backing of nine RS-based parties.

Durakovic says that he wants to make Srebrenica a multi-ethnic town with a more prosperous future, but one which must not forget genocide. He says Srebrenica's economic potential - its mines and wood industry - were first ravaged through a corrupt post-war privatisation process, while he says the RS government is now blocking council efforts to retain control of the area's vast natural resources. Durakovic estimates that, with better management, Srebrenica could join the ranks of the most developed local councils in Bosnia and Herzegovina within three years.

Kocevic did not respond to numerous Al Jazeera requests for an interview. During a recent press conference in Belgrade - where she lobbied for Srebrenica Serbs displaced in Serbia to register for the local elections - she said that, during 10 years of Bosniak rule, all the money had been channelled into Bosniak interests. She accused the Bosniak vote-registering campaign of being a ruse for the fictitious registrations of people who do not - and would never again - live in Srebrenica.



More than 16,000 shoes placed in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 2010 in memory of the 8,327 genocide victims. .


Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Women Who Refuse To Die

We Follow Four Survivors Of The 1995 Srebrenica Massacre As They Look To The Future Despite The Pain Of Their Past.



"When they took away my children in 1995, they also killed me - in the most brutal manner. This is not life .... I had my family and in just one day I'm left without them, without knowing why. And every morning I ask myself why, but there is no answer. My children were only guilty of having the names they had and their names were different from their killers. It was not only my children killed on July 11, 1995; thousands of other innocent children were murdered in the bloody genocide in Srebrenica .... I no longer have anything to lose; the criminals killed all I had, except for my pride."

Hatidza Mehmedovic

In July 1995, an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys - sons, husbands and brothers - were dragged away never to be seen again.

The Srebrenica massacre marks a particularly inhumane and brutal act within the tragedy and bloodshed of the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War.

My Home, Ripped Apart

A photo of the author examining bullet holes near the cemetery where his family is buried in Bosnia. (Credit: Eldin Trebincevic)

As I watch the Bosnian war crimes trial, I wish I could explain the horrors I saw as a boy, and how much we lost

BY KENAN TREBINCEVIC
SUNDAY, MAY 27, 2012 05:00 PM EDT
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"

My American friend James and I were watching soccer at a restaurant in Queens, but I couldn’t stop reading a story about Ratko Mladic’s trial at the Hague. There were two pictures with the story: One showed him smiling as he listened to his indictment at a pretrial hearing, and another of a mass grave he created.

“What’s that?” James asked.

I wanted to tell James how personal this was. It made me crazy to watch for 16 years as this monster responsible for killing what might be as many as 250,000 of my countrymen eluded authorities. “It’s the modern-day Nuremberg trial,” I said, wishing I could explain better.

I grew up in Bosnia, and fled to America in 1993, at the age of 13, after my family was exiled. A 31-year-old survivor of the war, I am one of the 5,000 Bosnians living in Astoria, Queens. Not long ago, I went back to visit my hometown for the first time since we fled. Vacation for other guys my age means partying, or hanging out with old friends. I spent two weeks visiting graveyards.

On the runway at JFK, I sat between my brother Eldin and my 72-year-old father, Senahid, nervous to return to the land after so many years.

“Which day are we going to the cemetery?” my father wanted to know.

“Which cemetery?” I asked as the plane took off.

The next morning in Brcko, the town of my birth, I climbed into the back seat of our rented car wearing a tank top, jeans and sneakers. My brother Eldin shook his head. “You’re not going like that, exposing your tattoo.” He gestured to the bright blue and yellow coat of arms of the historical Bosnian Flag on my arm. He did not want any trouble.

We were going to see the karate coach, Pero, who betrayed us. Our goal was not to pay respect. It was to see for ourselves that the bastard was dead.

But I’d waited 20 years for this; I would not back down so fast. “Let’s stop so I can get two bottles of water,” I said.

“Why?” my brother asked.  “So you can piss on Pero’s grave?”

Eldin knew me too well. As we parked, I felt his body temperature rise, along with his anxiety.

This was a Serb cemetery. We didn’t belong here. As I walked by the black marble markers and crosses amid the bitter scent of candle wax, I was conscious of sour looks and muttered profanities. How dare I walk over their sons’ graves with that ink on my left shoulder. In 1992, I would have been shot dead.

As I stood over Pero’s grave, I recalled how my brother and I were his favorites in the karate club.  He helped me become the youngest brown belt there.  One happy evening, my mother invited him over for stuffed peppers.

After the war broke out, Pero was put in charge of the city’s special-police unit. I was shocked when he arrived in front of our building in an army van to cleanse the building of non-Serbs like us. We were given an hour to leave, or be killed. My father and brother were thrown in a concentration camp while my mother and I stayed behind.

Pero turned my second home, the sports complex hall where he’d once coached me in karate, into a torture center where corpses of my neighbors were dismembered and stored, my father learned from fellow inmates. Five months later, I passed by Pero standing with a girl holding an AK-47. He pointed his finger at me and laughed. We later heard he was killed by one of his own, a Serb soldier, over a different girl.

“He’s gone, we’re alive and they still have to live next to us,“ my brother Eldin tried to console me at Pero’s grave. His time came before ours.  At least he had a funeral, unlike many of his innocent victims.

The second cemetery, for Bosnian Muslims, was located on the other side of the city. My Grandpa Suljo was buried there. The hatred and bitterness in the city spread to gravesites: Even the dead were split among ethnic groups. When the fighting began, the burial ground became the frontline, and the place was pummeled in order for Serb soldiers to have an unobstructed view. Horses and tractors ripped up and carried away the remaining headstones. Suljo’s tombstone was sliced in half. Reconstructed, it was glued back together at its base, just like we were.

I also found the grave of my great Uncle Sabit. He passed away a few months before our arrival. I had been hoping to go trout fishing, like we used to.

When the Serbs stormed his apartment, he hid behind a bookshelf. His sister, my Great Aunt Fatima, lay in the grave next to him. She sacrificed herself in 2003, jumping in front of a cab to save her granddaughter. Her husband, Smajl, mysteriously died in the hospital during the war. We never found out what really happened. In my final memory he was offering himself to the military police to distract them from finding Sabit and my father, who were hiding.

Last, we visited my Grandmother Emina, who passed away after holding services for the sixth month anniversary of my mother’s death. Heartbroken, it was a no-brainer that she’d go into cardiac arrest.

“Your tattoo looks amazing,” the undertaker said, waving as he walked away.

We belonged here.

We visited two more cemeteries. One contained 556 fighters from our side. Another was a burial ground for both Bosnian soldiers and civilians, a six-hour car ride away.

“Hey, you have to see this guy, he’s not one of us,” I yelled to my brother as I read the Serb name of a soldier buried there: Goran. He was a Serb who fought in the Bosnian Army against his own people; he fought for the good side, despite what he had been born into, and his family put him to rest among his Muslim neighbors. In my book, Goran deserved the most respect.  His ethnicity didn’t matter because he saw the war through the same eyes as everyone else who landed here.  If I’d died in my homeland, this would be the place I’d want to lay.

“You’ll never catch me dead flying over Bosnia,” my mother Adisa used to say after we’d escaped to the United States.

It had been four years since we’d been to see her in Enfield, Connecticut, where we’d promised to spread crushed marble stones on her grave.

“We have to visit mom,” my brother said.

“I know. But it’s too cold. Let’s wait until spring,” I told him.

“That’s what you said last time, “ Eldin said.

I blamed conditions of the war for the disease that killed her. The leading cause of death for Bosnian women who survived was breast cancer, with high malignancy and mortality rates. Ironically, my mom’s cemetery, just a few hours from where we lived in the United States, was the one grave I couldn’t bear to see.

I couldn’t explain all of this to James – the loss and the unbearable grief. Instead, I just remain glued to Ratko Mladic’s trial in a public viewing gallery in the courtroom, hoping that Ratko will be convicted before he dies in a country-style prison and is given a hero’s funeral, like Slobodan Milosevic.

As my family I wait for a semblance of justice to close the 20th century’s bitter chapter called Bosnia, forgiveness is not an option.  It’s hard not to feel that all the wrong people are dead.

Kenan Trebincevic’s work has appeared in the New York Times and on American Public Media radio. He is finishing a memoir about surviving the war called “The Bosnia List.”

MORE KENAN TREBINCEVIC.