From the AP: By Aida Cerkez
SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — The hardest part was the ants. They crawled over his arms and legs, over his face and into his mouth, hour by hour as he pretended to be dead in a pile of corpses slowly turning stiff.
Mevludin Oric lay for nine hours in one of the Srebrenica killing fields where Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic’s troops executed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995. He escaped in the dead of night, after the soldiers had satisfied themselves that everyone in the sea of bodies was dead.
On Thursday, Oric returned for the first time to the execution ground — a pretty V-shaped meadow surrounded by a forest — with Associated Press journalists to share his feelings about the capture of the man who orchestrated Europe’s worst carnage since World War II.
He brought his eldest daughter, 17-year-old Merima. He wanted her to know what happened here — he wants everyone to know, vowing to testify against Mladic at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands.
“I can’t wait to look into the eyes of that animal,” said the lanky 42-year-old, his eyes lighting up after a morning spent on the verge of tears.
Serbia extradited Mladic to the Netherlands on Tuesday to face genocide charges; he was arrested last week in a village north of Belgrade after 16 years on the run.
Oric, a Bosnian Muslim soldier captured by Serbs as he fled through the woods, is one of four men known to have survived the Srebrenica massacre. All endured the unspeakable ordeal of playing dead while Serb troops patrolled the blood-soaked field, finishing off anybody who showed signs of life with a pistol shot to the head
copyright: Associated Press
Comments
I have a feeling that those eyes are pretty dead until the moment a spark of anger lights them up. I did not get the impression of a a sick old man incapacitated by a struck when the arm he couldn’t use for a salute started to become rather animated when he felt contradicted during his initial appearance before the ICTY.