In Europe

raped. The men of the police and militia jeered that this way they would at least bear ‘Serbian babies’. Omarska was discovered in summer 1992 by Ed Vulliamy of the
Guardian
. He visited the camp ‘canteen’ and watched in horror as thirty emaciated men were given three minutes to gulp down a sort of piping-hot gruel. ‘The bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced,’ he wrote. ‘They are alive but decomposed, debased, degraded, and utterly subservient, andyet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with looks like blades of knives.’
    All these camps were part of a strategy of terror and intimidation that soon began having the desired effect: within six months, most Muslims and Croatians had left the Serb territories. Europe experienced the biggest refugee crisis since the one right after the Second World War. By late 1992, almost two million Bosnians had fled, with more than half a million of them seeking asylum in Western Europe. The Serbs were almost satisfied: they now had their hands on most of the country, and almost all of the Croatians and Muslims had disappeared from their territories. The only problem they had left had to do with Sarajevo, the capital of their dreams, and with the handful of remaining Muslim enclaves, towns filled with refugees that had until then been able to repulse the Serbian attacks. Towns like Goražzde, žZepa and, most famous of all, Srebrenica.
    The old village of Srebrenica was once an idyllic place which had grown up around a silver mine and was, from the nineteenth century, a fashionable spa. In fact, it was nothing more than a single long street at the end of a deep valley. There was a boulevard where the young people strolled, a café with a terrace where you were served by waiters in bow ties, the ‘Bosnia’ cinema, an excellent hospital and, at Hotel Guber, a world-famous spring ‘for healthy blood’. Around 1990 there were 6,000 people living there, a quarter of them Serbs, the rest Muslims.
    Srebrenica, however, lay in the middle of the area which the Serbs had claimed for themselves. And when they also began their campaign of ethnic cleansing here, a well organised local movement began offering strong resistance.
    One of the most important Muslim leaders was Naser Orić, a former bodyguard to Miložsević. Orić and his gang, in turn, began terrorising the surrounding Serbian villages. At first these Muslim militias did their best to conquer entire sections of countryside, and even to link up with the Muslim area around the city of Tuzla. But that did not work out. Around Srebrenica itself, however, a huge Muslim enclave soon arose in the middle of Serb territory. Orić became the local hero. In summer and autumn 1992 he attacked a large number of villages and farmhouses in the surroundings, murdering Serb families who had stayed behind and plundering their stores.
    In the course of time, these forays became vitally important. The Serbs had blocked all roads into the enclave, and as winter approached the food supply became a major problem. The inhabitants of Srebrenica were forced to live on feed corn, oats and dandelion salad. At night the town was plunged into total darkness: the only electricity was generated by a series of primitive waterwheels in the nearby stream. At a certain point the Muslims even proposed an exchange of prisoners: one live Serb for two fifty-kilo sacks of flour. During winter 1992–3, dozens of men, women and children in the enclave died of starvation.
    The Muslims, by the same token, had burned down at least thirty villages and seventy hamlets. Estimates are that somewhere around a thousand victims fell among the local Serb farming population, and the Serbs were furious. At the Yugoslavia Tribunal in the Hague, British negotiator David Owen later stated that Miložsević had warned him in early 1993 that if the Bosnian Serbs took the enclave, there would be a ‘bloodbath’ or a ‘massacre’. And, starting that winter, the Serbs actually began gaining ground in the area around Srebrenica. At last, all that remained was Srebrenica itself and a little fringe of land, a tiny island in Serbian Bosnia packed with Muslim refugees.
    The immediate threat to the enclave was countered thanks to the mediation of the United Nations. In March 1993, the French commander of the UN troops, General Philippe Morillon, appeared in Srebrenica. He addressed