“I had it in mind/ to slay Kaleva’s kin

 to get the Sampo to Northland.”  Runo 42

SREBRENIÇA

A poem by Jane Piirto

© Jane Piirto  All Rights Reserved

“That was a good hunt.  There were a lot of rabbits there.“

–Serbian soldier, 7/13/95

In the moonlight the back hoes

wove into the stony field.

Nezad Avdic, 17, wounded,

collapsed sideways.

Piled bodies made the field

seem covered by low bushes.

Hurem Suljic, 55, crippled,

boarded the bus as ordered.

They were taken to Bratunac,

put into a warehouse.

Busloads of Muslim men

came and went.

400 crowded in.

Soldiers took 40 out in back—

young, strong, virile ones—

beat them, killing them.

Their animal screams

sounded like a slaughterhouse.

Next day they ordered

10 men to bury them.

That afternoon the Serbs

separated Nezad and the others,

put them in a schoolhouse,

sent their women on a march.

Dutch peacekeepers called for air strikes.

U.N. commander Bernard Janvier

vetoed the idea.

Srebreniça was already lost.

Bosnian Serbian Army General

Satko Mladiς threatened massacre.

Diplomats urged Serbian President

Slobodan Milosevic to rein Mladiç in.

Afraid more peacekeepers would be held hostage

the Dutch looked on, quiet,

while Mladiç’s Serbs

put the men on buses.

The war crime tribunal at the Hague

arrested Mladiς in 1999.

We saw it all on television.

Don’t you remember? During dinner?

with green peas and corn

French fries and burgers.

“Faster! Faster!  Go!

Go!”

Nurse Christine Schmidt wrote,

“Everybody should feel the

violence on the faces

of Bosnian Serb soldiers.”

Satellite photos on July 13, 1995

from a U-2 spy plane

2 weeks later, showed up

only some freshly turned fields.

At another school nearby

2,500 blindfolded men boarded school buses.

They took them to the damp moonlit fields,

shot them in rows of four abreast.

Suljic, nestled under two dead men,

saw it all.

Hakija Husseinovic, age 52,

was taken to an agricultural warehouse.

Serbs shot through the window

with automatic rifles and grenade launchers.

He covered himself with two bodies,

waited for two days.

A priest expressed no remorse at the killings,

only at tortures.

“I would kill a Turk

but wouldn’t torture.”

In October thousands

of men and boys

captured around Banja Luca disappeared.

To Dayton, Ohio’s Wright

Patterson Air Force Base

Mlosovic came for proximal peace talks.

Sitting in separate rooms

they passed messages back and forth.

The night the story broke

in the New York Times

the ABC Nightly News featured

a story about the miracle of science,

showing us how the human brain

processes information and where.

By now it is all so prosaic—

Rwanda, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala,

Armenia, the Holocaust, Tibet, Cambodia—

how no one will ever plumb

black depths of the human heart—

how the tribal vendettas will be perpetuated

through the centuries—

how revenge breeds revenge—

how blood tells, blood rules, and  blood damns—

til the ozone layer dissipates

and the sun burns earth.