TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — As the 10th anniversary of the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica approaches, human rights groups are pressing the Serbian government to confront the atrocities committed during the Bosnian war. Until very recently, they have had little hope of success.
But the surprise disclosure of a nearly decade-old video that shows Serb forces executing six unarmed, emaciated Bosnian Muslims has altered the public debate in ways nothing else probably could have. Nearly two weeks later, the graphic images continue to shake the two communities.
For Serbs -- who heard their former president, Slobodan Milosevic, deny for years that troops from Serbia had even participated in the war in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, let alone committed war crimes -- the images came as a shock. They showed men in what appeared to be the black uniforms worn by Milosevic's special police units being blessed by an Orthodox priest in a Serbian town before setting out on their cold-blooded mission.
The tape's emergence could affect the trial of Milosevic and some of his associates, since it appears to link wartime atrocities to paramilitary units believed to have been controlled by the upper reaches of the Serbian government. Milosevic, who has challenged the authenticity of the tape, is on trial in The Hague before the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is prosecuting war crimes suspected to have been committed in the 1990s during the bloody breakup of the Yugoslav federation.
But the effect in Serbia, once the dominant constituent republic of Yugoslavia, seems likely to outstrip its potential influence in The Hague. The video has prompted at least the beginning of a reappraisal of Serb responsibility for war crimes in Bosnia.
Ljiljana Smajlovic, a Serbian political analyst, likened the video's effect to the photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib. "These pictures were shocking to Serbs because the images of the killers -- completely cold, no emotion -- clashed profoundly with the way Serbs see themselves.
"We saw these young men" -- the Bosnian Muslim victims -- "thin, frail, beaten up, horrible," Smajlovic said. "The video has changed the public mood."
Since the tape's broadcast this month, government officials in the ethnically Serb portion of Bosnia have admitted that forces from Serbia were active on Bosnian territory during the war.
