Video Alters Serbs' View of Bosnian War

And in Serbia, citizens horrified at the images even seemed ready to accept the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who has remained a venerated figure for years, despite his indictment for war crimes by the international tribunal. A day after the video was shown at The Hague, 10 of the men believed responsible for wartime atrocities were taken into custody, some of them alleged to be members of the unit shown on the tape.

It remains unclear the extent to which recent developments will further the reconciliation process in Serbia and Bosnia, once also part of the former Yugoslav federation. But the story of how the tape finally came into the hands of a human rights activist and an international prosecutor demonstrates that the walls of silence and denial are starting to erode.

The video, shown at the Milosevic trial June 1, appeared on national TV news in Bosnia and Serbia later that day with an introduction by an announcer saying, "Now a mother will recognize a son; a sister will recognize a brother."

One of the mothers who did was Nura Alispahic, a Bosnian Muslim from the town of Srebrenica with intense blue-gray eyes and dark hair.

She and her daughter Magboula, 39, had turned on the 10 o'clock evening news. "I immediately recognized Azmir" -- her son -- Alispahic recalled, tears coming to her eyes as she sat in the cramped living room of her small house on the edge of Tuzla, the northeastern Bosnian town where she now lives.

"There were six prisoners. First they [the Serbian forces] killed four of them, then they said, 'Take them away,' and my son and another had to carry the bodies to a small ravine. Then they killed the fifth one, and after that my son turned toward the camera and he was looking around as if he was looking for someone, for some help."

Azmir was 16, the youngest of her four children, the one who wanted to become a doctor. On July 11, 1995, Alispahic had urged him to leave Srebrenica. Serbian forces were at the gates of the city, which the United Nations had designated as a safe haven for Muslims who had been forced from their homes elsewhere in eastern Bosnia, and there was widespread fear that all the men and older boys would be killed.

Azmir went off with a small group, but then suddenly was back on his mother's doorstep. " 'I didn't kiss you goodbye; I want to kiss you goodbye,' " she remembered him saying. She kissed him and then hurried him off. Somewhere in the forest outside the city, he was captured.