Nezuk and Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Thirty years ago, thousands of Bosniak men and boys emerged emaciated from the forests surrounding the quiet Bosnian village of Nezuk.
Their gaunt faces and skeletal frames told only part of the story – visible hints of a far deeper horror that would fully emerge only after the mass graves of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide were found.
Today, Sejfudin Dizdarevic, 48, lives a life worlds apart from the desperate men who once fled through these woods. But he and thousands of others have just spent three days walking the same path.
“Knowing this history, it makes you humble,” Dizdarevic said about his participation in the annual remembrance walk called the Peace March. “Knowing that you are going [on] the path [where] not only people were killed, but also [that those] who survived ... were hiding exactly in the spot [in] which you are marching now.”
In July 1995, the town of Srebrenica and surrounding villages fell to Bosnian Serb forces, whose nationalist and territorial ambitions were emboldened by the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
Bosniak males, who were being hunted, fled the area, crossing the thickly forested slopes of eastern Bosnia for days and even weeks on end in a journey now referred to as “the death march”.
During their trek, they evaded deceptive calls by Bosnian Serb forces, who tried to lure them to surrender with false promises of safety. Many of the Bosniak men and boys saw their counterparts slaughtered en masse and were forced to wade through the pungent odour of their corpses stiffening under the blazing July heat.
Since 2005, Bosnians and people from around the world have been embarking on the three-day, 100-kilometre (62-mile) walk from Nezuk to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potocari, where newly identified victims are still laid to rest each year.
Dizdarevic, a Bosnian war refugee who fled to Germany in 1992, has been returning to take part in the march for the last four years and organising groups of nationals from other countries to join him.
While Dizdarevic, who is Bosniak, was not personally affected by the Srebrenica genocide, some of his family members were killed during Bosnia’s three-year war from 1992 to 1995.
“My intention is to show respect for those who were killed in the genocide,” he explained.