Bosnian city remembers young victims
of marketplace shelling six years ago
By Ron Jensen, Bosnia
bureau
Ivana Avramovic / Stars and Stripes
Tuzla's choir performs during Friday's ceremony remembering the 71 victims of the deadly
shelling six years ago. |
TUZLA, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Here is where the shell hit.
A bronze shield of the city marks the spot. It is in the marketplace of the city’s
old town, packed with young people on a warm spring evening on May 25, 1995.
That’s when the shell hit. At 8:55 p.m.
And when the bodies were removed and the blood washed away and the city measured the
breadth of the tragedy, it counted 71 dead. More than twice that many were wounded.
No one could believe it. At three years into the war, the sound of shells hitting the
city had become so commonplace that explosions only a few blocks away failed to even
disrupt conversations.
Such blasts had become part of the urban landscape of a city under siege, like a
burning trash bin or an empty butcher shop.
Anyone ducking when a shell hit more than a few blocks away was laughed at. Teased.
And here, where the shell hit that awful night, was a safe place. Or so it was
considered.
The buildings rise around it so that only a lucky shot — a one-in-a-million shot
— would have just the right angle, just the right trajectory to land here where the
young people gathered in the evening to drink coffee and beer, to talk and to flirt.
But in the days after the shell hit, a realization emerged. The shells of the previous
few days that hit here and there were not as random as they had seemed.
The Bosnian Serb gunners hidden in the hills were adjusting their fire, pinpointing the
marketplace in the old part of town where young people gathered by the hundreds when the
weather was right. They were planning for days to drop a shell in this place.
And so they did at 8:55 p.m., May 25, 1995, and the resulting carnage was knee-deep
body parts and cobblestones made slippery by blood and tissue.
Cars on a nearby street were commandeered by police to serve as ambulances. Anyone with
any medical knowledge at all — high school kids studying science, even — were
asked to make their way to the hospital to augment overwhelmed nurses and doctors.
Limbs were amputated in hallways. People died on the hospital steps.
Ivana Avramovic / Stars and Stripes
A Tuzla youth lights a candle for the 71 victims of the shelling six years ago. |
The dead included Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. So, too, does the
population of this city that tried to turn its back on the war, that rejected the ethnic
hatred that inflamed the violence.
Many were buried at night. Daytime funerals were a target just as inviting as young
people gathering at dusk. Only family members could attend the graveside services. Even in
darkness, the risk was too great.
The cemetery for most of the shell’s victims is on a hillside visible from town.
At any time of day even now, a father or mother or sister or brother visits a grave to
weep or pray or remember.
These were young people, these 71 dead. Teen-agers, mostly, though some in their 20s. A
few were even younger, a few older.
For some time, a glass frame hung near the spot where the shell hit. It held
photographs of many of the dead. Young and smiling faces. Gone.
Now the frame is gone, too. The city has erected a simple memorial and placed the city
shield on that terrible spot.
Tuzla stops every year at 8:55 p.m. May 25 to remember. On Friday, they came by the
thousands to the old town’s market place, a warren of cafes and shops and ice cream
parlors.
Friends of the dead came. Family members, too. So did people who knew none of the
victims but felt the tragedy just the same.
A city choir of nearly 100 young voices stood under lights and sang a Requiem. And then
each singer walked past the place where the shell hit and dropped a single white
carnation.
And then others came forward and laid flowers and lit candles and said prayers at that
terrible spot.
No words were spoken. None were necessary.
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