Srebrenica gets multi-ethnic police

The massacre at Srebrenica claimed 7,500 lives

By Alix Kroeger in Srebrenica

The fresh paint - blue and white - makes Srebrenica's new police station stand out dramatically.

Most of the buildings around it are still pockmarked with bullet holes, the last time they were painted was some time before the 1992-95 war. Little appears to have changed since then.

Police officers line the route into town. Two are standing under a tree in a cornfield, guarding the cornerstone laid earlier this year as a memorial to the victims of the Srebrenica massacre.

Police have to guard over the memorial to those who died

Around 7,500 Muslim men and boys were killed when the town fell to the besieging Bosnian Serb army in July 1995, at a time when Srebrenica was supposed to be under UN protection.

Inside the new station, though, there are changes afoot.

The building will house a multi-ethnic police force - almost all Serbs, but with five Bosnian Muslims who have volunteered to return.

The process has been fraught with difficulty. Originally 25 Muslim officers put their names forward, but all of them later withdrew their applications.

The UN blames political pressure from the nationalists, including the Muslim nationalist party, the SDA. The head of the UN mission in Bosnia, Jacques Klein, says without the Muslim police officers, it will be impossible to get other people to come back.

One of the Muslim officers who has returned is Alija Hasic, who made enough money for the rest of his life working as the manager of a rock band in Germany.

Six years since the end of the Bosnian war, the Bosnian Serb Government has not arrested a single war crimes suspect

He has come back to Bosnia to work as a police officer for $90 a month in one of the most difficult parts of the country.

The UN has banned him from talking to the media - it is too politically sensitive now.

The commander of the new police station, Zeljko Vidovic, admits there were problems when the subject of Muslim police officers returning was first raised.

But he says it is all right now, and he hopes the new multi-ethnic force will prevent further violence against returnees.

There have been 12 attacks on returnees in Srebrenica alone since March 2000, another 11 in the neighbouring town of Bratunac.

In Vlasenica, around 50km away, a 16-year-old returnee was shot and killed in July, the day after the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.

Radovan Karadzic is still at large

But many incidents go unreported and uninvestigated, and the vast majority of serious crimes against returnees remain unsolved.

Many refugees say they will not feel safe to return while those who committed crimes against them remain at liberty - in particular Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his general, Ratko Mladic, both indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for genocide at Srebrenica.

Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic says his government has no knowledge of the whereabouts of the two fugitives.

He asks the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to hand over any information it might have - and says his police forces are ready to act.

Srebrenica is now populated largely by displaced Serbs from the Sarajevo area who left after the war

But in six years since the end of the Bosnian war, the Bosnian Serb Government has not arrested a single war crimes suspect.

Srebrenica is now populated largely by displaced Serbs from the Sarajevo area who left after the war, when their leaders told them not to live under the Muslim-dominated government there.

So they packed up their lives and came to Bosnia's eastern edge, living illegally in abandoned Muslim-owned houses.

Excavations on mass graves around Srebrenica are still continuing

The Serbs are now beginning to go back to where they came from - slowly and without much fanfare.

Across Bosnia, 26,000 Serbs have returned to their pre-war homes in areas where they are in a minority so far this year - up 40% already on the year before.

Better laws on property rights have helped - allowing the area's pre-war Muslim population to reclaim their homes.

One official told me the displaced Serbs in Srebrenica were finally beginning to realise that they could not stay for ever, that their government would not keep its promise to give them all a plot of land and a house - usually belonging to someone else.

But progress is slow: less than 10% of claims for Srebrenica have been settled.

And many people - Serbs and Muslims alike - simply want to get their property back so they can sell up and get out for good, shutting the door on a painful past.