In the summer of 2005, a decade after the genocide in the United Nations-protected area of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs slaughtered more than 8,000 mainly civilian Muslim men and boys, I received a phone call from a friend in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who reported that Natasa Kandic, a Serbian human rights activist, had tracked down a snuff film made in Srebrenica by a paramilitary group, the Scorpions. Kandic had heard that members of the Scorpions proudly murdered some of the Bosnian men on camera. At huge personal risk, Kandic found a former member of the group, drove to Croatia, and confronted him. She got a copy of the video and sent it to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
The film is utterly sickening. It shows helpless Bosnian men herded out of a truck—beaten, begging for water, pleading for their lives. Both older men and teenagers, they were forced to dig their own graves before they were shot. I will never forget the killers mocking and deriding their victims as they faced death in raw terror.
