Read Online The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan - Free Book Online Page B

Army—or the JNA, as it was known.”
    â€œWhat are you saying, sir? That Drayton owned a Yugoslav army weapon? Where would he have gotten it?”
    â€œNot Drayton.” Khattak looked at her steadily. “Dra ž en Krstić.”
    She stared back unblinking.
    â€œLieutenant Colonel Dra ž en Krstić was the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the VRS in 1995. He was General Radislav Krstić’s direct subordinate. He was a superior officer to the security organs of the Drina Corps brigades. He also had a unique relationship with the Military Police and the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Main Staff.”
    â€œHold up,” Rachel said. “I’m lost. Main staff of what?”
    â€œThe VRS.” He folded his hands to cover the letters. “The Bosnian Serb Army.”
    There was a deadly little pause. It had never bothered Rachel that Khattak was a decade older than she, but she could see now that it had its disadvantages. He spoke of a war he had witnessed, whereas she had been a child during the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
    Memories of news coverage began to filter through. The secession of a republic known as Bosnia Herzegovina. A UN force on the ground. Shrill politicians. Hand-wringing. Yes, there had been plenty of hand-wringing.
    â€œDid you say 1995?” she whispered. He nodded, his expression not quite impassive.
    â€œAnd the Drina Corps’s area of responsibility?”
    â€œIt was Srebrenica.”
    Srebrenica.
    Now the dread had meaning.
    So too the letters.
    â€œAnd Drayton?”
    â€œTom thinks Drayton may have been Dra ž en Krstić.”
    The notorious war criminal at large. One of the chief perpetrators of the executions at Srebrenica, where eight thousand Muslim boys and men had been murdered near the endpoint of a war that had seen Yugoslavia dissolve into flames. Eight thousand dead in less than a week.
    Their hands tied, their bodies smashed, bulldozed into mass graves in an attempt to obscure the war’s greatest slaughter. An act commonly described as Europe’s greatest atrocity since the Second World War.
    Overlooking the rape, terror, and destruction that had characterized the three long years before the culmination of so much death.
    Khattak could never hear the word Serb without thinking of its dark twin, Srebrenica.
    And he could not think of Srebrenica without remembering his younger self, a self whose ideals and vocation were nearly lost to him now. The younger self that had participated in a student network against genocide, brave or foolish enough to accompany a humanitarian aid shipment to the once exquisite city of Sarajevo.
    On Tuesday there will be no bread in Sarajevo.
    He heard the cellist’s melody again: mournful, insistent, accusing. It had sounded as a requiem in the streets of Sarajevo.
    You failed us.
    And then you watched us die.
    The shipments had been no more than a bandage. Inadequate, deficient, robbed at airports and checkpoints by the same guns that had wiped the history of Bosnia from the map. The theft of United Nations fuel had supplied tanks and convoy lines, enabling the war to continue unto a world without end.
    Memory itself erased.
    A fig leaf in the end, for stone-faced passivity in the face of mass murder and the camps created for the purpose of torture and rape. The names indelibly stamped in memory: Omarksa, Manja č a, Trnopolje, Keraterm.
    It wasn’t passivity that had defeated the Muslims of Bosnia. He thought now that such merciless slaughter could never have been possible without the international community’s intervention. Forestalling air strikes. Appeasing the architects of the war while military units with names like the White Eagles and Drina Wolves pillaged and burned. Equivocating over “warring factions,” eager to accept the fiction that a people under threat of extinction had fired mortars upon their own marketplaces to generate international sympathy