07/01/1993 | Voices from the Drina

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Bosnian Serbs, at least those in rural areas, have the habit of leaving a piece of dried meat in front of their houses on Christmas Eve. If the meat freezes during the night the year will be good, if it does not – it will not. (1/2)

There was a terrible frost that morning in Kravica, fingers were getting stuck on gun barrels, but the meat did not freeze. (2/2)

Today a mass of starved Bosniak civilians trekked to Serb-controlled Kravica for food. When they broke into the village, they found suckling pig on a spit in front of each Serb house as is customary on Orthodox Christmas Day. (1/2)

After the action only the wooden spits remained. When the crowd retreated there was nothing edible left in the village of Kravica. (2/2)

🧵 Imagine the scene in Kravica today… our fighters numbered approximately five hundred. Each fighter had ten to twenty bullets. Behind them were ten thousand men, women and even children waiting, their teeth chattering with cold.

From their trenches the Serb soldiers look through their binoculars and see what is coming at them, counting. A soldier without binoculars asks, ‘What is it?’ They tell him, ‘There are thousands of them out there.’

The other soldiers turn pale, terrified. How can this be? They wonder. Aren’t they all dead already, from starvation if not from all the shells we’ve thrown at them?

They do not know that those ten thousand are desperate souls, mainly unarmed. They do not know that the masses are after food, not Serbs.