Life in the Valley of Death
In Srebrenica, reconciliation between Muslims and Serbs have remained difficult nearly 20 years after the Bosnian Genocide:
Among the Muslims who have returned, the outspoken Fazila Efendic is the anomaly. Far more common is the case of Suleiman Mehmedovic, a 31-year-old laborer who lives with his wife and two children in a tiny apartment at the edge of the town of Srebrenica. Only 12 in July 1995, he left the enclave on a bus with his mother, but his father perished; his wife lost her father and all five brothers. “We just keep to ourselves,” Suleiman said of his life today. “I work alongside Serbs, and it’s O.K. We just never talk about what happened at all.”
To Milos Milanovic, a Serbian member of the Srebrenica City Council, that’s the best that can be hoped for. “There is never any discussion about these things, only arguing,” he told me. During the war, Milanovic, now 50, was a member of the Srspka armed forces and was present at the fall of Srebrenica. “It’s mostly propaganda,” he said of the numbers killed in the July 1995 massacre. “The Muslims have even presented our victims as their victims. They need to keep the death count high to present Serbs as the only criminals and to cover up their own war crimes.”
Greg Ousley Is Sorry for Killing His Parents. Is That Enough?
Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes:
“Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill a dedicated Y.I.A. (Youth Incarcerated as Adults) wing at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. The United States is the only Western nation to routinely convict minors as adults, and the practice has set off a growing disquiet even in conservative legal circles. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, and just last month it similarly banned mandatory sentencing of life without parole in juvenile homicide cases.
“But in this controversy, Greg Ousley is an unlikely representative for sentencing reform. He is not a 16-year-old doing 20 years for his third drug felony or a 13-year-old who found his father’s loaded handgun and shot a playmate. What he is, or was, is a teenage boy who planned and carried out a crime so unthinkable that to most people it is not just a moral transgression but almost a biological one.”