At Ljubovija, the Serbian federal army has inaugurated a new border post between Serbia and the new Bosnia and Herzegovina in the worst way: a massacre. This town lies on the Serbian side of the river Drina, 50 kilometres south of Zvornik. The checkpoint is a bridge, guarded on the Serbian side by the Serbian army and on the Bosnian side by the Serbian militia — a curious conception of a border.

On the Bosnian side, the road crosses the town of Bratunac and then sinks into the hills around Sarajevo or Tuzla. Five -kilometres later, the smoke coming out of burnt homes in a field -attracts our attention. A curiosity stop. A few hundred metres further, a dirt road leads to a town set among several sloping pastures. There, we find a concert of weeping. Women of all ages, veiled, wearing long robes, sometimes covered with a denim jacket, cry in the gardens, on roadsides, in yards. There are -only three men. Nearby is the spectacle of houses completely destroyed, recumbent cows, farm equipment broken: the scene of a massacre.

This village, called Hranca, has a population of about a hundred Muslim families, mostly earning their living by growing fruit or forestry, or working in the local factories held by Serbs. There has been no significant disturbance here since hostilities in the -region began. And nothing particularly memorable during the  Second World War. A Muslim village in a Serb-held area. Occupied Bosnian territory.

But on Saturday, May 2, dozens of Serbian policemen and -militiamen rode to the village, raiding houses and demanding the return of shotguns. Terrorising the inhabitants, they were, it seems, largely obeyed, and they left for their encampment near Bratunac. The next day, about 30 men in army fatigues returned at 11 o’clock. Mostly masked, they were armed and equipped with cans of petroleum. Seeing them coming, most of the men tried to flee into the forest overlooking the village. The women remained. The Serbian militiamen — half from the surrounding Serbian villages, half from beyond — began their work. Systematically and calmly, they blew up everything with grenades and burnt 40 houses with the petroleum. They killed almost all of the cattle, except for one cow that now moos in plaintive solitude. Some stopped and took away a dozen men in front of their families. Others set off in pursuit of those who had fled into the woods, with bursts of Kalashnikovs.

At the top of a hill is the home of the Ramic family. A dozen militiamen kicked their way in. They found three men in the cellar with refugee women. Camil, the father, his brother Sacir, 35 years old, and his son Osman, 24. They beat the last two to death, before shooting them. People point to two pools of blood behind a hedge where the two men were shot in the head, the crushed skull of one victim,  the traces of knife wounds to the chest, and  the deep-set eyes and bloodied face of the second leaving no doubt about the veracity of their abuse and their murders.