CRNI VRH, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Dzevad Malkic came to the base of this mountain Friday from St. Louis to join with several hundred other men and women in an act of defiance - to show that the worst form of inhumanity was not enough to cleave them from their families, their faith or the land of their fathers.

The group set off shortly after 7 a.m. from the mountain, whose name translates as Black Peak, on a three-day hike through the forest and soaring hills, a journey meant to symbolize what has become known among Bosnians as the March of Death.

Their destination, which they expect to reach Sunday evening, lies about 45 miles to the southeast, near the town of Srebrenica. It was there that 10 years ago Monday nationalist Serb police and military forces overran the United Nations-declared "safe haven" where 40,000 Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge. By the time the slaughter ended, Serbs had massacred more than 7,800 Muslims, mostly men and boys. The U.N. War Crimes Tribunal would later declare the atrocities genocide, the worst case in Europe since World War II.

"It's very important that we show the world that Bosnian Muslims want to go back to Srebrenica, that they can't drive us away, that this is our land, our home," said Malkic, a slight, intense man with pensive eyes. "It's important to make this march to show the Serbs that they didn't succeed in destroying (our) presence there."

The Serbs' attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the region helped prompt a flood of refugees that in time would lead St. Louis to become home to one of the largest Bosnian communities outside of Europe. One local service agency estimates that between 35,000 and 40,000 Bosnians now live in the St. Louis area. Within that community are about 4,000 to 5,000 survivors of Srebrenica (sreh-breh-NEET-sah), the largest such concentration anywhere outside of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Town's fall

When war broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1992, Malkic was teaching elementary school-age children in Poznanovic, a tiny village of about 300 people a few miles east of Srebrenica.

Soon, the killers arrived.

On May 15, 1992, Serb soldiers attacked the village. They burned houses to the ground, beheaded many of the residents and dropped others alive from a bridge that spanned the nearby Drina River.

The Malkic family survived but spent the next year living in a creek bed with only a tarp to protect them from the elements. They lived off the land, eating berries and mushrooms.

In March 1993, the family sought refuge at a cousin's house in Srebrenica. Within days Malkic sent his wife, Sadeta, now 36, and their two young children to the Muslim-controlled city of Tuzla, where they would be safer.

Malkic and his wife communicated only a handful of times over the next few years, mostly through letters delivered through the Red Cross or by shortwave radio.

In Srebrenica, Malkic and a few other teachers organized a school for the growing number of refugee children flooding into the town and surrounding countryside. He also took up arms to defend the city, by now under constant Serb shelling and bombing.

On July 11, 1995, the town fell.

About 25,000 inhabitants, mostly women, children, the old and the infirm, fled to a U.N. military base in the nearby town of Potocari.

There, Bosnian Serb soldiers separated men and boys from women and other children. The women were put on buses and most made it safely to Tuzla. An estimated 1,700 of the men and boys were massacred, among them Sadeta Malkic's father. The killers dumped many of the bodies into mass graves.

Meanwhile, Dzevad Malkic was among 12,000 to 15,000 people, mostly unarmed boys and men of fighting age, some as young of 14, who took to the surrounding forest on foot to try to reach Muslim-controlled territory, about 30 miles away.

Through the forest

The next day, deep in the forest about a dozen miles west of Srebrenica, most of the men gathered along the only escape route.

Malkic wore black pants, a shirt and sneakers. He carried a map, binoculars, a compass, a loaf of bread, a bottle of water and a pistol. With him were many of his relatives.

The men set off under a clear blue sky through a valley laced with land mines. Serb observers on the surrounding hilltops spotted the slow-moving column and called in artillery. The barrage killed about 100 men near the end of the line and scattered the rest, Malkic said.

When some were able to regroup, they found out that many of their leaders had been caught and then beheaded, hung or shot.

The men hid among the trees and from then on moved only at night. Some went in search of water but found that Serbs had poisoned the wells.

At nightfall, Serb soldiers in civilian clothes mixed in with the fleeing group. Not much later, gunfire erupted. Malkic fell to the ground and began to crawl. He said he felt men run past and over him trying to escape. When the shooting ended 30 minutes later, men screamed, cried and called for help.

The next day, Serbs again infiltrated the group and lured people away by telling them they knew the way to safety, Malkic said. Groups of men ranging from 10 to hundreds followed and never returned.

The ambushes continued. Eventually, Malkic found himself alone.

He reached a two-lane blacktop road near the village of Konjevici.

For about two weeks, he sat almost motionless in the bushes and waited for an opportunity to cross the half-mile stretch of open expanse. Eventually he gave up.

He backtracked to where the column had been ambushed the first day. There he found about 1,000 bodies, including some of his relatives. At night, he and a few other survivors crept among the corpses, removing bread and other food from their backpacks and clothing.

When the men exhausted the food supply, they again headed south, back toward Srebrenica, passing to the west of the town toward Zepa. They moved only at night and searched for fruit, herbs and even leaves and grass to eat.

Every day men would come and go from the group, the numbers and faces constantly changing. At night, he said, he could hear screaming as men were beheaded and Serb soldiers would shout, "Here's my 100 marks," a reference to the bounty he said they were paid for each dead Muslim.

From his hiding places, he saw men surrounded by Serb soldiers and executed, including two of his colleagues who'd helped him open the school in Srebrenica. Others mistook Serb soldiers for fellow Muslims, only to be shot when they approached seeking help, Malkic said.

"It becomes normal for you," he said of the killing. "You don't think about it. At any moment, you expect to be next. The desire for survival overcomes every other feeling."

Some weren't so strong. They hung or shot themselves or asked others to do it for them, he said.

At night, they would stay on the move, sometimes covering as much as a dozen miles, only to end up in the same place they began.

After another two weeks or so, he and seven other men and young boys, including his wife's brother, began to head north and west again, toward Muslim-held ground near Kladanj. They walked for about seven days and could often hear Serb soldiers hunting for them.

Finally, at 11 a.m. on Aug. 29, near the village of Stupari, the group spotted men in uniform with patches on their sleeves that identified them as Bosnian Muslims.

The uniformed men gave the haggard group cigarettes, tea and dry clothes, and later, food. Malkic hugged the men, kissed them and then began to cry. After 48 days on the run, they were safe.

Of the 15,000 men who entered the forest on July 12, some reached free territory in less than a week. For others it took about nine months. Only about half survived. Among the dead were three of Malkic's uncles and many cousins.

A new life

The family eventually moved into a home near Sarajevo that had been deserted by a Serbian family. But the owner returned, and the Malkics had to move out. Dzevad Malkic wanted a better life for his children. He applied to be declared a refugee. The family arrived in St. Louis on Sept. 4, 2001, and like many other Bosnians settled in south St. Louis.

Dzevad Malkic soon found a job driving a truck. Sadeta Malkic went to work as a cook in a nursing home. Their two oldest children, son Almir, now 21, and daughter Almira, now 19, graduated from Soldan High School. Their youngest, Elmir, 2, was born at St. Anthony's Hospital.

A back injury put Dzevad Malkic out of work for 14 months. He then got a job as a machine operator in a bag factory. He quit when his employers refused to give him time off to come back for this week's march. It was too important to miss, he said.

Both Dzevad and Sadeta Malkic say they hope to return to Bosnia for good some day to be with family members.

"There was no better life than here before the war," Dzevad Malkic said. Asked what St. Louis means to him, he said, "I look at St. Louis as a source of life."

Still, to this day, he has nightmares that he is being chased. At times his wife will find him with his head wedged between the bed and the wall, as if he's trying to hide.

He wakes drenched in sweat. Only then does he realize he is safe and free.

Retracing the march

On Friday, Malkic and about 500 men and women set out underneath a bright blue sky. Organizers estimated that 100 to 300 of the participants were survivors of the massacre at Srebrenica. Malkic recognized no one else from St. Louis.

Security was tight.

A mine-detection team had swept the route. Planners said they worried not so much about the mines that were planted during the war, but new mines that might have been planted to disrupt the march. The threat seemed all too real. On Tuesday, authorities found explosives planted at a memorial to the victims in Potocari.

About 50,000 people - including members of about 100 families from St. Louis - are expected to gather at the site Monday for a commemoration and to bury 583 newly identified remains. Authorities said bomb disposal experts removed 66 pounds of explosives from two separate locations inside the memorial grounds.

On Friday, police and soldiers manned positions along the march route and helicopters circled overhead.

As the marchers passed through Muslim villages still showing the scars of war, women in peasant dresses, their heads covered by scarves, waved and said good luck.

Malkic said he felt happy to walk the route without fear. "This is the road of salvation," he said. "This is the road that saved us. It brings me joy."

At some points along the route, it wasn't much of a road at all. The marchers would come to a halt as they struggled up steep muddy inclines in single file.

At several points during the day, the column of marchers stopped at the site of mass graves and prayed.

At one, investigators previously recovered the remains of 310 bodies, all beheaded. Not a single skull was found. Now the site is covered by a garden of tomatoes, potatoes, pole beans and melons.

At lunch, many of the marchers, red-faced and drenched in sweat, stopped and removed their shoes and socks and cooled their feet in a cold mountain stream.

After eight hours and 15 1/2 miles, the marchers ended their first day next to a school in the partially rebuilt village of Kamenica Donja. Malkic, exhausted, climbed into a large green military tent, removed his shoes and wrapped gauze around the blisters on his feet. He lay down on a mat and fell fast asleep - safe and free.


Reporter Phillip O'Connor
E-mail: poconnor@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8321