Bringing a dark story to light

A scene from The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent.

On February 27th 1993, Tomo Buzov took the last journey of his life. The 63-year-old Croat boarded a train from platform four in Belgrade’s main railway station. Train 671 was heading to Bar in Montenegro. The distance was roughly 500 kilometres. Buzov – a retired officer from the Yugoslav People’s Army – was visiting his son, Darko, who was then serving his military service in Podgorica, Montenegro. The journey should have taken less than eight hours. But the train was already delayed by an hour when it finally pulled out of the Serbian capital. Just minutes after departing, the conductor, accompanied by two policemen, asked passengers for their tickets. Additionally, he requested their names and surnames.

By afternoon, the train had crossed into Bosnia-Herzegovina, randomly stopping in a small village, Štrpci, where passengers were asked, yet again, for identity documents. This time, however, the request came from Bosnian Serb soldiers. They were on a hunt for Bosnian Muslims, commonly known as Bosniaks.

It was two years into the Bosnian War (1992-1995): one of several interrelated multi-ethnic sectarian conflicts fought across the Balkans during the 1990s, as Yugoslavia broke apart. In Bosnia, the conflict was particularly bloody. 100,000 people were killed and a further two million (half the population) were displaced.

Passengers aboard train 671 would have understood the potential danger awaiting individuals being asked to leave because of their ethnicity-religion. To save themselves, they remained silent. Tomo Buzov chose not to. First, he stood up in his seat. “Stop, people, what are you doing, is there law in this country?” Buzov is believed to have shouted. A Bosnian Serb soldier heard Buzov’s angry protests. But he didn’t argue. “Get out”, he replied, immediately removing Buzov from the train.

That afternoon, Buzov was one of 20 passengers removed from train 671, then tortured and killed. The oldest victim was 59 years old, the youngest was 16. The killings were carried out by the special unit “Avengers” of the Republika Srpska Army, under the command of Milan Lukić. In 2012 he was sentenced to life imprisonment by The Hague Tribunal for committing war crimes in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, but not for the Štrpci deaths.

That day at Štrpci, 18 of the victims were Bosniaks. The identity of the other remaining passenger has never been established. To date, only four bodies of the 20 have been recovered. It’s believed the remaining corpses were likely dumped in the Drina River, which forms a border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. Like numerous war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, the legal battle for justice is long and complex.

In 2002, a Montenegrin court sentenced Nebojša Ranisavljević to 15 years for his participation in the abduction of civilians in Štrpci. In October 2022, in Bosnia, seven individuals were sentenced to 13 years in prison each for a war crime which begun at the Štrpci train station. In Serbia, in 2018, five defendants said to have participated in the Štrpci massacre were indicted. That year, their trial began in a Serbian court. But it has been subject to many delays and complications. Two of the accused – Ljubiša Vasiljević and Jovan Lipovac who were initially sentenced to 10 years each for crimes against civilians – have since died, and their sentences were subsequently dismissed.

Then on October 30th 2023, the court of appeals in Belgrade overturned the original verdict and sent it back for reconsideration. The new trial was rescheduled for January 2024 but has been postponed. No investigation has ever been formally opened into who ordered the killings of the 20 victims at Štrpci.

In February 2014, in the Split daily, Slobodna Dalmacija, Boris Dežulović called the Štrpci train massacre “one of the darkest stories in modern Serbian history”. The Croatian journalist published those words in an article marking the 21st anniversary of the sectarian killings. Specifically, his piece focused on Tomo Buzov’s unrecognized bravery and courage. “Tomo Buzov was killed by Chetniks, but Croatia does not remember him because he lived in Belgrade,” Dežulović wrote: “Nor does Serbia remember him because he was a Croat, [who] opposed a Serbian soldier.”

“This brilliant journalistic piece feels to me like a piece of literature,” Croatian director, Nebojša Slijepčević explained over a mid-morning espresso in the lobby of Hotel Dubrovnik in central Zagreb. “After reading it, I was immediately inspired to make a short film about the story it told, but my intention was not to make a history lesson,” said the documentary filmmaker whose other films include My Neighbour Wolf (2022) Srbenka (2018) Something About Life (2016) and Red Slide (2025).

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (2024) is a fictional reimagining of Tomo Buzov’s last living moments. It premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded a Palme d’Or for Short Film. “Fundamentally, this is a film about good and evil,” said Slijepčević. “From the moment I came up with the idea for it, I knew it would all need to take place in real time, in a narrow claustrophobic space of a train compartment in less than 15 minutes.”

The short film has since won several other prizes at film festivals across the globe. At this year’s Academy Awards in Los Angeles, it was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film. “Maybe my life would have become more complicated if I won that Oscar, so in a way I was relieved,” said Slijepčević.

His award-winning film opens in darkness, as we listen to the sound of wheels passing over rail joints. There is haunting quality to the repetitive rhythm. “Where this crime happened, Štrpci, is positioned between two tunnels,” Slijepčević explained. “For me, this coming in and out of darkness is a good metaphor.”

When the train’s brakes screech to a sudden halt, a face gradually comes into focus. The man appears to be in his mid-30s. He looked tired and anxious. He is sharing the train compartment with five others, including two young girls. Someone announces that the stop wasn’t planned. The man goes to the corridor of the train for a cigarette. There, he notices a younger man. The two men return to the compartment and converse. The older man, Dragan (Goran Bogdan), introduces himself. The younger man, Milan (Silvio Mumelaš) looks terrified. He doesn’t have his identity papers, he tells Dragan. But even if he did, they would reveal he is a Bosniak.

“It’s okay, Milan,” says Dragan. “Don’t be afraid.”

Dragan, we come to learn, is a Christian. In theory, he is not facing a life-or-death situation. But his bravery is tested when a Bosnian Serb soldier (Alexis Manenti) enters the train compartment. First, he asks Dragan to show his official documents. Then the soldier requests Dragan’s family’s saint name. “St George,” he answers.

“Dragan is not the hero of this film, but a bystander, who bears witness to the crime,” said Slijepčević: “He is a righteous man, who knows right from wrong, but at the precise moment when he is supposed to react, he discovers something about himself. Can any one of us know for sure how we would react if we found ourselves in a similar situation?”

Milan then goes through the same humiliating process. But he has no papers. A Bosniak, he has no family saint name to speak of either. The Bosnian Serb soldier asks Milan to stand up. Then Tomo Buzov (Dragan Mićanović) intervenes.

“Leave the boy alone,” he says. “He has done nothing wrong.”

The soldier asks Tomo Buzov for his papers. Refusing to be intimidated, he stands up, handing them over with contempt. “Who gave you the right to check people’s papers,” he says. The soldier observes that this man is a former army captain and requests for him to formally state the name of his family saint. “That’s none of your business,” Tomo Buzov replies. The Bosniak man is left sitting on the train. Meanwhile, Tomo Buzov is taken away.

“Tomo Buzov was not suicidal, he believed he would somehow talk his way out of the situation once he was off the train,” Slijepčević explained. “But he was killed on the spot, and his body was never recovered. We have this information from the perpetrator, Nebojša Ranisavljević, who was subsequently arrested and put on trial.”

The Croatian director mentioned the research he consulted before writing the script. This included reading thousands of pages of court documents and witness testimonies. “Most of the film’s dialogue comes from sentences I found in these testimonies,” said the director. “But the six people who are in this train compartment, that’s all fiction.”

Slijepčević also met with Tomo Buzov’s son, Darko, who gave his full approval for the film. “He told me that his father reacted as he did that day because in this young [Bosniak] man who was about to be removed, he recognized his own son,” said Slijepčević. “It was almost as if Tomo Buzov was acting like a father who is protecting the child.”  

This past February, in a strange coincidence, Darko Buzov died of a heart attack. “Darko was still a young man in his early 50s, and, remarkably, he died the same day his father was murdered in Štrpci, 32 years prior.” Slijepčević said.

The Croatian director claimed the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s had created “unresolved intergenerational trauma … We did not process what happened during the 1990s in a proper way,” he said to me. “We just buried it under a very thin layer of earth. This trauma is not healed, just delayed. Unfortunately, what history teaches us that from old traumas come new traumas and new conflicts.”

The director insisted that while his film is rooted in a specific time and place, it grapples with universal themes relevant to our present age. “Today, whether it’s in Ukraine, Gaza or elsewhere, we are constantly being forced to ask ourselves: is the violence that happens to someone else my business, or am I allowed to look the other away?”

Slijepčević concluded: “In this film I try not to give any answers or to preach, but to [subtly] ask that question by telling this particular story.”

JP O’ Malley is a freelance journalist and critic. In addition to his regular contributions to New Eastern Europe, his work appears regularly in publications such as The Sunday Independent, Ireland, The New European, The Age, and Index on Censorship.

New Eastern Europe is a reader supported publication. Please support us and help us reach our goal of $10,000! We are nearly there. Donate by clicking on the button below.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Film, war in Bosnia