“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.” -Czesław Miłosz
By July 11,1995 roughly 25,000 Bosnian muslim refugees fleeing the conflict between the Bosnian government and separatist Serb forces had sheltered at a barbed wire ensconced UN compound set up on the grounds of a derelict battery factory near the “UN safe zone” town of Srebrenica in an area called Potočari. There they joined some of the 37,000 besieged residents of the town in seeking the protection of a lightly armed Dutch combat force of UN peacekeepers numbering less than 500.
As the overmatched, under-resourced and unsupported Dutch soldiers attempted to offer food, safety and support to the tide of refugees, the town was encircled by Serb forces. Many particularly vulnerable Bosniak refugees were brought inside the factory compound. Dutch peacekeeper Henk ven der Berg described the situation as heavily armed Serb soldiers overran the town, began walking around the building…and reality began to set in:
“…That was terrible, it was a mess. I’m not sure how many [refugees] were inside but people were scared, they wet themselves, there were miscarriages. It was hell.”
Cameras watched as the head of the heavily equipped army of Republika Srpska, Ratko Mladiċ, easily disarmed and dismissed the Dutch soldiers. They then followed as he toured the compound handing out candy and bread, cooing to babies, assuring and petting begging mothers and their children in one of the most twisted acts of gleeful psycho-emotional torture and cruel sociopathy captured during the 20th century.
“All who wish to go will be transported, large and small, young and old. Don’t be afraid, just take it easy. Let the women and children go first … No one will harm you.”- Ratko Mladic, recorded 12 July 1995.
Then the cameras disappeared.
Over the course of the next two days 20,000 innocent Bosniak muslim women and young children would be separated from the “fighting age” male members their families (including young teenaged children), loaded onto busses and driven to muslim controlled areas of the region where they were ‘allowed’ to flee back into an active war zone — but not before many were subjected to depraved incidents of rape, sexual violence and torture.
Back in Srebrenica, in full view of the powerless and forsaken Dutch peacekeeping force, Mladiċ’s soldiers, in conjunction with local Serb police and paramilitaries, marched or drove at least 8,300 Bosniak men and boys to fields or farmhouses and executed them en masse in the most gruesome and callous ways imaginable. Bodies were dumped into mass graves or left to the dogs. In the weeks and months that followed, the mass graves were dug up by Serb soldiers and the remains intentionally scattered and mixed in an attempt to conceal evidence, making future identification of victims profoundly difficult. As of this writing — nearly 30 years hence — over 1,000 families are still awaiting identification of their murdered loved ones.
It was and remains the largest and most brutal single war crime committed on European soil since the Holocaust. It was also, according to the ICJ and ICC, an undeniably genocidal act.
“Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson. These are truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.”-International Criminal Tribunal judge Fouad Riad.
The world watched it happen. Literally and figuratively. And the institutions empowered to prevent exactly this, completely and fantastically failed.
The Dutch peacekeepers had been pleading for help of any kind from the UN forces headquartered in Sarajevo for weeks leading up to the events of July 11–13 as they watched tanks and bus loads of Serb soldiers arrive and gather along the only road into and out of town. World leaders, who should have been operating at the height of vigilance having allowed a genocide to be perpetrated in Rwanda a mere year earlier, dithered and politicked.
In fact, the leaders of the US, UK and France decided to halt NATO airstrikes against Serb forces without notifying any of their allies, most importantly the Dutch, who were operating in Srebrenica under the expressed agreement that airstrikes would be available to their peacekeepers within 2 hours of any Serb attacks against them. The peacekeepers at Srebrenica came under attack and requested air support NINE times in the weeks leading up to the massacre. Adding to the craven complicity, the United States and UK both had reliable intelligence in late May of 1995 that Serb forces were planning assaults on 3 UN safe zones, including Srebrenica, and did not share their intelligence nor act to prevent the attacks they knew would happen.
All of that to say, the horrors outlined above and many, many more as — or more — gruesome were perpetrated in a spasm of heinous brutality that could have easily been prevented.
With this kind of disgrace forever loadstoned around the necks of the western world, the act of memorializing the victims and ensuring that the abject failure of the world to protect them should serve as a warning to present and future generations ought to be the most contrite and humble of formalities.
What a difference less than a half of a generation makes.
On May 23rd the United Nations, seemingly in spite of itself (and providing further evidence that the vast majority of leaders the world over are gross opportunists), finally voted to recognize July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.”.
The 193-member General Assembly voted thusly:
84, In Favor.
19, Against.
68, Abstaining.
22 nations refused to attend the meeting at all.
Many of the 19 “No” votes were unsurprising. A clown-car spurt from the psychotic goatfuck government coalition: Russia, North Korea, Syria, Belarus — and despite the resolution not naming the country or its citizens as perpetrators — Serbia, which was embarrassingly represented by the sniveling Putinite, Aleksandar Vucic. That he draped himself in a Serbian flag as he bleated and mewled would have been humiliatingly overwrought for even a high school drama nerd on a “Hamilton” bender, if it weren’t taking place at an event of such solemn importance.
But the cheesy performance pieces from Vucic and bovine statements from the Let’s-Be-Considerate-of-Sensitivities arschgeigen aside, the incomprehensible cowardice of abstaining from a vote of this kind of morally uncomplicated resolution is staggering. Citizens of the 68 countries whose governments refused to allow their voices to be counted among the righteous must realize that their proxies to the international community are the most foul of ethical degenerates: those that engage in petty and trite thought experiments in the ghastly face of rape, mass murder and infanticide.
At least the denailists have clarity of purpose. The governments abstaining, and the petulant children that refused to even show up, should be driven from the halls of power and mocked from the global stage for the moppets they are. The rationale offered for their moral feebleness is as vacuous as the people tasked with delivering it.
And whereas the wicked can rely on their own totalitarian systems of disinformation and censorship to ensure the ignorance of their citizens to the truth, the abstaining governments are relying on something far more insidious, insulting and dangerous: apathy and whataboutism. My god, these atrocities were committed in broad daylight, without hesitation or fear. Multiple court cases have been undertaken to their devastating conclusion and even Vucic himself has admitted the events of those days.
And to be explicitly clear: there were countless war crimes committed during the Balkan conflict, many of which were committed against Serbs. In fact, NATO and the United States itself committed war crimes on a number of occasions during the 78 day bombing of Serbia in 1999, not least of which were the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (blamed by NATO on ‘bad maps’), the bombing of a passenger train at the Grdelicka gorge (‘bad timing’), and repeated bombing of the little town of Surdulica, which killed hundreds of civilians including a particularly disgusting incident on May 30, 1999 in which a nursing home housing Croatian refugees was bombed, killing 21 (‘bad luck’). These are just a few of a litany, many reaching the levels of depravity seen in Potočari in July of 1995. And no one, I repeat, no one has ever been charged or even investigated for these crimes against the Serbs. It damages any hopes of reconciliation and is a glaring stain on the concept of international law.
And nonetheless, Srebrenica must and should stand alone. Especially under the conditions offered by the UN resolution brought by Germany and Rwanda. It should not serve as a placeholder for other crimes, nor should it set a precedent. There is room and space for all victims of atrocities to be acknowledged, remembered and respected. There simply must be.
The genocide at Srebrenica, the Bosnian genocide and all of the unholy bloodshed during the Balkan war of the 1990’s should have been a turning point for Europe, NATO, the United States, the UN and the global community. That it wasn’t, that the mere attempt to memorialize the event should lead to threats of violence from Serb officials and create such shameful equivocating in a majority of the General Assembly, only makes the need more urgent and clear.
The successful work done in various Truth and Reconciliation commissions required public truth sharing, apology, and commemoration that acknowledged and redressed past harms. It remains among the most powerful and difficult work that society has undertaken. And it is unarguably vital. This is a small step on that path.
The institutions we have empowered to ensure the protection of civilians from atrocity, to keep minority populations from oppression and violence, to head off marauding mass murderers at the pass…all failed. And whereas in a perfect world the resolution would have been undertaken in modesty, the circus of shame that occurred is perhaps more fitting. The episode should serve as a dire warning and galvanizing reminder that we relinquish responsibility to politicians to carry our global and national morality at our own peril, that we cede the right to claim ignorance when we demand freedom and don’t invest in educating ourselves, that the sins of our leaders will be counted upon our heads, certainly by their victims — and should there be a Just Universal Force, most assuredly by it too.
The horror of Srebrenica is not yet in the past. Nor are the lessons anachronistic. The wholesale torture and slaughter of innocent men, women and children in the name of safety, security, history, God — is more of this moment than not. This perhaps says it best:
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
I shall not be silent.
