21 years ago
The Srebrenica massacre was 21 years ago today.
The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a safe haven for civilians, but that didn’t prevent Serb soldiers from attacking the town they besieged for years. As they advanced on July 11, 1995, most of the town’s Muslim population rushed to the nearby UN compound hoping that the Dutch peacekeepers would protect them.
But the outnumbered and outgunned, peacekeepers watched helplessly as Muslim men and boys were separated for execution, while the women and girls were sent to Bosnian government-held territory. Nearly 15,000 residents tried to flee through the woods, but were hunted down and also killed.
The victims were buried in mass graves, which were dug up shortly after the war by the perpetrators and relocated in order to hide the crime. During the process, the half-decomposed remains were ripped apart by bulldozers. Body parts are still being found in more than 100 mass graves, put together and identified through DNA analysis.
21 years ago. Not more than 70, like the Holocaust, but just 21.
Peter Popham looked back a couple of months ago.
In late-1991 I spent a few days under bombardment in Croatia reporting on the civil war for The Independent, then moved on to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, to see if something similar was brewing there.
The locals were expansive, charming, bibulous and comprehensively reassuring. “What? Serbians, Bosniaks and Croatians turning on each other and killing each other?” The idea was laughable, I was told. This was a modern, sophisticated town full of mixed couples and families, where the bloody borders dividing Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim which had scarred the Balkans for centuries had been swallowed up and forgotten in happy modernity: first Tito, then European liberalism, had buried the region’s ugly history.
Yet within months the siege of Sarajevo was under way.
It can happen any time. It can happen anywhere and any time – no country or set of people is immune. It’s dreadful to admit that, and to be aware of it…but it’s dangerous not to.
Bosnian Serbians could not have picked up their guns and trained them on their Muslim and Croatian neighbours without believing they were doing something right and necessary.
The man who provided that belief, Radovan Karadzic, is now beginning the 40-year sentence handed down this week in The Hague. Charismatic, theatrical, a poet with something of the prophet and much of the charlatan about him, Karadzic was the right man in the right place, infusing his Serbian brethren with an intoxicating belief in their high racial destiny, involving a millennial conflict with the Muslims who, under the banner of the Ottomans, had inflicted that never-to-be-forgotten defeat at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389.
…
We make a mistake if we see Karadzic as a unique monster. Figures like him are springing up and prospering right across the world, wherever the old state structures nourished by the post-war order totter. The viciousness of the historic divisions in the southern Balkans lent a fire-and-brimstone quality to the Karadzic rhetoric, just as the medieval touchstone of fundamental Islam justifies the barbarities promulgated by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Isis. France’s Marie le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Lega Nord each know how to apply the flame of rhetoric to the blue touchpaper of atavism. Each is as different as the clans to which they appeal, but all appeal to blood and soil. Civilisation as we know it was an awakening from such nightmares. These people lead us back into the dark.
Nigel Farage, Donald Trump.
Exactly. Every country and time has them and that is why I will always support co-operation over nationalist separatism.
I was living in Europe when this happened. I can still recall the newspapers and the awful pictures and stories, and I remember being shocked that it wasn’t being reported hardly at all, when I came back to the USA that summer for a brief visit. There was one picture that still haunts me, to this day, on the front page of la Reppublica: a picture of an old woman, probably someone’s grandmother, apparently quite poor judging from her clothing, lying in the middle of a street, a meter-wide pool of blood around her head, lifeless eyes still open.
To this day, I think that if american media would print pictures like that, as boldly as the editors of la Reppublica did, then maybe our citizens wouldn’t be so hasty to enter into wars. Italy and Europe had lived through two terrifying wars, and they knew the power of those images.
Sadly, all of Europe seemed to be paralyzed with fear that any real involvement would precipitate WWIII.
I still remember where I was, listening to descriptions of the massacre on NPR. Horrifying.
I was very young when that happened so I only remember small details of horror that I would read in the newspaper when my parents weren’t looking. I remember one story about a family who had been massacred. The murderers had even stuck a knife into a pregnant woman’s abdomen.
It’s Kosovo that I remember more vividly. Then I was in my teens. News reports talked about soldiers taking any young women they found with the fleeing refugees. I was aware that those were girls my own age.
I’m very much afraid of where things could go in the US.
By which I mean, I’m afraid of well armed groups of right-wing ,white supramacist, etc, going into minority areas to commit massacres, or doing violent attacks on defenseless, non-strategic government buildings, and what the results could be as we become ever more polarized.