Remember the Genocide in Bosnia
Henry Maitles, Emeritus Professor of Education, UWS.
Over the period of a few days in July 1995, exactly 30 years ago, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered – most of them shot at close range – by Bosnian Serb militias, the leaders of which ended up in trials for war crimes in the Hague. Alongside these killings, there was the forced and abusive ethnic cleansing of some 40,000 Bosnian Muslim women, girls, children, and elderly. The circumstances of the murders are particularly disturbing and raise complex issues.
Some things never leave you. At a genocide scholars conference in 1998, I attended the funerals in nearby Srebrenica of some 600 Bosnian children that had been found murdered in the nearby forests. The events will stay with me forever: the impossibly small coffins; the 300,000 grieving and furious Bosnian mourners; the organised chaos of this crowd, unpoliced as the police were in barracks as some had been allegedly implicated in the crime; and the anger towards the Serbs, the West and the UN in particular.
Srebrenica was supposedly at the time a UN “safe haven”, where civilians would be under the protection of the Dutch Battalion of the UN – some 800 professional soldiers with helicopters and armoured carriers. Due to its UN status, fleeing Muslims had gravitated there. Not only did the UN force not protect them, but they handed over men and boys who were in the factory area under their direct control to brutal racist armed militias, who already had a reputation for extensive human rights abuses. The excuse from the Dutch Battalion was that they were only allowed to use force if attacked. As a human rights lawyer said at our conference, why could they not have said to the militias “you want them, you come through us”? But they didn’t and they handed them to the killers. Indeed, when the UN declares an area safe and people flock to it, if they are not protected then the UN was unwittingly collecting them together nicely in one place for the Bosnian Serb killers.
I would never suggest that these things are easy in times of war and internecine fighting. We see similar all too often in situations – in Ukraine and Gaza right now and in the alleged crimes of well-trained British elite units in Afghanistan and Iraq, recently highlighted by BBC and other media investigations. It is a dehumanising of the other.
The lessons are there for us if we want them, as they were at the end of World War 2 and in various other genocide and war crime events since then, of the inhumanity that can come when racist ideas take hold. Perhaps we need to take a step back and argue that “never again” can only be realised if we constantly and consistently reaffirm our support for human rights and we stop racist movements on their way up. As history from the 1920s onwards tells us, it is much harder when they are fully formed.
