Scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history

July 11, 2020 7:49 AM

Over a number of days in July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys.
Even as remains continue to be identified, denialism is moving from far-right fringe into mainstream . It is time to fight back against Bosnian Genocide denial.
Bosnian Muslims feel shunned by Europe. AlJazeera spoke with some survivors.
Srebrenica ~ Genocide in eight acts. (TRIGGER WARNING). A brief encapsule.
posted by adamvasco (21 comments total)

A comment from Mefi's own, greatly missed DeeXtrovert
posted by adamvasco at 7:50 AM on July 11, 2020 [36 favorites]

.
posted by limeonaire at 7:53 AM on July 11, 2020

A historic comment, adamvasco
posted by infini at 8:12 AM on July 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I expressly don't want to derail this into a discussion of US politics, but the last couple of paragraphs of DeeXtrovert's comment are, let's say, quite pertinent to current events, ten years on.
posted by zamboni at 8:28 AM on July 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

I was in Bosnia when it happened. Mostar and nearby, also in Split, Croatia.

I think most of the world wants to not think about this story at all. It doesn't fit with most stories, except for the west's long, long-running disdain for the Balkans (partly inter-, partly intra-religious).
posted by doctornemo at 8:34 AM on July 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

Sadly I just ran into genocide deniers (oh they don't deny that massacres happened but get their panties in a bundle if you call it genocide). Also some conspiratorial stuff about how the US supports Radical Muslims over Moderate Muslims to counter Russia and that's what happened in Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile if the US did exactly the same atrocities, these "anti-war" apologists would be out in full force denouncing the horrors of US imperialism.

I'm sure the people whose families were killed in all this really give a fuck what you want to call it, except for the fact that some people ended up facing some (minor) justice for their war crimes, and if you didn't call it a genocide, there would be no tribunals, no justice at all. Should there be more justice? Absolutely, and all sides have their share of guilt in atrocities. This isn't a one side is blameless situation. And that includes the US.

For now a moment of peace and . for the innocent victims in all of this who were trying to exist and live their lives as they had before the ... Balkanization.
posted by symbioid at 8:55 AM on July 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

I don't like to read this stuff in the AM; but if we don't; it gets forgotten.

Not to sideline the event; but modern digital media has to be doing something to prevent this stuff from happening as much as it used to.

The every day moving thousands; and then killing hundreds at a time; then the moving them again, and they killing hundreds more; as if the dispersion would hide or absolve a massacre. Vile, just vile.
posted by Afghan Stan at 9:21 AM on July 11, 2020

It makes me sad and angry how quickly denialism can take hold even as many of us remember events and know survivors.
posted by meinvt at 9:23 AM on July 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

.

When the Berlin Wall came down, it was such an amazing moment. It changed everything. But at the time I was traveling a lot and meeting young people from all over Europe, and one day when my grandfather (who was ecstatic) asked me what I thought would happen, I said "war in Europe with a decade". Unfortunately, I was right. I had seen the rise of nationalism even among dear friends, and understood how there were good, but bad, reasons that the Western European model of Social Democracy and state-enforced tolerance would never work in the East.

Those years when the Balkan wars went on, I had friends on all sides, and family in the NATO and UN peace-keeping forces. It was impossible to escape the knowledge and painful to watch, just when we thought a new age of peace and prosperity had arrived.

That Peter Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature was a scandal, and I think part of an activist backlash on a par with the elections of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and the clown Boris Johnson and Brexit. Not to mention what is going on in the former Eastern block.

All of that said, I am actually optimistic about the future. Things are not going well now, but as stated above, I see it as a backlash, a last terrible wail of death from the nationalists and fascists who started this a generation ago and whose identities are built on hate. I'm very aware that there are young people who believe the lies and that the internet is a machine for spreading hate. But in my everyday life as a teacher at a university where the students have all backgrounds, I see a stark difference from 25 years ago, where many couldn't read through the propaganda and didn't understand what the nationalists were up to.

I hope.

And grieve for the victims of Srebrenica.
posted by mumimor at 10:03 AM on July 11, 2020 [17 favorites]

Clicking down links to the NYT review of My War Criminal by Jessica Stern

...Karadzic weaponized history and identity to stoke hatred and fear and turn the people who listened to him into killers. Stern wants the truth to be more complicated and less banal than it is.

“I had been harboring a secret, megalomaniacal dream — that I was going to get him to apologize,” Stern writes, never explaining how she planned to “get him” to do anything while steadfastly indulging his self-pitying monologues and trumped-up delusions. When she gently asked Karadzic if he had any regrets, he finally told her: “I would do nothing differently.” It turns out that the self-aggrandizing war criminal harbors not a speck of remorse. For once in this book, I believed him.

The "banality of evil" has been criticized, but while very powerful for a time, these horribly people are not supervillians, they just do not care. They do not care if people are hurt or killed.
posted by sammyo at 10:29 AM on July 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

For various reasons, the eastern suburbs of Atlanta have become a settling place for refugees. As a result, I have taught students who survived or are children of survivors of every genocide, civil war, and famine of the past few decades. My Bosnian students were the first to warn us a few years ago that what happened to their families could happen here, right now. I think it is incredibly important to keep reminding people of Srebenica, of how centuries of simmering animosity were leveraged to turn neighbor against neighbor in an explosion of violence and ultimately genocide, of how no nation on earth is a safe place where this could not happen if the wrong people are in power.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:34 AM on July 11, 2020 [18 favorites]

I have a dear friend, whom I lost touch with after my last trip to Chicago where I found he had moved without leaving any forwarding information. Mithat was a very large and visually forbidding Bosnian Muslim doorman of my apartment building. One day, I happened to stand at the door with a cigarette before going in and we fell to talking. He was erudite and charming and completely at odds with his "thuggish" looks. He was a corporate lawyer in his 40s who had been upper middle class in Bosnia but his legal education and experience were useless in the US at his age and he had a young family and an aged father to support. Over the next three years, Mithat and I became close friends who stood at the threshold, looking out at the Viagra triangle, musing on the vagaries of life and immigranthood in the United States.

<3
posted by infini at 10:43 AM on July 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Thanks for this.

This. Happened.

Just leaving this here:

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Mladić (IT-09-92)

Trial Judgement Summary (11-page pdf; summary specific to Srebrenica starts on page 4; content warning as it does detail specific atrocities)
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:47 AM on July 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Not to sideline the event; but modern digital media has to be doing something to prevent this stuff from happening as much as it used to.

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya would say otherwise. Facebook actually facilitated it by playing the same role that radio did during the Rwandan genocide (which also happened out in the complete open).
posted by Anonymous at 12:21 PM on July 11, 2020

We've had criminal trials about what happened and we know.
This wasn't a war that came from the grassroots up. It was directed from Belgrade (and Zagreb) by opportunist politicians who'd seen in nationalism a chance to grab power and territory.

 — Robert Wright, Social Policy Correspondent, FT, on his experiences as a young journalist sent to cover the conflict.
posted by scruss at 2:55 PM on July 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

Yes, it rubbed me the wrong way when someone above mentioned centuries of animosity. It was all fabricated. I have friends from all parts of former Yugoslavia, and I saw how some were caught up with the rhetoric despite literally never having thought of those divisions before.
Obviously some people, not my friends, are still engaged in this nonsense. But thousands of people had to flee because they had married across the so-called ethnic boundaries, because it was a natural thing to do. Because ethnicity was a minor issue, not a main element in any person's identity. The idea that anyone carries resentment over something that happened several hundred years ago is rubbish. I do think a second generation can carry on their parent's anger in some form, specially if they experienced the offence in their childhoods. And the trauma can exist for generations. But the hate becomes abstract and political.
It's the same with the so-called Sunni-Shia divide, that was practically nonexistent before the second Iraq war. It is absolutely there now, but before it wasn't a thing in the way it is now. Look at that video with the school teacher who worked with her kids on racism that was posted here recently. That is exactly how it works. An authority says that brown-eyed people are bad, and a significant portion of any group will go along with that.
posted by mumimor at 3:40 PM on July 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

From 2015
How Britain and the US decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate.
Ed Vulliamy covered the war for the Guardian.
Long Read - Bringing up the bodies in Bosnia
posted by adamvasco at 3:56 PM on July 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

I have 2 very good friends who were there at the time. One grew up in Sarajevo. She is ethnically Croatian, but will only admit that under certain circumstances. She (rightly, IMO) insists that she is Bosnian, and still feels the anger and betrayal of having that identity robbed from her. She escaped the siege early, and was rewarded by getting to spend her high school years in a refugee camp.

My other friend grew up in Belgrade. She is a few years younger. Her experience of the war is of the USA bombing her city at night, and the incredible fear she felt as a young girl. She is not an apologist for the Serbian government at all, but it's hard not to take people dropping bombs on you personally.

Her family eventually escaped over the mountains into Montenegro until things settled down. I wouldn't have know about the latter except for the intense panic attack she had one time when we drove off-road on some jeep trails to a picnic.

Her family is back in Belgrade now, and have totally bought the current right-wing party line about the war being justified, and the Serbs being persecuted. There is a lot of other cultural (anti-cultural?) baggage along with that, and since she's married to another woman, she's had to cut them out of her life.
posted by Anoplura at 6:35 PM on July 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Emir Suljagić is Director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial.
''we operate in an environment that is openly hostile and rife with genocide denial. Locals as well as the authorities in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, continue to see and treat us as an enemy, undermining our work and our mandate....''
......there is no precedent for victims and survivors returning to the sites and places where genocide was perpetrated and continuing to live there and memorialise their loss. There is no precedent for allowing the political structures responsible for genocide to rule the part of the land where it was perpetrated. The Nazis were not allowed self-rule in Bavaria, for instance, in 1946.....
.....one war ended in my life, for another to start. It is a war for the interpretation of the war, as the renowned Bosnian poet Abdulah Sidran aptly put it. It is a war to honour the men and women I grew up with, who were murdered mercilessly, and to make sure their deaths are not forgotten."
posted by adamvasco at 5:34 AM on July 12, 2020 [3 favorites]

I can't add much, but I just want to state this for the record: Aside from my own ex-Yugoslavia experiences, I knew and know various soldiers with direct experience of investigating Srebrenica. It absolutely happened, and we took so much documentary evidence because we always knew denialism would come. It was a genocidal war crime even in an ethically and religiously based bloodbath of a conflict. It happened.

I have personally stayed in the home of a coastal family where only two people survived from the entire extended family group. They did so by sailing out to sea on a small yacht and anchoring until their supplies ran out and they could no longer starve after that without being too weak to bring the yacht back to shore. They arrived to find their house full of their dead and mutilated family members. I have touched the bullet holes and seen the newly disused houses. Their family trauma existed in the context of almost everyone of their ethnicity in the village having been murdered in the same raid. What happened there was a smaller act of genocide, but involved the killing of both the few remaining men of fighting age and the general population. Denialism is an act of psychological violence against that family and families like them, and must be resisted.

I'm also proud to say that a British soldier heroically broke his RoE to walk outside his base to tell a Serbian detachment that if they didn't release the civilians they were killing he was going to open fire on that detachment and say they'd shot first. As with Rojava, individual soldiers often do what they can even when the orders they are bound by are horrific. In this case, he was neither commended not punished for it, which is about as close as the CO could come to an unofficial medal. Less proudly, it took an act that should theoretically have resulted in a court martial to even prevent a ongoing execution.

Even less proudly, the units stationed at Srebrenica failed to make the same choice. Given our failure to protect an entire population, the absolute least we can do is to both repeatedly state what we know, provide documentary evidence, and fund and champion organisations that aim to maintain the popular recognition of genocide and other war crimes during the conflict.
posted by jaduncan at 11:56 PM on July 12, 2020 [6 favorites]

Absolutely, and all sides have their share of guilt in atrocities. This isn't a one side is blameless situation. And that includes the US.

Can we please not do a "very good people on both sides" in a discussion about a specific genocidal act perpetrated one one group by another? Civil wars are very nasty things and I don't for a moment doubt that all kinds of things were done by all sorts of people but the reality is that: a) this particular genocide at Srebrenica was not remotely a complicated one. b) Broadly, this entire conflict was managed by the Serbian government and the vast majority of organised killings of civilians was carried out on Bosnians by Serbs. Ignoring that and sort of hand waving ideas about how "they" have hated each other for centuries is foolish at best, if this a conflict that you don't understand enough to have an opinion on, then that's ok.
posted by atrazine at 3:00 AM on July 13, 2020 [5 favorites]