Srebrenica and genocide after 20 years

One of the most important consequences of the Second World War was that the price of the crime of genocide committed against the Jews before and during that war was made to be paid by all of humanity, beginning with the Germans.

The idea that if an atrocity of that scale has been committed somewhere in the world, the whole world is responsible for it was, in truth, not an unjust idea. To this day the Germans continue to pay, materially and morally, as sons or grandsons, compensation for this crime committed by their fathers or grandfathers. The idea underlying this compensation and the need for confrontation is that such events should never be experienced again in human history.

However, while Germany pays heavy material compensation on the one hand, in its foreign policy it also counts standing by as a spectator to everything Israel does as part of this account. In contrast, it is evident that it still has not drawn the necessary lessons from genocides and crimes against humanity. Had it done so, it would not have hosted in its home the coup-maker Egyptian dictator, who brutally massacred thousands of his own people in Rabia Square, coveting the 8 billion dollar trade agreement he would sign.

Not a day passes without the rest of the world being invited, through films, conferences, exhibitions and other means, to an emotional sharing in the dramas concerning the Jewish genocide. It would be ungrateful to say that humanity has not responded to all these invitations. All people, whether they took part in the genocide or not, judged and condemned the genocide inflicted on the Jews and continued to pay the compensation the Jews demanded. The most important justification accepted by common sense for these compensation suits, these films, or all these reminders that are increasingly wearying, was to ensure that humanity would never fall to this point of atrocity again. These events were to be kept constantly on the agenda so that humanity would not fall into these mistakes again. Yet, let alone preventing humanity from falling into these mistakes, these discourses do not even keep some of the Jews who were victims of the previous atrocity from becoming this time the fierce perpetrators of another atrocity. Then, is it not necessary to ask what benefit these Holocaust discourses have for humanity? On top of that, with the force of law and with justifications that appear to possess this philosophical depth, the historical reality of the genocide has been closed even to discussion in many countries.

What Israel does to the Palestinians shows sufficiently that what was expected of the Holocaust discourses was by no means a substitute for this universal principle. Israel has openly turned the Holocaust discourses into a source of livelihood. Every passing day it proves that it could do far worse when it gets the chance.

If this Holocaust discourse had had any benefit, it would surely have formed an obstacle to the genocide attempted against the Bosniaks 20 years ago. Did Karadžić, Milošević and the Chetniks under their command never listen to a Holocaust story, never watch a Hollywood film and curse Hitler? Yet the late Alija Izetbegović, when saying that he had not at all expected the concentration camps, isolation and attempts at genocide to which the Bosniaks were subjected, said that he had trusted the propaganda concerning this Holocaust experience. He used to say, naively, "Because of the geography we live in, that is, Europe, and the age we live in, that is, the last decade of the twentieth century, we could not conceive that such a thing could ever happen."

Twenty years ago today, in Srebrenica, which the UN had deemed a safe area, the Dutch, who collected the weapons of the Bosniaks being pursued by armed Serbs and handed them over to the Serbs, had of course drawn the necessary lessons of humanity from the Jewish genocide discourses. But they had taken this lesson as if they would never again allow harm to come to even a hair of a Jew. When the Serb Chetniks, on the pretext that "we are searching for war criminals, we will interrogate the Bosniaks," demanded that the city's population be handed over to them, they did not hold back from handing them over, even though all the signs showed that the Serbs would slaughter them. The Bosniaks they loaded onto buses, knowing what would happen, begged the UN soldiers not to hand them over to the Chetniks; and although the gunshots killing those sent earlier could be heard further ahead, the UN soldiers continued to transfer the Bosniaks to the slaughter site. Within a week, 8,372 Bosniaks were savagely massacred in Srebrenica under UN supervision. Their bodies were buried in mass graves.

These bodies, which were known as missing for years, gradually began to emerge as a result of searches of the mass graves. Each mass grave opened a new page of shame about the wretchedness of humanity. From time to time, relocations were carried out to camouflage the graves. Therefore some of the bodies have become mixed with one another; the parts of a single body can turn up in several different graves. Putting them together and determining to whom they belong is a very laborious, long task carried out through detailed DNA analysis. Those identified are buried together in a ceremony every year on 11 July.

These ceremonies are held as a call for justice. What is aimed at is not revenge but justice. In an environment where centuries-old genocide claims have been turned into a source of livelihood, it is an invitation to feel the pains of a genocide still smoldering.

Ten years after the above statements, many of which I made in exactly these words ten years ago, we are in Srebrenica on the occasion of the 20th anniversary.

Twenty years after the event, the world has come somewhat closer to accepting that what happened was genocide and to sharing the pain. But this is still not enough to create an effective and preventive sensitivity at the time genocides, massacres and crimes against humanity are taking place. Today the world is still in a frightening indifference to the massacres and crimes against humanity taking place in Syria, Egypt, Myanmar and many other places.

Statesmen who generously open files from a hundred years ago that impose no responsibility, to ease their consciences, are in a terrible heedlessness toward massacres that impose first-degree responsibility because they are taking place before their very eyes.

We can already see that in the future this negligence will be read as complicity in the crimes committed today.