Twenty years ago, several thousand Bosnian Muslims were herded into trucks, blindfolded and roped together like animals, and massacred on the fringes of a United Nations ‘safe-haven’ in Srebrenica. Even before the killings began, it was clear that the UN had lost control of the situation. Sustained shelling by Serbian artillery in the surrounding hills had undermined its humanitarian relief effort. Electricity and water had been shut off and roadblocks had prevented food relief from getting through. The population was close to starvation when General Ratko Mladić’s Bosnian Serb forces assumed control of the Dutch peacekeepers’ compound in Potočari. Shortly afterwards, with the blue-helmeted Dutchmen standing by helplessly, truckloads of men and boys over the age of 12 were rounded up for the slaughter. The killings lasted for three days.
The Dutch peacekeepers were initially forbidden to discuss what they had seen. They were even congratulated, publicly, for completing the mission successfully, before the full horror of what had transpired at Srebrenica became known. Subsequently, some critics would argue that the Dutchmen’s passivity amounted to abetting a genocide. What made Srebrenica especially galling for Europeans was that it took place so soon after the Rwandan genocide in which the strict rules of engagement for UN peacekeepers had reduced them to little more than spectators.
In 2009 the International Commission on Missing Persons put the number of victims at Srebrenica at 8,100 (more than 6,000 of whom had already been identified by DNA analysis). Information on the women and children who were killed is still emerging. Although General Mladić and former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadžić – the intellectual author of the genocide – have both been brought to trial at the Hague, it is hard to say that there has been any resembling adequate justice for the victims of Srebrenica. In fact, two decades later there seems to be a conspicuous lack of attention paid to a massacre that took place in the heart of Europe forty years after the international community created institutions to avert exactly this sort of war crime. The silence has more to do with politics than apathy, as can be seen by Russia’s recent veto of a UN resolution – on the basis that it displayed an anti-Serb bias – that would have labelled the killings as an act of genocide.
The American relief leader Fred Cuny used to joke that if the UN had been in place at the start of World War Two we would all be speaking German. The quip retains much of its dark humour because we are no closer to solving the obstacles that prevent coordinated responses to international crises in our own time. When the Turkish government carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century, against its Armenian population, the massacres of thousands of innocent civilians were reported at length in European newspapers. Today, as was the case with the advent of 24-hour televised news before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, we are inundated with details about atrocities around the world. But to what end? There is little to distinguish Europe’s indifference to the fate of the Armenians from our collective indifference to what happened in Kigali, Srebrenica, throughout the Congo War, or what is currently happening Syria and Iraq.
As ever, apathy or indifference can quickly be exploited for political ends. Russia’s veto of the genocide resolution deftly undermines the Western case for intervention in the Bosnian war. As Le Monde editor Natalie Nougayrède points out: “Manipulating the very memory of Srebrenica unleashes old hatreds that Russia can easily play on to get a foot in the door [in the Balkans] and increase its influence.” Additionally, President Putin has a vested interest in deterring the sort of meddlesome international tribunals that investigated Srebrenica from looking too closely into Russia’s activities in Chechnya.
“The struggle of man against power,” writes Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Monstrous events like those which took place in July 1995 in Srebrenica ought to remind us of the importance, and difficulty, of maintaining that struggle.
