|
Thank you, Deputy Secretary General Eliasson, and
High Commissioner Zeid, for your powerful presentations.
I was a 24-year-old reporter in July 1995 living
in Sarajevo when the Bosnian Serbs made their move on Srebrenica. I
was there when – a few days after the Srebrenica safe area fell – a
colleague first told me about reports of mass executions.
“No,” was all I could say. “No.”
Even having lived in a war zone and under siege
and even having seen innumerable atrocities, I couldn’t bring myself
to believe that Bosnian Serb forces would execute every Muslim man
and boy in their custody. For all of the brutality of a horrific
war, this was a singular horror. It was genocide. A fact now proven
again and again by international tribunals. When I learned that
Russia was planning to veto the UN Security Council resolution
commemorating the genocide in Srebrenica, I confess I had a similar
reaction.
“No,” I said. “No.”
Why would Russia vote to deny recognition of the
Srebrenica genocide? Today’s vote mattered. It mattered hugely to
the families of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. Russia’s
veto is heartbreaking for those families and it is a further stain
on this Council’s record.
I spent the tenth and the fifteenth anniversaries
of the genocide in Srebrenica there, in Srebrenica. In 2005, I met
up with my former colleague, journalist David Rohde, who is here
with us today. In August 1995, days after the massacres, it was
David who discovered a leg protruding from a mass grave site in the
woods and fields of Nova Kasaba. Subsequently, he discovered a pile
of canes and another piles of eyeglasses. Canes of the old men who
had been executed for one reason, because they were Bosnian Muslim.
Canes.
In 2005, David and I joined the Bosnian families
of those who had been massacred as they walked along the route that
many of Srebrenica’s Muslim men and boys had taken while fleeing the
fallen safe area. The families were tracing their loved ones’
journey in reverse. All along the route, although it was ten years
since the genocide, we came across the human remains of the victims.
Scraps of clothing. Shoes. Discarded IDs. And, even scattered bone
fragments protruding from the earth.
In 2010, when I led a U.S. Presidential Delegation
to Srebrenica on behalf of President Obama, I retraced just the
final leg of that journey again. Interspersed among those on the
march were many children of those who had been killed in Srebrenica.
Most were teenage girls and young women who had grown up without
fathers and brothers. There were far fewer young men than women on
the walk – a chilling result of the fact that so many young boys had
been executed. Remains were still being dug up and mourned. One
mother I met in Srebrenica was burying the fourth of her five sons
at a mass grave site in the center of town. She was still searching
for the remains of her fifth. It is that mother’s truth and pain
that was vetoed by Russian today.
Why should we continue to retrace victims’
harrowing journey? Or why, for that matter, do we continue to gather
– whether it’s here at the UN, or in Srebrenica – to mark this day,
and to retell these gut-wrenching accounts of the victims?
We revisit so that we can try to learn from our
collective failure – and by ours, I mean the world’s, the Security
Council’s, and particularly those governments, including mine, that
had the power to prevent what happened but didn’t.
Bosnians believed they would be protected by a UN
flag and by the principles it stood for; they took refuge in a place
literally called a “safe area.” Yet when Bosnian Serb forces probed
the UN’s willingness to protect civilians under its watch, the
peacekeepers melted away, and the Bosnian Serbs pressed ahead. First
they cut off fuel and other essential supplies; then they attacked
the peacekeepers’ outposts; then they disarmed and humiliated the
peacekeepers themselves. Promised NATO airstrikes never
materialized.
Now we also commemorate Srebrenica to show our
ongoing commitment to hold accountable the perpetrators of these
atrocities. The perpetrators of the genocide in Srebrenica killed
more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys and raped countless women and
girls, in part because they felt confident that they would never be
punished. That is why it is so important that all of the indicted
masterminds and commanders of the genocide in Srebrenica, most
notably Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are now facing trial for
their crimes in The Hague. This shows that the arm of justice is
long, and that abusive regimes – from the Assad regime that gasses
its own people, to the North Korean government that works its people
to death in gulags – will one day have to answer for their
atrocities.
Now, as we saw today, some political leaders and
groups deny that genocide took place in Srebrenica or fail to wish
to recognize it. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik last month called
the genocide, “the biggest sham of the twentieth century.” We have
heard such statements from Holocaust deniers and even, more
recently, from Rwandan genocide deniers. Individuals who use such
phrases humiliate themselves and mislead those they claim to
represent. Genocide happened in Srebrenica. That is the conclusion
reached by both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice based on mounds
and mounds evidence. The refusal to acknowledge that genocide
occurred is not only deeply hurtful to the victims and their
families who have already endured so much, but it is the obstacle to
reconciliation. Imagine being the mother of those five sons killed
in the Srebrenica genocide, and being told that a denial of the
genocide will advance reconciliation. It is madness – a madness
motivated by a similar negation of the Bosnian Muslim experience
that helped fuel the slaughter at Srebrenica in the first place. So
long as the truth is denied, whether here in this council or in the
region there can be no meaningful reconciliation. Imagine us,
imagine if this were our families, would we reconcile when our
experience was being denied? There is no stability in genocide
denial. This Council did everything in its power to get Russia on
board with this simple resolution that did not even name the
perpetrators. But Russia had a red line; the resolution could not
reference the genocide in Srebrenica. It could not reference a fact.
Twenty years ago the international community failed to protect the
people taking refuge in Srebrenica, and the result was genocide.
Today, because of Russia’s refusal to call what happened in
Srebrenica by its rightful name, genocide, the Council is again
failing to live up to its responsibility. This is a veto of a
well-established fact documented by hundreds of thousands of pages
of witness testimony, photographic evidence, and physical forensic
evidence of the kind I encountered on my walks.
The Rwandan genocide, like the Srebrenica
genocide, is an established fact. Would anybody here dream of
arguing that we should not mark the Rwandan genocide – indeed that
we should deny it – because a group of genocide deniers said it
might undermine reconciliation or stability? Does Holocaust denial
advance reconciliation, or do we all agree that recognition and
remembrance are the key, critical ingredient to moving forward?
Everyone here knows the answer to these questions. Yet a number of
countries today have chosen to remain “neutral” on genocide
recognition by abstaining from supporting this resolution. If the
mothers of the boys executed in Srebrenica – boys executed just
because they were Bosnian Muslims – were here today, they would ask
how anybody could abstain on their reality.
But far worse, they would ask how could any
country use the privilege of permanent membership on this Council to
negate entirely what has happened to them. The crime of genocide is
the crime that the United Nations Genocide Convention was written
and ratified to prevent and punish. The crime of genocide in
Srebrenica is what the genocide convention – which all of us have
ratified – exists to prevent and punish. Reconciliation cannot be
built by burying the dark parts of one’s history, however unsettling
they may be. In the hearings at the ICTY, perpetrators and victims
alike testified to how heavy machinery was brought in to dig up the
earth to bury victims, even before the executions had occurred. So
as the victims – many of them blindfolded, their hands bound – were
led to their death, they heard not only gunshots and cries, but also
the roar of bulldozers, digging the mass graves that would
eventually bury them.
I just want to tell one story in closing. Ramiz
Nukic nearly ended up in one of those mass graves. As Bosnian Serb
forces approached Potocari in July 1995, he said goodbye to his wife
and children, and fled into the forest with his father, brother, and
thousands of other Bosnian men and boys – he shared his story
recently with a reporter. When the men and boys paused briefly at
the top of a hill, tanks and guns opened fire. His father and
brother were killed immediately, along with others; Nukic himself
managed to escape, eventually finding his way to a refugee camp.
In 1999, Nukic returned to Potocari and found his
way back to that hill. He found bloodied clothes and shoes and three
skeletons there, but none belonged to his family. Since then, he has
spent every single day searching the woods around Srebrenica for
victims’ remains. What began as a search for his father and brother
has become a search for the remains of all victims. He said that a
day rarely goes by that he does not find some remains, which he
reports to Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons, which then tests
the bones’ DNA against a network of survivors.
The identification is important for victims’
families, particularly those who have never been able to confirm
what happened to their loved ones – expecting they were killed, but
having nothing tangible to prove it. The remains help give them a
long-overdue sense of closure. “Thanks to [Nukic] many bones got
their names,” a staffer at the institute said.
This year, partial remains of Nukic’s father were
finally found – though not by him – in a mass grave. Nukic will bury
his father on Saturday in Srebrenica – one of 136 newly identified
victims to be buried alongside the 6,241 victims already interred in
a joint cemetery there. He will be joined by thousands of mourners
who assemble each year to mark the genocide. On recovering part of
his own father, Nukic said, “Although he is not complete. I will
bury him, and I will know where his grave is.” He said he intends to
keep searching for the remains of other victims for as long as he
lives.
We too must continue to search relentlessly for
the full truth about Srebrenica. The remains of more than 1,000
victims are still out there. They continue to haunt us, and we
cannot rest until they are all found. Only by unearthing these
truths – and only by recognizing this genocide, the gravity of this
genocide, and how we outside failed to prevent it – will we be able
to help the region move beyond such a dark part of its history, help
it walk toward greater reconciliation, which we all seek, and live
up to the promise of preventing genocide in our time.
Thank you.
|
