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It is difficult to understand the organized,
systematic genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian military and civil
authorities from the Republic of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In
July 1995, the Serbian army and police forces murdered more than
7,000[1] Bosniak males, many with hands tied behind their backs, in
merely a few days. As the men were first separated from their
families and then slaughtered, thousands of women and children were
forcefully relocated, and women were raped. This hateful and
unconscionable operation, carefully planned, according to the
International International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), actually started in May of 1992 during the siege
of Srebrenica.
The town was quickly filled with 50,000 to 60,000
terrified refugees from eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, and people died
from starvation in the town. It even continued after July 1995 when
Serbian authorities did all they could to conceal the forensic
evidence of genocide, reburying remains from mass graves hoping to
make it impossible to identify the individual victims. The goal of
this action, self-consciously preformed on the part of Serbian
military and civilian authorities, was to exterminate Bosniaks in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It is difficult to understand the genocide because
of the social relations and shared histories that existed between
the executioners and the victims. Bosnian Muslims were killed by
former friends, neighbors, colleagues and schoolmates. Buses that
drove Bosnian Muslims to places where they were murdered had been
buses used to drive them to work. Schools inside which victims were
executed had been their former classrooms (see Suljagić 2017).
It is difficult to understand the genocide because
the genocide occurred not in a secret place, but in full view of the
observing world. In 1993, Lieutenant General Philippe Morillon, the
United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Commander in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to Srebrenica and, after seeing the death
camp circumstances of the civilians living under the siege, declared
that Srebrenica was under the protection of the UN. In April 1993,
the UN Security Council, adopted Resolution 819 which formally
declared Srebrenica a UN “safe area,” following after Morillon’s
declaration, and sent UNPROFOR soldiers from Canada, and later the
Netherlands to the town. As part of the demilitarization agreement,
military commanders defending Srebrenica agreed to turn over their
heavy arms in exchange for UN protection. As early as April 1993,
Ambassador Diego Arria, Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the
UN Security Council, described the situation in Srebrenica as a
“slow-motion genocide under the protection of the UN forces” In July
1995, Srebrenica—under the protection of UN forces—became a
fast-motion genocide.
* * *
Who are the Bosniaks? Bosniaks are European
Muslims, to draw from the title of William Lockwood’s well-known
ethnography. Bosniaks are South Slavs, sharing cultural customs and
social heritages with Serb and Croat South Slavs. Bosniaks are not
Turks. Bosniaks reside between two panethnic identities, their South
Slav heritage and language and their faith brethren in Turkey, which
is becoming stronger after the genocide.
One academic effort to understand the genocide is
as follows: “In Bosnia, Muslims once considered good neighbors and
fellow Yugoslavs became enemies [Bringa]. In some views the Bosnian
Muslims were “really” Serbs or Croats who had foolishly and weakly
converted to Islam during the Ottoman period and now needed to be
forcibly dehydridized and returned to their true ethnic fold.
Violence in Bosnia was thus antisyncretic; aimed at reducing people
to unalloyed ethnic identities” (Steward 1999:54). The academic
effort fails to recognize human beings as human beings. The account
accepts the nationalistic ideologies that the perpetrators of
genocide in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina used to frame their
collective action. The account labels the victims, blaming the
victims for being other inside a prejudicial rhetoric that purports
to frame the cultural reality of modern Yugoslavia, when being other
is a natural, positive aspect of social life in a vibrant community.
The account mines, unwittingly, the discourse of Radovan Karadžić,
convicted of genocide and sentenced to forty years in prison by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, who had
said during the war: “There are ethnic communities unable to live
together in the heart of Europe. This is simply because they hinder
each other’s development. There are species among plants that cannot
grow together. They have to be separated in order to grow” (Suljagić
2017: 27). Karadžić’s point of view absolutely controls the academic
account, which becomes a regression in the attempt to understand the
genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, limiting itself to the primitive
conception of life Karadžić used to incite genocide.
* * *
Jean-Paul Sartre identifies the trap pundits step
in when analyzing the rhetoric of a demagogue.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely
unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know their remarks
are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves,
for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly,
since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.
They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous
reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They
delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by
sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them
too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by
some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they
are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous
or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over
some third person to their side. (1968:14-15)
Academics, judges, journalists, authors, and
leaders are obliged to use words responsibly since they believe in
words. Their obligation makes them vulnerable to becoming the foil
of the demagogue, who plays with words and does not use words
responsibly. Sartre points out the demagogue promoting and
exemplifying hatred knows that his words are ridiculous and absurd.
There is a small degree of self-consciousness here that
interlocutors, in their desire to resist the demagogue, overlook. It
is easy to say the demagogue’s speech is irrational and ignorant,
but the demagogue already knows this. The critique allows the
demagogue to assume a sense of intellectual superiority since the
demagogue sees the interlocutor is taking the demagogue more
seriously than the demagogue takes himself. Demagogues use words to
disconcert and intimidate and for no other reason. The demagogue is
uneducable, a cue ball. The vainglory seriousness of the
interlocutors’ words is feeble, and maybe irresponsible. While
speech for the demagogue’s interlocutors is an opportunity for
understanding, it for the demagogue is a ruse for play and sadistic
enjoyment.
* * *
It is difficult to understand the executioners of
the genocide. What were they doing? Why were they doing it? What
were they thinking? How could they have done what they did? In
Srebrenica MCMXCV [2017], Emir Suljagić recounts a testimony from an
executioner told to the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia after a massacre near Srebrenica in July 1995:
From that pile, that heap of dead bodies that did
not resemble human bodies any more, a human being emerged. I said
human being, but it was actually a boy, five or six years old. It
was unbelievable. Unbelievable. A human being came out and started
walking towards a path, a path along which men were standing, doing
their job, carrying automatic rifles… And then, out of nowhere they
all put their guns down and all of them were just paralysed. And it
was only a child in front of them. . . . And this child was covered
in the tissue and intestines of other humans . . . And this child
emerged from the pile of executed people, calling: «Babo»…. this is
their word for father. The boy said, «Babo, where are you?»
It is not possible to understand the genocide,
whether in Bosnia-Herzegovina or elsewhere. This executioner’s
testimony, however, uncovers the face of genocide: its blank,
humanless face, as perhaps no other testimony can. When the
executioners saw the young child, they saw a human being and put
down their guns. They stopped doing their heinous job because they
saw in that moment how heinous it was. We have to ask ourselves:
What happened to the young child searching for his father? Was he
killed? Did the executioners spare him?
Marš Mira, the long, three-day peace march from
near Tuzla to Srebrenica which has since 2005 annually retraced the
steps of those who were able to escape the genocide in Srebrenica
and honoring those who did not, occurs without understanding the
reasons for genocide. All the intellectualizing, analyzing,
rationalizing, and theorizing that seeks to do its best to
understand genocide is transcended in the march, restoring a human
face to humanity.
Sources:
Bećirević, Ednina. 2010. “The Issue of Genocidal Intent and Denial
of Genocide: A Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” East European
Politics and Societies. Vol. 24: 480-502.
Lockwood, William. 1975. European Muslims: Economy and Ethnicity in
Western Bosnia. Cambridge: Academic Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the
Etiology of Hate. New York: Schocken Books.
Suljagić, Emir. 2017. Srebrenica MCMXCV. Zenica: Vrijeme
Stewart, Charles. 1999. “Syncretism and its Synonyms: Reflections on
Cultural Mixture.” Diacritics. Vol. 29: 40-62
Note:
[1] Some estimates the number of those killed to be over 8,000. The
Preliminary List of People Missing or Killed in Srebrenica compiled
by the Bosnian Federal Commission of Missing Persons contains 8,373
names.
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