SREBRENICA GENOCIDE – THIRTY YEARS LATER

by KARLO NANUT

The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, who died in 1981 in Zagreb, wrote in one of his works, that when the lights go out in a Balkan tavern, the guests hold the knife, as if to say that the Balkan peoples have boiling blood. I don’t know if this is entirely true, but certainly this summer, traveling with the Adriaticgreen Peace Caravan, far and wide through Bosnia and Herzegovina, I ”touched with my own hands” the riches of their culture. This territory has undergone in various historical periods influences of different peoples, it was occupied and administered by Byzantine, Bulgarian, Turkish, Venetian, Hungarian, Austrian empires, whose cultures have mixed among the peoples and preserved to this day. The remains of beautiful fortresses bear witness to this: monasteries, churches, libraries, bridges. My journey ended in Srebrenica, ten kilometers from the Serbian border. July of this year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, the most serious war crime since the Second World War. Thousands of civilians, including women and children, were massacred by Bosnian Serb units. What remains today of that tragedy? Mass executions have left deep scars: today the city, which was once a major industrial center, seems to have died along with its inhabitants. To make the pain even more unbearable is the continuous denial of the genocide that accompanies the survivors and the families of the victims. The war broke out with the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, which many still remember with nostalgia today. After the brief Slovenian detachment from Belgrade in 1991, which we Gorizia residents also experienced with bated breath on the border of Casa Rossa, and then the bloody war between Croats and Serbs, supported by the Yugoslav army (JLA), the most ferocious conflict flared up in Bosnia-Herzegovina, between Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Bosnian Serbs. Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia, soon became one of the epicenters of violence. In 1993, as Bosnian Serb forces advanced, the United Nations declared the city a “protected zone.” Thousands of Bosniak civilians found refuge there, but the area was poorly defended by the UN peacekeepers. Between 11 and 22 July 1995, troops under the command of General Ratko Mladić captured the city. The Dutch soldiers of the Dutchbat contingent not only failed to prevent the genocide, but gave the Serbian army all weapons and uniforms without firing a shot. Colonel Karremans of the United Nations was later accused of failing to fulfill his duties, although he had asked in vain for air support from Aviano to strike Serbian tanks. Under the eyes of the blue helmets, the massacre took place: almost 10,000 men and boys were immediately separated from their families, executed, dismembered and buried in mass graves. Thousands of women were systematically raped. Some Dutch soldiers, who returned to the Netherlands, took their own lives after witnessing the horrors. Today, those who live in Srebrenica speak with difficulty about the tragedy, crushed by the weight of memory. Crossing the narrow valley, it seems to be in an open-air cemetery. During the Caravan of Peace we visited the memorial and cemetery in Potočari, where more than 8,700 civilians are buried. Before the war they also lived in friendship with the Serbs, but today peace is difficult. Bosnia and Herzegovina has become a federal state consisting of two political-administrative entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. This highly decentralized order should be functional to the presence of three constituent peoples: the Croat, the Bosniak (or Bosnian-Muslim) and the Serbian component. What the political entities have in common is only the army, all the other ministries are double, i.e. triple and autonomous with all the chaos you could imagine. In the past decade, genocide denial has reappeared, and the worst is that there is an academic public actively working for crime denial, warns Hikmet Karcic, a professor at the University of Sarajevo. And he warns, because this denial is intended to completely erase all responsibility. And not only that, but also of not being able to foresee future destruction, future genocide.

But is reconciliation possible in the face of the world’s ethnic and political tensions? Have we learned anything from war and genocide? Ernst Bloch, one of the German thinkers of the post-war period, wrote in his beautiful book The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung), that man still lives in the ”prehistory” of the creation of the world, of a just world, and much of Genesis, which in Greek means birth, creation, and which is part of the books found at the beginning of the Bible, originally had to be placed at the end, therefore it had to refer to something, which is yet to become, for which men should be responsible.