The 15th anniversary of the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbs in Potacari, Srebrenica, had an added dimension of pain: The newly found bodies of about 700 Bosnians were lying on the ground, all shrouded in timeless and deeply sad green colors. Their relatives had come to claim them, each seeing the last remnants of their loved ones for the last time. Everyone was collapsing on the ground like leafs falling from a tree. As if their pain and agony for the last 15 dark years was not enough, they were going through it again.
All of us there on that day felt like the massacre had just happened. It was as if Gen. Ratko Mladic and his barbaric soldiers had just walked out of the battery factory in Potacari and started to shoot the fleeing, unarmed men and boys; as if these murderers had just left their humanity in a dark corner and come out to show to the world the limits of inhumanity and barbarism; as if they wanted to teach a lesson to a Europe and the UN, which were paralyzed, incompetent and indifferent to the biggest human tragedy in recent European history.
They taught a lesson, which was that a massacre had taken place in the heart of Europe at the end of the 20th century and that no one had done anything to stop it. After Srebrenica, nothing was the same. All the talk about humanity, civility, European/Western values, democracy, human rights, tolerance and human dignity lost its meaning. It was as if we had learned nothing from the Holocaust 40 years ago, the world let another massacre happen before our very eyes. Yes, the Dutch were to blame. Yes, the UN was to blame. Yes, the international community was to blame. But the simple fact is that we once more lost our humanity in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.
What lessons can be derived from it? The Srebrenica massacre shows that the most lethal weapon on earth is not weapons of mass destruction or biological and chemical weapons but a humanity that has lost its sense of direction and descended into a state of barbarity. What Hitler did with his German supporters (and they were in the millions) in the 1930s and ‘40s, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Mladic and hundreds of other Serb leaders did with the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The world watched in horrifying disbelief and betrayal as these murderers displayed their inhumanity and did practically nothing to stop them for fear of leaving their comfort zone. The so-called international community and its laws and regulations and conventions all became meaningless. What remained was shame.
This is the most important lesson to be learned from the Srebrenica massacre: shame. It is a shame that still permeates the halls of power in Europe, the UN and the world 15 years later. The reason I say it is still a shame is because we don’t see anyone saying, “Never again!” with any degree of credibility and resolution. Some may take comfort in the dignity and resilience of the Bosnian people and how they deal with their pain and agony. But this is the high humanity and virtue of the Bosnian people, not a value to be manipulated by the power holders of the world. When there are virtually hundreds of war criminals from the Bosnian war still moving around freely and probably with a horrific sense of pride for their “heroic acts” in the name of Serb nationalism, one wonders if we can sit back and say it is time to close the file on the Bosnian war and the genocide in Srebrenica.
