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The real lesson of Srebrenica |
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On our site, www.srebrenica-project.com, for the moment only in the Serbian version, we have a section with Moslem witness statements dealing with Serbian victims of Srebrenica. These Moslem witnesses are Mirsad Sulejmanovic, Saha Cohadarevic, and Rifat Muratovic. Each of them, from his or her own vantage point, confirms that Serbian civilians in and around Srebrenica were continuously targeted by Moslems from within the enclave throughout the conflict 1992—1995, both before and after the establishment of the UN protected “demilitarized safe zone.”
Diana Johnstone, well known author and political analyst from the United States, correctly observed at the time of our International Srebrenica Symposium in Banja Luka in October of 2008 that Balkan nations, much as they may have to their credit, also exhibit an epistemology which is very strange by Western standards. Essentially, the measure of truth is whatever is seen to advance the interests of the speaker’s community at any given moment.
Indeed, the impulse to be fair to others and self-critical in relation to one’s own group seems sadly lacking in that part of the world. That makes such honest and critical accounts of what witnesses saw and experienced, especially if they carry connotations that are negative for their own community, all the more significant and trustworthy.
For any real progress on the Srebrenica issue to be made, its narrative must be depoliticized and contextualized.
A tragic story with an enduring historical and moral message cannot be constructed on a foundation of falsehood and on a version of facts which has been carefully redacted. The official Srebrenica narrative is based on both.
The claim of 8000 dead is a falsehood unsupported by empirical evidence. It is negated by the critical scrutiny of even the limited corpus of evidence that has been put forward in its support.
For that inflated account to appear remotely sustainable, it was necessary to subject the real flow of wartime events in and around Srebrenica to a drastic redaction. In fact, one half of the relevant events, the half which refers to the systematic destruction of the surrounding Serbian community, had to be deleted and excluded from consideration entirely for the fictions of the other, inflated half, to be able to remain standing in their distorted form.
What was properly, and by any reckoning, a great human tragedy affecting people of both faiths, as a result of the moral blindness and political short-sightedness of the Moslem community’s leadership, has now been transformed into a cheap monoethnic propaganda farce.
It now is up to the Moslem community to demonstrate its maturity, and to show that it is composed of independent, responsible men and women capable of critical thought and moral analysis, that it is not, in other words, what its leaders think: a suggestible herd. Only they, the ordinary Moslem people who lost everything in a senseless war, can now morally reclaim their lost husbands, sons, brothers, and cousins. There is only one way that they can do that: it is by denying their venal and cold hearted leaders the permission to use their kin as props in a demeaning propaganda show. They must insist that their sons and husbands are human, that they suffered unjustly in a savage war incited by others and that, as innocent victims, they must be treated with compassion and dignity due to them. Even those among them who were deluded into committing crimes were but puppets in a war they did not initiate or understand, and whose ultimate purpose they were never told. Their gravestones must no longer serve as stage décor in the political scenarios concocted by those who pushed them over the precipice of death in the first place. The Moslem community will become truly free only when it resolutely demands of its leaders a public admission of the whole truth, including every detail of their own knowledge and complicity, in the tragedy of Srebrenica. But Srebrenica, let us remember, is a tragedy which engulfed not just Moslems, but all who lived there. They must therefore ask their leaders to explain not only the fate of their own kin, but also the fate of their Serbian neighbors between 1992 and 1995, to identify and condemn their torturers and executioners, and to apologize for their crimes.
Only after that is done, not in the form of hollow political gestures, but as a unyielding demand surging from the moral depths of an awakened and vibrant Moslem community, will conditions for genuine peace in Srebrenica be met. But that will never happen as long as one side blindly and stubbornly demands of the other to contritely admit what both sides very well know to be a lie.
For peace and reconciliation in Srebrenica to happen, the ordinary Moslem must meet his Serbian neighbor halfway and invite him for a cup of coffee, ready to apologize and prepared to hear the other’s apology. Any other approach is a recipe from Hell for the endless repetition of countless crimes, and for the reenactment of Srebrenica in the life of each succeeding generation.
All the people of Srebrenica, both Moslem and Orthodox, must always remember a simple fact, which has already cost the lives of so many of their near and dear, and the forgetting of which may yet cost them their own lives if they fail now to heed the real lesson of Srebrenica. That fact is the following. The ideologues and fanatics who sow distrust and hatred for their own advancement and for the benefit of their distant puppeteers, their children, their brothers, and their cousins, will never have to face the consequences of the evil doctrines with which they indoctrinate the simple folk. In a world which both the Holy Quran and the Bible agree lies in evil, those destructive and amoral creatures may even be praised as respectable statesmen, patriots, or theoreticians. It is not they but the poor bastard who is expected to respond to their siren call, and that means each and every one of you, who will have to pay the price of their perfidy.
Isn’t it therefore time you all stood up, Moslem and Orthodox, and told them with a single voice: “Enough! Never again! Go away from us please, and never come back.”
----------------------------------------- Sulejmanović was a military commander with Moslem troops in Srebrenica and he describes vividly the killing spree conducted against surrounding Serbian villages and the slaughter of their inhabitants. Saha Čohadarević’s account is important because she spent the bulk of the conflict within Srebrenica enclave and therefore had an insider’s perspective. Muratović describes crimes committed by Moslem forces under Naser Orić’s command against Serbian civilians in the Birač area near Srebrenica. |
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