The Killing Fields of Srebrenica - Our History or Our Destiny?

Sousse, Tunisia last week

Ten days ago in Sousse, Tunisia, crowds of people rested by swimming pools and on sandy beaches enjoying the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. A man approached with a sun brolly which concealed his automatic firearm. Within an hour, 38 people - including 30 British tourists - were dead and others seriously injured. Local people, at great personal risk, cornered the gunman who was later shot dead by the police. He was, it became known, inspired by the Islamic State and its call to arms against unbelievers.

Ten years ago tomorrow, in London, hundreds of thousands of people headed for work on a warm July morning. While some took the bus, many massed into the stairwells and lifts that descended into the Undergound tunnels of the city's tube system. Among them were three men from Yorkshire wearing backpacks, like tourists heading for the airport. As their separate trains headed round the multi-coloured lines that snake beneath the British capital, they pressed the buttons that linked through wires to the packs of explosives strapped around their bodies, exploding themselves in tiny, cramped spaces. As a fourth man on the surface, disoriented when he found his designated tube station closed for repairs, boarded a bus and blew

Murder in Russell Square, London, 7 July 2005

himself up along with several passengers, 52 people met their deaths as they went around their daily work routine, with over 700 maimed and injured.

As it would be in Sousse, the four men drew their inspiration from a belief that they were acting in the name of their Muslim faith. Their deaths and their taking of lives would be rewarded in the afterlife.

Twenty years ago, today, with the blessing by the Christian priest done, the Serbian paramilitary commander signalled his men forward. For months they had surrounded the thousands of Muslim civilians and a handful of lightly armed defenders huddled into the small protected town of Srebrenica in the Bosnian valley below. A small United Nations force of largely Dutch blue helmets provided thin cover between the two groups and melted out of the way as the well-armed attackers moved on the town, their heavy armour provided by the remnants of the Yugoslav Federal Army. As the inhabitants fled into an ever smaller area around the Dutch military compound, the military observers reported that the Serbs were "ethnically cleansing" the streets and buildings that came under their control in the name of Christian civilisation.

Within five days, after the Dutch troops watched as the Serbs separated men and boys from women and put them all on separate buses to drive them off into the hills, over 8,000 unarmed Bosniac Muslim males lay dead in ditches, in fields and in mineshafts. To this day, many are unrecovered and those that are come in shattered bundles of broken bones and partial bodies.

The three scenarios may be separated by decades, by thousands of miles and by different faiths and lives. But they are intimately, fatefully connected and they each and together provide an awful warning of what may lie ahead if we let it be so.

Srebrenica was just the latest of many, many atrocities committed by the Serbian rebels led by Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, proteges of the nationalistic President of the Serbian Republic, Slobodan Milosevic. They had rebelled in 1992 against the democratically elected government of Bosnia Hercegovina and, fuelled, funded and armed by Milosevic, they set out with the declared aim of eliminating the 1,800,000 Bosnian Muslims who made up around 45% of the population of the newly independent state. Karadzic declared that, although from the same genetic stock as himself, Bosnian Muslims were to have "no further hope of survival or continued existence."  
Over three bloody years, their army of butchers killed about one in every twenty Muslims and displaced many more. Rape camps worked to impregnate captive Muslim women with Christian Serb men's children and communities that had lived peacefully alongside and with each other for several centuries were wiped out forever.

Although all this happened on the doorstep of Europe, with a few notable exceptions, European politicians stood by wringing their hands. They claimed to impose an arms embargo on the area, a chilling echo of the Spanish civil war when, as in Bosnia, a democratically elected government was only thinly armed against well-equipped rightwing militarists and embargoes served merely to stack the odds ever more in favour of the nationalists. The British Government was particularly active in opposing any intervention to stop the bloodshed - Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was especially keen to express the need to not get involved, although he was personally very happy to get very involved in lucrative business deals with the Milosevic regime a few years later.

The Bosnia war was finally brought to an end after a short bombing campaign by US jets against the rebel Serbs' positions around besieged Sarajevo, but the damage was done. With nearly 90% of the civilian dead Muslims, the apparent willingness of Europe to stand aside while tens of thousands of "westernised, integrated" Muslims were slaughtered purely for their faith gave an abundance of fuel to the hate preachers and extremists who wanted to turn the gaps and misunderstandings between the West and Islam into a chasm of violence and division.

In this context, the appalling London bombings, on the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, are not excused or legitimised in any way but there is little doubt that the Bosnian bloodbath radicalised many younger Muslims and made their recruitment by the psychopaths of ISIS and al Qaeda that bit easier.

And now, another decade on and the blood flows - in Sousse, in Paris, in Aleppo, Baghdad, Raqqa, Damascus, Gaza... the list is endless. And the plans for the future? The answer to the deathly black flags and the murders amidst the ruins of Palmyra? More bombing, more weapons, more death.

The phrase that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it is hackneyed, but never more true. But perhaps what is even more important is how history is written and what is remembered. For in so many narratives, on all sides, only snippets and single events are recalled, commemorated and alternately reviled or celebrated.

Mass burial of Srebernica dead, 2010: 1,500 bodies remain missing

Churchill said that "History will be kind to me as I am going to write it" and this has never been more so than now, when our media and commentators rarely go much beyond last week to explain the events of the day. To them, Bosnia is as obscurely distant in time and as irrelevant as the War of Jenkins Ear or the Vikings' sack of Lucca. But, as even today bodies are recovered and children born of industrial-scale rape reach adulthood, it has never been more important to understand how the prejudice and conflicts of the past are the building blocks of today. Everything is connected, as we all are, and commemoration of the past is pointless unless we learn from it so we both understand today and make a better tomorrow.

"The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice," was Mark Twain's verdict. In a world shaped by the poison pens of the Daily Mail and the narratives of the bloodthirsty, arms manufacturing elite, we must look hard, listen hard and reflect on the truth so often buried from view. And that is that what unites humanity is in fact much more than the cultures, faiths and traditions that are held up to divide us by the Presidents and Prime Ministers, by the Caliphs and Kings - by those who do not want us to question the grip they hold on our world.

For the true history is that people of all faiths and none have lived in peace for incalculably more time than they have fought with each other. Our hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares are much the same, regardless of the trappings of difference in clothes or buildings or customs or ritual. But for some it is an inconvenient truth and a dangerous one for their continued domain over the rest of us. Their watchword is our ignorance.

Srebrenica, London, Sousse. They are our history, but they do not need to be our destiny.


Previous posts on Bosnia -  "The Ghosts of Bosnia"
                                               "Indicting Mladic for Srebrenica, Sarajevo - and London"

Balkan Echoes

The Mothers of Srebrenica - the surviving relatives of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys butchered in 1995.

A Dutch Court has today ruled that the Dutch state is liable for the actions of Dutch soldiers, operating as part of the UN peacekeeping forces during the Bosnian war, who delivered some 300 Bosniac men and boys into the arms of their Serb murderers in Srebrenica back in 1995 were guilty of war crimes. The decision, taken following a case brought by the "Mothers of Srebernica", is welcome and long overdue. But it also highlights the ongoing hypocrisy and disregard of western governments towards the victims of European wide nationalist and neo-Nazi groups.

Who can forget these days back in  late June and early July1995? TV cameras covered the crowds of scared and hungry civilians crammed into the supposed safe zone; while the Dutch UN commander promised that he would not leave the terrified Muslims, mostly unarmed and surrounded by heavily weaponised Serbian paramilitaries. For months, they had been terrorised and starved until now their tormentors moved in. In the midst of this, 300 men ad several thousand women took refuge inside the UN compound itself - only to be herded out by their supposed protectors, the Dutch troops. They were assured that General Ratko Mladic himself had guaranteed their safe passage in spite of the obvious hollowness of his many, casually proffered previous promises.

Forced out of the compound in untypically decisive action by the UN in Bosnia, the three hundred joined the queues outside. Ominously, the women were separated from the men, supposedly to go to safety on different buses.

Except, as we know, the men's ones never turned up on the other side of the warring lines. Instead, 7,000 males, from teenage boys to crippled elderly men were led into the hills and then, as Christian priests blessed their executioners, they were shot and bludgeoned to death in the single worst act of genocide in Europe since the close of the Second World War. Their bodies were abused and dumped in mass graves and down old mine shafts in a clumsy attempt to put any evidence beyond the reach of any future investigators.

And, of course, the Dutch commander did not stay, instead getting as far away as possible.

The media of course was more than equivocal about the whole event - just as with Gaza now, the one sided nature of the Bosnian war, in which over 85% of casualties were Bosniac Muslims, the BBC and other western outlets suggested that the arms embargo favoured by the EU somehow "levelled the playing field" (or killing zone would have been more appropriate). In truth, given that the Serbs started with the full panoply of the well armed former Yugoslav army behind them while the Bosniacs started with a few police pistols and partisan rifles from World War 2 museums, the embargo in fact ensured ongoing Serb supremacy. This was only brought down when, finally shamed into action by the shelling of Sarajevo market, the UN finally approved the bombing of Serbian gun emplacements around besieged Sarajevo. A ceasefire and peacetalks leading to the Dayton Accords swiftly followed, but, of course, it has taken nearly twenty years for the families of the men butchered at Sarajevo to find even a smidgen of recognition of the UN's collusion with the Serb rebels.

And, as this Court finding is finally given, another tragedy with very similar traits and motives is playing itself out several hundred miles to the east of Bosnia - on the steppes of the Ukraine, the rightwing regime that came to power by overthrowing the democratically elected President has, with much western backing, more or less consolidated its hold over Russian speaking areas in the east. In spite of much hostile media coverage of Russia's attempts to protect ethnic Russians from the predations of fascist and far right vigilantes favoured by the Kiev irredentists, Putin has not overtly intervened and the Russian militias portrayed as extremists by the west have been almost completely eliminated.

But one look at who is busy fighting for the Ukraine regime immediately raises serious concerns about what is going on, and where Ukraine is headed - Scandinavian "volunteers" proclaiming that they are engaged in a race war for "the white Christian people". This statement does seem all the more odd given that most Russians are fairly white; until you reflect on Hitler's views of the Russian Slavs as what their name originally meant - an underclass, or under-race of slaves.

The Azov Unit uses the Wolfsangel banner once favoured by the Nazis.

Operating as part of the Azov militia, an outfit echoing the Serbian Arkan Tigers of the Bosnian genocide, they openly parade Nazi flags and symbols. Indeed, Nazi views are widespread among the European right - anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, persecutors of the Roma minority, many of their proclamations make the chilling "manifesto" of Utoya murderer Anders Breivic seem like a children's book by comparison.

The West, keen to get its hands on Ukrainian shale gas (the new regime has signed a 50 year deal with western energy bosses, including the son of US Vice-President Joe Biden and a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry, which hands over their national treasure to big foreign corporations), has happily backed all manner of misfits and extremists. The coup d'etat in the Ukraine by a mob including racists, anti-Semites and out and out neo-Nazis, some of whom are now members of the Government, highlights very much what the true focus of western interventions in states around the world are actually about. As John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN under the Bush Presidency said of the Iraq war, it was never about freedom and democracy; it is about American (Western) interests. And money.

Dangerous genies were let loose two decades ago when Britain in particular connived in the destruction of Bosnia; and as we remember the ghosts of Bosnia today, the news from the East remains as grimly unsurprising as ever as the tragic cycles of history repeat, again and again.

Chilling echoes - right-wing militia round up ethnically suspect Russians.