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"

If You Let Them Take Me, Next They'll Come for You

Back to the future - when will it be 1984 again?

The Tory election victory was of course a desperate disappointment to many of us, even if there was a sneaking sense in the final days of "1992" , recalling when so called "shy Tories" who would not disclose their political views to opinion pollsters plumped for the Conservatives in the anonymity of the polling booth. It was slim, of course, with just a few hundred voters scattered over a dozen seats making the difference between a hung Parliament and a Cameron regime with untrammelled power on just 37% of the votes cast.

And how untrammelled the Conservatives are promising to be with that power. Never has Britain's lack of a written constitution been more apparent: unlike every other country in Europe, none of us have any inherent rights as citizens of our country. Instead, as subjects of the Monarch, we are held to whatever freedoms, or lack thereof, are graciously granted in the name of the Queen through powers exercised formally on her behalf by the Prime Minister who, constitutionally, is the King-In-Parliament.

First major action promised - to be executed at express speed in the first 100 days of the new Cabinet - is to be the abolition of the 1998 Human Rights Act. So, to be clear, we will no longer enjoy the following legal rights under domestic law:
1. The right to life
2. The right to respect for your privacy and family life
3. The right to liberty
4. The right to not be tortured
5. The right to a fair trial
6. The right to freedom of religion and belief
7. The right to freedom of expression
8. The right to not be enslaved
9. The right to property
10. The right to start a family
11. The right to freedom of association and to join a trade union
12. The right to not be prosecuted for something that is not a crime

Astonishingly, according to the rightwing press, triumphantly proclaiming an end to human rights, these are not British values. Indeed the Daily Mail described the rights listed above are "hated" and "a farce". They have forgotten the history - the Act, introduced by Labour enshrines the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in British law. That declaration, denounced repeatedly by the likes of the Daily Mail as "European", was actually largely written by British lawyers on the instruction of Winston Churchill at the end of the Second World War.

It was adopted by the member states of the Council of Europe, a much larger body than the EU, via the European Convention on Human Rights and was intended to extend to all people the protections that had been denied them in the years of Nazism and fascism. It represented the very values that so many British servicemen and women fought to defend (whilst of course the Daily Mail pre-1939 was infamously supportive of the German Fuhrer). Never again should it be possible for a  Government to legally detain and suppress its citizens in the run up to the brutal excesses of internment camps and gas chambers.

Churchill's legacy - architect of human rights declaration

If anything represents British values, or what we like to think of as British values, surely it is the European Declaration of Human Rights? It is framed to ensure that all of us are safe from arbitrary treatment by powerful governments. It is overseen by the European Court of Human Rights, which can instruct signatory governments to amend their domestic laws if they are held to be out of line with the letter and intention of the Declaration.

The Tories of course draw on two sources to attack this - the first is the widely held but completely false assumption that it is imposed on us by the European Union: if fact, we signed up to it over a quarter of a century before Britain entered the EEC as it then was. If the HRA is abolished, we will still be covered, if less clearly, by the Declaration/Convention, but many Tories are signalling a desire to get out of this too - so the current highspeed legislative plans are likely the first of two or three intended stages of dismantling human rights protection altogether. Both the current and previous Tory Justice Secretaries have made clear their wish to opt out of the European Court of Human Rights if the Council for Europe does not agree to their new legislation, which includes an intention to prevent the ECHR from instructing changes to British law. Any redress Britons might seek for breaches to our human rights would become harder and harder to obtain - a process likely to be deepened exponentially if we leave the EU, which would open the way to opt out of the European Convention completely.

Secondly, they highlight a handful of cases where terrorist suspects have made sometimes spurious claims for protection citing either the European Convention or more recently the HRA to avoid extradition. The most infamous case was Abu Qatada's long legal wrangle before he was deported to Jordan. The sticking point? The Jordanians had refused to guarantee he would not be tried using evidence obtained under torture.

However, the fact was that, in the end, he was deported to Jordan (where he was subsequently acquitted of the charges brought against him, although he faces prosecution on other unrelated matters). And for every Abu Qatada or Abu Hamza dragging things out, there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of the rest of us - innocently seeking to exercise our rights in what is supposedly a free society.

And yet is it? Or will it be?

Introducing the Government's plans to conflate abolition of  human rights with the "war on terror", David Cameron said this week that as the act is abolished, to be replaced with something much less comprehensive and non-universal, he is now concerned not just by terrorists but by "non-violent extremists" as well. These, it seems, are people whose views undermine our society - how this is defined is of course anyone's guess. Is it fascists? Islamists? Conspiracy theorists? People who believe the Queen is a lizard? People who advocate a different economic system, such as ecosocialists or communists? How about Scottish Nationalists, whom Cameron's lackeys have portrayed as the greatest threat to the UK since, apparently, the Abdication Crisis of 1936 (you'd have thought they might have come up with something better than that, to be honest)?

In what must be one of the most chilling statements ever made by a British Prime Minister, Mr Cameron declared that obeying the law is no longer going to be enough:
“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone."

Along with Home Secretary Theresa May, he has stated an objective to interfere in the lives of people holding extreme views whether they are violent or not, or, by implication, even if they are not breaking the law. As well as "disruption orders" to silence individuals and groups deemed extreme, the so-called Snoopers Charter will be reintroduced, allowing the authorities to monitor all of our electronic communications whether or not there is a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity. And of course woe unto anyone who goes "off grid" and stops using mobile phones or email as these are likely to invite an immediate assumption of wanting to hide some undesirable activity. Taking a break from Facebook? Hmm, presumably to attend some sort of dodgy training camp. Or maybe off reading some really dangerous philosophy or economics tracts!

In a distinctly Orwellian twist, May claimed that all this would help to protect British values of tolerance and free speech. Black is white and four is five in Tory Britain.

Were the new anti-extremist plans being brought in with the Human Rights Act still in place, there might have been some comfort that they could at least be subject to legal challenge. That the Act will be gone makes the developments particularly threatening to free speech and liberty, especially set against Cameron's comments.

Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany legally. He used methods such as anodyne "protective custody orders" to suppress people he deemed to be extremists - ie, opposed to his interpretation of German society and values. Cameron is not Hitler, but alongside some of the post-9/11 powers brought in, ironically, by Labour, his actions create a framework for abuses of power by British Governments to go unchallenged and unchecked. It may start with ISIS and al-Qaeda supporters as its proclaimed objectives, but as with all too many all-encompassing laws covering legally vague concepts such as "extremism", it will be able to be interpreted and re-interpreted by state officials, inevitably extending its scope and impact and the degree of interference in perfectly law-abiding, peaceful citizens lives.

Imagine one truly nightmare scenario - a politicised police force run by a private corporation, implementing a watch on people it deems extreme for campaigning to end privatization of the police.

Far-fetched? Perhaps not - heed the words of a Federation speaker at yesterday's protest march by 30,000 police that "privatisation by stealth" is already underway. And then reflect on how laws introduced to counter terrorism have been used to stop protestors reading out the names of dead soldiers at the Cenotaph, or even to detain them for booing at the (Labour) Home Secretary.

In the USA, under some laws, perceived threats to the nation's economic wellbeing are now treated on a par with terroristic violence. If Britain treads the same path, what future for those arguing for a different type of economics, or to counter the overweening power of giant business corporations? Will we be designated hostile to our way of life? Will it be dangerous for you to read this blog, and for me to write it? How will we know if we can be peacefully following all known laws but still deemed beyond the pale as far as someone like Theresa May is concerned?

And whoever polices the new approach, it will almost certainly be very counter-productive. In recent weeks, in my own town, two 17 year old school boys ran away from home to join ISIS in Syria. Their families expressed their dismay, while the local rightwing paper took the entire Asian community to task for not somehow knowing the adolescents' intentions and stopping them. Quite aside from the complete impossibility many parents face in anticipating the actions of teenagers, when I discussed the episode with some local community members, they told me that many in their community are too scared to discuss ISIS at all, fearing it will lead to them being seen as potential troublemakers. Consequently, there is no clear dialogue that allows them to identify vulnerable individuals at risk of being seduced away by the terror group's slick internet videos and social media grooming techniques. The new climate being created by the Government seems unlikely to improve this situation.

Britain's history is one of tolerance of different views: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, German anti-semites, Italian anarchsts and many others of many hues were all granted asylum in Victorian/Edwardian Britain in spite of their being wanted by our then-Allies in Czarist Russia and elsewhere. Karl Marx's opus magnus, Das Kapital, was written in the heart of the British Library during his exile from Germany. Tory Governments were as open as Liberal ones to the exiles' presence, at least until the Aliens Act of 1905 , although even this still permitted entry to those facing prosecution for their political views regardless of what these were. And throughout the 20th century, however imperfectly, there has been no official attempt to suppress peaceful expression of even the most odious views unless they have sought to promote active hatred or violence. Cameron's rolling back of human rights at the same time as extending his intention to "interfere" in the lives of peaceful, law-abiding people smacks of the thin end of a very long, very dark wedge.

"Martin Niemöller (1952)" by J.D. Noske / Anefo - Nationaal Archief.

You may of course think it has nothing to do with you. After all, if you've done nothing wrong, why would they do anything to you? Except that is precisely the threat Cameron is making. Doing nothing wrong will no longer be enough.

Not all Tory MPs are likely to support the full range of Cameron's coup d'etat against liberty and freedom. Hopefully the likes of David Davis will lead a challenge in the Commons, while the Scottish Government has said it will withhold the consent legally required from it for the Westminster Parliament to abolish the Human Rights Act.

If they fail, our liberties will face their biggest legal reverse since the Barons forced the Magna Carta from the hand of King John in 1214.

Shy Tories? Shame on you. Time you read some Pastor Niemoller: "First they came for the Socialists..."

Breivik - Totally Sane and a Complete Bastard

And so the verdict is in: by a unanimous decision of five judges, a Norwegian Court in Oslo has found Anders Breivik, the xenophobic terrorist who butchered 77 people last year, to be completely sane. He has been sentenced to a minimum of 21 years in prison - the maximum under Norwegian law - which can be extended in 5 year tranches if he is considered to remain a threat to society.

Ironically, the prosecution was keen to find him insane and apparently even now may conceivably appeal on this point.

However, this seems to typify the reaction so common when a white man slaughters people in the name of a political creed - in Breivik's case, white supremacy and Nordic racism. Within hours of his murder of scores of young socialists on the island of Utoya, the media and others were declaring him sick, mad, the product of a broken family, a loner obsessed with violent video games, and so on.

Strikingly, the media often does this with rightwing white terrorists - in spite of their normal revulsion of excuses for criminal activities, they all too frequently hurry to explain their excesses as mental aberrations and write them a get out of jail free pass. We don't hear the same excuses about other terrorists - they don't write about Osama being ignored by his Mum, or the 9/11 bombers being gripped by paranoid delusions: their activities are correctly ascribed to their ideology; so why not Breivik's and the likes of Timothy McVeigh as well?

Everything would have been different if only Osama's parents
had let him watch "The Prisoner"

Yet in truth, Breivik and his muderous activities, while maybe superficially inexplicable to the many ordinary citizens who would never contemplate such extreme acts whatever their views, are not so inexplicable at all. They are simply the tip of a very dangerous iceberg of hatred which we ignore at our peril. Look at the messages of support he got from rightwingers across Europe on web boards; or the excusatory comments to be found written by Daily Mail readers under the articles about him of the "it's terrible but not surprising.." variety. Breivik is responsible for his own actions, but the slaughter of Utoya, by his own admission, was in part inspired by the commentaries published by journalists like the odious Melanie Philips. His manifesto took their extreme views and moved them on a few stages to what was, for him, a perfectly logical conclusion.

Supremacist ideologies lend themselves to violence - we have seen that time and again, from the anti-Semitism of the Nazis to the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs in Bosnia, or the current spate of murderous assaults on Christians by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Breivik and his acolytes may spend most of their time in their bedrooms online, devising fantastical pseudo-organisations with kitsch medieval names and symbols, but that does not make them mad, nor any less dangerous.

Utoya, Srebrenica, Zaria, Kaduna - cultural supremacists of different nationalities and faiths continue the slaughter of the innocent, use violence in place of argument and twist sometimes genuine grievances into weapons of scapegoating and hatred. Their acts betray their own deep insecurities about themselves and degrade the very cultures they claim to defend or promote, but that does not give any credence to writing them off as aberrations, excusing their wider societies of their own (and our own) failures to be inclusive and humane with each other and with strangers.

It may offend those of us with inherent liberal beliefs in the fundamental goodness of humans, but for whatever reasons, the people who would bomb and kill others in the name of culture are usually far from insane, no matter how unpalatable their beliefs. In so many ways, they are simply the extreme manifestation of their own societies, of the savagery that lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilisation which can so easily be stripped away - just look at how quickly ordinary people were committing the most gross acts against their neighbours in former Yugoslavia, or in Rwanda, or Chechnya, or scores of other places at many times in history.

So they are not mad and indeed the act of declaring their actions necessarily insane both reinforces totally inappropriate stereotypes about mental health and completely misses the real causes of the atrocities they commit. In the film Downfall, Adolf Hitler was powerfully portrayed as a dark-minded, manipulative and angry human being -  causing great offence to many, not because it was in any way inaccurate, but because by showing how banal and even normal evil can be, it conveyed the very uncomfortable truth that such terrible acts can be carried out by someone who is ultimately just flesh and blood, like any of us.

And so the people who blow up cars in streets or detonate bombs on underground trains or shoot defenceless teenagers in the name of defending culture or religion are not insane at all - but they are very, very bad. And rather than writing them off as not responsible for their actions and in the process exculpating ourselves, we must certainly resist them with every breath we can find. But to begin with, we need to take a very, very long look at ourselves and our societies and how they can so easily provide the fertile ground for the poisonous seeds like Breivik to bud and bloom so very, very tragically.