From Srebrenica to Gaza
Thirty years have passed since what was deemed the first genocide in Europe since World War II. Srebrenica is the tragic symbol of the Bosnian War. More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered. It is difficult to forget the shame of Europe and the democratic West for having allowed such barbarity. It is the same thing we will hear in a few years about what is now happening in Gaza. How could the brutal genocide in Srebrenica have been committed? How can the genocide in Gaza be happening? How can we fail to learn? The memory of evil is weak; we soon collectively turn the page. We forget and relapse. The memory of what we have not experienced firsthand fades too quickly from our consciousness. It is as if history were starting all over again, and with it the endemic collective hatreds.
Today's world is rearming itself, and war (explicit or commercial) once again reigns in international relations. Multilateral diplomacy, despite all its hypocrisies, weaknesses, and balances, is always better than the law of the strongest that US President Donald Trump is imposing. His unpredictable dialectic of clashes is giving wings to those who only know how to act through brute force, like Putin in Ukraine and Netanyahu in Gaza. A Netanyahu who has had the cynicism to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Faced with him—especially in the face of the barbarity of Gaza—Europe, exiled and weakened, is once again failing, incapable, divided, and impotent. The images and stories of terror from Gaza will haunt us for years to come, just as those from Srebrenica have done over the past three decades. In the future, it will be difficult to accept the shame.
The necessary remembrance of the Srebrenica massacre is shocking. The Bosnian Serb army, following instructions from the President of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, and under the direct command of General Ratko Mladić, committed a cold-blooded and inhumane massacre, the fruit of ethnic and religious hatred. Faced with the passivity of the Dutch peacekeepers, they occupied the UN base on the outskirts of the city where the surrounded Bosnian Muslim population had taken refuge. It had been declared a "safe zone" in theory, but it ended up becoming a deadly trap: Serbian soldiers seized it without hesitation, separated the women and girls, took them out in buses, and then shot the men, both adults and children. It took many years for first President Karadžić (2012) and then General Mladić (2017) to be tried and sentenced, to 40 years and life imprisonment, respectively, by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Three decades later, the pain persists among the victims' families. 7,000 bodies have been identified. 1,000 remain in mass graves, their identities unknown. Many families are still waiting to bury their missing loved ones. This Friday, like every July 11, the tragedy of Srebrenica has been relived, while in Gaza civilians continue to die every day in inhumane conditions.