In Srebrenica... The World Was Put Out Of Joint ..

[Ishiyoshi]

In today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion section – lessons of Srebrenica; a profound read that deserves your attention.

Srebrenica

Aleksandar Hemon.

Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jul 11, 2005. pg. A.12

A couple years ago, at a Bosnian event in Chicago, someone pointed out to me a mother from Srebrenica. She was on her way to Washington to talk about the massacre to members of Congress. She had lost, the person told me, about a hundred male members of her immediate and extended family. She was surrounded by other Bosnians, talking and listening to them, but she seemed to exist in a different realm, her serene, sad face marked by an experience most of us could not begin to understand. I did not dare approach her, for I had spent the war safe in Chicago. What could I have said to her? What can be said? Please accept my condolences? Never again? Had I found myself face to face with her, I would have probably stood silent, for the enormity of her loss is beyond my imagination, therefore beyond the reach of my language. I would have probably been embarrassed by the triteness of what I perceived as my "problems" (taxes, an ankle injury, marital discord, etc.). I would have also been ashamed of my human, individual helplessness in July 1995, and thereafter, and always. I regret I had no courage to hug her, but even if I did I would have been humbled by the physicality of my body, both of us reminded at that moment that her men had perished, and I was arbitrarily alive.

The magnitude and the hateful thoroughness of the crime committed by the Serb forces 10 years ago creates an awed silence around the act itself. We talk about the circumstances in which it took place; we talk about the consequences; we talk about the shame that ought to be spread thickly around the world, shared between the U.N. and Europe and all who could have done something but let it happen. Often this silence is expressed in the form of platitudes and lazy cliches. The description of the small Bosnian enclave as the site of "the biggest massacre in Europe since World War II" always annoyed me -- would the suffering of the mothers who lost their sons and husbands and brothers be lesser if it were a close second, or the fifth biggest, massacre?

Srebrenica is thus in danger of being displaced into the realm of the symbolic and the abstract, for it is much easier to imagine what it stands for (the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, the calculated ineptitude of the U.N., the murderous essence of Milosevic's Greater Serbia project) than what it really is -- the incomprehensible, criminal destruction of human life, the loss that can never and in no way be recovered.

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In a video recording recently shown in the International War Crimes Tribunal courtroom in The Hague and subsequently around the world, members of the Serbian police unit called Skorpioni (Scorpios) execute six Srebrenica men and teenagers. Apparently proud of their endeavors, the Scorpios recorded their war adventures, and made it possible to rent the tape from a video store in the Serbian town of Sid, from which most of them came. Needless to say, it is a ghastly document: the Scorpios unload the men from a truck; they beat them and curse their Muslim mothers; the men are terrified, their faces bloody; they lead them up into the woods. Then it all goes fast. The men put up no resistance, for they are exhausted and hopeless. The Scorpios shoot them in the back, one by one. The penultimate man shudders when he hears the shots finishing off the one before him -- the shudders bespeak the unfathomable fear he experiences the moment before he dies. The last man left standing does not shudder when he hears the shots; he does not move or show in any way that he is present at his own execution. He is dead already, only waiting for the bullet to confirm it. Entirely oblivious to the suffering and death of fellow human beings, the Scorpio cameraman keeps complaining about a weak camera battery -- well past all moral problems, he has only electrical ones.

The footage is a supreme document of the banality of evil, of the pathological inability to empathize with other human beings. For the Serbian killers, the Srebrenica men have no names, no faces, no bodies, except as bullet receptacles. They are entirely abstracted, reduced to symbolically representing their Muslim enemy standing in the way of the ethnically clean Greater Serbia. The Scorpios did not know, for they did not care to know, that one of their victims was a 16-year-old boy named Azmir Alispahic, that he liked girls and soccer and wanted to be a doctor. It did not bother them -- and it probably still doesn't -- that never will the person who Azmir Alispahic was be alive again, that nobody will ever feel and know and hope for what Azmir felt, knew and hoped for. Nobody will ever love or be loved as Azmir, and none of those small moments of happiness that the living take for granted (the morning coffee, the smell of blooming linden trees in June, Mother's bourek, etc.) will ever be experienced by Azmir again. If a human life is a multitude of unrepeatable details, moments and feelings, then Azmir's life is simply irreplaceable. And if every life is connected with other lives, if it is part of an infinite network that binds us in humanity, then Azmir's absence is irreparable damage to humankind.

Multiply that by eight thousand and you might get the idea of the size of the human catastrophe that Srebrenica was and is. For that is genocide -- that incomprehensible annihilation of the past and the future life, of the individual and the communal life. This is what Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both still at large, had in mind -- the absolute erasure of Bosnian Muslim life, for which the murder of Azmir and eight thousand other Srebrenica men was necessary. It is not hard to understand the legal definition of genocide, but the human consequences are unspeakable: everything that life was, is and could be vanishes, whole personal worlds disappear into oblivion. The Srebrenica woman who had lost a hundred family members is alone in a lifeless, silent desert.

All of us were part of the Srebrenica network -- not just Bosnians and Herzegovinians, but all of humanity -- and with the murder of the eight thousand men, our lives are irreversibly changed. We live in a world that would have been different had Azmir lived. He would have been 26 today, perhaps a doctor, saving lives in the Srebrenica hospital or treating his mother's diabetes; perhaps he would have had his children, adding love to the world that desperately needs it. We will never know. Everyone who possesses an un-Scorpio-like mind and soul, everyone who believes that all human destinies are inescapably interconnected, is aware of the emptiness that is the consequence of the Srebrenica massacre. We are deprived of Azmir's life.

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Bosnians suffer from that absence most. Every time I go back to visit Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina I notice a permanent shift in the structure of reality -- over there, time is out of joint. There are symptoms at every corner: in the center of the city there are ruins reeking of urine and feces; conversations unnoticeably pass from soccer to genocide and back; on a street car there is a sign stating that it is strictly prohibited to carry flammable materials, explosives, weapons and corpses on a public transportation vehicle; old Muslim ladies beg on side streets, out of the sight of passers-by, probably because they are new to begging and are ashamed of it; the town of Srebrenica, like many towns in Bosnia, is controlled by the Serbs who had cleansed it of its Muslim population. The biggest shift in reality is the Bosnia-Herzegovina existing in the ludicrous form established by the Dayton Peace Accord, which legitimized the fruits of the Serbian ethnic cleansing. The Accord allowed for the situation in which the ideological heirs of Karadzic and Mladic are ruling over their victims, as part of the government of the country they worked hard to destroy. For many Bosnians, such absurd, distorted reality results in the feeling of the world devastated and divested of humanity, the world in which Azmir would be killed again and equally brutally. We still have not done much to save his life.

The world was put out of joint in Srebrenica, and it is our duty to put back together what we can, so our children's children have a better chance of living a normal life (whatever that means), so that a future Azmir has an opportunity to treat his mother's diabetes. To make that possible, the memory of Srebrenica needs to be preserved in all possible concreteness -- we need to know the names of the victims and the names of the criminals; we have to bury the dead with dignity and put the murderers on trial; we must understand how and why such a crime could take place. Most importantly, we have to be able to imagine, as fellow human beings, the lives of Azmir and all the Srebrenica dead. We must listen and learn from those for whom what happened in Srebrenica is more real than their own lives. If, today, I found myself facing the woman from Srebrenica whom I failed to hug in Chicago, I would still be overwhelmed by the silence. But I would know I need to listen to her, for she is the one who can teach us how to understand. She is the one with whom we must mark the 10th anniversary of our loss.

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Mr. Hemon, a novelist born in Bosnia, is the author, most recently, of "Nowhere Man" (Vintage, 2004). He lives in Chicago.

[Bananatree]

It's the same thing that happened in Rawanda, and everyone is ignoring it.

Sadly, it seems Eastern Europe, and Muslims aren't enough of a selling point for TV, and they are getting washed over in the news.

I think it is sick that our news channels will report when Arab and Muslim extremists blow each other, or others up, but when they are being slaughtered by the truck load, no one seems to care.

[Breepee2]

And our stupid forces (DutchBat) we're sitting on their ass, waiting for French air support that never came (due to a corrupt general).

As a Dutchman, I'm ashamed that our ground forces stood by and did nothing.

[Bananatree]

AFAIK, the Ghanians, the Dutch and the Canadians were the only ones who did ANYTHING during the Rawadan genocide, so don't feel too let down.

The world we live in is pretty sick, if we spread this news we can hope this will never happen again, or atleast will never go unnoticed again.

[Christopher]

I'd never had the time to sit down and read this piece, but the topic title has stayed in my head since this was created earlier this month. I was finally able to give it a read this morning. It's truly saddening the events that have occured there, and Mr. Hemon's words strike a chord so deep within me that I have troubles speaking anything further about the matter.

I can imagine Hermon as he put this together, traveling through the streets as a wandering poltergeist admist the forlorn surroundings..a true tragedy has occured, and I fear that no matter the initative the pain will never be eased.