11 July marks the 29th anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica in Bosnia, one among many appalling atrocities as Yugoslavia collapsed in on itself in a series of deadly wars as racial hatred took over far too many minds and the world gained a new term in ‘ethnic cleansing’. It was reported in May by the BBC that United Nations member states had voted to declare 11 July an annual day of remembrance for victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Why did this terrible event take place? There is a theory that it was somehow inevitable as ancient hatreds bubbled up, like a pan of deadly soup left too long on the hob. Yet that simply isn’t true. And therein lies a lesson – and a warning – for us today.
What happened in Bosnia?
Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, Bosnia had been a largely peaceful land where Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) lived most part in peace and harmony. There were even examples of people going to each others’ religious festivities, with Bosniaks joining in Orthodox (Serbian) and Catholic (Croat) Christmas celebrations and Christians joining in similar festivities at Eid. This is all perhaps best symbolised if you go to Sarajevo, the main city in Bosnia, where the Catholic cathedral, the Orthodox cathedral and the main mosque in the city are all within a couple of hundred metres of each other. Poignantly, the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide is the middle of the three religious buildings.
What happened in Bosnia to upset the harmony and spread misery and suffering is essentially the same as has happened in many other parts of the world. In his magisterial 1999 book Humanity,Professor Jonathan Glover explores what turns a peaceful society into a broken, divided, death-filled place. As Glover says:
“the approach was to start from the moral resources we have. What, in everyday life, restrains people from doing horrible things to each other? Obviously, part of the answer is social pressures and the threat of legal punishment.”
He then expertly shows how those restraints are dismantled in certain circumstances and the worst side of humanity, in all its brutality and destruction is then unleashed.
Glover goes on to ask, “how could people participate in the massacres of My Lai, Bosnia or Rwanda?” The answer is that the social pressures that usually act against those who wish to perpetrate atrocities are instead turned against those who wish to criticise and stop them. Societies fall into tribal traps, where the normal ways of thinking are overturned and it is somehow seen as the right thing to do, to attack and kill your neighbours, if they seen as part of the ‘other’. In reality of course, there is no ‘other’, just fellow humans with the same feelings, hope and fears as everybody else. This is where the need for political leadership to turn people against each other comes in, so that peer pressure is for hatred and brutality while legal restraints are discarded. And sadly, the former Yugoslavia was not short of such leaders in the form of people like Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić and Franjo Tudman.
The Srebrenica genocide
So it was that on 11 July 1995 and in the days afterwards, 8,372 men and boys, all Muslim except for one Catholic, were murdered in cold blood by Serb forces, outside the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, while their mothers, daughters, and sisters were taken on buses to Tuzla, unaware of what was happening to their loved ones. Meanwhile in other parts of Bosnia other terrible atrocities also took place between 1992 and 1995. Srebrenica itself was supposed to be a safe haven, but Dutch UN troops stationed at nearby and Potocari, did little or nothing to protect those massacred.
What can we learn from what happened at Srebrenica?
Within days of Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany, on 30 January 1933, the brave, principled Christian pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer went on German radio to tell the German people to beware leaders, who were really ‘misleaders’. It was a warning that would have been highly appropriate for what happened in Bosnia.
It was the vital component of tribal leaders such as Milošević, Mladić and Tudman, more than happy to stir up hatred and fear in people to gain political power, that facilitated the terrible war in Bosnia. It was their rhetoric that encouraged people to forget the moral resources they had and throw away the restraints they had and attack and kill those portrayed as the ’other’; people who had often been their friends and neighbours for years and where simply fellow human beings like themselves.
A similar process has taken place in many places and at many times of course, be it Nazi Germany, Rwanda in 1994, and so many other settings down the years. And I believe it is a process that not only seems to happen again and again, but can happen anywhere.
Let us explore this further by examining what is happening in three countries, traditionally seen as bastions of liberal democracy and human rights.
The USA
In the USA the upcoming General Election in November is truly a perilous moment for American democracy and given the power of the US, for democracy across the world. It was noted in June that a blueprint for what Trump would do in power, which goes by the name of Project 2025, running to over more than 900 pages, has been released and it, “calls for sacking thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education and other federal agencies, and sweeping tax cuts.”
It was further reported that California congressman Jared Huffman had responded to the plan by saying, “Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.” It is also forecast that immigrants and religious and social minorities will be targeted by a new Trump presidency, which will be considerably more divisive than even his first term was.
The United Kingdom
Speaking of Trump, we have seen one of his copyists take up a lot of the media’s time during the recent General Election campaign in our own country; Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK.
Reform UK’s policies, were neatly summarised by Freddie Heyward in the New Statesman a week before the General Election: : “The Reform manifesto is a Trumpian document for a British electorate. It promises a public inquiry into “vaccine harms”, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, the abolition of net zero targets and the deployment of ex-army officers into the police. Immigrants will have their rights stripped back and “High Intensity Training Camps” will be opened for young offenders. Nigel Farage accepts the Republican Party idea that a woke deep state is obstructing change: he wants to politicise the civil service by allowing ministers to install their chosen officials”.
Meanwhile, an undercover reporter for Channel 4 discovered a canvasser in Clacton to be expressing deeply racist and homophobic language, including about the Prime Minister himself. Following this Labour leader Keir Starmer claimed that Farage hadn’t “shown the leadership he should’ve shown. There’s no good condemning remarks after the event. If you lead a party you set the tone, and the culture, and the standards of your party, and I don’t think he’s done enough in terms of leadership.””
While many may be celebrating the troubles in the Tory Party, shouldn’t we also beware the rise of Reform UK?
France
As for France, at the time of writing the far-right National Rally are on the verge of power. Among their policies is the very disturbing abolition of France’s “droit de sol”, or ius soli. This policy automatically grants French nationality at 18 to people born on French soil to foreign parents (provided they have lived in France for at least five years since the age of 11). Under very worrying plans developed by Marie le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally, automatic French nationality would be restricted by blood, granted only to people born to at least one French parent. For a western European country to be thinking of imposing such a policy, a throwback to the days of Nazi Germany, should be a concern to us all.
Conclusion
In the years before 1990. Bosnia was a peaceful land, where different groups lived in harmony, as beautifully exemplified by the success of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. Yet within 10 years, with the rise of right-wing populist leaders such as Slobodan Milošević, the people of Bosnia had turned against each other to deadly effect, culminating in the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995.
There are at present signs of right-wing populists in countries such as the UK, the USA and France gaining support among their populations, which threaten the basic human rights of millions of the citizens of their countries. We must learn the lessons of what happened in Bosnia and remember that genocidal violence has occurred in many different settings and at many different times, after the world said ‘never again’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Porajmos and the Second World War
Let us all remember the pain and suffering of the Bosnian people at this anniversary time and keep them in our thoughts and prayers. And perhaps one of the best ways of honouring their memory is to stand against those who would wish to divide us in other societies including our own.
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