Twenty-eight years have passed since the Srebrenica genocide, 11th July 1995, and I believe the best words to describe that horror are still ' the great fraud'.
That massacre was clearly designed and built as if in a chemical lab and was sold to the fools because of a civil conflict, an ethnic clash, a random barbaric act. Europe with inertia, interest, or complicity, was deliberately misled. It should not have taken much effort to understand; it was enough to ask ourselves more insistently the basic questions of how, where when and why. And above all: to whom all that brought benefits.
I was 16 years old, and the Balkan war was in the news, yet, as it should be for any other adolescents in the world, it did not belong to me. I was enjoying my summer holiday, dancing with my converse shoes to the beat of Technotronics, wearing ripped jeans and sweaters twice as wide as me.
I do not remember where I was between the 11th and 13th of July 1995, as many of you I remember the exact time and place when the news of the Twin Towers attack broke into our lives, but I cannot recall where was I when Srebrenica fell. The number of people who lost their lives those days were three times more than as in New York, but “no one saw it coming”, and while Europe was sunbathing, that place with an unpronounceable name, hidden in the mountains, became forgotten by everyone, even by God.
It was not until many years later that I was able to pronounce that name correctly, along explaining the word genocide. My Human Rights Law professor, a former UN official, introduced me to those concepts, definitions but above all to atrocious memories. I remember looking away from videos of tortured bodies, and doing so I crossed his figure, standing in a dark corner of the classroom. His gaze was fixed on those images, and his face had tears. He, as many others, had no idea that the same system he believed in, could betray as Judas the people they served.
"Don't worry, you will be protected" this was the last sentence of General Philippe Morillon during his discharge, after leaving Bosniacs without weapons, after having brought them to the “safe zone”: an enclave that would have become the ground for serbs to strike last fatal atrocities. Yes, because the blue helmets had been cautious enough to disarm the Bosniacs, but not the besieging Serbs, who were far better equipped with weapons and insanity. Ratko’s Mladić intimidation had worked well.
Last April, I decided to take a trip dedicated to memory, tiptoeing into what is now Bosnia Herzegovina, starting from Mostar heading up north.
Every landscape weep painful memories: walls torn apart by mortars, hills, land and roads burying mass graves, signs of landmines and gravestones at cross roads.
Then there is the deafening silence of the dead.
Collective memory in Bosnia Herzegovina is alive, a must, and it intersects with the personal stories of the people, the memories of everyone and each of them: stories, narratives of victims and perpetrators, Bosniacs, Serbs,Croats, Muslims,Orthodoxs and Christians.
As those young people who did not experience that war directly, I found myself at the junction of a transgenerational/intergenerational/multigenerational transmission of experiences, more specifically of traumas, with ethnic, religious and political connotations.
A nation's collective memory is easily and artfully managed by those in power, especially when official history is rewritten after a regime or other significant changes. But we must not and cannot overlook the fact that individuals also do 'manage' their own memories.
Collective memory obliges you not to forget, but every narrative depends on the suppression and repression of its exact shattering contrary- as ghosts of our past.
On the 11th of July in Potočari, on the outskirts of Srebrenica, people crowded around the UN headquarters: 'defend us'! But the blue helmets did not move a finger- it was out of their mandate at that point- and Mladić begun the carnage. Men started being picked up by serbs soldiers. That entire night you could hear shouts, gunfire… silence and so on. More trucks were needed the next day, to dispose 'the waste', 'the parcels ''. That was the order, those parcels were 8000 men, shot after being tortured in warehouses, cinemas, schools. All this within two, three days. Bodies placed in mass graves, subsequently hidden under roads, or near mine fields: a warning not to get close, not to search.
Today there are those who live next door to the murderers of their husband, son, father, brother. The same executioners, some of whom, during the opening of the Potočari memorial, drove the buses carrying survivors to the commemoration ceremony.
We were complicit: Europe, the UN, and NATO, no one raised a finger in front of the chronicle of a death foretold by films, interceptions, documents. We left the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, of human beings I would say, take place where we declared a safe zone, rather than a concentration camp and a venue of execution.
Collective, public memory is an ever-changing process: the result of choices and a selection of what needs to be remembered and what to be forgotten. What happened in the former Yugoslavia, including the genocide of Srebrenica, cannot and should not be remembered as a civil war between ethnic-religious groups. As per Goldstein's words, what is a clear omission of memory and analysis concerning the genocide and other massacres, only serves the purpose of sidelining the international community's failure in taking responsibility and in protecting.
Sebrenica marked the failure of Europe, the grand union that continues deliberately not to remember while repeating the same ill narratives and mistakes.
My journey stopped in Sarajevo, at the Gallery 11/07/95. I did not have to, nor did I want to continue further to Srebrenica. Everything was clear and memorised.
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