Remembering Srebrenica
"That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented." (German philospher Karl Jaspers commenting on the Holocaust)
We are living through times of seemingly great divison. The Brexit vote opened up a wide fissure in British society, as did the narrowness of the No Vote in the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014.   Added to these are the ongoing scourge of terrorism and the disastrous effects of austerity policies, imposed in the wake of the equally damaging economic crash of 2008.  In times like these extremists and those wish to manipulate others for far from benign political ends can prosper and terrible suffering can result from this. It is in this context that my trip to Sarajevo, Tuzla and especally Srebrenica had particularly important things to tell me and I believe all of us.
My trip,as part of a delegation from the National Union of Teachers, in conjunction with Remembering Srebrenica, began with a flight to Tuzla followed by a two-hour journey in a minibus to Sarajevo, along what can be best described as a long a winding road. Indeed if I hadn't been so tired, I might have been tempted to break into song to comemeorate this journey.... Thankfully, after a sleep and breakfast we were ready to see what we could learn about hatred and its deadly consequences in the stunning city of Sarajevo, with the help of our excellent guide Resad Trbonja.
We began at the Tunnel Museum, which comemorated the Tunnel of Hope which ran for 800 metres under the airport runway. At only 1.6 m high and 1 metere wide, traversing the tunnel was not a journey, which many enjoyed and often it was blocked due to people getting injured or fainting. It reminded me of mines I have been down in my native Northeast England. However, it was important  to the survival of the people of Sarajevo, during the four-year long siege, as it enabled people to bring in much needed food and medicines, literally under the noses of the Serb forces besieging the city. It is a timely reminder of the lengths people will go to stay alive.	
From the tunnel, we went on to look at an exhibition in one of the main museums in Sarajevo and then to a viewpoint, from which we could see just how beautiful a setting Sarajevo is in, for all its tragedies and hardship.  Surrounded by mountains, in a way no British city, even Glasgow is, it looked beautiful, but of course thoise very same mountains were, for four years, walls around the city manned by hostile Serb forces. They acted then as prison walls...   
Walking down from the viewpoint we went through one of the many new cemetries in Sarajevo, which seemed to surround the city, like a sparkling string of pearls glinting in the warm late Spring sunshine.  The cemetries were packed full of small white towers, each marking a grave and on each one there were the dates of the person buried there. It was truly disconcerting to see that many of those buried there, who had all died between 1992 and 1995, were born after me.....     
In the centre of the city, as well as seeing the site where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinanad on 28th June 1914, so precipitating the First World War, we were shown a site which summed up what Sarajevo had been....and why what happened is so worrying. Within a few hundred metres of each other, are a najor mosque, a synagogue and two churches, a large Orthodox church and a Catholic cathedral. Sarajevo was clearly a multicultural city, where people of different faiths and backgrounds got on very well, until circumanstancxes changed and manipulative political leaders began to stir up hatred that hadn't been there.  The point was that far from Sarajevo being a city where tensions had always existed and the breakdown in community cohesion was inevitable, the opposite was true. So if the nightmare can happen in Sarajevo, it can happen anywhere.  
Our final destination for the day was Galerija 11/07/95 a self-funded gallery near the Catholic cathedral, run by the photographer Tarik Samarah. Here we saw many haunting photographs connected to the genocide at Srebrenica, including pictures of bodily remains and survivors in refugee camps.  There was also film, which was both thought-provoking and disturbing.
The next day we went to the heart of the Bosnian darkness, to Srebrenica. Arriving soon after midday, we had lunch and then proceeded down the valley through the town to the old Dutch army base at Potocari. This was an old battery-making factory, where firstly Canadian and then Dutch troops had been stationed during the Bosnian War under the UN flag. Here we were met by Hasan Hasanovic, a survivor of the Srebrenica Genocide.  Through Hasan's testimony, including how he lost his father and brother in the genocide and through film and exhibits, we learnt how the terrible events unfolded after the Serbs, under Ratko Mladić, had taken Srebrenica on 11th July 1995. 
 Many thousands sought safety with the Dutch UN troops, in what was after all the world's first official UN Safe Enclave. Thousands were kept out by Dutch troops who just wanted to get out themselves.  In fact one of the abididng messages of the Memorial Centre at Potocari is that it seems that the Dutch troops never wanted to be there. There was some appallingly racist graffiti, in English, about Bosnians and it was only too apparent just how badly the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica had been let down by the Dutch UN troops. However, perhaps the real fault lay even higher up.  The Dutch troops, under the haples leadership of Karremans  did ask repeatedly for air support to try and stop the Serbian advance, but the request was repeatedly turned down. Later that evening Karremans was filmed drinking a toast to Mladić. The same day Mladić dedicated the capture of Srebrenica to the Serb nation and went on to talk darkly of revenge over the Turks, referring back to the defeat of gthr Srerbs to the ottoman Empire forces at the Field of the Blackbirds in 1389. 
It is also important to mention the propaganda organised by the Serbs and Croats towards Bosnians, particularly the Bosnian Muslims. It can be reasonably argued that  a lot of it not only galvanised the Nationalists in Yugoslavia but also internationally. The international community had a misconception of Bosnian people and the Bosnian war, hence the uber slow and late intervention.  This is a warning to us all; beware propaganda from any side in a conflict....if not it can lead us all down a very dark road.
The refugees at Potocari were split into two groups; men and boys over 12 nyears of age and women and younger children. The latter group were sent to Bosnian army lines in buses, while the men, thinking that they would be killed by the Serbs sought to escape.  They were right to be worried. Forming a column about 15 000 of them tried to make it through the woods and the mountains to Tuzla, some 40 miles to the north. 8 372 never meade it and were captured and massacred on the way.  
From the museum we then went to the huge memorial a short walk away. There we saw thousands of graves, eerily reminiscent of the huge First World War cemetries. We heard from another survivor, Nedzad Avdic,  who was shot but still manged to get to safety alive with the help of another survivor.  He has now received an honorary doctorate from University of Bedfordshire.  We also heard movingly from one of the mothers of Srebrenica, who lost family members.   
Having finished our visit to Srebrenica, we  went on another journey throiugh the stunning Bosnian countryside to Tuzla.On the way I noticed how Bosnia was in one respect like like Northern Ireland.  There is peace, but it is an an uneasy peace, with tribal areas marked out by Serbian and Bosnian flags, in a similar way to how Northern Irish towns may be covered in union jacks or tricolours.  I remembered what John Hume's father Sam once told his young son, at an Irish Nationalist meeting shortly after the Second World War; you can't eat a flag. 
On our last day we made a visit to two places in Tuzla. Firstly we went to a house owned by the Mothers of Srerenica, from where they still attempt to find remains so that there can be closure for families, and to remember those whose lives were so callously taken away. We then went to the Podrinje Identification Project, where the International Commission on Missing Persons has a laboratory and storage facilities. There we heard from one of the workers trying to dientify body parts and saw the many bags containing the remains of some of those massacred in 1995 and still not fully identified and buried.   We heard about how difficult a job it was to identify the remains, with bodies being moved to secondary and tertiary graves to try and hide the evidence of the genocide.   We also heard how funding may dry up before all the remains have been successfully identified. 
What is clear is that, to echo the point made by Karl Jaspers shortly after the Second World War, the war and killing can happen again in Bosnia...and can indeed happen anywhere - including our own country - witness the tragic death of Jo Cox and the sharp spike in hate crimes last summer following the Brexit vote. There are a number os steps to genocide, which have been identified and which can help us to see the warning signs. 
Many of the most inspirational passages in the Bible come from the prophets; people such Micah, Amos and isaiah in the Old Testament and of course Jesus himself in the New Testament. These were prophets who often spoke out against narrow tribalism and were always in favour of principles such as peace and justice.  They didn't set out to stir up hatred within people, but rather to encourage people of their time to live peaceful lives, within a fairer society.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from Srebrenica is this; beware the false prophets.  Beware those who would seek to divide us.  Beware those who would seek to classify us into groups of us and them and to use symbols to seperate us.  We need to oppose those who would seek to discriminate against a certain group in society and we need to similarly oppose any attempts at imposing discriminatory laws. We must watch carefully for signs of people organising against others in society, especially when they see fit to dehumanise others and see them as anything less than as fully human as they are.  We must  watch carefully for all steps taken by powerful people, which could lead to polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination and ultimately genocide.  Finally we must stand resolutely against any attempts to deny genoicidal activities, which have taken place, or any of the steps whoch can lead to genocide. 
There is much to do.....
(c) Peter Sagar June 2017