Remembering Srebrenica

In October 2016 Lindsay Meader, who was then Associate Rector of St James’s Church, and I joined a group of nine youngish Muslims for a three day visit to Bosnia organised by Remembering Srebrenica. Two days later we were meeting with survivors of a massacre.

Srebrenica is one of those words which, once you know what it stands for, can’t be forgotten. But today there are many who weren’t even alive, so have never heard the word. It’s important. During a few July days in 1995, over 8,000 Muslim men and boys who had believed themselves to be under the protection of the United Nations, were murdered by Serbian soldiers. Thousands more perished on what became known as the Death March.

What struck me most about all the survivors who spoke to us was how reluctant they were to go back into the trauma, even though they wanted the truth to be known. Hassan, solid and thickset, with traces still of the farm boy he had been before the war, was clearly uneasy during the introductions. He’d told his story many times before but you could sense his longing to be a ‘normal’ person, someone who could start a conversation with strangers about football, or video games, not for ever condemned to be a living witness to atrocity. But once he got started, it was hard to stop. The horror of his narrative never dims: how he had fled with his father and his twin brother from the Serb soldiers into the wooded hills near Srebrenica, how he had walked for days with no food or water, how he had finally reached the safety of Muslim Tuzla. His father and brother didn’t make it. Most of the ten thousand who set off didn’t make it. ’That’s us,’ he said. ‘Survivors. We will always always be survivors. To the end of our lives. Unfortunately.’

Another young man we met Nedzad, was one of hundreds of Muslim men and boys who were rounded up in a field and shot. He was left for dead and after dark he crawled out from under the corpses and was able to hide. The bodies were buried using heavy machinery. Because the Serbs knew it was a war crime, the bodies were dug up, sometimes two or three times and the bones jumbled in different sites. This made the work of the ICMP (the International Commission on Missing Persons) particularly difficult.

We visit the memorial site, thousands of identical white graves, and listened to one one of the Mothers of Srebrenica, whose husband and three sons were all murdered. The killing took place over three days and the soldiers had to work in shifts, round the clock.

The genocide didn’t happen out of the blue. In 1995 the Bosnian war had been going on for three years. Sarajevo had been under siege, its people picked off by snipers when they went in search of food. We’d had images of emaciated prisoners on our TV screens, villages in flames, refugees loaded onto lorries, stories of executions. But Srebrenica was supposed to be safe. DutchBat, UN soldiers, were guarding this ‘safe zone’. Except when the Serb soldiers attached, they were overrun.

It was a trip Lindsay and I would never forget.

July 2017 and St James’s hosted an sombre evening of words and music to Remember Srebrenica. There were traditional Bosnian songs and Lionel Handy played the Cellist of Sarajevo;  Lord Paddy Ashdown and Simon Callow and others spoke movingly, but the highlight without a doubt was the powerful testimony of Munira Subašić, President of the Mothers of Srebrenica, whose husband and son were both murdered. She spoke with the same simple dignity and calm witness of the survivors we’d met on our trip.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre. With all the horrors in our world right now, why remember something that happened a generation ago? The theme this year is ‘Remember yesterday, act today’. Remembering has never been so important. Last year, following the hideous killings in Southport, we saw how quickly a minority can become a target for hate: a hostel housing asylum seekers was set on fire and only swift action prevented senseless deaths.

And the parallels with Gaza right now are only too obvious. For more than two years we’ve watched ethic cleansing, bombings, starvation, destruction, dehumanisation – and felt powerless to stop the horror. Right now it looks as though it will only get worse. How can we stop the hatred spilling over into our own communities and cities?

Resad, our guide in Sarajevo, was seventeen when the war broke out and he joined the army straight away to defend his home city. ‘It seemed the only noble thing to do,’ he told us, before adding. ‘But I wouldn’t do it again. Nothing in this world is worth killing and dying for.’

He took us to visit the synagogue in the heart of Sarajevo. The old Jewish caretaker had been the closest friend of Resad’s Muslim uncle and they greeted each other warmly. Resad tried to explain to us how the Bosnia he grew up in, a Bosnia where a Muslim and a Jew could be best man at each other’s weddings, could implode with such devastating speed.

‘It all starts with Us and Them,’ he told us. ‘Us and Them is the time to act.’

So … we do need to remember Srebrenica.