It's midway through August already. Which means that amidst the household chaos and general mayhem I didn't blog about an important anniversary.
In the middle of July 1995, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys from Srebrenica were killed by the Bosnian Serb army led by Gen. Ratko Mladic. The men were separated from the women, put onto buses and then drived to throughout the Drina Valley and executed in cold blood. Some men, fearing the worst, tried to make a run for it, through Serb territory but few made it to Bosniak territory before being slaughtered.
What is really hitting me hard about the anniversary this year is that it feels as if it is starting to pass into history. 16 years is a long time. So much has happened in the world since then. Wars in Iraq and Afganistan, not to mention civil conflicts not unlike that that Bosnia endured in Libya and possibly other middle eastern countries. Suddenly Srebrenica feels like a long time ago. Even the arrest of Mladic this year only served to make it feel as if it was from another era. One that is now closing.
But for the women who lost fathers, sons and husbands those terrible days in July 1995, it isn't history. It is their lives that they continue to live every day without their families.
Take a moment to remember Srebrenica. How much it is still a part of our lives. What fades from newsprint, overshadowed by other more recent atrocities, does not move into the realms of history. Not yet. Not when it is still so real for so many people.
24 hour news channels and the quest to provide the 'latest' news means that events like this quickly pass into history. For some time I've felt there's been a need for a form of current affairs reporting which revisits events like these and reports on their long-lasting effects. Too quickly things are forgotten. Thanks to writing such as yours people can be reminded and informed.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Having made my first trip to Bosnia (and the Balkans) this year I am reminded that what seems like history to us isn't history to other people. Thank you for the reminder.
ReplyDeleteThere was an impressive review of the past when Karadzic was arrested. For a lot of young people Bosnia and Srebrenica were already history even then - unknown history. But my impression was that there were a lot of journalists around who had been involved in reporting the war and were determined to make sure that the public knew why Karadzic had been arrested and why that arrest was important. With Mladic there was much less general background information around. It was as though it was the arrest of the fugitive at long last that was newsworthy and what the fugitive had done was rather less important. Srebrenica had already been done and wrapped with Karadzic.
ReplyDeleteNext year's the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Bosnian War - the 20th anniversary of horror in places like Bijeljina, Prijedor, Foca and Visegrad, even less well remembered than Srebrenica. How many people know about Milan Lukic, Pionirska Street, Bikavac and Vilina Vlas? As long as people don't know they don't care, so Bosnia gets left in the stranglehold of a peace agreement that forces the victims of the war to return to towns run by the people who murdered and raped their children.
Saying "Never again" gets you nowhere unless people remember that it can always happen again. Thanks for doing your best to remind them. (And hopefully I can hear the sound of gears engaging!)
Recent history is difficult to follow precisely because it is neither the present or history. It is hard to understand how it has affected the world beyond, and what it means. It is nigh on impossible to learn about it in schools here in the UK because no one has written much about it. Should that be the job of a journalist or that of an historian? It sounds as if I don't care, that is wrong. I do. It is a dilemma that faces us all in this age of instant communication, it is almost happening too fast and we don't get time to digest the important stuff, yet important stuff happens everywhere all the time. I wish I could find a solution. Perhaps by keeping alive the memories, the anniversaries we will learn and say never again...
ReplyDeleteI hadn't realised that it was 16 years or that such an immense number of victims were involved
ReplyDeleteDefinitely something to take time to think about
Thanks, M, for the reminder. We thought of this slaughter when TSI students in Tuzla made the pilgrimage again this summer to Srebrenica. May people continue to go so the world remembers man's inhumanity to man.
ReplyDelete-Toni in Ithaca, NY-
You're right. It does feel like a long time ago. Well done for reminding us.
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