Never again?

Emir Suljagić, who survived the Srebrenica massacre at the age of 19, writes from Sarajevo:

Here is what’s happening in and around Srebrenica in broad strokes.  As it happens, the trial of Ratko Mladic, who was in charge of the Republika Srpska (RS) troops there during the massacre 17 years ago, opens today in The Hague.

A political party actively campaigning on genocide denial looks as if it could win the mayoral race in Srebrenica later this year. This is unacceptable to those of us who survived the 1995 genocide there.  It would give control over the Potocari Memorial, including my father’s grave and those of many other innocent victims, to people who deny the crimes that led to their deaths.

The Obama administration, including advisors such as Samantha Power and Susan Rice, appear to have taken US policy on Bosnia back to 1992, when Secretary of State James Baker said the United States had no dog in the fight. The American Ambassador to Bosnia, Patrick Moon, is not objecting to RS President Milorad Dodik’s demand to hold the election under the BiH Election Law, putting an end to the “Srebrenica exception.” It allowed all 1991 residents of Srebrenica to cast a vote in the elections regardless where they are at present. There are already around three thousand Serb voters from Serbia currently registered to vote in Srebrenica.

The political parties who do not deny that a genocide happened in 1995 could in theory stop this from happening by blocking the adoption of the Bosnian state budget, which Dodik needs because RS is in financial difficulty.  But they have failed to do this, as they are more afraid of Dodik, the US government, and the Europeans than they are of the Srbrenica massacre survivors.

To counter this betrayal, the survivor groups have organized a coalition that will work to register citizens of Bosnia from all over the country to vote in Srebrenica in the upcoming election. This is permitted under Bosnian law. We have about 90 days before the voter lists are completed. I am convinced that we can register around three thousand people to help us stop the graves in Potocari from falling into the hands of those who deny killing those buried in them.  No doubt some in the international community will try to stall this process.  The survivors will make such attempts public, including to the international media.

The survivors’ associations have misgivings about the presence of international representatives in Potocari on July 11 this year, when the massacre is commemorated annually.  It seems better to mark the occasion this year without those who were also absent 17 years ago and have now forgotten the suffering of the victims.

I read in Samantha Power’s America and The Age of Genocide: A Problem from Hell about Rafael Lemkin’s lobbying efforts with the Allies at Nuremberg to include genocide in the charges against Nazi leadership. He failed. My friends and I will go all the way in registration process. Because we know, like Dervis Susic, that “what we do for our country will be built into what is bound to happen one day.”

It is sobering to  realize how little has changed. July 1995, when more than 8000 people were murdered at Srebrenica, could happen in today’s world as well. Perhaps it already is happening in Syria.