Crime, Oblivion and Shame: Opposing Them Are Those Who Remember

Written by: Amir Sužanj/BHRT

When a traveler sets off along the gentle valley from Konjević Polje towards Srebrenica, not knowing where they are going, they would think they are entering an oasis of beautiful nature, beauty and peace that can hardly be disturbed by anything. The greenery, clear water, forest and birdsong seemingly give no hint that this area was the site of the most terrible war crime in Europe after the Second World War – the Srebrenica genocide – and that the surrounding hills and forests are witnesses to the terrible time of killing in July 1995, exactly 30 years ago.

On those forest paths and clearings, hundreds of murdered people remained among the thousands of victims who suffered a terrible fate in those bloody days before the gun barrels of the Army of Republika Srpska, with the collaboration of various international calculators and traders in human tragedy, such as the Special Representative of the United Nations for the former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, who used all possible diplomatic means to try to prevent international intervention, thus abandoning the people of Srebrenica and all those who found themselves in that supposedly protected enclave at the time to units under the command of Ratko Mladić, not only to disappear in the horror of the crime but also, by digging up their graves, to try to remove even the memory that they ever existed.

… Thirty years later, among the tens of thousands of people who will come to Potočari to pay tribute to the victims of the genocide, there will also be many young people, descendants of those who were predestined and condemned to be killed in the genocide and to be swallowed by the darkness of oblivion, as if they never existed. They come, as every year, from various parts of the world, from Australia to America and Canada, where life scattered them after the genocide. There they became doctors, engineers, scientists, experts of various profiles, some of them world-renowned specialists. They come as the living legacy of their fathers, brothers, grandfathers and other members of their families, who were killed in the genocide and who were supposed to disappear from memory so that this terrible crime would be hidden and forgotten, and its perpetrators shielded behind a policy of denial.

These young people come, carrying the memory of their murdered loved ones, having become successful and respected through their work and learning, to today's Srebrenica, which all these years has borne the curse of that terrible crime and where, after thirty years, there is almost nothing – for a long time not even a kiosk or a bakery – and for the smallest thing its residents have to go to Bratunac. They come as an indestructible pledge of those who were killed, to shatter the misery of the genocide deniers with just two or three unspoken questions – if the genocide did not happen, what were you hiding and what were you digging up in the years after the war? Why are the remains of the same victims today found in three or four different graves, some as much as a hundred kilometres apart? What were you hiding then with bulldozers, digging up and moving the graves in which they were buried?

These young people come to show all the misery of those who today claim that empty coffins are being buried in Potočari. Yes, some of those coffins are almost empty – just one or two bones, because in the effort to hide the crime of genocide, their remains were deliberately destroyed, so families today, after many years of painful waiting for their bodies to be completed, agree to bury at least what they have, so that their names will not be forgotten, it will not be forgotten that they once existed, as intended by those who killed them in July '95, and especially it will not be forgotten that they were killed.

The descendants of the murdered Srebrenica people come, by their very existence, to tell the officials, institutions and circles that deny the genocide that today the genocide and the memory of the victims are spoken of all over the world: through commemorations, gatherings, exhibitions, paying tribute to the murdered people of Srebrenica – in vain you triumphantly draped yourselves in flags and did the math with which you tried to deny the genocide even in the United Nations itself.

These young people come to say something else to the perpetrators and deniers of the genocide. You thought you would bury with bulldozers even the memory that our murdered existed and were killed, but here we are in their place. We have become great and respected people and a force across the planet, and we have kept the memory of our murdered fathers, brothers, grandfathers, who will not be forgotten… And what have you become and what is left for you except the misery that surrounds you and in which you have drowned, denying the genocide and our murdered???