Recently I laid over at Amsterdam’s
Schiphol Airport, at which the Delta Airlines security agent checked my U.S.
passport prior to boarding the plane to Minneapolis. Upon seeing my name and
place of birth (Bosnia and Herzegovina), he asked in Serbian if I spoke
"our language." I responded with a "yes, of course," and he
completed the rest of the security procedure in ‘our language,’ revealing that
he is a Serb who escaped to the Netherlands in 1991 because he did not want to
have to fight the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) or the Croats, as they are all
"my people, our people."
Coincidentally, this random interaction
occurred only two days after the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide,
which took place on July 11, 1995. It made me ponder the use of the word ‘our’
in this brief conversation. We all clearly still have a lot in common: the
primary, and perhaps strongest, connection being the language. ‘Our’ language,
as the security agent used it, refers to Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. However,
in ‘our’ language, there is still a contention over what happened in Srebrenica.
Recently, Russia, Serbia’s ally, had vetoed the UN Security Council measure
that labeled Srebrenica a genocide. Killing people based on their identity is a
very basic definition of genocide, and denying that is to politicize it once
again, and take away from the core of what this event should represent 20 years
later, which is healing and hope for the future.
Leading up to the anniversary itself, much of the world media had been referring to the genocide as the worst case of mass violence on the European continent since World War II. The systematic killing of over eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and young boys in what was considered a UN safe haven shows nothing short of failure on the part of Europe for not holding up the 'never again' promise. What remains at stake now is the way we remember this horrific event based on the language used to label it. Srebrenica has been labeled a crime, and a massacre, but why not genocide?
During the 20th anniversary
commemoration ceremony, President Bill Clinton begged the international
community to not treat this as a mere monument, but as a sacred trust for
healing, implying that Srebrenica shouldn’t be a place of forgetting but of
active remembering. Therefore, education is crucial
to its memory. The members of various refugee communities scattered around the
world have already done a lot in this respect, but education must continue for the
sake of future generations of not only Bosniaks, but also Serbs and Croats.
After all, it is something that marked all of “us.” We also shouldn’t forget
that Bosnia is made up of many ‘little Srebrenicas’ that amount to many more
victims and their grieving families. Ultimately, what Srebrenica must remind us
of is our common humanity, and that conflicts rooted in identity continue to be
a struggle for the world.
In April of this year, the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies hosted an international conference on the 100
years of the Armenian Genocide, bringing the struggle over its acknowledgement
to the forefront. For many like myself, this served as a reminder of the
politicization around Srebrenica as well. The question is then, are we going to
treat Srebrenica the same way in the upcoming century?
Erma Nezirevic is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, and coordinator of the HGMV workshop series for CHGS.
