Lessons from Srebrenica

Anniversaries, by their very nature, are contrived events. Certain moments seem so significant, and their diminishment with time so unpalatable, that the only appropriate response is to make their memory a matter of organisation and routine.

So it is that 20 years ago this week, after a seemingly endless besiegement, Bosnian-Serb forces officially "liberated" Srebrenica. Three days later the gears shifted, the violence became systematic, and Europe was witnessing its first genocide since the Second World War. However, more than just a ritualised act of remembering, the anniversary of Srebrenica offers a series of lessons that are still pertinent today.

Lesson one: In the absence of a strong state, identity-based violence is always just moments away

Following the collapse of Communist party rule in the former Yugoslavia, the old federation began to fragment. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991, and Bosnia-Herzegovina followed suit in 1993. As the Yugoslav state, along with the common Yugoslav identity, began to fade, power vacuums formed, and ever-deepening cycles of ethnic entrenchment quickly took over.

Groups, once culturally similar, living side-by-side, speaking the same language, intermarrying, and often visually inseparable were driven back into their ethnic identities out of a deep Hobbesian panic. Fearing the ethnic mobilisation of their neighbours, Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks no longer able to rely upon their state for protection, addressed this new insecurity through ethnic mobilisation of their own.

Through this new spectrum, the presence of a Bosniak majority population in Srebrenica – a small mountain village in Bosnia-Herzegovina, only 15 kilometres from the Serbian border – was seen as an intolerable situation insofar as it stood outside the newly forming greater-Serbia. So it was that the massacre in Srebrenica – violence so shocking in its intent that it stirred a new legal description, 'ethnic cleansing' – was as much a product of irrational fear, as it was of cold hatred.

Lesson two: In situations such as this, neutrality is not an option – force, or at least the credible threat of force, is a prerequisite for any successful humanitarian intervention:

In April 1993 – two years before the genocide - Srebrenica, by virtue of United Nations Resolution 819, became a designated 'safe area'. And from the beginning, Commander in Chief of the Bosnian-Serb army, Ratko Mladic, set out to test the substance of this commitment. As the UN Peacekeeping force was arriving, Mladic was looking for a precedent by which to judge the future terms of his assault on Srebrenica: he simply maintained his siege and waited for the international response.

Commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, General Philippe Morillon, arrived in Srebrenica under this onslaught and, despite the carnage around him, infamously denied smelling the "odour of death" – Mladic had his standard. The Peacekeepers had two key, and potentially incompatible, mandates: to protect the civilian population of Srebrenica, and to maintain neutrality. Based on this first encounter, Mladic reasoned that their commitment to the latter would always outweigh the former.

In a two year encore to genocide, the Peacekeepers maintained an implacable commitment to passive indifference, all the while the Bosnian-Serb forces escalated their siege of Srebrenica. By the time of the genocide, the violence had increased to such levels that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an organisation well practiced at operating within war zones, had been forced out of the area under mortar fire.

Three days prior to the genocide, NATO command had promised a series of air assaults as a last minute attempt to push back the Serbian forces. These strikes were abandoned after administrative officers pointed out the requisite paperwork had been filled out incorrectly, and by that afternoon Mladic was strolling through the streets of Srebrenica.

As Serbian forces were going house-to-house, rounding up civilians, and shelling those who managed to flee, the Dutch Peacekeepers watched on passively. To make matters worse, the same Dutch forces had earlier confiscated the armaments of the local Bosniaks – as per the terms of the 'safe area'. Now, not only were they refusing to defend those people whom they had disarmed, but they also refused requests to return the weapons to the community so that they might defend themselves. Accordingly, the restrictive rules of UN 'non-engagement' had not only failed to prevent the genocide in Srebrenica, but had actively contributed to it.

Lesson three: Despite this, it is prudent to be cautious in our judgement. There is an after-the-fact tendency to overly simplify what were, at the time, messy moral landscapes.

The indifference of the Dutch Peacekeepers was not entirely as it seemed. By all accounts they were both underprepared and ill-equipped for the situation in Srebrenica. Yet it is hard to imagine that sufficient preparation was ever possible: tasked with providing humanitarian aid and shelter to a region seen both as a threat and as a strategic asset, the success of the mission always relied solely upon the good will of the Bosnian-Serb hierarchy.

However, this was never a realistic expectation: Serbian forces had already shown that they had no compulsion against violating the sanctity of Peacekeeping operations, with the Dutch forces in Srebrenica aware that many of their comrades had already been imprisoned and used as human shields in the wider conflict. Moreover, as the genocide began, Serbian forces made an explicit threat to kill any Peacekeeper who tried to intervene.

Placed in a hopeless situation, the fear felt by the Dutch Peacekeepers was beyond question – their stricken faces, trembling voices and stuttering speech was caught on camera by Serbian film crews. Overwhelmed by their experience, their sense of hopelessness, their guilt, and their subsequent mental trauma, a significant number of these soldiers were to commit suicide in the years after the genocide.

Similarly, in the context of the overarching conflict, it is too simplistic to draw clear moral lines between perpetrators and victims. As much as the Serbian nationalists are widely seen as the instigators of the violence, the reality is considerably more nuanced. This became apparent as Serbian forces eventually began to weaken under a barrage of airstrikes. Croat and Bosniak populations seized upon this opportunity and launched their own retaliatory waves of ethnic cleansing – righteous victims are often a rarity in civil conflict.

Lesson four: It is for this reason that post-war justice is important – more than restoring legal accountability, and beyond assigning moral responsibility, it also frees people from the weight of the past.

When Serbian forces first seized Srebrenica, the UN Peacekeepers were forcibly removed from their posts. A week later they were allowed to return – by then only half of the town's population remained. Out of the 100,000 people killed in the Bosnian conflict, a number approaching 10,000 were killed in only a matter of days in Srebrenica.

The uncertainty over the exact number killed is largely a result of the efforts of the Serbian army. Clearly aware that they had stepped outside the bounds of humanitarian law – that, rather than an act of war, they had in fact committed a criminal act – the victims were deliberately dismembered and scattered across five separate mass-graves in order to hinder investigators. Serbian forces, not satisfied that they had sufficiently covered their tracks, returned to these graves periodically, to reopen, further dismember, and to further disperse the remains.

Insofar as it differs considerably from how it is commonly used in our vernacular, genocide is a troublesome legal category. However, there is little doubt that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia acknowledged this fact in 2001 and then again in 2004, beyond which countless governmental, parliamentary and institutional reports have since arrived at the same conclusion: Srebrenica was a systematic attempt to eradicate an entire ethnic and religious group.

In recognising this, it is important to extricate the Serbian people as much as possible from the actions of their military leadership. German Philosopher, Karl Jasper, explained the value the Nuremburg trials held, not only for the victims of Nazi aggression, but also for the German nation, "for us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively".

For years after Srebrenica, the chief architects of the genocide, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, though technically fugitives, lived relatively comfortable and unmolested lives in Serbia. Now arrested and facing trial in The Hague, the Serbian nation ought to be morally separated from its war criminals – rather than dumping blame on the doorstep of an entire people, the guilt of these few ought to exonerate the many.

Lesson five: For all the meaningless harm that was delivered at Srebrenica, suffering of this kind can have a value.

In Srebrenica, the failures of the international community were publically laid bare. However, they were not entirely unpredictable. The UN intervention in Bosnia, like so many others before it, was half-hearted, under-resourced, and limited by impossible terms of engagement. Aware of these restrictions, the Serbian forces merely orchestrated their way around them. So it was that, as Serbian forces constructed concentration camps and perpetrated genocide – two measures not seen in Europe since the Holocaust – the Peacekeepers on the ground became nothing more than spectators.

It was with this memory in mind that four years later in Kosovo, NATO drew an abrupt line in the sand. With much of the same command once again in charge, Serbian forces began positioning themselves for an invasion of Kosovo after unrest in the border regions. Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, gambled that, just as in Srebrenica, the international community would want to avoid a military engagement at all costs.

This time, as Serbian intentions became obvious, NATO did not wait for the genocide to begin. A pre-emptive 78-day bombing campaign forced the Serbian parliament to pass a NATO-designed peace plan; after which the UN Security Council passed resolution 1244, agreeing to take administrative control of Kosovo. After the misery of Srebrenica, this moment of international moral commitment was, according to Czech statesman, Vaclav Havel, the clearest example in the history of warfare of a battle fought "in the name of principles and values".

The UN originally committed 35,000 troops for the protection of Bosnia's civilian population – only 7,000 were ever supplied. This left the designated 'safe area' of Srebrenica guarded by only a few hundred soldiers. For the Serbian command, intent on genocide, this was more than they could have hoped for: instead of fighting, instead of fleeing, the would-be victims remained huddled together in a single, and easily accessible location.

As the former Yugoslavia collapsed, 250,000 people were killed, 50,000 women were raped and 2.7 million people were left in need of emergency humanitarian aid. Perhaps due to its predictability, perhaps due to the presence of UN Peacekeepers, throughout all of this suffering the genocide at Srebrenica leaves a unique scar on the international collective conscience.