Lessons from Srebrenica

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.