Thirty years since the mass murders in Srebrenica, Henry Maitles asks: whatever happened to ‘Never Again’?

Some experiences never leave you. At a genocide scholars conference in Sarajevo in Bosnia in 1998, I attended the funerals in nearby Srebrenica of some 600 Bosnian children who had been murdered in nearby forests, most of them killed by a bullet in the head. What I witnessed will stay with me forever: the impossibly small coffins of the children, passing over thousands of heads; the 300,000 grieving and furious Bosnian mourners; the organised chaos of this crowd, unpoliced because the police were in barracks since some of them had been allegedly implicated in the crime; and the anger and rage towards the Serbs, the West, and especially the UN.

The events of the genocide are relatively uncontested now. Over a few days in July 1995, exactly 30 years ago, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered – most of them shot at close range – by Bosnian Serb militias. Most of the militia leaders were tried for war crimes in the Hague, and many received very long sentences. Alongside these killings, over a longer period, there was forced and abusive ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women, girls, children, and elderly.

The circumstances behind these facts are disturbing and complex. Srebrenica was supposedly at the time a UN “safe haven”, where civilians would be under the protection of the UN’s Dutch Battalion, comprising 700 professional soldiers and support, with some helicopters and armoured transport carriers. Due to its UN status as a place of safety, Muslims fleeing the pogromist mobs and killers had gravitated there. However, not only did the UN forces fail to protect them, but they handed over men and boys who were in the factory area under their direct control to brutal racist armed militias, which already had a well-deserved reputation for extensive human rights abuses against Muslims. The excuse from the Dutch Battalion was that they were only allowed to use force if attacked. As a human rights lawyer said at our conference: why could they not have said to the Serb militias, “you want them, you come through us”? Instead, the Dutch soldiers handed them to the killers. By declaring the area safe then failing to protect them, the UN had unwittingly collected civilians in one place for the Bosnian Serb killers.

Wars have many victims. Most groups in the areas of the old Yugoslavia – Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians — were involved to some degree or other in ethnic cleansing. Serbs too were driven out of areas which had been their home for generations. The Observer reported on 8 October 1995:

“‘Throughout the whole territory of Bosnia, ethnic cleansing is now nearly complete’, said Steve Curliss, of the UN High Commission for Refugees, after the fall of Zepa in July. Since Curliss said this, the UNHCR estimates that 417,000 people have left their homes in Bosnia and Croatia. These are the last tectonic shifts of ethnic cleansing”.

Any serious evaluation of the various Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian authorities reveals similar features. Firstly, politicians and party bosses on all sides used nationalist rhetoric to bolster their support and strengthen their own and their supporters’ positions. Secondly, relatively small but extremely brutal groups of nationalists and ethnic cleansers used rape, torture and killing to get their way, often at least covertly sanctioned by their ‘respectable’ political leaders. And thirdly, the mass of ordinary people who had lived in some sort of peaceful coexistence with members of other ethnic groups for decades, now faced the choice of fleeing for their lives, leaving homes and possessions behind, or seeing their erstwhile neighbours and friends having to flee. These were all real victims of this war.

As one commentator at the time said in the Financial Times of 8 August 1995: ‘The UN has failed. NATO, the European Union and even the Red Cross have failed. Diplomacy, mediation, peacekeeping, humanitarianism and the new world order have all failed. Brute force has succeeded’.  For the Western powers who control NATO and UN, the answer was not to protect civilians from the butchers, but to support one lot of bandits by bombing the others, believing this could improve the pro-Western force. Many politicians and some Left activists also demanded military intervention, in the false hope that Western warmongers would care a jot for civilian victims. Srebrenica showed what a failure that was.

All this ethnic cleansing was justified by the same notions of ‘the other’ that are prevalent in current situations. In Gaza and the West Bank, the daily killing of civilians by the IDF does not warrant mention or concern in the media. The alleged crimes of well-trained British elite units in Afghanistan and Iraq have only recently been highlighted by BBC and other media investigations. The dehumanising worldview of Western imperialism sustains the biological racism of the era of slavery in seeing its enemies as sub-human. Every colonial settler and racist nationalist project from the Americas (North and South) to Gaza today, including during the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and in Bosnia and Rwanda, has adopted the same mentality towards their respective ‘inferior’ enemies. Even while these ‘inferior people’ are being killed or ethnically cleansed, there is a narrative that says that they are terrorists and thus a perceived threat, which needs pre-emptive action.

When ‘Never Again’ was stated at the end of World War Two, the words were meant to spark an understanding that war crimes, collective punishments, ethnic cleansing and genocide must not be tolerated. The lessons of the Holocaust were meant to be universal. However, for the imperialist powers and their sub-imperialist allies, they never have applied. Imperial powers have acted with impunity, towards the Iraqis, the Uyghurs, the Yemenis or the Palestinians, always treating their victims as subhuman. The lessons from World War Two and every genocide and war crime since is that inhumanity returns when racist ideas take hold. ‘Never again’ can only be realised if we constantly affirm human rights and stop racist movements on their way up. A century of history tells us that stopping them is far harder when they are fully formed.

Henry Maitles is emeritus professor of education at the University of the West of Scotland and a member of UCU and the Socialist Workers Party.