Yesterday Srebrenica, Today Gaza
By Emina Bužinkić & Piro Rexepi
Instigated by Germany and Rwanda, the United Nations recently brought to the fore the question of the Bosnian genocide denial and proposed recognizing the mass massacre of over 8,347 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica as an act of genocide. The resolution “condemns any denial of the Srebrenica genocide as a historical event and actions that glorify those convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by international courts”. We are concerned with two questions in relation to this resolution: why now and with what intent?
It is an odd timing to adopt a resolution that reflects on and commemorates crimes that occurred almost 30 years ago amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and military terror in the occupied Palestine. Of course we understand that in the context of wide-spread and orchestrated denial of both genocides, every recognition matters, but it shouldn’t come at the price of asking how some of those recognitions are surreptitiously legitimizing the ongoing genocide in Palestine – instrumentalised as they are by the US and Germany in particular.
Germany’s involvement in sponsoring the resolution, while actively supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is even more concerning considering how the ongoing empowerment of racist, islamophobic and anti-Semitic politics are all being legitimized as historical processes of ‘righting past wrongs.’ The language expressed on the occasion of the adoption of the resolution, namely that the resolution “is about honouring the memory of the victims and supporting the survivors who continue to live with the scars of that fateful time” could not be more exemplary of how Muslim lives matter only after they are genocided. All of a sudden, a Muslim life of a Bosnian, not deemed worthy to be saved thirty years ago and not honored for thirty years into this day becomes superiorized over the ongoing genocide in Palestine. What we are witnessing through the whitewashing of the perpetrators, is the re-emergence of racial hierarchies and necropolitical reorganization of life. The normalization of genocidal violence could not be more obvious with Germany being the second largest supplier of weapons to Israel that are routinely used in IDF’s so-called “war operations” of killing as many Palestinians as possible in as little time as possible.
A protest in front of the German embassy in Zagreb, 16.04.2024. Photo: Marija Mileta. See a video from the protest here.
On the very day when the UN condemned the violations of the safe zone in Srebrenica-Potočari, the last sanctuary for over 1,5 million of displaced Palestinians – the city of Rafah – was under fire despite the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ask for Israel to stop further attacks. Within 48 hours of the ICJ’s ruling, Israel attacked Rafah for over 60 times with the bianco political support and weapons secured by Germany and the United States. The ICJ’s ruling from the January 26th based on the Genocide Convention did not call for ceasefire in Gaza but rather gave a whole month to the State of Israel to stop the attacks on Palestinians and do everything in their power to prevent genocide. This, despite the fact that a genocide had been unfolding in front of our eyes for months, with at least 35 000 forcibly pushed into the plastic bags and thrown in massive graveyards and thousands exposed to starvation. The response of the Israeli army was more death, more debilitation and suffocation of Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine. The recent Lancet report warns about over 185,000 forever taken Palestinian lives. Israel experienced no sanctions despite the series of polite requests issued to them since. In her recent report on the anatomy of a genocide, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese declared that the acts of genocide have undoubtedly been met,
Israel has sought to conceal its eliminationist conduct of hostilities sanctioning the commission of international crimes as IHL-abiding. Distorting IHL customary rules, including distinction, proportionality and precautions, Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting’, thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable. In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.
Israel has increasingly targeted Palestinian civilians and essential infrastructure, using international humanitarian law (IHL) terms to justify its actions. By the overly broad application of concepts like “human shields”, “collateral damage”, and “safe zones”, Israel has eroded the protective purpose of these terms, blurring the distinction between civilians and combatants in Gaza. Albanese called it a “humanitarian camouflage.” Humanitarian camouflage was also used by the US in collaboration with Israeli forces in the construction of the coastal pier in Gaza for supposed humanitarian purposes in May 2024. A few weeks later, after failing to fulfill its stated purpose to deliver much needed supplies to Palestinians, there has been strong allegations, including by the World Food Programme (WFP), that the same pier was used by IDF soldiers as a hiding place during the Nuseirat massacre, when Israeli forces killed 274 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on June 8th of this year.
We must ask about the exploitation of the Bosnian and Kosovo genocide by the US and the EU to promote their selective “universalism” of genocide recognition in international bodies such as the UN, all while voting against the ending of the genocide in Palestine at those very international bodies. It is necessary that these questions come from Bosnia and Kosovo, as we deliberated in a recent discussion amongst the Balkans scholars. That the Bosnian and Kosovo governments have to align themselves with the West for fear of their own genocidal futures is clear. In Bosnia and Kosovo post-genocidal independence has created states of suspended sovereignty that allow Serbia, the former perpetrator, to continuously threaten with war, while putting the West in the position of a supposed and reluctant guarantor of ‘peace’. Despite the intensified policing and surveillance of Palestinian solidarity by regional governments, the overwhelming response by people has been clear across the region.In her recent piece on the cross-temporal transversality of the Bosnian and Palestinian genocide, Bosnian journalist Nidžara Ahmetašević writes: “Every image from Gaza takes me back to the early 1990s in Sarajevo, where my family and I were trying to survive attacks by the Army of Republika Srpska. The images, words, and sounds are so familiar. I do know medical procedures without anesthesia; I do know hunger, thirst, fear, hopelessness, loss of loved ones, and the smell of blood. I recognise the feeling of humiliation while waiting for humanitarian aid, opening and eating food from cans or plastic bags. And like over 30 years ago, I feel angry again because not enough is done to stop the war and genocide.” The chilling ease of taking a Muslim and a Palestinian life lives in material and affective memory of many, including the authors of this article.
It is overwhelming for people to see and regonize the genocide not only because it is reminiscent of the same forms of genocide we witnessed in Bosnia and Kosovo but also because the same tactics of dehumanization and mass murder are deployed in the ostensibly ‘defense’ of ‘civilization’ from ‘terrorism.’ The destruction of people, lives, land and cultural and religious sites are working out in the same way they did in the 1990s and their justifications are anchored in Islamophobic, racist and colonial articulations of mass murder in the name of Western liberalism. In the 1990s, during the siege of Sarajevo and their genocide of Bosnian people, the Serb army argued that they were defending Europe and European values, that theirs was a war of ‘darkness and light.’ Israel stands on similar grounds with claims of defending ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ from barbarians and terrorists; the oxymoron in its presence with over 41 000 counted deaths and many uncounted ones. In an ongoing application of disproportionate force, the Israeli state demonstrates the core politics of settler colonialism – the bio- and necropolitical power over life and death of Palestinians. The scenes of the experience from what is known as a flour massacre (at least 12 flour massacres occurred since the end of February) prove the horrifying fact – that no Palestinian can ever find a safe zone. Such a scale of destruction, including the violations of medical neutrality by bombing hospitals and bringing them to a complete disfunction, links to the meticulous reports created by the Forensic Architecture investigators who keep proving the Israeli strategy of the entire destruction of infrastructure and land deployed both as a life-taking strategy and a debilitation of capacity to preserve life.
Solidarities across the Balkans
In mid October 2023, the Free Palestine Initiative in Croatia mobilized over a thousand people at the Victims of Fascism Square in Zagreb, asking in tears and with chants for the end of occupation and genocide in Palestine. Only two and half years earlier we stood at the same place, when the fourth war on Gaza that lasted for 11 days, took more than two hundred lives including those of 67 children. In both rallies, migrants, refugees, Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, former members of the International club of student friendship from the time of the Non-aligned movement, Black lives matter community members, feminists, war veterans, and others came together to condemn the genocide through reading of Palestinian liberation poetry and performing resistance to war, colonization and apartheid.
Photo: Branimir Matoz
In November 2023, nearly a month after the beginning of the ongoing genocide on Palestinian people, a group of activists from Kosovo’s social space Termokiss connected directly on Zoom with Palestinian activists to discuss how to organize a solidarity movement that would reflect the situation on the ground and ways to make the solidarity marches, gatherings and activism more effective. The question of what we can do to address the issue has been a burning question for many anti-war and peace activists in the region as we watched with the rest of the world the genocide unfolding in real time on our social media spaces. The recommendation of the Palestinian activists was to continue talking about the genocide in Palestine because every action across the world, no matter how small or large, is the most we can do at this stage. Similarly, Palestinians living in Zagreb suggested gatherings, protests, marches, teach-ins, conversations with politicians in order to move closer to ending the torture of watching the genocide waged on their loved ones. Majd Nasrallah, a Palestinian community organizer who was recently hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, expressed how powerful the movements in the region are for their creative organizing against the genocide, and that the protests, performances and resistance should not be fearful or feel threatened by the authority structures, “since there is nothing threatening in standing up for human rights.”
A march in Zagreb on the occasion of the International Women’s Day, 08.03.2024. Photo: Bojan Mrdjenović.
Solidarity marches in Tirana, Sarajevo, Prishtina, Skopje, Sofia, Athens, Thessaloniki, Belgrade, Zagreb, Bucharest and Ljubljana have been ongoing. Pride marches across the region this summer expressed solidarity with Palestine. Amidst the protests’ increased policing, these regional movements have been engaging in whatever resistance is possible by organizing marches, performances, strikes, occupations of cultural institutions, reading and writing spaces, mourning rituals, movie screenings, student encampments, and actions in front of the embassies whose governments have been at the forefront of enabling the genocide in Gaza – already taken precious lives and eradicated entire generations. The genocide in Palestine, as many Palestinians point out these days, has had a chilling effect on the collective body of the populations in the region in an entangled horror of watching Palestinians being wiped out from the face of the Earth while re-living its own memory of the genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the mass killings and expulsions in the Balkans in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“Life, freedom, justice” – a march in support of Palestine in Zagreb, 13.01.2024. Photo: Branimir Matoz.
One of the most inspiring recent images has been that of the Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza on his visit to Bosnia for the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide in July this year, surrounded by Bosnian children chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘ free free Gaza.’
In contrast to the politics of genocide denial across geographies, we call for the urgent ceasefire in Gaza, end of bioterror in the occupied Palestine, and peace and freedom for Palestinians. The global order that we commit to not only timely recognizes the genocidal intentions at the onset of settler colonial, occupational and apartheid projects; but abolishes any possibility of supremacist ideologies, violence and erasure of peoples and lands. We close this text by breathing with Majd Nasrullah who recently said, “Palestinians will be free, wherever they may be”.__
Title image: “Life, freedom, justice” – a march in support of Palestine in Zagreb, 13.01.2024. Photo: Branimir Matoz.
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