“The crime concerns you too, because, you know: whoever kills an innocent soul is as though he had killed all mankind. We were all killed countless times, my murdered brothers...” said Bosnian writer Mehmed Meša Selimović.
“The ongoing conflict in Gaza is no war, but a genocide and ethnic cleansing. What we are going through now is the same as the genocide experienced by Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Israel wants to kill everyone in Gaza,” a Palestinian from the city of Deir al-Balah, in the central part of the Gaza Strip, uttered these words while holding the body of a slain child.
A few days before the announcement of the four-day truce – a hard-won temporary cease-fire with strong diplomatic mediation by the State of Qatar – Israeli forces bombarded the Saliha family’s house. Fifteen people died under the rubble.
Thirty years earlier, in Srebrenica, a city in the east of Bosnia, which was declared a “U.N.-protected safe area” (UNPA zones/areas/sectors) by Resolution 824, a broken-hearted father was holding a dead baby.
The baby died of malnutrition and due to lack of medical supplies. In fact, the little boy’s life might have been saved had he been evacuated to Tuzla, in the northeastern part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but members of the international peace forces of the U.N. refused to take him in the helicopter.
They said that there was no room for a baby! Priority was given to the soldiers of the international forces, the UNPROFOR, who were (mostly lightly) wounded during the Serbian bombardment of Srebrenica.
“The baby is dead,” said the U.N. doctor shortly after.
Before the eyes of shocked locals, the boy’s body was handed over to the father, whose despair mirrored the horrors surrounding children’s deaths in this enclave. Recorded by TV cameras, this father’s painful sobs still echo across the Bosnian sky.
Over 70,000 Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims, mostly expelled from other parts of eastern Bosnia, were gathered there, in Srebrenica, in an area slightly larger than the Gaza Strip. Like the Palestinians in Gaza today, the people of Srebrenica and other Bosnians who had taken refuge in this ghetto fleeing from the Serbian forces lived in desperate conditions. Without food, water and medicines, they were plagued by infectious diseases caused by such circumstances. Like in Palestinian hospitals in recent weeks, doctors such as Ilijas Pilav performed surgeries without anesthesia and amputated with hacksaws! They were exposed to shelling and even chemical attacks with gas shells.
“Srebrenica is turning into a vast slaughterhouse. The killed and the wounded are being transported to the hospital constantly. It is impossible to describe it. Every second, three deadly missiles fall on this town. Will anyone in the world come to witness the tragedy befalling Srebrenica and its residents? This is an outrageous crime being perpetrated against the Bosniak population of Srebrenica. The population in this town is disappearing,” poet and journalist Nino Ćatić sent in his last report.
His body has not been found to date. Hajra, Nina Ćatić’s mother, died in 2021 without knowing the truth about her son.
To the Bosniaks of Srebrenica, this brave man was what Motaz Azaiza or Al Jazeera reporters like Tareq Abu Azzoum are to the Palestinians today: the voice of the truth – the only pursuit of both Gaza and Srebrenica, Palestine and Bosnia.
“If you can hear us, tell the truth,” Tareq Abu Azzoum said during the dramatic reports in the first days of horror in Gaza.
So, how did humans come to be exposed to such unimaginable suffering?
In both cases, it is clear that these processes were preceded by dehumanization. On Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals.”
The U.N. Committee on Racism then voiced concern about a “sharp increase in dehumanization and racist hate speech,” warning that it “could incite genocidal actions,” but – as in the case of that little Bosnian boy – the world did absolutely nothing to prevent the killing of more than 6,000 Palestinian children.
The world remained blind even when the former president of the Bosnian entity Republika Srpska and former professor at the Faculty of Science in Sarajevo, Biljana Plavšić, 93, claimed three decades earlier that Bosnian Muslims were “a genetically defective material that converted to Islam.”
“It is true. It is a genetically deformed material that embraced Islam. And now, with each new generation, that gene becomes concentrated. It gets worse and worse, becomes prominent and dictates their opinion style and behavior, which is rooted in their genes,” Plavšić said, putting a serious effort to “prove” it; she was later convicted of crimes against humanity before the Hague Tribunal.
In the opinion of Sasha Havlicek from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), “the basic tenet of all extremist ideologies is the dehumanization of others” because “when you establish an 'us' versus 'them' mindset – you can create incredible divisions and conflicts between people.”
Following the “deformed gene” narrative, the Serbian media were tasked with “planting the poison of hatred.” They constructed large-scale propaganda aimed to justify genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated against Bosniaks. Similar to the narratives we hear about Palestinians, Serbian propaganda also created the thesis about “Muslim extremists” who even “threw alive Serbian children into cages with lions” in the Sarajevo Zoo!?
This very example of a systematic placement of lies and demonization is shared by Renaud de La Brosse, professor at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France), in his report for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) “on the consequences of media instrumentalization for ultra-nationalist purposes.” De La Brosse indicates that the crimes were preceded by a “systematic smear of Bosnian Muslims” to the level where claims of “Muslim degeneracy” were made. He compared it to the Nazi propaganda in Europe.
While lies were served to millions of viewers, Serbian forces also targeted the “Zehra Mujdović” maternity hospital in Sarajevo. At the time of the attack in May 1992, there were 130 women and 70 newborns in the maternity ward. Five babies were killed. Among the 11,541 murdered citizens of Sarajevo, as many as 1,601 children were killed during the 44-month siege. Bosnian children were killed like the Palestinian children today – with the intention to exterminate the entire population!
The Bosnian example confirms this. At the peak of the aggression, following a devastating dehumanization campaign, the genocide in Srebrenica took place. However, Bosniaks had been systematically killed and detained in concentration camps throughout the country during the genocidal campaign since the spring of 1992.
Accusing Bosniaks of the “Turkish sin” and centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, when entering Srebrenica, Serbian war commander Ratko Mladić said: “At last, the moment has come to (...) retaliate against the Turks in this area.”
Indeed, in just a few days in July 1995, at least 8,732 Bosniak men and boys were killed. It was the biggest crime in Europe after World War II. Newborn Fatima Muhić is the youngest person buried in the Potočari – Srebrenica Memorial Center. Her fate is painfully connected with the fate of thousands of murdered Gaza children (instead of Palestinian children, the Western media refer to murdered “minors” or “persons under 18”).
Meanwhile, like Ratko Mladic in Srebrenica, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu triumphantly enters Gaza these days, promising a continuation of the “mighty vengeance.” All the way!
Does this mean many more murdered children? Yes, for sure.
We are interested in whether Netanyahu will be held accountable for the war crimes perpetrated and face punishment and a prison cell, like Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić and Biljana Plavšić. Albeit weak, this seems to be the only hope for today’s world order, which is descending into complete darkness, because there will be little satisfaction for the victims if future U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres comes to Gaza to pay homage to the victims, as Ban Ki-moon did in Srebrenica. Too late. This is why victims need justice.
Europe also died in Sarajevo.
Today, we can only say with despair that our world died in Gaza – just like it did in Srebrenica and Sarajevo.
*Editor and journalist based in Bosnia-Herzegovina
