The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

196 annihilating difference
story was any different. And a human rights officer’s concern is always with credibility.
She had experienced people who made up stories about atrocities; perhaps
this man’s story was one of those? As the man’s story unfolded, I had the terrible
realization about the fate of the missing boys and men of Srebrenica. A mass killing
of unimaginable proportions had taken place, and the man in front of me was
one of only a few survivors. I was in no doubt whatsoever that his story was true,
and that he was talking from personal experience. He was very concentrated as he
spoke, and his language was factual and to the point. His descriptions were detailed
and specific, citing place names, giving an exact chronology of events, and using
personal pronouns. 5
The Srebrenica survivor showed us the marks around his wrists left by the rope
that had been used to tie his hands behind his back. He had been lined up with
hundreds of other men, who all died of gunshot wounds to their head or other vital
parts of their body. The bullet that was meant for him just missed and touched
his chin. He survived because he was protected by the dead bodies on top of him.
He escaped at night with one other survivor. More than seven thousand men of
all ages where executed during a few hot July days in 1995 in the picturesque fields
and forests around the town of Srebrenica, a town that had been designated a U.N.
“safe area.” 6
The story of the massacres of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the days following
the Bosnian Serb Army takeover of the U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica on
July 11, 1995, is now accessible through some well-researched documentary books
and films, as well as through the indictments for genocide and crimes against humanity
issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in
The Hague. 7 There are two main stories: on the one hand, what the Bosnian Serb
Army planned and executed under the command of Ratko Mladid, and on the
other the complacency, incompetence, and unwillingness to act to prevent genocide
represented by the international community through its U.N. peacekeeping
forces. The UNPROFOR human rights team filed a cautiously worded report
which stated that grave human rights abuses had occurred in the aftermath of the
Bosnian Serb takeover of Srebrenica. It cited testimonies from witnesses and suggested
that assaults may have occurred that resulted in numerous deaths, but that
those accounts were “as yet unconfirmed.” 8 The report that failed to identify the
enormity of the crimes that were taking place was transmitted to the United Nations
Secretariat, but the head of UNPROFOR did not see any need to alert his
superiors or an international public of the team’s “unsubstantiated findings,” and
in the meantime the killings in the hills around Srebrenica continued. 9
PRELUDES TO GENOCIDE
The organized massacre was the worst in Europe’s history since World War II.
But it was a crime that could have been prevented, inasmuch as it could have been
predicted. For Srebrenica was the final push in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”