Yesterday, Saša Zeković told Podgorica’s public broadcaster that the victims of Bratunac and Srebrenica should be more fully incorporated into the culture of remembrance. As one of Montenegro’s veteran human rights activists, Saša should have approached the issue with greater sensitivity. He should have answered more clearly and used the opportunity to explain the distinction to both the journalist and the wider public. I did not watch the show so there is possibility his remarks may have been taken out of context.
Are all innocent victims of the wars in the former Yugoslavia equal? Or, more precisely, should they be treated as equal? For anyone with even a trace of conscience, the answer is unequivocally yes. The death of every child should affect every decent human being in the same way. Whether that child was killed in Murino, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Bradina, Srebrenica, Kravica or Bratunac. Every innocent victim is equal. There should be no controversy about that.
But not every crime is the same. In conversations with Kosovo Albanians, I learned they draw a clear distinction between the Serbian army and police, on the one hand, and paramilitary units on the other. The army is viewed and discussed differently in Kosovo, which surprised me. The army killed, but it did not operate in the same way as units that entered homes and murdered entire families or devastated whole villages. The police and paramilitaries carried out such killings on a mass scale.
A NATO pilot bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia did not take off with the specific intention of killing a child, although he was aware civilian deaths were possible. Others went out with the deliberate intention of murdering people. The killers operating from Grbavica did. Caco and his men at Kazani did. Arkan and his forces did. That is why everyone who carried a weapon cannot be put in the same category. There were both criminals and honorable people on every side.
None of these changes the nature of the war. Nor does it mean that all crimes can be treated as equivalent. Every innocent victim is equally a victim. But Bratunac and Srebrenica cannot be equated. Here is why.
Before the war, Srebrenica was a small town of fewer than 10.000 inhabitants. By the time of the genocide, almost 40.000 people had gathered there. How did that happen?
Anyone familiar with the history of the war knows that Bosniak communities across the Drina Valley were being expelled, town by town. Many of those who survived sought refuge in three enclaves: Žepa, Srebrenica and Goražde. They were called enclaves because they were surrounded on all sides by the Army of Republika Srpska. This situation lasted for three years. The population was systematically deprived of food and forced to live under siege, constantly trying to break through the blockade, obtain supplies and survive. During those clashes and attempts to break the encirclement, members of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with other armed Bosniaks, entered villages around the enclave. Fighting took place and crimes were committed. Those crimes must not be denied or dismissed. But there was no single event in Bratunac in which thousands of Serbs were rounded up and killed over the course of three days.
Srebrenica was fundamentally different. In the summer of 1995, Ratko Mladić ordered his forces to seize the enclaves of Žepa and Srebrenica and remove their Bosniak population. Some civilians sought protection at the UN base in Potočari. Others attempted to cross territory controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska and reach areas held by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some managed to escape. Many others were captured – a total of 8.372 people. They were detained, assembled, transported to multiple execution sites and shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves. They were later exhumed and transferred to secondary graves in an effort to conceal the evidence. This was systematic, organized and cold-blooded. Killing thousands of people, transporting them, burying their bodies, digging them up and moving them elsewhere required an enormous logistical operation. It required buses, personnel, heavy machinery and coordination.
This was not the chaos of combat. It was not a sudden crime committed in the heat of battle or in the uncontrolled madness of war. Srebrenica was a calculated campaign of mass murder. That is why Srebrenica was genocide. Bratunac, by contrast, was not a crime in itself. No one entered the town and began carrying out executions.
Bratunac is a neighboring municipality whose villages saw repeated fighting during the war, particularly when armed groups and civilians from the Srebrenica enclave attempted to break through the siege. Many of those killed were soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska. Civilians were also killed. Those civilian victims deserve remembrance.
But their deaths must not be used to relativize what happened in Srebrenica.
There was no genocide in Bratunac. Mentioning Bratunac in the same sentence as Srebrenica is an act of relativization and an attempt to justify the crime. Look at the map of Operation Krivaja ’95, through which Srebrenica was ethnically cleansed. Look at any wartime map of the area. How can we equate people under siege with those besieging them – those who controlled the territory stretching from there to Belgrade on one side and Sarajevo on the other, and almost near Zagreb?
