Sermon: Shabbat Mattot-Masei – Remembering Srebrenica (Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn-Harris)

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 18 July 2018

I went to Bosnia in the winter. It ought to have been the early spring, when tree leaves unfurl and flower buds dot the countryside with flashes of colour. But winter came late this year and when I landed in Sarajevo, the ground was still coated in ice and snow and the black grime of frozen mud and grit.

I had been invited to Bosnia by the charity, Remembering Srebrenica, as part of a small interfaith delegation of women to learn, in particular, about the atrocities committed against women during the Bosnian War in the mid-1990s. We hardly knew each other before the trip began, but almost as soon as we landed we were holding each other up, not merely to stop ourselves from falling on the ice encrusted snow drifts, but also to keep our spirits intact as we journeyed through tales of terror from survivors – survivors of the siege of Sarajevo, survivors of the massacre at Srebrenica, survivors of systematic rape and torture, survivors of ethnic cleansing, survivors of the worst cruelties of the human imagination.

How to talk about these things to you, here this morning, as we gather here to celebrate the joy of Shabbat? Should I brutalize your senses with the gruesome details of yet more blood spilled on the false alter of nationalism and religious intolerance? This is the sort of story we already know; we are, after all, Jews.

So why did I go to Bosnia? Why did I listen to these survivors tell the intimate details of their particular tortures? Why did I wander amongst the graves of thousands of slaughtered men and boys in Srebrenica? Why did I step into the forensic laboratory that more than twenty years later is still trying to identify the remains of those who were slaughtered? Why should it matter to me? What should I be telling you?

Like every story, like our story as Jews, the story of the Balkans – of the Serbs and the Croats and the Bosniaks – is unique in its detail and universal in its message. The Balkans sit at the southern crossroads of Europe, a bridge between Catholic Italy, Orthodox Christian Greece, and Muslim Turkey. Here national identity and religious belief are tied together in complex ways that are confusing for the outsider. Always in Bosnia the people we met referred to Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. My brain kept hitting a category error – aren’t Croats and Serbs an ethnic identity whereas Muslims are a religious identity. But our local guides kept trying to explain – across the Balkans they are all physiologically largely the same. They cannot tell each other apart simply by looking. They must hear each other’s names before they know where someone belongs. And in any case, when they refer to Croats, they mean Catholics; when they refer to Serbs, they mean Orthodox Christians. The Muslims in the Balkans are simply the descendants of those converted by the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century.

And historical memory looms long in this part of the world. When Serbian forces entered Srebrenica, their commander, Ratko Mladic, referencing an event from 1804, declared “We present this city to the Serbian people as a gift,” … “Finally, after the rebellion of the Dahis [sic], the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.”[1] The video footage of this moment continues to shock and astound me. The Ottoman Empire had not ruled this part of Bosnia for more than a hundred years when Mladic made this declaration and yet, somehow, the memory of an empire dead for some seventy-five years at that point served, in the mind of Serbian nationalists, as justification for the rape of women and girls and the wholesale slaughter of men and boys.

But I am ahead of myself. I have not told you the story of Srebrenica yet. Among the many complicated stories of the Balkans, enmeshed in the midst of the Bosnia War following on from the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, is the story of the massacre at Srebrenica, which is commemorated this coming week on 11 July. It is a complex narrative, not easy to sum up. Towards the end of Bosnian War, Serbian forces had taken large swathes of land in the north of Bosnia on the border with Serbia. Bosnian Muslims fled, many of them to the south, towards Bosnian government held territory, but a few isolated places remained in the near the border where the Bosnian Muslim population had stayed safe. One of these places was Srebrenica. In early July 1995 Serbian forces captured Srebrenica and thousands Bosnian Muslims fled towards the UN peacekeeping forces compound in Potočari nearby. But the UN peacekeeping forces were unable and, some say, unwilling to protect these people. Eventually the UN peace keepers capitulated to the Serbian army and the Bosnian Muslims who had sought protection were given over to Serbian army control. Women and girls were separated out from the men and boys. Some fifteen thousand men had already fled into the mountains, trying to reach Bosnian government held territory. In the end more than eight thousand men and boys were killed by the Serbian army, who committed many other atrocities too long to list and too horrifying to recount this morning.

On the tenth anniversary of the massacre, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, described Srebrenica as ‘a terrible crime — the worst on European soil since the Second World War’.[2] More than once I heard survivors say to me, ‘We said “never again”, but here it happened again,’ by which they meant not that the Shoah had occurred all over again, but rather that again, in Europe, people had killed and tortured and maimed each other solely because of their religious identities. ‘If it can happen here,’ I was told over and over again, ‘it can happen anywhere. Learn from what happened to us.’

So why did I go to Bosnia? Why did I feel the compulsion to be here today to share the terrible story of Srebrenica with you? Because my fear is that when we say ‘never again’, we too often mean ‘it should never again happen to us.’ Because since the word genocide was coined, we have seen, in my lifetime, the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Simply saying ‘never again’ has not changed human behaviour. If the Srebrenica massacre can take place on European soil after the Shoah, then we still have much work to do if we are truly to be God’s partners in the repair of the world.  Bosnia reminded me of that.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/11/22/566024325/remembering-the-monstrous-legacy-of-ratko-mladic?t=1530524093965 (accessed 02/07/18)

[2] https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sgsm9993.doc.htm (accessed 03/07/18)