Omar Suleiman – Srebrenica Massacre Explained Europes Muslim Genocide
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AI: Transcript ©
When I was 12, I saw all my
family, my father and my uncles shot right
in front of me. They were shot right
in front of my house and the people
who did it still live in my city.
This may sound like Gaza today,
but it's actually Srebrenica.
The genocide that occurred in Srebrenica
29 years ago this week when some 8,000
mostly Muslim Bosniaks were killed by a Serbian
nationalist militia
was the largest genocide Europe has seen since
the holocaust.
But it didn't come out of nowhere.
In the 3 years leading up to the
genocide,
an estimated 100,000
people were killed,
80% of whom were Bosniaks.
Mushkithara
has 3 children. They were all shelled last
week and their husband is dead.
2 sisters hit by shrapnel. Their parents were
both killed by shell fire in Cornish Polya.
Harta on the right has lost a leg.
Surgeons working around the clock have operated on
60 people so far. This girl has been
living off crumbs.
Today, there is near global consensus that there
was in fact a genocide in Srebrenica.
And today, we're seeing it in Gaza.
And in an information overload world, we're inundated
with the news of casualties and tragedies every
day. 10 killed here, 25 killed there, 700
killed
there, a hospital bombing here, a UN school
destroyed,
a whole family tree wiped out.
7 year old Hind Rajab's car shot
355
times. Understanding how genocide unfolds means remembering how
the systematic dehumanization
of a people is what permits it in
the first place.
It doesn't happen in one day.
It takes sustained neglect of a fellow human's
plight,
degradation,
and humiliation.
Women, children, and the old packed in so
tight, many were struggling to breathe.
There were numerous stops. The refugees were so
hungry and thirsty, they were begging us for
snow.
Suddenly, a tailgate broke open and women and
children spilled onto the road bringing yet more
misery.
Bringing down the sides of the lorries revealed
the full extent of the suffering these people
had gone through to escape the horrors of
Srebrenica.
One elderly man died on the way.
Some will never remember what they went through
to reach safety.
Others are unlikely ever to forget.
Would the victims of the Srebrenica genocide have
been brutally massacred if they weren't Muslim?
Despite their location in Europe and their Caucasian
identity,
Muslim Bosniaks were demonized,
dehumanized,
and consequently assigned for slaughter precisely because of
their Islam.
Post world war 2 decolonization
had already normalized the 3rd world Muslim victim
of Africa and Asia.
But in Europe itself, only a few decades
separated from the holocaust,
Europeans were boasting that they had already left
the savagery of the past behind.
Insert Islam however, and the Bosniak Muslim is
automatically
transformed into a natural casualty.
After seeing the aftermath of 8 1,000 men
and boys brutally slaughtered,
it begs the question,
did being Muslim alone potentially disqualify one from
being considered European
or even human?
You can go today to the video store
in Belgrade and take out the videos.
In my home city, which is today in
the Serbian part of Bosnia, this testimony from
1995 might as well have been from 2024.
The Bosnian genocide happened before social media,
before widespread Internet access, before a smartphone world.
Vance describes the job as one of the
toughest in the world underlined by the refugee
crisis in Tuzla and elsewhere,
where the orphanages are overfilled with young victims
like these from Srebrenica.
Now as a genocide unfolds in Gaza on
our phones, TVs, and tablets,
what's our excuse? We know in real time
as victims are murdered in cold blood. We
see the bodies of lifeless Palestinian children.
We observe the death toll increase
every single day.
In many ways, it seems like the information
overload at our fingertips has done little to
stop the killing.
9 months on, and Israel's undeterred genocide in
Gaza continues
with very little international accountability.
The question is, if we can see genocide
playing across our screens,
what does that mean for the world that
we live in today? And how do we
prevent
future Srebanitzas
and future ghazas from happening while still being
present in the moment and stopping this genocide
today? How do we avoid statistical numbness?
One in which where casualty counts past and
present are merely numbers,
absent souls.
When I visited the Srebrenica Memorial Center,
I was chilled to the bone by the
sheer number of graves.
Most of them containing
bodies or parts of bodies of Bosniak Muslims
recovered from mass graves.
They cover the ground as far as the
eye can see. And in Srebrenica, the air
itself seems to bear witness to the genocide
that took place
only less than 3 decades ago.
So many, many returning.
10 years to the day
to where so few escaped.
Not just massacred, but hurriedly buried, then methodically
exhumed to be hidden in deep pits.
Safe,
the Serbs hoped, from the eyes of the
world.
It could never have worked.
And so today, a decade on, 610
bodies identified by their DNA
were buried here in the mass cemetery for
Srebrenica,
laid to rest for a 3rd
and final time.
The difference between 1 casualty or 2, much
less 8,000 is the difference between night and
day. And the most chilling display at the
memorial center is this line of shoes
in the place where the victims were slaughtered
like animals.
Each pair a reminder that we must humanize
the victim and bring life to the virtual.
Every human being who once stood in those
shoes had tried to escape the horrific cruelty
of their tormentors.
The victims thought of many ways to run
and hide and dreamt of walking freely without
fear. They were children, parents,
insects. Now they were less than insects.
Now in Gaza avoiding statistical numbness is just
as important.
Resist it by humanizing hint, by humanizing the
soul of our soul Reem.
They are alive with their Lord, and they
need to remain alive in our hearts.