The Srebrenica Massacre
11 July 1995
I was five when the Srebrenica genocide
happened but I remember. Yes, don't laugh please. Kids here in this part of the world remember things like this.
My 14 years old cousin Omar remembers his 2 years old memories of the Iraq war.
I was too young so, I have such vague
memories of it, I was a first grade kid in primary school and somehow I still remember a few things.
I still recall the Arabic songs/Nasheed my aunts used to play from an album called "The wounds of Sarajevo".
A collection of Arabic poems in the form of songs talking about the massacres, about places called Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Bosnia
and all these hard to pronounce Slavic names.
Later I found these poems and songs online after years of
research and I still love to listen to them often.
I remember she had a bumper-sticker about Bosnia
on her radio/cassette device where we used to play these songs.
I remember a lot of the Modern Standard Arabic vocabulary I picked up and the concepts I learned about through this . I remember asking her as we were
watching black and white TV reports and I was having such a hard time
understanding why they are killing kids somewhere in the world called Bosnia.
It's so strange how I could clearly remember these details but it also shows what kind of childhood some of us have experienced in Egypt even
though we were too far away from these conflicts since the post Camp David era.
Still none of my peers in school and all the way up to college would relate
to these stories or know of them.
"European Muslims", "Non-Arabic speaking
people who believe in the same God and book I believe in", Yugoslavia",
"Serb and Bosnian" and of course the "Hate/ discrimination
crimes" all were things you don't get exposed to if you're a regular
Egyptian who grew up in culturally Muslim households in a secular educational system.
As I grew up and while I was exploring my identity I felt a strong connection with these
people though, more than just sympathy. I was so curious and wanted to know
more about this part of the world and why these white Europeans who don't look like us are Muslim and why they were massacred like that.
When I was introduced to the internet finally in 2003 I
did an intensive research on the issue in Arabic ( There wasn't much out there at all back then) and eventually had to do more in English. This was one of the topics that made me want to start blogging when I was 17 or so.
I didn't think anybody else around me knew or cared and that was hard to understand.
Later in 2008 I wrote 2 articles on the
Bosnian Genocide and until today I still get visits from people searching it in
Arabic.
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Until today I still listen to all the
beautiful poetry they wrote about the war/genocide that I memorized growing up in Arabic.
 |
| The wounds of Sarajevo, an album cover |
I
can't miss July the 11th without thinking about it and recalling
all the Aljazeera documentaries and all the articles and pictures I have in the back of my mind about this horrific event.
I still feel the words on alienation, estrangement,
and that Bosnian guy singing about growing up in a non-Muslim country missing
the warmth of home, the mosques, the call to prayer, the family and friends, and everything he left behind after
becoming a refugee knowing that he can't be back. Ever.
Before the uprising Egypt was
pushing me further away more and more and at that time I started to be an
advocate of such unpopular/ unknown causes that nobody here cares to learn
about.
I started an online educational/awareness campaign
on the online forums I used to participate in about this part of the world, the
Balkan and central Asia, its history and
present, the early Islamophobia in the 1990s.
Nobody I know really cared at that time,
but I was happy I got some people excited about the idea online.
I couldn't understand why nobody else
was wondering as I did for so long.
How come 8,000 people were killed in 4 days
for being males and Muslims and how come women and girls got raped for being
Muslims and females?
How come people were kept in concentration
camps starving to death and getting tortured like this?
Why didn't anybody talk about it as much
as they talked about other events while it was the most outrageous mass killing
in Europe after WW2?
Why do you need to be a Muslim to speak about it and why don't fellow Muslims know about it at first place?
90% of all the mosques, schools and old architecture were
destroyed , more than 700 hundred mosques and more than 850 public library.
Only (yesterday) around 500 newly
discovered bodies where buried.
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"How can these army generals do it and get away with
it?" that
was one naive question I had as a first year college student until I saw other
army generals doing similar things in my own country.
Looking at the destroyed buildings and
the coffins piling up in Syria
reminded me so much of these pictures showing green coffins and veiled women
crying over them. For some reason it wasn't like Palestine or Iraq's
scenes at all, it was more like Bosnia.
Now Syrians have more means to talk about what's going on there. Will that change people's perception to mass killings?
Does it mean that no more massacres will
continue to happen, that no more innocent people will continue to die in vain and life
will go on like this.
Does it make a difference to educate ourselves about history mistakes and
educate those around us in order to avoid it?
**************
The Bosnian genocide and the way the world responded to it all taught me so many lessons about our world and the reality of things. The racial and religious dynamics in the whole thing have hundreds of lessons on how our world is operating.
I don't know what could be done to stop the bloodshed around the corner from my house in Egypt to be thinking about solving these issues in other countries.
I just know that this specific event has certainly shaped the political and religious consciousness of so many young Muslims in the world as it did with me. More people should learn about this massacre in this context.
The least I can do about it is talking and honoring these victims by letting
more people learn about what happened to them.
For those of you who still don't know
much about it, you can easily google: Srebrenica + Genocide + 1995 and you will
find plenty of documentaries and articles.
These are some of the tweets people
posted today on twitter to commemorate Srebrenica Massacre, you still can
follow the hashtag #Srebrenica to get updates on it:
Stay Human @Stay_Human1
Imagine whats going through families who
only just buried their beloveds today after 17 years ... bodies still being
identified#Srebrenica
Zbigniew G @Zbigniew_G
In many cases, body parts of one
individual have been found in several different mass graves #Srebrenica
Kaya Dee @Kaya_Dee
To this day i remember Bosnians telling
me about the pain they suffered at the hands of their neighbours #Srebrenica #Islamophobia@MPACUK
Taji Mustafa @tajimustafa
#Srebrenica massacre: I remember how UN arms embargo
left Bosnian Muslims largely unarmed
while Serbia
inherited Yugoslav Army's arsenal
Radeyah Why? @TryUmphNow
After the #Holocaust we dealt with #antisemitism
After the #civilrightsmovement we death with #racism But we never deal with#Islamophobia
MPACUK @MPACUK
#Srebrenica, where nearly 9000 Muslims were
murdered. They are still finding more bodies 17 years on! We
will never forget!
MPACUK @MPACUK
Rape was as much a weapon as bullets &
bombs. Women raped in front of their parents, children. Fathers forced to rape
daughters #Srebrenica
MPACUK @MPACUK
An estimated 200,000 Muslims murdered, 12,000
children & 50,000 women raped at the end of the genocide. How can we
not forget?#Srebrenica
