Acts of genocide have given rise to rudiments of international legal system: JNU professor

JNU professor Dr Amir Ali says that genocide can almost be predicted like the weather. Every time a genocidal event such as Srebrenica happens, the ineffectual refrain of ‘Never Again’ is ritualistically repeated, only for it to happen all over again.

New Delhi: It has been 25 years since the Srebrenica massacre happened between the 11th and 16th July 1995. This is the first mass killing to be called genocide in Europe after the Second World War when Europe witnessed the horrors of the Nazi holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. Every time a genocidal event such as Srebrenica happens, the ineffectual refrain of ‘Never Again’ is ritualistically repeated, only for it to happen all over again. Srebrenica itself took place just a year after the horrendous genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in which 800,000 were killed between April and July 1994.

Genocides should not happen. In many instances, they have taken place with the international community standing haplessly by. In the case of Srebrenica, the Dutch peacekeeping force present merely looked on and in fact, failed to provide shelter to 300 Bosnian Muslim men who were then killed by the forces of the Bosnian Serb military general Ratko Mladic. In 2017 an Appeals Court in the Hague indicted the Dutch peacekeeping forces for failing to protect the lives of those 300 men who were looking for shelter. Rather ironically, Srebrenica was designated as a ‘safe zone’ by the UN and all that the designation did was to make sitting ducks of the 8000 Bosnian Muslim men who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

A genocide can almost be predicted like the weather. There are straws in the wind that clearly indicate the direction of impending mass killings. Just as the violence in Rwanda was about to break out, the Canadian Major-General Romeo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) sent urgent messages about his worst fears. There was no response from the world. One of these straws in the wind is a rapidly growing hatred of the targeted group and their consequent dehumanisation. Back in 1994 in Rwanda, when the world had not been fully introduced to the internet and social media platforms such as Facebook were still a decade away from being created, the task of spreading hatred was accomplished very effectively through the newly created Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that broadcast exhortations to ‘kill the cockroaches’, this being a reference to Tutsis. The man who funded and founded this broadcaster, Felicien Kabuga was recently arrested in Paris at the age of 84 where he was living under a false identity.

If such a rise of hatred is a clear indicator, then the source of hatred can very often be a vicious rising tide of very nasty nationalism. One has only to look at the career of Slobodan Milosevic who was Serb President in the early 1990s and who is considered the individual most responsible for the kind of violence that Serb nationalism unleashed across the breakaway republics of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and of which Srebrenica is the most vicious example.

Back in the 1980s, Milosevic was a communist party functionary, but then he discovered the lure of hard-line Serb nationalism as the best form of career advancement. Milosevic was to increasingly suggest from 1986 onwards that it was actually the Serbian population in the autonomous region of Kosovo that was threatened by genocide. From the perceived threat to this minority Serbian presence in Kosovo, would be built up the project of a Greater Serbia. What we have then is the projection of a perceived threat of genocide to his own ethnic group, that then becomes the grounds to turn this around, as it were, in the actual perpetration of genocide against an opposing group.

In 1989, the year he became President of Serbia, Milosevic decided to strip the province of Kosovo of its autonomy granted in 1974. This was to be just the beginning of the horrendous violence in the breakaway republics of Yugoslavia that would rage on throughout the early 1990s. There was a non-violent, civil disobedience movement in Kosovo led by a veritable Gandhi in the Balkans, Ibrahim Rugova who later went on to become President of Kosovo and who had earlier studied under the literary theorist Roland Barthes, while in Paris. Even the presence of a movement of this kind did not deter Milosevic from constantly invoking the spectre of terrorism emanating from the region, which became the pretext and justification for him to launch yet more repression in the form of mass killings and ethnic cleansing.

It is distressing to note that there is the little political will to stop genocides from happening, despite clear indications existing on the basis of which any reasonably perceptive observer can discern their possibility. The unfolding of genocide is also made possible by the earlier mentioned rise of hatred being accompanied by what French historian and political scientist Jacques Semelin in his book Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, invoking German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, refers to as a ‘spiral of silence’. This implies large numbers of people who may not themselves actively indulge in acts of hate speech, indeed may even not agree with them, failing to speak out and condemn this. They may not want to so much as even express a certain degree of empathy with the suffering of the group in question, for the narrow fear of being isolated from their own group.

The story of genocide in the 20th century has been a depressing one. Acts of genocide have given rise to the rudiments of an international legal system that, while failing to prevent such acts themselves, do at times catch up with the perpetrators, if only after a long lag. However, for every Felicien Kabuga, Slobodon Milosevic and Ratko Mladic arrested and put on trial, there are many perpetrators who live their lives to the end and get away with it. One only wonders if they are able to get a good night’s sleep.

(Written by JNU professor Dr Amir Ali)