Originally written in July 2015 to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, this piece by Arzu Merali has been revised by its author for the current context, including updating footnotes, and adding description which now requires addition for those unfamiliar with the essay’s contents.
Listen to the essay here or read the full text below.
Introduction 2025
On this 30th anniversary, while a genocide is being perpetrated in front of our very eyes, the lessons of the genocide in the Bosnia war have not only not been learned, the travesties of justice left in its wake have paved the path alongside other horrors, for the genocide we are witnessing in Palestine today. It is no coincidence that the Israeli entity and Serbia had close ties during the Bosnia war, ties of military and technological cooperation that continue through this genocide.
The interview of Demir Mahmutćehajić on South Africa’s Salaam Media regarding the unlearned lessons is appended below: the failure to implement programs akin to de-Nazification amongst the Serbian population; the failure to apply similar standards of justice as were set up at the Nuremberg Tribunal and so on, have left the field open for both genocide denial and further, more extreme genocide implementation.
Meanwhile the anti-Muslim / Islamophobic narratives that have been instrumentalised to these nefarious ends against Bosnians and Palestinians (of whatever faith and none), drench European(ised) media world-wide. This bodes nothing but further ill.
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Original title:
You Will Burn My House Down – But I will Still Dream be Here: Memories of Bosnia, Genocide and the Histories of Hate.[1]
People born in the late ‘80s onwards, of course, do not remember. Who expects them to? Yet, it wouldn’t be unreasonable that the message of this disaster, rather catastrophe, of ginormous proportions, would be passed on by those of us who do. Yet, all of us, regardless of the 20 year memorial fever currently hitting, at least, the UK, have failed to do just that.
I know, there have been TV programmes and documentaries – I have produced one ‘Forgotten Genocide’[2] myself. But it’s been 20 years, with paltry recognition meanwhile of something that should be memorialised, at the very least, as a cautionary reminder. A reminder that Europe has not learned from the Holocaust. A reminder that the idea of Europe is created by the idea of unity against a heathen Muslim and Jewish ‘other’, and that it does – it must – repeat its cycle of violence periodically to cleanse its soil of the ‘undesirable’.
Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the Bosnian academic and first Deputy Prime Minister of Bosnia called this out repeatedly. Not long after the war he wrote thus:
“For most people today, the truth about the Holocaust seems to be just a story conceived in rich human imagination, rather than recent European history. In the same way, the truth about Bosnia is already being misunderstood in a sickening way which denies its reality… is it possible, through a relation between the Holocaust and the genocide in Bosnia, and through the predominant understandings of both, to claim that the potential for future atrocities exists at the present time, a potential which may be realised in the future?”[3]
Yet, we have only just come to commemorate. In Cathedrals, with choirs, because it is now understood to be bad. Bad enough to cry and imagine and retell, without context in that recent European history that repeats.
This is how corrupted histories are born. This is how they are fed.
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10 years ago I conducted a straw poll amongst family friends about 5 – 10 years younger than I. I had been 24 when Srebrenica happened. Bar one, none knew what Srebrenica was. Given that I had written about it and campaigned (so I thought) for many years on it, this could only be a grotesque failure on my part.
At the Islamic Human Rights Commission (where I worked then), despite almost annual missives and ad hoc reports on Srebrenica, Bosnia, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) et al, it became clear that this discussion only had purchase amongst those old enough to remember what had happened. Thus, the idea of annual commemoration was born. First stop? To gather support from contemporary organisations in the Muslim community. Those who were old enough, like us, to remember.
Disappointment and distress. Not one wanted to support such an event. Maybe because of the already extant climate of fear that has put Muslim organisations on the defensive? Who knows? Some minister or other[4] and definitely some putative British neocons had flagged up the idea that anger over the crimes committed in Bosnia, were a deeply rooted cause of so-called radicalisation amongst Muslim youth.
A year later returning from a conference on conflict resolution, I was asked by an academic I was sharing a train journey home with how far this was true. I mentioned that straw poll. “It may affect people my age, but not the youth.”
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At least some of those organisations feel safe to commemorate Srebrenica (if nothing else) now.
We remember the 8000, and forget the rest of the (according to ICTY) 100,000 slaughtered – or was it as the Bosnian government claimed 200,000, or more? Where is our commemoration of the 20,000 women (according to UNICEF) who were mass raped by Serb soldiers (and maybe by some UN officials too). Or is it 50,000[5] or 80,000? Whatever the numbers, it can’t be denied the damage? Surely? The 6 year old girl whose vocal chords were permanently damaged after night after night or performing forced oral sex acts? The 9 year old, the baby? The women who killed themselves, the women who are the living dead?
If we remember only Srebrenica, what about Ferida Osmanovic? Her name is not amongst the commemorated dead. She hung herself in despair near Tuzla airport after being separated from her husband during those fateful days. What about the girls who were raped that day, like cousins Mina (aged 12) and Fata (aged 14) Smailovic? Witnesses reported seeing the two girls return to where they and others had been detained, having been forced outside by Bosnian Serbs dressed in UN uniforms. Both girls covered in blood, Mina is reported to have cried, “We are not girls anymore. Our lives are over. We don’t have a life anymore.”[6] Later that night Fata hung herself with her own scarf.
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And then there were the men and boys. Raped, yes, some. Castrated, perhaps many more[7]. Sexual violence as a weapon of war was at its most seen then – for all the world – yet what do we recall now?
“You will give birth to Chetniks,”[8] women impregnated by mass rapes in the detention centres were often taunted (a Chetnik is the term for an irregular Serb soldier across various conflicts).
‘Ethnic cleansing’, as the genocide of Bosnians was prettily renamed by European powers, was not simply some mass expulsion of people from certain lands. Half the population of Bosnia – around 2.6 million – were displaced).[9]
Genocide across Bosnia (because that is what it was), came in many forms.
The burning of books, the confiscating of land and homes, the rapes, the impregnations, the castrations and the murders. To be dead in Bosnia, did not guarantee even that you were buried. Look at the annual burials in Srebrenica. These are still yet the lucky ones. Meticulously put together bone by bone, excavated from different mass graves, DNA checked and finally laid to rest, their families get at least a locus to turn to and mourn. Others we know, know only that their brother, mother, father, husband, child was identified by feet found in a wheelbarrow (no other parts remain), or an inscribed wedding ring on an exhumed hand.
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Did you cry reading The Book Thief? Then cry again.
Genocide was (is) the myriad ways of extermination that the Serbian nationalist project took – a project that targeted all who stood in its way whether Muslim or not (do you remember Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić, the Romeo & Juliet of Sarajevo shot dead on Vrbanja Bridge as they tried to escape?)
Genocide was the setting aflame of Bosnia’s National and University Library in Sarajevo, and the immolation of 90% of its 1.5 million catalogue. On the fateful night in August 1992, when Serb sniper fire set the building ablaze a human chain of librarians and citizens tried to save as many books as possible.
Remember, please, Aida Buturovic[10], shot dead by a sniper for doing just that.
And then there was Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute.[11]
And then there was Bosnia’s National Museum. Its director Dr. Rizo Sijari, was killed by a grenade blast on 10 December 1993 while trying to arrange for plastic sheeting from UN relief agencies to cover some of the holes in the building created by Serbian shelling and sniper fire[12]. And then there was Mostar…
History repeats, no Europe repeats. It is the Holocaust again, and it is the conquest of Granada in 1492 and the destruction of the Americas that same year. It is erasure of identity so crucial to the Trans-Atlantic Holocaust that is still lived today in the naming of descendants, in the defeated economies of ‘post-colonial’ states, in the endless compensation of enslavers and the failure to pay reparations to the enslaved.
It is more than just the hatred of the ‘other’, writ large in every history book the victor writes. Europe – in its many guises – can only do this because it defines itself by what it is not. Do we realise yet, that in our aspiration to be a part thereof, we too become (this) Europe?
Burning books and burning bodies. Sounds familiar?
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A lone Bosnian looks at the camera and speaks on behalf of Daesh, addressing, supposedly his Bosnian brethren. His misguided face runs alongside the 20 year commemoration news pieces on Srebrenica. The implication? Some conveyor belt from Muslim loss in the 1990s and the atrocities committed by Daesh today. Muslims must not be allowed to remember then, because what happens is this.
Except that lone Bosnian Daesh is too young to know first hand what happened. His historiography, in its all too familiar nationalist perversions is neither vengeance nor justice for Bosnia, but the Serbian nationalist project under another name. The bloody atrocities of Daesh all too readily highlighted, the evidence of its methodological symmetry.
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There is some consternation now, that the United Kingdom, France and the USA were more than just impotent observers of the carnage in Srebrenica but may have been complicit in it. This is hardly a secret. The declassification of documents[13] simply gave more detail to things known both on the ground and by observers in the run up to the genocide.
We already knew that the US had reconnaissance pictures of what was unfolding and didn’t share them with NATO. We already knew that the French commander of UNPROFOR Bernard Janvier had a recklessly close relationship with the Serbs, credited for his halting airstrikes, even as evidence of what was happening in Srebrenica started to come to light.
Given the many crimes that Dutch UNPROFOR troops are alleged to have been complicit in, nothing should surprise. Their alleged crimes included surrendering all of Srebrenica’s civilians to the Serbs and helping to split the men and boys up from the women (the unit commander).
Recently declassified documents show that ‘the UN provided 30,000 litres of petrol, used by the Serbs to drive their quarry to the killing fields and plough their bodies into mass graves’[14]. We could have guessed that.
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Back home in Turkey, Bora tells us one day, about his time as a volunteer fighting in Bosnia. We have been friends a long time, but this is the first I have heard any details (some 20 years after the event). He remembers finding Hizbullah soldiers in distress after fajr[15] prayers one day as they found out about an Israeli onslaught taking place back home – the same war on two different fronts. He remembers the Iranians who helped build the tunnel that broke the siege of Sarajevo and paid with their blood like their Malaysian and Pakistani comrades too. There were of course so many others, but these nations contributed perhaps the most after the Bosnians themselves.
And then of course there was the rolling in of Saudi ‘aid’, once most of the fighting was done. Armed with food convoys and the most pathetic excuses for ‘dawah’[16], they leafleted the locals to educate them about the heathen nature of those who had come to fight with and for them.
Bora recalls telling one, “Yes, you are right, I agree, they are all kafir, they are not Muslims,” before continuing, “But know this, that kafir became shaheed[17] here and here and here to liberate this land. Please continue your ‘dawah’.”
When, after 9-11, we all became too scared to speak of the heroes of Bosnia, we allowed that ‘dawah’ to become the alternative narrative of the war.
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We are taught then only two histories. Either we remember only the civilian Bosnian men and boys killed in Srebrenica, not the men and women who fought and were martyred. Or we are taught that we must avenge in the way our oppressors tortured, desecrated, raped and humiliated us. Both are Europe, and neither are Islam.
We – those of us who do remember, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or British, Indian, Bosnian whoever – fail our children again and again by allowing only these world views to exist in their minds.
By all means remember and respect Srebrenica’s dead in Westminster Abbey, the Vatican and wherever else will acknowledge their names. But understand that this is neither enough, nor good enough, because Europe and its minions repeat – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, in DRC, Pakistan and well beyond. And in 2025 as I revise this, in Palestine – in the unfolding potential for a further Holocaust Rusmir Mahmutćehajić warned us about. Not to understand that not only fails to respect the dead, it has turned that ‘potential for future atrocities’ into bloody, brutal reality.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. She was one of the co-founders of Islamic Human Rights Commission.
Banner image: Grave of martyr Derviš Mahmutćehajić in Sarajevo, (c) and courtesy Demir Mahmutćehajić, edited by Nasreen Shaikh Jamal al-Lail.
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Further viewing and reading
Srebrenica, 30 Years On: Is Global Silence Still the World’s Response to Genocide? Bosniak and human rights activist Demir Mahmutćehajić dissects.
Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace: Destruction of Libraries during and after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s András J. Riedlmayer
FROM THE ASHES: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF BOSNIA’S CULTURAL HERITAGE András J. Riedlmayer (Harvard University)
ENDNOTES
[1] The title of this essay refers to the poem ‘Message’ by Mak Dizdar, reflecting on grave stones of Bosnian ancestors, written in the 1960s.
And secret and sly like a Western spy
You’ll burn my home
Till all
Fall
And then you’ll say these dark words
This nest is done for now
This cursed cur
Is slain
With pain
But by a miracle I will still dream, be here, on earth
And from afar
I’ll let it be told
This truth of mine
Unerring
And old.
[2] ‘Forgotten Genocide’ is a documentary directed by Assed Baig and produced by Arzu Merali for IHRC, and was released on 13 July 2015. To arrange a screening or for more information, please contact media@ihrc.org or call the IHRC office on +44 20 8904 4222.
Watch the documentary Forgotten Genocide here.
[3] Mahmutćehajić, R. ‘Muslims as the ‘Others’ of Europe’ presented at “Cultural Identities, Cultural Integration, What Future for Europe?’ March 21 – 24, 1997, Krakow, Poland (European Mozart Foundation).
[4] Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom’s Strategy, 2006, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/272320/6888.pdf
[5] Crowe, David M. (2013). War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice: A Global History. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-0-230-62224-1 and also Stiglmayer, A., (1999) ‘Sexual Violence: Systematic Rape, in Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know’ 327, 327 (Roy Gutman and David Rieff eds., 1999)
[6] Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War, by Michael D. Kennedy, U of Minnesota Press, 2002, p226
[7] See Feron, E. (2018), ‘Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: The Hidden Face of Warfare’ In Bosnia’, accessed 12 July 2025 at https://medium.com/colloquium/wartime-sexual-violence-against-men-21ae5b15b3c: “for example, a study of 6,000 detainees in concentration camps in Sarajevo during the 1992–95 war found that 80 per cent of male prisoners were raped. Many cases of castration, of mutilation of sexual organs, of sexual humiliation, of forced fellatio, of enforced rape (male prisoners forced to rape other prisoners, both men and women), have been documented by the UN in Bosnia.”
[8] Definition 1:an irregular Slav soldier in the Balkans; especially :a member of various irregular Serbian military forces that in periods of disorder (as during World War II and following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991) pursued ultranationalist aims; Definition 2: an ultranationalist Serbhttp://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chetnik
[9] ‘The war resulted in massive displacement. In less than three months, the number of Bosnian refugees and internally displaced persons reached 2.6 million’ Young, K. ‘UNHCR and ICRC in the former Yugoslavia: Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (2001) https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/781_806_young.pdf
[10] From Zećo, M. (1996), Library Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 294-331 ], The University of Chicago:
“It is my moral and human obligation to mention the workers of the library who lost their lives over the course of this brutal war. It is especially poignant that most of them were killed on their way to or from work. The first to be killed was Aida Buturović, a librarian thirty years of age. The day before her death, she told us that she would soon marry her longtime boyfriend. But on August 25, 1992, the same day on which the library was attacked, only three or four hours earlier as she was returning from work, Aida was shot directly in the head by a sniper and was killed near her apartment. We wondered how anyone could have the heart to kill such a young, beautiful, and fragile woman, who looked more like a child than an adult. Not until the next day did her parents find her in the morgue. Ten months after Aida’ s death her father was also killed by an enemy sniper as he was going to her grave at the Koševo football stadium, just as he did devotedly every day, regardless of how dangerous it was to walk around the city.”
[11] Riedlmayer, A. (1995) ‘Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Harvard University’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin.
“…home to the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscript texts and Ottoman documents in Southeastern Europe, was shelled with phosphorus grenades and burned. Losses included 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Aljamiado (Bosnian Slavic written in Arabic script); 7,000 Ottoman documents, primary source material for five centuries of Bosnia’s history; a collection of 19th-century cadastral registers; and 200,000 other documents of the Ottoman era, including microfilm copies of originals in private hands or obtained on exchange from foreign institutions. The Institute’s collection of printed books, the most comprehensive library on its subject in the region, was also destroyed as was its catalog and all work in progress.”
[12] “The Archives of Herzegovina, housing manuscripts and records documenting the region’s past since the medieval period, was repeatedly hit and suffered severe damage. Over 50,000 books were destroyed when the library of Mostar’s Roman Catholic archbishopric was struck by shells fired from artillery positions on the heights overlooking the city. Further tens of thousands of books and documents were exposed to fire and damp when shells smashed through the roof and windows of the Museum of Herzegovina. The University of Mostar Library was also hit and burned, along with a score of other libraries and archives at various locations in the city.” Ibid
[13] Vulliamy, E (2015), ‘Revealed: the role of the west in the runup to Srebrenica’s fall.’ Accessed online 12 July 2025 at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/04/west-true-role-in-srebrenica-massacre-bosnia
[14] Op. cit.
[15] Dawn prayers
[16] Calling to Islam (proselytising)
[17] Martyr
