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Serbia says sorry for Srebenica, but it should go further

01 April 2010 04:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Serbia has made great strides, but its apology for the Srebrenica massacre should acknowledge that what happened there was genocide, says Harry de Quetteville, APA reports quoting â€œThe Telegraphâ€ newspaper.
The terrifying thing about the Srebrenica massacre is that the figures keep changing. Was it 6,000 Muslim men and boys who were herded to the side of pits and shot dead by ethnic Serb soldiers in 1995? Or was it 7,000?
The consensus when I was covering the Balkans was: between the two. That was the best guess from the remains recovered from the area around a shattered town in eastern Bosnia. But then, after a while, the total more often mentioned increased to 7,000.
I donâ€™t work in the Balkans anymore, but even so it wasnâ€™t much of a surprise when I saw, in the news reports about the fact that Serbia has finally, today, officially apologised for this killing field, that the estimated death toll now stands at 8,000.
And what, you may ask, is another 1,500 bodies when you are dealing with a system of savagery? A system which dehumanises individuals because of their race or religion? A system, in other words, of genocide.
And what is 7,000 or indeed 8,000 when set against the genocide of millions in the Second World War? The figures seem as meaningless, as unimaginable, as the recent multi-billion dollar losses of the worldâ€™s financial institutions. In both cases it is tempting to argue that the precise numbers are less important than ensuring that the systems which went so wrong do not do so again.
With this in mind it is heartening that among the political groups that endorsed the Serbian parliamentâ€™s apology in the early hours of this morning was the Socialist Party, once led by Slobodan Milosevic. It has moved on from the nightmare of expansionist nationalism that drove the 1992-95 wars following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Serbia has moved on too. These days Serbs dream not of Greater Serbia but of EU membership and the ease of trade and travel that come with it. The countryâ€™s president, Boris Tadic, is a good man, understated in his way, but not ineffective. Not even the amputation of the former Serb province of Kosovo, now an independent nation, has opened the sluices for fresh rivers of blood, as many predicted it would.
Serbia is fit for membership of the EU (itself a club which has played a crucial role in offering Balkan people a future in which peace promises more than war). Ratko Mladic, the general who led the massacre at Srebrenica, is one of the only two Serbs wanted for war crimes still left uncaptured. His days at large are surely numbered.
For Muslims in Bosnia, understandably, this is not enough. For todayâ€™s Serb resolution, while it offers an apology, does not mention the word â€˜genocideâ€™.
It is true that the Serb soldiers did not kill everyone at Srebrenica. Technically, I suppose, it was only the men of fighting age (if children and pensioners can be considered of fighting age) who were butchered. But few doubt the ethnic dimension of the killings. So an apology for genocide there should be. But that should not devalue the great strides that Serbia has made towards acknowledging and accounting for its bloody recent past.
Back in Srebrenica meanwhile, there is work underway that serves us all more than any Serb apology. There, teams still excavate and exhume bodies from the many pits in which the dead were buried. So far more than 5,600 victims have been identified by DNA analysis.
They have been rescued, in other words, from the anonymity of the mass grave. They have been given names and faces again, and in many cases have been reburied under their own headstones. They are individuals once more. This work shows that establishing the precise numbers of genocide is not less important than ensuring that the systems of genocide cannot occur again. Rather, it is integal to that process.
Anyone who has visited Yad Vashem knows of its efforts to catalogue the Holocaust, to remember each individual caught up in a system of savagery. By doing so it shows that such systems, which try so hard to strip their victims of identity and humanity, fail and are doomed to failure.