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To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous thought, we can say that every genocide is similar, but at the same time, each one is unfortunate in its own way. The last unfortunate genocide on the Old Continent took place in Srebrenica, and tomorrow is the painful anniversary of that event, which reminds us of the horrors to which members of the Bosnian nation were subjected when they were left without protection.
This is the most recent genocide in Europe and the first since World War II, a continent that has seen many genocides in its history. Europe is often understood as an exceptionally advanced continent with a high quality of life, sensitive to human rights and social issues, but at the same time this same continent – and we will give some historical examples below – is the exact opposite: a powerful, dark and violent continent that regularly commits the worst crimes that we would consider to be tantamount to genocide.
Although opinions vary, it is believed that the first genocide in Europe took place more than half a century ago in 1492. When Columbus discovered America, the conquistadors quickly attacked the indigenous populations by force and carried out a brutal colonial genocide – a technical term that is almost universally accepted in the scientific community – in which the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas were destroyed and humiliated. Europeans got rich from the troubles of others and left us with countless ostentatious buildings, squares and royal palaces in Western metropolises, which were probably at least partly funded by the above-mentioned immoral behavior. At the beginning of the new century, Spain, one of the hegemons of Europe, whose rulers attached the adjective Catholic to themselves and were far from evangelical values, took the lead in adopting bad policies: first, they expelled the Jews. A similar fate befell the Islamic population in Spain in 1492 and in the decades that followed. It is considered the first systematic form of ethnic cleansing in the modern era, and some of the elements that constitute genocide are already present.
On the one hand, civilization was developing and the New World was revealed, but while we were witnessing its development and progress, social and political life in Europe was accompanied by brutality, ethnic cleansing, many of which were essentially the same as genocide. When the Spanish monarchy passed the Edict of Granada, they explained in detail the fate that would befall the Jewish population, they created a model that would later be easily adopted by many countries. This model was completely inhumane, but it would be used a lot by various actors in the following centuries: if you were a member of the unprotected population, you didn’t really have many options, you could leave and escape, or change your religion and country, or you would lose your life and be forced to take care of this monstrous regime. A similar matrix was used in many genocidal acts that marked the development of “Lady Europe” (as Kleiza once called her). The main condition was that the population that was subjected to the acts equivalent to genocide was not protected: exposed to the arbitrariness of a violent political regime, the fate of these people seemed to be predetermined.
Almost all countries in the world that are proud of their national pride, heroism and the success of their own people have committed acts in the past that can be equated with genocide. The scale, goals and purposes of these atrocities vary, but the connection between them is this: at a certain stage of social development – most of them are wars, crises or other turbulent moments that awaken and activate irrational demons – they wipe out the unprotected population that is almost exhausted. They kill people systematically because they call themselves differently or pray to a different god – as it is said in the mass consciousness. Political dissidents meet a similar end, because in bad regimes they resist criticism and any different opinion is a priori understood as treason. People are killed because of different skin color: black groups are mostly exposed to this, they experience suffering unprecedented in history, but albinos also suffer to a lesser extent, they are considered demons due to their lack of melanin. Sometimes religious differences lead to persecution: Jews and Muslims suffer the same, Catholics and Protestants are massacred in religious wars, and Orthodox Christians also suffer a lot.
People suffer for different motives, but in a way, they are linked by similar misfortunes: they suffer because they are not protected, sick political regimes, inhuman cowards who carry out executions by justifying their actions with cheap rhetoric, all under the guise of a sacred nation and national interest. A realistic and even pessimistic confrontation with our own collective past is the best corrective to any contemporary social or political illusions to which we are often prone.
The genocide in Srebrenica is not only a sorrow for Bosnia and Herzegovina: this small place with at least 8,372 Bosniak victims, all with first and last names, is a permanent reminder that the logic of evil can occur almost anywhere if the necessary conditions are met, the sick thinkers and their executioners are found, and the whole world is watching silently. Although it is almost impossible to give meaning to human suffering on such a large scale, perhaps in today’s world, where the ghosts of the past often erupt in violent forms almost everywhere in the world, the discourse about Srebrenica is a memorial to the entire social and political past, both ours and Europe’s, but at the same time it is also a hope, perhaps a utopian hope, that the modern world will at least find more effective models for the protection of human life. So, from the darkness of our past, some wonderful flowers will bloom for future generations.
Not a single one of our forty thousand ideals is still being slaughtered in the grave of reality.
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