Felling Trees
July in Sarajevo, October in Gaza
On the 11th of July this year, I found myself in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As far as I could tell it was simply another oppressive summer’s day in the Balkans. I had made plans to meet some friends near the Vijećnica, the city hall of Sarajevo. That morning, however, everything felt askew. My hosts, normally possessed of an infinite hospitality, were a little less friendly and a little more distracted. The coffee was burnt, the conversation stilled and subdued.
At midday I set out to meet my friends. The route from my host’s place to the Vijećnica passes by one of Sarajevo’s many cemeteries. They are a constant feature of the Sarajevan cityscape and indeed Bosnia more generally. I had arrived in Sarajevo two days prior, travelling from Split. The bus winded its way through the Bosnian countryside, circling Sarajevo before arriving some nine hours after our initial departure. As we crossed the border and entered Bosnia proper we came to our first stop, Livno. Above Livno rises a steep and imposing hill, whose face is littered with the white tombstones characteristic of Muslim graveyards. It was the first man made monument I saw in Bosnia.
The cemetery, the graveyard, the necropolis. Call it what you will but it has become an unfortunate symbol of Bosnia. Documentaries about the Bosnian War open with panning shots of cemeteries. Perversely survivors of the conflict are interviewed amongst tombstones. In Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergović novel Kin, scenes of cemeteries and graveyards abound. When I wrote about the book in 2021 I emphasized this; in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah McEachern’s review opened with the same observation.
Those who know anything about the history of the region perhaps realize the logistical error I had made. For the 11th of July is the memorial of the Srebrenica massacre. Srebrenica is a small town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Bosnian War (1992-1995) Srebrenica was declared a UN safe haven. In July 1995 it was overrun by the VRS, the Army of Republika Srpska. The VRS massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslims over the course of July. The VRS maintained variously that these were combatants or that it was just revenge for Bosnians killing Serbsin the towns surrounding Srebrenica. In 2013, the Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic apologized for the “crime of Srebrenica”, but refused to call it a genocide.
From the Vijećnica, the city hall of Sarajevo, the names of all 8,000 victims are read out from A to Z. There is no shade around the city hall. As I stood in the square across from it, waiting for my friends, there was nothing but the heat and the names of the dead to whittle away the time with.
I do not speak Serbo-Croat-Bosnian, nor is it a language whose details I can pick out easily. But as I waited and this chant of remembrance washed over me, a nausea rose in me as I heard an unmistakable repetition. It was a last name on repeat, the last and only memorial to an entire family tree extinguished.
When we think of who will remember us after we pass, we think of our family. If we have any hope for immortality, for being more than our mere bodies, it lies in the fact our loved ones will carry our names into the future, for at least sometime after our passing.
Some might call this romantic, and mean by this criticism. But in times of immense catastrophe such romanticism has its value. Jergović stages his expansive novel Kin around narratives of his family. This act of remembrance allows him to stage the complex and bloody history of the Balkans in all its complicated tragedy. Family members who resist or join the Nazis, who survive (miraculously) and die (predictably) in bloody conflicts and quotidian acts of revenge. Yet there is an kind of cruel irony at the heart of Kin, one I was unaware of when I first wrote about it. Jergović is in some sense lucky to be able to write a family history at all. Those last names, read out for what felt like an eternity in Sarajevo on July 11th, underscore this fact.
These days we in the West feel we have a certain degree of moral clarity about the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars. It is clear to us that the Serbians committed, aided and abetted genocide. These countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia are just far away enough, just east enough that we assume a certain irrelevancy; I would never get swept into such horrible thoughts and deeds. And I would never engage in the cruel whataboutism of a genocidal power.
There are those who hold that Serbia and Serbians did not commit genocide. Nobel Prize winning writer Peter Handke is one. One of the features of the conflict that comes up in interviews with those who lived through it, is a sense that the other side too committed atrocity. This is not actually to be denied. The Bosnian army did kill Serbian civilians during the Bosnian war.
Despite this, we would be incredulous of any history of the Bosnian War that began by foregrounding Bosnian war crimes. Not because they didn’t happen, but because they do not capture the dynamics of the situation, of the imbalance of powers, and of the sheer destruction inflicted on the Bosnian people. An attempt to write events in such a fashion would not suggest balance and moral clarity but moral confusion.
As the number of Palestinians killed by the IDF exceeds 9,000 in just under a month, a new grime fact has emerged. Entire families have been wiped from the civil registry. On October 15th this was estimated at 47 families, by October 28th the Palestine News and Information Agency had reported 825 families wiped out. Antiwar protesters have been quick to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, resigned for his role. In his resignation letter he claimed the UN was failing to prevent genocide in Gaza. On October 13th, six days after hostilities began following Hamas’ attack on Israel, Raz Segal penned an essay entitled “A Textbook Case of Genocide” in Jewish Currents. Segal argued that Israel’s actions and the rhetoric of its leaders all met the definition of genocide. Some have disagreed with the invocation of genocide. Dov Waxman wrote a letter to Jewish Currents arguing that:
while Israel’s relentless and devastating aerial bombing of Gaza is certainly killing many Palestinian civilians, it does not seem to be aimed at simply killing as many Palestinians as possible; if that were the case, the casualties would undoubtedly be even higher, given the military force at Israel’s disposal.
The perversity of this argument aside - if Israel wanted to commit genocide it really would - ignores three crucial factors. Firstly, it is historically the case that genocide is covered by the fog of war. Conflict allows for plausible deniability. I mentioned it before but will restate it here: after Srebrenica, there were claims by the Republika Srpska (specifically the Government Bureau for Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)) that while there was some indiscriminate killing, nothing was organized, that it was mostly targeting combatants and so on. Without intent, there can be no genocide. But we also have to take stock of the fact that, as Saree Makdisi argued in n+1 we are witnessing the evolution of such acts, traditionally conducted with small arms:
But in no instance that I know of has ethnic cleansing been accomplished through the use of massive ordnance and heavy bombardment with ultra-modern weapons systems, including the one-ton bombs (and even heavier bunker-buster munitions) used by Israelis flying the latest American jets. Such matters are normally conducted in person, with rifles or at the point of the bayonet. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was carried out almost entirely with small arms, for instance; the Palestinian civilians massacred at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and other sites to inspire others into terrified flight were shot with pistols, rifles, or machine-guns at close range, not struck by thousand-pound bombs dropped from F-35s flying at 10,000 feet or higher.
What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples—the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites, and of course the Philistines.
Makdisi sticks to less objectionable term ethnic cleansing, a term Waxman also uses in his letter. What I am building to here, however, is an important point about those who use the term genocide in their rhetoric, protests and objections to the conflict. Are they risking “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning” as Waxman objects? Perhaps. A legal case, a case that might come before the international court might not meet the UN’s definition of genocide. But protestors are not lawyers, and politics is not the court room. The events in Gaza this October are events in situ, and the shape they are taking points towards the extreme end of human atrocity.
I am not the first to point out the comparison with Bosnian War. As the numbers converge, as similar horrors begin to emerge, the shape of what is happening slowly comes into view. Those on the street are trying to get ahead of this; if the use of the term genocide is hyperbole it is the fear of those calling for a ceasefire that it soon won’t be. Politics is often about grasping the situation in situ, about fighting for the future.
Must we wait until the Gaza strip is laid to waste and its population annihilated or displaced before we are able to assess the situation clearly? History looks backwards, one will never have its clarity in the current moment. To argue over definitions of genocide as family trees are felled is to miss the point, to have descended into a vacuous pedantry. We know where this is going, we have, unfortunately, been here before.