Today will be a hard day for Sydneysider Mirela Muratovic, a survivor of the only recognised genocide in Europe since the end of the second world war: Srebrenica.
During the 1990s Bosnian war Srebrenica was designated a United Nations-protected “safe area” – a label that came to mean nothing.
Thirty years ago, in the days after 11 July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were rounded up and killed. Mirela was five years old at the time. Her dad, Munib, was one of those victims.
If that wasn’t enough for such a young mind to deal with, it came just two years after her mother, Dzeva, failed to return home after leaving to find food with her cousins, presumed kidnapped and killed. A peace of sorts came as a result of Australia accepting Mirela and her remaining family members as refugees in 2002.
In 2010, Mirela’s family was informed a “part” of her father had been DNA identified. The Muratovic family pooled savings to help send relatives over to Bosnia to hold a funeral for Munib.
What remains difficult for Mirela and her four siblings is that they’ve never been able to achieve the same closure with their mother, whose remains have never been found.
Like so many who have experienced that trauma, other world events trigger deep memories and powerful emotions.
“Just this morning,” she tells me, “I was in tears watching a report out of Gaza. I sat there crying because of the suffering of others, thinking surely someone else was crying the same way about us 30 years ago. We must speak out, these things shouldn’t keep happening.”
The precursor to today’s international criminal court was the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The ICTY was set up no doubt as an attempt of sorts to create a rational response to rein in and hold to account those responsible for the spectacularly brutal irrationality of the time.
It took almost a decade but the appeals court of the ICTY eventually ruled that what happened at Srebrenica was genocide. In the years since, some of the worst perpetrators have been captured and tried. A modest sense of justice has been experienced in the minds of the survivors, a closure of sorts.
Over the years, on every 11 July, funerals committing to earth the remains of the dead have been held at Potočari, Bosnia. When Mirela’s father was buried, 99 other funerals were also held.
The day will be for ever remembered after the UN resolved 11 July would be an International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.
Rightly, Australia joined with others to support this. Just as we as a nation rightly opened our doors to refugees such as Mirela and her relatives who had witnessed and endured the unspeakable.
And we can be proud of the role we played in helping them write a new chapter in their lives, also welcoming their contributions to our country as Australian citizens.
When it comes to the horrors of genocide we say “never again” with an ironic frequency.
Last year marked 30 years since the savagery of Rwanda: 800,000 killed in just 100 days.
Journalists such as Philip Gourevitch covered these episodes and walked away painfully affected. He wrote powerfully about the events of Rwanda.
After accidentally walking on a human skull in the course of visiting a Rwandan massacre memorial, he wrote: “This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”
In the late 90s, as Gourevitch was talking about his work at a podium in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum audience members noticed escalating emotion in his voice, as he spoke of the West’s “active, willed, non-action in Rwanda”.
When do we short-circuit the re-run of this pitiful, shameful, painful cycle? We witness the innocent unimaginably suffer, the unaffected sit as inert spectators only to act after thousands have been killed, the legal system takes time to officially recognise a genocide and we ultimately declare “never again”.
Never again, the Holocaust. Never again, Rwanda. Never again, Srebrenica. How much longer before we declare: Never again, Gaza?
