Srebrenica to Gaza: Things that changed, things that stayed the same

How to characterise what we’ve been witnessing in global politics is the primary intellectual struggle. An answer can be found in two symbolic phrases.

The first is a quote from 19th-century French critic and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The second slogan one can hear throughout the last one-and-a-half centuries is “Never Again”.

In addition to these two sentences, a spectre of a word is haunting the West, a spectre that must not be named. What has been happening in Gaza since October 7 can be regarded as a breaking point for international, regional, and local relations because that spectre was given a name – genocide.

It created a division in the “international community” whether what Israel is doing in Gaza is suitable for the ‘G word’ or not.

Yet amid all this chaos, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution for another genocide titled the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.”

Eighty-four countries voted for the resolution, 19 voted against it, 68 countries abstained, and 22 did not vote.

On the 29th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, which cases should be called genocide continues to be a contentious issue.

Curious case of amnesia

Every “new world order” is built upon genocide. This might come as a bold statement to make, but this was the case with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the “new world” that is now known as America in 1492, and the same year coincided with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Andalusia, Spain, after a campaign called Reconquista (Reconquest).

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were no different than the 15th century on the issue of genocide. Mass slavery and colonialism of European empires that expanded from South America to Africa and South Asia lay the footsteps of what was to become the Holocaust.

It came as a shock to many people at the time to discover what had happened to millions of Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation during World War II.

Concentration camps established for the sole purpose of exterminating Jews left a massive scar on the writings of intellectuals that followed.

Particularly, the Auschwitz camp in Poland that was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 kept its place as a symbol of this brutality to this day.

Historic events regarded as turning points paved the way for implementing new vocabulary. It was the case for the word Holocaust, a particular term used to define what happened to Jews under Nazi rule and occasionally used for others who were killed, such as Soviet prisoners of war, Romas, and disabled people.

Holocaust was used interchangeably with genocide, but the reverse was not the case. No other genocide was named the Holocaust afterwards.

In the years that followed, we started to hear new words for killing people in large numbers. “Mass killings,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “mass atrocity crimes” are some new terminologies that were invented in the 20th century.

This not only applies to the Holocaust or genocide, but it was also the case for “torture” after the attacks on 9/11.

A similar kind of amnesia and disappearance showed itself during the long decade of the US’s so-called war on terror, where the word torture was replaced with “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, another “new world order” was about to be established as the US claimed victory.

However, the first signs of this new system were once again seen in the two major genocides against the Bosnians and the Tutsis in Rwanda. The first occurred in the centre of Europe, whereas the latter happened in the heart of Africa.

The international community, symbolised in the form of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, was aware of what was happening in both countries yet was unable to stop genocides.

“Never Again” was the famous slogan that was engraved in public memory, which referred to the fact that something like the Holocaust should never be lived or repeated.

However, horror stories have been heard across the world ever since. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Decades of genocides and denials

The war in Bosnia, the siege of Sarajevo, and the mass killings of 8,372 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica became symbols of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s.

Human rights organisations around the globe, as well as public intellectuals such as American writer Susan Sontag and the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson, were mobilising support to break the occupation of the Serbs. Recognition of the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide came after a long journey of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The decision to bring the two words Srebrenica and genocide together triggered controversies among intellectuals of the era.

This was the case for famous American linguist Noam Chomsky, who said, “The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it "genocide" so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion.”

This goes beyond technical or legal terminology on how to define genocide and ends up with whose deaths can be associated with that word.

Intellectual attitude towards Srebrenica opened a new form of “mass atrocity denial,” which continued and still proceeds after the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court’s rulings, which define Israel’s atrocities in Gaza after October 7 as genocide.

Considering all these disputes over genocide, then how should one understand the UN General Assembly’s resolution on Srebrenica?

Although it can be regarded as a symbolic win, the distribution of votes indicated that it was not a smooth and easy vote.

It is one of the rarest resolutions where division within the UN Security Council's five permanent members with veto power became clear when Russia and China voted against the resolution, as others, the US, United Kingdom, and France, voted in favour.

Those who want to align with these powers and those who don’t want to antagonise both camps either voted against or abstained.

Despite ethical and moral claims regarding international communities’ “responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” this was never appropriately achieved.