Srebrenica

By Anna Foa*

Once again, Srebrenica. It is not just my fad: twenty years ago that genocide (let’s call things by their real name) broke down Europe’s dreams and caused pain and dread. Serbia can show that it is no longer Milosevic’s country and that the troops of a brand new butcher like Mladic will not carry out new massacres, but it can do this only by accepting the blame and responsibility for what was done. Vucic attended the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary and advanced moderate proposals, but he did not recognise the true nature of that dramatic event, whose memory he was commemorating. This happened because at the UN the tsar Putin had forbidden to formally define that event a “genocide”. Srebrenica massacre took place in broad daylight, in 1995, with the complicity of the UN and the entire Europe. This is why it is something that has to do with us, as European citizens, because of the impact that that event had on the subsequent history of Europe and its dreams of peace; at the same time it is something that has to do with us, as European Jews, for what those eight thousand graves make us remember of our own history, and for the memory of the other nameless graves in our past.

*Anna Foa is an historian. This article has been translated in English by Ilaria Modena , student at the Scuola superiore interpreti e traduttori di Trieste, ‎who is doing her apprenticeship within the newsroom of Pagine Ebraiche.