Survivors of the Bosnian Genocide 30 years ago told Radio Free Asia that they see parallels between their suffering and the experiences of Uyghurs in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.
At that that time, the international community failed to stop the mass killings and other crimes against Bosnian Muslims. The 1992-95 Bosnian War left 100,000 dead, including the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Bosnians don’t want to see that happen again, and yet they see it unfolding in various locations around the world.
“We have been shouting for many years that ethnic genocide should never happen again, but we are witnessing it every day,” said Almasa Salihovic, 36, who at age 8 fled with her family from advancing Serb forces and lost a brother in Srebrenica.
“We see that it is happening to Middle Eastern people, and it happened to African peoples,” said Salihovic, a spokesperson for the Potocari-Srebrenica Memorial Center, referring to the Palestinians and killings in Darfur, Sudan and Rwanda. “There was no concrete action to stop this.”
Salihovic said she was perplexed as why the international community has not yet taken concrete actions against China for what the U.S. government and more than 10 parliaments in Western countries have declared a genocide and crimes against humanity.
“The international community has failed so far to stop this type of crime,” she said.
Azim Halic, director of the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, empathizes with the Uyghurs. Anytime political and human rights are taken away from people, it’s a crime, she said
“That is what happened here and is happening all around the world right now and to the Uyghurs as well,” she told Radio Free Asia.
Ethnic cleansing
Many Bosnians are still haunted by memories of the genocide.
In 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army set out to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Muslims, and mostly Catholic Bosnian Croats in an effort to incorporate the area into a greater Serbia.
Over the next few years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated crimes against Bosnian Muslims, called Bosniaks, and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people, some 80% of them Bosniak.
Salihovic said she and her family sought refuge in a former battery factory in Srebrenica, a designated security zone controlled by Dutch soldiers under the command of the U.N. peacekeeping forces.
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But the Dutch soldiers failed to protect the Muslims, and Bosnian Serb forces separated her brother, Abdulla Salihovic, from the rest of the family and killed him, she said.
All told, nearly 8,400 Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica, the single largest massacre in Europe since World War II.
‘Happening around the world’
Many Bosnians are aware of the plight of the Uyghurs in China, who have been subjected to mass detentions, torture, forced labor and the destruction of property, including religious structures, though they are more familiar with the oppression of Palestinians.
“We know that Uyghur Muslims, because of religion and everything else, are being forced to perform labor, basically tortured,” said restaurant owner Abdu Porcovic, 39, who also survived Bosnia’s genocide.
“All their freedoms are being reduced,” he added.
Muhtar Abdurrahman, a Uyghur scholar whom RFA interviewed in Sarajevo during an October meeting of the World Uyghur Congress, called on the Chinese government to stop its persecution of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs.
“They should remember how the perpetrator of the Bosnian genocide, Slobodan Milosevic, was brought before an international criminal court and faced justice,” he said.
Milosevic, president of Serbia between 1989–1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until his overthrow in 2000, was tried on charges of committing war crimes at an international criminal tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, in the early 2000s. He died before the case concluded.
‘Fascist government’
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who led the Bosnian Serb Army and was known as the “butcher of Bosnia,” were also tried and convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Their fate suggests that those responsible for modern-day genocides also will see their day in court, Abdurrahman said.
“We firmly believe that [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and his henchmen and his fascist government one day will face justice here in the International Criminal Court one day,” he said.
The Bosnia War ended with the signing of the Dayton Accords in December 1995, a peace agreement that divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two autonomous states — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina dominated by Bosniaks and Croats, and the Bosnian Serb Republic dominated by Bosnian Serbs.
Despite the immense hardships facing Uyghurs, Abdurrahman is hopeful that the situation in Xinjiang will follow a similar trajectory.
“We are convinced that this genocide will eventually play a role in the birth of an independent Uyghur nation,” he said.
Translated by RFA Uyghur Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.