A Little Perspective

This past week in my Peace & Conflict Resolution seminar we have been going over the Bosnian genocide. I honestly did not know much about the Bosnian genocide before this or about the conflict which lead to it. As an introduction we read Peter Maass book, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. Peter was a journalist who was stationed in Bosnia to cover the conflict while it was going on. I want to warn anyone who is thinking of reading this book it is quite disturbing and upsetting since it talks of the genocide which occurred and has refugees and survivors accounts of what happen to them. It tells of concentration camps, rape, starvation, brutal attacks and honestly gets you quite lost about where humanity has gone. But it is a very important book because as difficult as it is to talk about war and genocide and human beings being so brutal to each other we cannot forget it or turn our backs on it because if we do then we will forget and may allow the same mistakes to occur again.

The next few days after discussing Maass’ book we met Bosnian refugees and survivors. What is so difficult for a lot of people in my seminar is that the survivors are just a few years older than us. They are in their twenties and going to college. This genocide occurred when we were alive and when we were kids. It is not some far off thing like the Holocaust that happened during a World War it happened in the early nineties and there is still high tension in the area.

Something that was very interesting was the fact that so many people received labels from the Yugoslav army that they did not even know they had. The Bosnian genocide is when Christian Slavs wanted to “cleans” Bosnian of Bosnian Muslims (or as they were referred to by the Yugoslav army Turks). Some of the Bosnian Muslims did not go to mosk and they even ate pork (which is against the Islamic religion) but they had a Muslim name which meant they needed to be “cleansed.”

I cannot imagine how it must have been to be persecuted for something which you did not even identity with, which is what we heard from some of the survivors. The survivors told us that they were labeled into a group and an identity they did not even know they had. To be told that you are something, which you feel you are not, and that that something is wrong which justifies killing you enrages me, because I know if it happened to me I would be enraged.

Not to have a downer post, it is more to make people think about how important it is that things of history which are bad must be taught for that is the only way in which society is not doomed to repeat atrocities.