Robert Leonard Rope

Sarajevo mon amour (pt 1)

This is an open letter to the citizens of my beloved Sarajevo, and throughout Bosnia, among whom I now include close friends and acquaintances. I am thinking of the countless quietly courageous and sympathetic people I’ve had the pleasure to meet and bond with over the last decade, the many men and women who have opened their hearts and their lives to me, sometimes in interviews, other times less formally. I will always feel a deep gratitude and empathy. My visits to your city, rooted in such a rich tradition of both diversity and tolerance, have helped me to understand why Sarajevo once bore the label: Yugoslavia’s heart and soul. Even today, after all the carnage that has transpired, the city remains an amazingly open and welcoming refuge. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to communicate here, filled as I am with regret, anger and righteous indignation. Regret, because I’ve not spoken out sooner, publicly, beyond a few comfortable and familiar social media pages. Anger, because a man who shares my Jewish identity and my own passion for maintaining the good fight against Nazi war criminals has exhibited a callous indifference, at best, to the victims - and survivors - of the unspeakable evil foisted upon the residents of Sarajevo, and throughout the Balkans, during the 1990s. Most of all, I’m struck by a powerful and righteous indignation that, nearly two decades after one of the longest, most exhausting sieges in human history, longer than the infamous German siege of of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), a representative of one of the most prominent anti-fascist institutions in the world would dare to assert, publicly, that genocide in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s had never occurred. “It was not genocide,” Efraim Zuroff arrogantly assured his Banja Luka hosts earlier this month, merely some ethnic cleansing. Whatever the hell that means.To paraphrase Shakespeare, genocide, by any other name, carries the same ugly, lingering stench. Of course for Zuroff to deny the genocide from the capital of “Republika Srpska,” one of the centers of the genocide itself, was a pretty safe trick.Try that genocide denial schtick with the surviving family members of the 1200 plus children in Sarajevo who were brutally slain in the midst of the siege, often directly and sadistically targeted by Chetnik snipers, or their Russian or Greek ultranationalist cohorts. Try it with the surviving widows, mothers and loved ones of the 8,000 mainly men and boys who were meticulously rounded up and mowed down by Chetnik forces in and surrounding Srebrenica. Even the oh-so-cautious Hague Tribunal has labeled that particular massacre “genocide.” Efraim Zuroff surely has the right to hold whatever personal opinions he chooses, wrong-headed and foolish as they might be. But to publicly espouse genocide denial as a representative of the widely respected Simon Wiesenthal Center is a different matter entirely. That is a direct assault against principles which my colleagues and I hold near and dear. It is a direct affront to my own family who lost nearly 100 family members in Poland during the hellish genocide of the Holocaust. I will not, I cannot accept such lies and blatant historical obscuration in silence . Some people in the west may have conveniently forgotten the evil that transpired during the Milosevic era , but I have not. It is too embedded in my soul, into my DNA. Now I also have also become a witness to genocide, albeit from a distance. As such I hold a responsibility to tell the truth, and to combat the denial of genocide wherever it raises its sordid voice. Ironically, Zuroff’s shocking episode of revisionism immediately transported me back to three highly respected intellectuals, also Jews, who each issued an early and compelling warning of the Bosnian genocide, already in progress, while most of the world still remained in selective, passive ignorance. The first, and perhaps bravest among them was the award-winning journalist Roy Gutman. His early discovery of Serb-run horror camps was first chronicled in Newsday, and the reports later bound together in a groundbreaking volume aptly titled “Witness to Genocide”: “Concentration camps. Rape camps where women were held and raped, systematically and for a very long time. Sometimes two or three months. The destruction of the culture. Attacks on mosques -- destruction of every mosque in the country -- on schools, libraries, as well as the normal destruction in war. Attacks on refugees. Have I left anything out? Those are the kinds of things. These are crimes,” concluded Gutman, “that defined under international conventions, crimes against humanity or war crimes.” My friend Fehim, a “graduate” of concentration camp Omarska, still credits Roy Gutman and his colleagues, journalists like Ed Vuilliamy, with helping to ultimately save his life, and that of his wife Nadya. Thousands of other Bosnians, especially Bosniaks, were not so fortunate. Another prominent witness to the Bosnian genocide was the irrepressible and always eloquent Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, unable and unwilling to silence his own troubled conscience, seized on an opportunity at the grand opening of the US holocaust Museum in Washington DC, in 1993, gently but firmly reproaching then President Clinton: "Mr. President,” began a determined Weisel, “ I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew,” he continued, “ I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. People fight each other, and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done." And most ironically, I returned to the haunting words of the great Simon Wiesenthal himself, founder of the world’s most insistent Nazi-hunting institutions, which continues to bear his great name. In June, 1993, Wiesenthal courageously joined with the Islamic Conference in equating crimes committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims with World War Two-era Nazi atrocities, and joined in the call for lifting the arms embargo, arguing that it was a fundamental right to defend oneself. In a poignant public moment of self-reflection , Wiesenthal wondered aloud if his 40-year activity “for not forgetting” Nazi war crimes had been in vain, in view of what was going on in the Balkans. It would seem that his predecessor might wisely ponder those prophetic words. Even today we continue to witness the aftermath of Balkan genocide, all denial to the contrary. Over the last three months of 2013, two separate mass graves were opened and tentatively exhumed. In the first case, the site is at Tomasica in northeastern Bosnia, near to the city of Prijedor, one of the many centers of wartime genocide. So far the remains of over 300 people have been exhumed - mainly Bosniak and Bosnian Croat civilians, mainly shot in the head and then dumped into the huge pit. Originally the gravesite was believed to hold 1,000 people, so the whereabouts of the other 700 remain a matter of macabre speculation.. The Tomasica site was only recently located with the help of two of the guilt ridden perpetrators, former fighters with the Bosnian Serb army that was organized and supplied directly from Belgrade. One of the fighters was so overwhelmed by guilt that he recently committed suicide by jumping off of a bridge, yet another casualty of the genocidal madness. The other recently opened mass gravesite is located inside Serbia itself, to the south, very near the border with Kosovo. It lies by the city of Raska. So far, the remains of only seven Albanians have been exhumed, but witness testimony and aerial evidence indicates hundreds more were interred here. My colleagues and I have been documenting mass graves and other forms of creative extermination for at least the last three years. Where is the outrage - where is the international public indignation? Some years ago, I asked the then editor of Oslobodjenje, Senka Kurtovic, how they handled the news of these mass graves, which were already numbering in the hundreds.”It’s not front page news,” she responded, “ I can promise you that. It’s probably covered on page 10, unless they find babies.” I was really aghast. “How can you people act so blase - your readers only respond if they discovered the remains of children?!” “Babies,” Kurovic repeated. “I said babies. Finding children in the graves is nothing special.” Exactly what danger, I wondered, did these children, these babies represent? Denying the Bosnian genocide is unforgivable. Efraim Zuroff should feel ashamed. “The truth is incontrovertible,’ asserted Winston Churchill. “Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” Next: week: Part 2 - Instrumentalizing World War 2