on this day 25 years ago the settlement
it's a genocide took place it was a
premeditated genocide that took place in
a town just 132 kilometers from my own
father's hometown and located in the
heart of Europe 11th of July 1995 was
the date that the army of Republika
Srpska or vrs under the command of
general Ratko Mladic
as well as various serb paramilitary
groups took control of the town of
stubborn Itza in eastern Bosnia and
Herzegovina the town was a so-called
United Nations safe zone and at the time
held some 40,000 bozniak or Bosnian
Muslim refugees from surrounding towns
and villages that had fled or had been
expelled following Serb military
takeovers in the 10 days that followed
the UN handover of sermon answer to the
vrs Serb soldiers engaged in the
systematic and methodical mass killing
of thousands of bosniak civilians mostly
men and boys with some as young as 11
once they were identified as being
bosniak they were taken to fields school
gymnasiums warehouses abandoned
factories and the surrounding woods for
their executions sometimes the victims
were told to dig a hole prior to being
gunned down these holes were to be their
own graves
[Music]
what took place after the handover of
sir Anissa was the worst instance of
systematic mass murder of civilians in
Europe since the Holocaust of the Second
World War it became known as the
sermonettes a genocide and so far eight
thousand three hundred and seventy-three
victims have been identified from the
hundreds of mass graves that have been
uncovered to date only God knows how
many more remain buried in hidden mass
graves in the fields and hills that
surround the town so why did this happen
shortly before the genocide took place
General wrapkin bladedge
was quoted as saying this corner here
luggage the commander of Serb forces
during the Bosnian war said this quote
on camera shortly before or during the
mass murder of at least eight thousand
three hundred and seventy-three civilian
men and boys in stir Burnett sir
the so-called uprising against the Turks
he refers to is the 1389 Battle of
Kosovo where the Ottoman Empire defeated
Serbia in a battle that is mythologized
in Serbian folklore in effect luggage is
simultaneously invoking the Serbs
catastrophic defeat at Kosovo and
equating the local Bosniaks civilian
population to the Turks of the Ottoman
Empire of some six hundred years prior
those who subscribed to the Serbian
nationalism of Malevich and Co did not
see them as men and boys when they
stripped them of all dignity and gunned
them down one by one they saw them as a
symbolic representation of Islam in the
Balkans and a byproduct of an historical
Ottoman presence in the region which
they so hated
it's why they specifically destroyed
mosques libraries bridges and other
cultural sites those buildings were
often built in the ottoman era and were
symbolic representations of the presence
of the Turks
in the Serbian Christian homeland the
destruction of those buildings along
with the mass killing of civilians
served as a way to ethnically cleanse
that homeland of any such presence in
the settlement it's a genocide we can
see how fascism fuelled by nationalism
and racism combined to create a deadly
situation in which the destruction of
the people based on their ethnic or
religious identity was seen as not only
a palatable but even necessary
undertaking it is important for the umma
to remember these events in our
collective Muslim memory for two main
reasons
first Bosnia and Herzegovina is on the
periphery of the Muslim world and it is
critical for our awareness and our
understanding of the world as Muslims to
be aware of what takes place there just
as much as what takes place in the very
center of the Muslim world Bosnia and
Herzegovina might be geographically
isolated and cut off from the rest of
the Muslim world but it is still an
important part of it second Islamic
history isn't just all about salahuddin
and Fatih Sultan Mehmet may Allah be
pleased with them both
there are dark periods in our history
Esper
our recent history which we should know
well so that we are not ignorant about
the suffering that took place and to
ensure that something like that never
happens again may what took place in
suburban insa serve as a permanent
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