| July 13, 2005 | Wednesday | Jumadi-us-Sani 4, 1426 |
A decade since the Srebrenica massacre
SREBRENICA (Bosnia-Herzegovina): Hands on their eyes, bending slowly towards the ground, in accordance with the Islamic funeral tradition known as janazah, hundreds of relatives of the men and boys executed ten years ago in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica said a last farewell to their loved ones.
THE international conference on the soulful message of the great sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, organized by the Sindh Cultural Department last week turned out to be a major cultural event.
The conference was part of the three-day golden jubilee celebrations of the cultural centre at Bhit Shah.
Scholars from different parts of the country, speaking different languages — Raj Wali Shah Khattak from the NWFP, Dr Tahir Taunsavi from Punjab and Dr Razzaq Tahir from Balochistan – participated in the conference. Besides, Dr Nabi Bakhsh Baloch, Shabbir Qaim Khani, G.A. Allana, Inayat Baloch, and Salim Memon also addressed. Some academics, including Hero Thakur and Nan Chhugani, came from India to attend the moot.
All the speakers dilated upon the message of peace and universal love preached by Shah Latif around two centuries ago and emphasized the need to carry his poetry to a larger number of people.
In the present world torn by terrorism, the Shah’s poetic message is more relevant than it was at any other time. Some speakers, however, observed that Shah Latif Bhittai was fated to live in the worst period of Sindh’s history when usurpers and opportunists were rolling in wealth while the people were living in dire poverty. And yet the Shah’s message of love survived in the hearts of people through the ages. Now, the need is being felt for education and social reforms to translate Shah’s preaching into action.
It’s woefully alarming to note that Sindh, the land of peace and culture, is in the grip of tribal feuds and killings over property and wealth. Women are treated as bargaining chips and subjected to karo-kari.
Without social justice and equal distribution of resources, poverty cannot be alleviated and a peaceful society based on the principles of welfarism cannot be formed. Meaningful agrarian reform by giving land to the landless is necessary to curtail the unbridled power of the feudal aristocracy — the main hurdle in the way of social change. This would be quite in accordance with the teachings of Shah Latif.
ZAHEER Akhtar Bedari, author of many short stories and newspaper columns, was given reception the other day that was largely attended by writers.
The function was presided over by noted critic Dr Hanif Fauq. Among those who talked about Bedari’s writings and his person included poet Khalid Alig, who was also the chief guest, Ahmad Zainuddin, himself a story writer and editor of journal Roshnai, Kiran Singh, editor of a literary monthly, Jamal Naqvi, critic and poet, and Ahmad Altaf, an activist.
First to present his views was Noor Mohammad Shaikh who also compered the proceedings. His paper was based on the social commitment that Bedari so much cherishes.
Khalid Alig said he and Bedari both belonged to the same tribe of progressives, with a companionship spread over some 50 years.
Bedari’s faith in his political ideology was very strong as reflected in his writings and also his lifestyle, Kiran Singh observed.
Ahmad Zainuddin said Zaheer Bedari was an ‘ideological writer’ who had narrated the painful lives of people, their aspirations and their struggles.
Bedari spoke about himself, his art and the lamentations of the people living around him. He thought writers had to do even more to enlighten the common people and arouse them to action. They had to play a revolutionary role.
Dr Hanif Fauq in his presidential remarks sought to dispel the belief that the progressive writers’ movement was dead. No intellectual movement was ever dead, he said, though at times it might lose its original strength.
TWO poets, Azm Behzad and Aijaz Rehmani, were invited by the Karachi Gymkhana library’s literary committee to a reception held last Friday.
Seema Raza introduced the poets and spoke briefly about them.
Azm Behzad is the grandson of Hazrat Behzad Lakhnawi, a contemporary of Jigar Moradabadi and Josh Malihabadi. Another prominent figure in the family was Anwer Behzad, a broadcaster of repute. Azm presented some ghazals in ‘trannum’ that won the audience’s attention:
Kahan gaey voh gosha-i-dil mein phool khilanay walay
Aankhen dekh ke khwabon ki taabir batanay walay
Aejaz Rehmani, a senior poet, who has authored 11 poetry collections with many unpublished material, had come to Pakistan in 1954 from India and was a disciple of Ustad Qamar Jalalwi. With a touch of social and political bias, his ghazals are well received. His style of reciting is also appealing. Recalling the eventful years of 1972-73, he says:
Raahber so gaey hamsafar so gaey
kaun jagey ga hum bhi agar so gaey
Yeh hamaray moqadder ka andher hae
jab bhi nazdeek aai sahar so gaey
Dr Zahid Hasan Ansari, convener of the library and literary committee, thanked the guests and the audience.
In attendance Monday as the remains of 610 victims were put into ground at the Potocari Memorial Centre were family members, delegations from more than 50 countries and some 50,000 people who came to show solidarity with the victims of what was described as the worst atrocity in Europe since Word War II.
“The United Nations failed to safeguard the people of the protected zone. They surrendered them to Serbian forces who killed 7,800 men,” Sulejman Tihic, member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina rotating presidency, said in his address to the tens of thousands who attended the service.
“However, the war criminals who did this cannot be war heroes as they have no nation or religion,” he added in a reference to the fact that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the wartime leaders of Bosnian Serbs accused of this crime are still at large and regarded as war heroes in neighbouring Serbia.
“The truth of war crimes and punishment of those responsible will be the basis for future relations in the region,” Tihic added.
“The tragedy of Srebrenica will always haunt the history of the United Nations,” UN official Marc Brown said as he relayed the message of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. “We can say that great nations failed. We could have sent stronger military forces. It was serious error of judgment based on principles of impartiality and non-violence that was not appropriate for Bosnia and Herzegovina” the message said.
Potocari is the town where some 8,000 men and boys were separated from their wives, sisters and mothers by the Bosnian Serb army that had overrun the Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia on July 11, 1995, just months before the three-year war between Serbs and Muslims ended.
The 300-strong United Nations battalion of Dutch soldiers at Potocari could do nothing to prevent what happened later.
In a matter of days, the men and boys were executed by Serbs in nearby woods, fields and battery factory and agricultural buildings. Their bodies were buried in at least 40 mass graves, in an effort by the Bosnian Serbs to hide their responsibility for the crime.
More than 1,300 victims of the massacre have been recovered and reburied at Potocari, after being positively identified by forensics and the International Commission for Missing Persons DNA lab in the central Bosnian town of Tuzla.
Hundreds have been buried at different locations in Bosnia, where their families resettled in 1995.
In July 1995, more than 20,000 Muslim women and small children were bussed by Serbs to the closest areas under Muslim control, most of them remaining today in Tuzla. Bosnian Serb authorities later settled Serbs fleeing parts of Bosnia under Muslim control in Srebrenica.
So far, the figures of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) say fewer than 2,000 Muslims have returned to what used to be, in pre-war times, a predominantly Muslim town.
“Memories are still hard. It’s not easy to come to terms with what happened,” said Abid Dudic, 51, who attended the janazah for his father Huso, who was 65 when he was executed after the fall of Srebrenica.
Dudic’s wife Fahreta, 50, attended the funeral ceremony as the body of her brother, Resad Mujic, was recently identified in a mass grave and brought to final rest. He was 33 at the time he was killed. The bodies of two more of her brothers, Sefik, 31, and Redzep, 24, have not yet been found.
The couple returned to Srebrenica in 2001, trying to build their lives anew, as “there is no place like home when you’re on your own,” Dudic told IPS.
“It is very hard to live, knowing how your loved one’s life was ended,” said Dudic, a professional truck driver. “But it means a lot to me that my father’s body was found; that he can be buried with dignity... My life must go on and this helps me continue.”
For Fahreta, mother of two sons who are well and sound, married now and having children of their own, “the whole war was nothing but a sea of sorrow and suffering for all.”
“Everybody faced only suffering and pain, nobody gained a thing, regardless of the nation they belong to,” she told IPS. “Nothing can bring the dead back to us. We have to reconcile with our Serb neighbours and continue to live on.”
Srebrenica looked like a ghost town in the days ahead of the commemorative ceremony.
Its Serb residents were reluctant to speak or comment about the events ten years ago. Most said they are displaced persons themselves, who arrived only when “everything was over,” and that they did not know what really happened in the days after July 11, 1995. The Serbs are of the Christian Orthodox religion. Some were in denial that the crime ever happened.
“It’s an exaggeration — speculation with numbers,” Milos Milovanovic, a Serb, told IPS. “Others who committed crimes against Serbs are being absolved of their sins,” he added, in reference to atrocities the Muslims committed against Serbs during the war that claimed 250,000 lives in former Yugoslavia. Most of the war’s victims were non-Serbs.
Srebrenica, once a prosperous mining town of around 30,000 people, and a popular thermal spa nearby, fell to a population of less than 10,000 after Bosnian Serbs took over in July 1995.
It derives its name “Srebrenica” from the Serbo-Croat word for silver, “srebro”, which was extracted in the mines surrounding the town.
“This is a town where few people have jobs and few chances for a real life or prosperity,” Vera Grujicic, a Serb in Srebrenica told IPS. She fled her native town at the beginning of war in 1992, “as something was brewing, dark, threatening.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service