Moral Implosion

These days we commemorate that 30 years ago the enclave of Srebrenica fell, and more than 8,000 Bosniaks were murdered by the troops of Ratko Mladić. For years he had the opportunity to hide. For more years still he had the chance to defend himself, invoking among other things the laws of war and the right of self-defense. It was only four years ago that he was definitively sentenced to life imprisonment on appeal for genocide. That sounds longer than it is likely to be.

The Dutch UN troops, known as Dutchbat, who in 1995 were responsible for the security of the enclave, did not intervene at the time. Much has been said about the reasons for their passivity. Dutchbat was only lightly armed, and part of the battalion had no combat role. Commander Karremans was under heavy pressure and spoke poor English. The UN did not provide the promised air support. But none of that could explain why the Dutchbat soldiers, after their own evacuation and return to the Netherlands, broke out into a spontaneous conga line. That image has stayed with me most from the catastrophe called Srebrenica.

I arrived at a campsite in France after a day of cycling. In the camp shop a copy of De Telegraaf was for sale, with a large color photo on the front page showing the Dutchbat soldiers dancing upon their return. That scene too has often been excused since, with references to understandable relief after a stressful time. But its simultaneity with the massacre was unbearably bitter. Real consequences have never followed. Responsible ministers dealt with it in words, never by taking personal responsibility. They all landed well in life. From that safety, much later, when lives were largely or entirely over, came a token compensation here, an apology there. So too this week, in a speech by the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, Veldkamp, also known as the man of quiet diplomacy.

Already in 1995 I was deeply allergic to the culture of excuses and appeals to circumstances. I had experienced it up close when my mother was killed when I was nine, and from that moment on a verbal smokescreen was erected from which everyone benefited, except the victim and her children. The femicide was covered up. The harm was downplayed and ultimately denied. The perpetrator even gained materially. Now, some fifty years later, I realize that what happened to me then was an early introduction to a mentality I now encounter again: death as a business model.

While we pause to remember Srebrenica, another massacre is taking place, under the same passive gaze as then. And then. And then. Not 8,000 men as with the Bosniaks, but now tens of thousands of women and children have been murdered on grounds that are denied, relativized, or justified in every possible way. Even when the scale of the killing is fully clear, doubts are still cast on the wording, the timing, and the motives of those who try to draw a red line. Not only by the perpetrators, whose psychology is at least somewhat understandable. But also by the powerful bystanders, the accomplices, and, as has now become clear, the many profiteers of the violence. The systematic silence of our own leaders about the naked facts that everyone has seen is nothing new. Neither is the twisting of the truth. And even celebrating on the graves of others is something we have seen far too often.

The Netherlands was born from indignation over the sale of tickets to heaven by a corrupt church. The United States was born from indignation over a tax on a cup of tea without representation in return. The Republic of India freed itself from England out of indignation at the hypocrisy with which it had been plundered for centuries. Sooner or later, the tide turns. Which people, which movement, which country will be born from the moral implosion we are now witnessing?