Remembering Bosnian genocide through M'sian lens, 30 years on
It was one of the bloodiest episodes of the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 until 1995 and left more than 100,000 dead, with over two million people displaced.
Behzo and his family were among those displaced.
Now aged 60, he arrived in Malaysia in 1993 as a refugee with his family of six. He has been here for more than three decades, and his family have all become permanent residents.
Behzo, who declined to publicise his full identity, recalled that...
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Malaysiakini
27-07-2025
- Malaysiakini
Remembering Bosnian genocide through M'sian lens, 30 years on
July 11 marked 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre, which claimed the lives of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in only two weeks. It was one of the bloodiest episodes of the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 until 1995 and left more than 100,000 dead, with over two million people displaced. Behzo and his family were among those displaced. Now aged 60, he arrived in Malaysia in 1993 as a refugee with his family of six. He has been here for more than three decades, and his family have all become permanent residents. Behzo, who declined to publicise his full identity, recalled that...
Sinar Daily
26-07-2025
- Sinar Daily
Genocide is a pattern, and Israel is in both chapters
IN July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims men were executed in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic - a massacre declared genocide by international courts. The world stood by, hand-wringing, as blue-helmeted UN troops looked away while men and boys were systematically separated, shot and buried in mass graves. Today, the same world watches in equal paralysis - and complicity - as Israel unleashes one of the deadliest military campaigns of the 21st century against Palestinians in Gaza. Over 58,026 people have been killed, mostly women and children. The infrastructure of life - hospitals, schools, bakeries, water systems has been bombed into dust. This is not self-defence. This is deliberate, industrial-scale extermination of a trapped, colonised people. But these two genocides, Srebrenica and Gaza, are not just morally comparable. They are historically connected. A recent investigation by Al Jazeera, based on newly uncovered documents and eyewitness interviews, confirms that Israel supplied weapons and rocket systems to the Bosnian Serb army in the early 1990s. The same army that would go on to massacre thousands of Bosnian Muslims, rape thousands of women and ethnically cleanse entire towns. This revelation is not just an indictment of Israel's past. It is a warning about its present and its future. Weapons for Genocide: Israel's Role in Bosnia The Al Jazeera investigation, corroborated by historical data and international records, details how Israel exported artillery shells, mortars and rockets to Serbian forces during the Bosnian War. These transfers were not accidental. They were approved and coordinated at the highest levels of the Israeli state, facilitated in exchange for the evacuation of Jewish communities from the war zone. In short, Israel made a calculated deal: in return for extracting a few hundred Jewish civilians, it armed the perpetrators of Europe's worst genocide since the Holocaust. These weapons were not symbolic. They were used to lay siege to Sarajevo, to shell Muslim enclaves and to massacre civilians in what was supposed to be a United Nations-protected zone. Israeli arms were complicit in the architecture of genocide in Bosnia. And now, the same state stands accused at the International Court of Justice for committing genocide in Gaza - not just through bombing, but through starvation, mass displacement and indiscriminate killing. Shared Blueprint: Bosnia and Gaza The similarities between Bosnia and Gaza are not coincidental. They follow a well-documented genocidal playbook: 1. Dehumanisation of the Victim Group In Bosnia, Serb propaganda portrayed Bosniaks as Ottoman invaders, terrorists and threats to Christian Europe. In Israel, Palestinians are routinely referred to as 'human animals,' 'snakes,' and 'terror babies.' Israeli politicians invoke Biblical genocide, comparing Palestinians to Amalekites to justify their extermination. 2. Siege and Starvation The Siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days from 1992 to 1995 making it the longest siege in modern history. More than 11,000 civilians were killed amid relentless shelling and sniper fire by Bosnian Serb forces. Sarajevo was surrounded, starved and reduced to ruins while the world watched in silence. Gaza has endured a systematic Israeli siege for over 17 years. Since 2007, Israel has imposed a total blockade on the coastal strip - controlling all border crossings, airspace and maritime access. This blockade has crippled Gaza's economy, restricted the flow of essential goods and left two million Palestinians in a permanent state of deprivation. Now, under Israel's ongoing genocidal campaign, food trucks are blocked, water infrastructure is destroyed and children are dying from dehydration and hunger. Even humanitarian aid convoys are bombed. Famine is no longer a threat - it is a weapon of war. 3. Forced Transfers Bosnian Muslims were pushed into shrinking enclaves - Srebrenica, Goražde - before being slaughtered. In Gaza, Palestinians are forced south, from north Gaza to Khan Younis, then to Rafah, then to the "humanitarian zones" in the desert. Israel uses 'safe zones' as traps and then bombs them. 4. International Paralysis and Hypocrisy The UN failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica. In Gaza, the same failure is repeated. Western powers veto resolutions, justify Israeli brutality and supply bombs that shred Palestinian bodies. The same global north that sanctioned Serb war criminals now bankrolls Israeli crimes with impunity. TOPSHOT - Palestinian casualties of an Israeli strike on an apartment at the Nuseirat refugee camp, receive care at Al-Awda hospital in the central Gaza Strip on July 19, 2025. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP) The Myth of Israeli Moral Exceptionalism For decades, Israel has framed itself as a moral nation, traumatised by the Holocaust, committed to democracy and merely 'defending itself.' But this narrative is shattered by its own history. A nation that arms genocidaires cannot claim moral innocence. A nation that builds an apartheid wall, bombs refugee camps and uses white phosphorus on children cannot hide behind its own historical suffering. The Holocaust is not a license to commit atrocities. It is not moral immunity. And now the truth is clear: Israel was not just a bystander to genocide in Bosnia - it was an active participant. The same state now stands accused of enacting genocide in Gaza. Naming the Crime This is not a war. This is not a conflict. This is genocide. International law defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Israel's actions in Gaza meet this threshold: the scale of killing, the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the public rhetoric and the genocidal intent expressed by its leaders all point in one direction. The world's refusal to call it genocide reflects its own moral failure, not a lack of evidence. From Bosnia to Gaza: The Unbroken Chain of Complicity The same weapons that massacred Bosniaks were provided by a state that now bombs Gaza. The same silence that enabled Srebrenica enables Rafah. The same diplomatic cowardice that failed Sarajevo now fails Khan Younis. This is not about Israel alone. This is about the entire system of international impunity that protects genocidal states, as long as their victims are brown, Muslim, or colonised. From Washington to Brussels to Tel Aviv, the machinery of denial continues. But the facts are no longer buried. The graves are fresh. The evidence is undeniable. Conclusion: Never Again Means Nothing If We Let It Happen Again 'Never Again' has become a lie. It has become a slogan weaponised to protect the powerful while the oppressed are buried beneath rubble. Bosnia was not an exception. Gaza is not an accident. They are consequences of global complicity, double standards and a refusal to hold powerful states accountable. Let the Al Jazeera investigation stand as a document of historical truth. Let the ruins of Gaza speak louder than the lies of those who still claim moral superiority while bathing in the blood of children. And let the world finally understand: genocide does not start with gas chambers; it starts with silence. True justice isn't choosing whose genocide matters more. It's acknowledging them all, prosecuting them all, and preventing them all. Revda Selver is Friends of Palestine Public Relation and Media Executive. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.
New Straits Times
17-06-2025
- New Straits Times
Survivors of Bosnia 'rape camps' come forward 30 years on
Smajilhodzic IT took years for Zehra Murguz to be able to testify about what happened to her and other Muslim women in the "rape camps" run by Serb forces during the war in Bosnia. One of the awful memories that drove her to give evidence was of seeing a girl of 12 "with a doll in her arms" dragged into one of them. Murguz felt she was also speaking "in the name of all the others, of that girl of 12 who will never talk... who was never found." The horror began for her in the summer of 1992 when Serb forces took the mountain town of Foca and Murguz was taken to the Partizan gym, one of several notorious rape camps the Serbs ran. For months dozens of Muslim women and girls were gang raped and forced into sexual slavery there. Others were sold or killed. At least 20,000 people suffered sexual violence across Bosnia as Yugoslavia collapsed into the worst war Europe had then seen since 1945. Most victims were Bosnian Muslims, but Serbs and Croat women also suffered. In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia became the first court in Europe to recognise rape as a crime against humanity in an historic verdict against three Bosnian Serb army officers from Foca. While a handful of survivors driven by a thirst for justice continue to collect thousands of testimonies, many remain locked in silence more than three decades on. Murguz, 61, began her judicial journey when she returned to Bosnia in 2011 – after years living in exile in Montenegro, Serbia and Croatia – to bring her neighbour to book for raping her during the war. "If I don't speak, it will be as if the crime never happened," she told herself. He was still living in Foca and "wasn't hiding", she said. He was arrested and tried in the local court in 2012. Going there was "like going back to 1992", to the "agony" of that time, Murguz recalled. "I came face to face with him, we looked each other in the eye, and justice won out," she said. The man was jailed for 14 years, a "light sentence", said Murguz "for the murder of three people and a rape." But the conviction at last "stamped him with his true identity – war criminal", she told AFP from a sewing workshop in Sarajevo run by the Victims of the War Foca 1992-1995 group. Around her other survivors wove fabric together, a form of collective therapy. "To this day, only 18 verdicts have been delivered for crimes of sexual violence committed in Foca," said the group's president, Midheta Kaloper, 52. "Three trials are ongoing. A lot of time has passed, and witnesses are exhausted." She herself was a victim of "an unspeakable, inexplicable crime" in Gorazde, the "worst torture a girl can endure", she said. She still hopes the suspect will be tried in Bosnia, not in Serbia where he now lives. But Kaloper warned that things have "stagnated" over the last five years, with 258 cases involving 2,046 suspects still needing to be judged, according to figures from the High Council of Magistrates. Bosnian judges had tried 773 war crime cases by the end of last year – over a quarter involving sexual violence – according to the OSCE monitoring mission. It said there had been "significant delays" in hundreds of others where the suspects have yet to be identified. "What kills us most is the excessive length of these proceedings," said Kaloper. "We have been fighting for 30 years, and our only real success has been obtaining the law on civilian war victims," under which survivors can be given a pension worth about US$400 a month, she said. However, the law only covers the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia and those living there, and not those living in the self-governing Serb Republika Srpska (RS) and the small mixed Brcko District in the northeast, which have different judicial systems. Around 1,000 survivors have obtained war victim status in the Muslim-Croat federation and some 100 more in the RS and Brcko, said Ajna Mahmic, of the Swiss legal NGO Trial International. Rape, she said, still carries a particular stigma. "Unfortunately, as a society we still put the blame and shame on the victims rather than the perpetrators. "Many of the survivors do not feel secure," Mahmic told AFP. "Some of the perpetrators are still living freely and some are working in public institutions," some in positions of authority. Not to mention the continued glorification "of war criminals (in the Balkans) and the minimisation of the suffering we have endured", Kaloper added. Nearly half of ongoing cases are held up because the accused are abroad, an OSCE report said in January. Another "worrying trend is the widespread failure of courts to grant victims compensation" in criminal cases, the OSCE added. While witnesses could testify anonymously in The Hague, there is nothing to protect their identity in civil compensation proceedings in Bosnia. "Even today it is very difficult for victims to speak," said Bakira Hasecic, 71, head of the Women Victims of War group, and they keep the "weight of this tragedy in their hearts." Many follow what their former torturers are up to on social networks. It is an emotional "timebomb that can explode at any moment and drives some to call us", she said. Though over 30 years have passed, 15 more victims stepped forward needing to talk in the last few months alone, Hasecic said.
