Never again

Otago Daily Times

2 days ago

Dunedin man Emir Hodzic survived a genocide. Now, as Gaza experiences its own, he tells Tom McKinlay that humanity's commitment to "never again" risks losing all meaning.
Emir Hodzic was once the child waiting to die.
His father and his brother were already in the nearby concentration camp, Omarska. The death camp. Behind the barbed wire, his brother was wasting to skin and bones.
Others were already dead, lying crooked in unmarked graves.
"We were just waiting for our turn," Emir Hodzic recalls.
"It's difficult to explain ... But the passing of time, it seems like years, because literally every second of every day, you're waiting your turn. You're not questioning it."
The future had been stripped of all other possibilities, as part of the erasure going on all around him. The ethnic cleansing, the genocide. Later, there would be a further erasure, denial.
Hodzic recalls the overwhelming feeling of helplessness, the dehumanisation.
"That you are the filth that needs to be cleansed."
He was 14 at the time and living in Prijedor, which had been part of Yugoslavia when he was born. Prijedor was then a richly diverse town, home to the mosque, the church and the temple, to the Muslim, the Catholic, the Orthodox Christian, the Jew and the Roma.
But by the beginning of the 1990s, the federal republic of Yugoslavia had begun a convulsing, cataclysmic disintegration, old enmities re-emerging, reanimated and retooled by populist politicians who saw their chance and were busy recruiting people behind their standards of ethno-nationalism. The old state's constituent republics fractured. In Bosnia Herzegovina, Serb militias were readied to ethnically cleanse Prijedor of its Bosnian Muslim — and other — populations, as part of an effort to establish a "Greater Serbia".
On May 31, 1992, all non-Serbs in Prijedor were ordered to hang white sheets outside their homes and wear a white armband in public, after which the atrocities began.
Between 1992 and 1995, 3176 civilians, including 102 children, were killed. It is likely many more would have died had British journalist Ed Vulliamy not found his way to the Omarska death camp and shared his story with the world.
It didn't stop the killings, but the ethnic cleansing in Prijedor pivoted towards deportation, rather than outright extermination.
That was the choice Emir Hodzic's family faced in the end. Accept deportation, which carried no guarantees — not every transport made it to the border — or stay and risk worse.
Hodzic says they chose deportation because it offered a quicker death, if that's what was fated.
"Being killed is better, it's final, than waiting your turn, than the torture of not being wanted, being hated, just waiting, not knowing who's going to kill you," he says.
"They hate you so much that it's not going to be just a bullet in the head. It's going to be torture. It's going to be rape.
"It's going to be really awful stuff. So you choose the possibility of death, willingly, if there's a percentage chance that you might get out."
The horror of those times lives with Hodzic still, as with so many others who lived through it.
On the latest anniversary of the May 31 decree, he tied a strip of white cotton around his arm again and stood in Dunedin's Octagon, where a cold wind whipped like a memory around the few who had gathered in a silent vigil of support. In front of them lay a row of white shrouds, body bags, representing Bosnia Herzegovina's immeasurable hurt and loss.
Most of those passing are respectful, but one young man contorts his face and spits a tired, racist taunt. Hodzic is unmoved. He's seen so much worse.
Hodzic has been marking White Armband Day since 2012 — indeed, he, together with his brother and a friend, another survivor of the camps, initiated what has become an annual commemoration.
On that first occasion, Emir Hodzic stood alone in Prijedor's main square, in defiance of the Serb authorities' ban on public commemorations.
An image posted to social media went viral and White Armband Day was born — turning the original decree on its head, transforming it into a symbol of hope.
It's very, very surreal, Hodzic says, to return to a town from which you were ethnically cleansed by Bosnian Serb nationalists, to find them in power.
Prijedor is now part of Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. By the time a "cold peace" was agreed in 1995, Bosnian Serbs were the overwhelming majority in the town.
The genocidal project involves committing war crimes so horrible, you ensure survivors never come back, Hodzic says.
"That's how you destroy the fabric of the territory, that was multiethnic ... of hopes of living together, or even side-by-side.
"That's how you destroy it because you feed your own people hatred and fear. How do you go back somewhere where your whole family was killed, raped, children murdered?"
White Armband Day is part of the answer to that question.
In the years following Hodzic's first lone vigil, the white armband commemoration has grown and been marked in a variety of creative ways — even as the local authority has continued to rebuff requests for a permanent memorial to the children killed, digging into denial.
More recently, since moving to Dunedin, Hodzic has been observing the day quietly, wearing the armband and only explaining its significance when asked.
This year, though, cried out for something more.
"Since the ethnic cleansing and mass killings and genocide that we are witnessing in Gaza, Palestine, it is very difficult for me to continue commemorating a day that marks the beginning of extermination of Bosnian Muslims and Croats," he says.
White Armband Day has been an effort to stand against the final phase of a genocidal project, he explains, the denial that it ever happened, the denial that those murdered ever existed.
Now, in Palestine, the genocide is happening concurrently with the denial, he says.
"We are observing another genocide live on air, with the denial being current, also live on air."
For the most part, Western politicians have shrunk timidly from the word genocide — even as their citizens watch the livestream.
"There's this kind of surreal moment when we know what is happening, we can see what is happening, but the denial is not historical, it's not the final stage of genocide, denying that it ever took place ... 'It was just a war'. This is not historical, it's live, it's happening, we are watching it as it happens."
The International Court of Justice ruled early last year it was plausible that Israel had violated the Genocide Convention and ordered the state to take all measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts, including preventing and punishing incitement to genocide, ensuring aid and services reached Palestinians under siege in Gaza, and preserving evidence of crimes committed in Gaza.
Its ruling followed a declaration made by then Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, early in the war, that it would cut electricity and block the entry of food and fuel as part of "a complete siege" on the territory of more than 2million people.
The parallels send chills coursing through Hodzic's body. He remembers when Prijedor was similarly cut off from the world, surrounded, no phones, no electricity.
Just last month, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared Gaza would "be entirely destroyed". Once civilians moved south to its "humanitarian zone" they would "start to leave in great numbers to third countries".
Again there are chilling echoes of Bosnia Herzegovina, where it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed and 2 million people, more than half the population, were forced to flee their homes.
The official death toll in Gaza is now about 55,000, though there is good reason to believe many more lie unaccounted for in the occupied territory's rubble. More than 4500 have been killed since Israel broke a ceasefire agreement in March. Of those, more than 1300 were children, Unicef reported late last month — consistent with about one death in three involving a minor, one child killed every 45 minutes during the past 20 months.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, and for the crimes against humanity of murder and persecution.
It's all too familiar for Hodzic, who knows how these things proceed — not without planning, not without intention.
He recalls the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, who was presented with the plan to begin ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina earlier in that same month of May, 1992.
The plan included separating ethnic groups on territory "rightly claimed by Serbs, by force if necessary".
In response, Mladic sought clarification about what he was being asked to do. "Do you know what this means?" he asked his political taskmasters. "What you are asking me to do, gentlemen, is called genocide."
Once the killing started, it did so in a planned way, Hodzic says.
This was no case of a few bad apples gone rogue. Prijedor had not one but three concentration camps — Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje — and the infamous Srebrenica massacre claimed more than 8000 lives, during which bodies were buried by earthmoving equipment.
Both Mladic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic were later imprisoned for life by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide and crimes against humanity.
And once again, the international community said "never again".
Hodzic's concerns for our current moment centre on Gaza but extend to the rise of ethno-nationalism more generally, whether in Oban's Hungary, Putin's Russia, Modi's India or Trump's America.
The nationalism that led to Bosnia's genocide was whipped up by the rabble-rousing Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic from the late '80s — he died while on trial at the ICTY.
Hodzic remembers the way in which the climate in Prijedor changed.
Yugoslavia had been particularly proud of its fight against fascism during World War2. But under Milosevic, the mood began to shift — Serbia's Nazi collaborators were rehabilitated as national heroes. And new perspectives began filtering their way down through society.
"The first time I heard the name balija (bali-ah), which is a derogatory name for Bosnian Muslims, was from a friend of mine, going to school."
Hodzic was 13 years old and hadn't been paying much attention to what was going on — Milosevic's drum beating or the suggestion in response that Bosnia and Herzegovina should declare its independence.
"So these things were happening and we saw posters for Bosnian independence in town, and my friend goes something like 'balija'. And I was, like, 'balija, what's that word?'. And he turns around and goes, 'What? You don't know we call you that?'. And that was the first time that I felt othered.
"That's when I sensed, 'oh, you know, this is us and them', and then things just got worse."
In hindsight, the process is clear, the brainwashing and promotion of sectarianism, the emotional appeals to blood, soil and religion, the cultivation of a murderous mob hooliganism.
Then as now, it was much easier for politicians like Milosevic to build a brand around such rhetoric than it would have been to address the genuine, everyday issues of his constituents — the prosaic stuff of healthcare, education, jobs and rent.
"You put all the hard stuff aside ... because you are talking about existential stuff."
However, the population that has been radicalised in the search for cheap votes, those who have bought in, will eventually want a return on the rhetoric.
"And, you know, when the first bullet flies or when the first blood is drawn, there is no going back."
In the case of the former Yugoslavia, that wasn't because Serbians are a genocidal people, Hodzic says. They are a proud people, a good people.
"I have friends, really good friends who are Serbs who I would die for."
What happened in Bosnia was orchestrated and planned by those in power, and we know their names, he says.
It is the survivor's responsibility to warn against these things.
Beyond its role in standing for the right to remember, White Armband Day commemorations in Prijedor are about healing division.
In 2014, those taking part gathered under a banner that read "Budimo ljudi" — "Let's be people" — and have continued to do so since.
In those early years, Hodzic would go out with young Bosnian Serb activists, armed with stencils to spray paint "Budimo ljudi" around the town.
"For the first time ever, we reached out to the local Serbs. We went to other towns to commemorate killings of civilians by different armies, to say, 'hey, this is what we're about'. Never again ... I don't care what flag it is. Not in my name. You will not kill children in my name."
To just be people, be human, is the plausible, concrete aim and demand of the movement, he says.
When they first approached the local authorities about erecting a monument, they suggested it be dedicated simply to the "killed children of Prijedor". Their ethnicity was not the point.
"Everything we did, and are doing, is to push back against genocide denial, to re-humanise victims that were dehumanised to the point of extermination. And we are starting with killed children."
And in that way, the campaign is universal, it crosses borders and connects to the horrors of Gaza.
Hodzic says he's not interested in debates about Israel's right to defend itself.
"What we are saying is, 'oh my God, 17,000-plus children have been killed, over a thousand babies'. We are talking about removing an entire group of people from their ancestral homeland. We have made it unlivable for years.
"How do we talk about the Second World War? How do we talk about the Holocaust? How do we talk about the Bosnian genocide? ... It's now meaningless if we can't stop another genocide."
It's an urgent question, he insists.
"And the sense of urgency, number one, is a Palestinian baby, right now, who's waiting its turn to die, just like I have. Because don't forget, as this madness continues, there are Palestinian children alive today while we speak, who won't be alive tomorrow.
"But the sense of emergency also is for the rest of us, as a so-called international community, on the so-called new reorganisation of the world order. All these kinds of notions are on us as well. Because if we allow the final solution to become normalised as a legitimate political project, who's next?" The stages of genocide
In 1987, law professor and founding president of Genocide Watch Gregory Stanton identified eight stages of genocide. He later expanded it to 10 stages.
He has written: "I first identified the 'stages of genocide' in 1987 by comparing the Cambodian genocide with the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. I looked for fundamental processes that led to those genocides. They are the socio-cultural processes that interact to transform a society into one that developed into genocide. In 1994, the same processes drove the Rwandan genocide."
Ten stages
1. Classification
2. Symbolisation
3. Discrimination
4. Dehumanisation
5. Organisation
6. Polarisation
7. Preparation
8. Persecution
9. Extermination
10. Denial Support for expulsion
The vast majority of Israeli Jews now support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, according to a survey.
The survey, by Pennsylvania State University, the results of which were published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month, found 82% support for the move.
Further, 56% of Israeli Jews supported expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
But perhaps the grimmest finding of the survey was in answer to the question "do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, i.e., to kill all its inhabitants?".
Nearly half, 47%, answered yes.