I knew next to nothing about the conflict generally or the massacre specifically just the names of the bad guys and a bit about various groups involved.
What a harrowing read it was.
I'm going to read a bit more about it if anyone has any recommendations. I'm not looking for anything book length.
Friend of mine wrote the book on Slobodan Milosevic. No. Really. And I am named in the thanks, for the work I did transcribing interviews with his sources. I heard a lot that was not included in the book, in 70 hours of interview tapes. I also worked for the peacekeeping forces in the Balkans, IFOR, KFOR, and SFOR. The only area that was still hot when I was there, was Kosovo, which was long after Srebrenica. But. We all knew about it. And Mostar. And Sarajevo. And others. I managed a shop on the military base in Sarajevo. Two of our girls who worked there, and were good friends, were a Serb and a Bosnian. One of their brothers was a gunner on the hills over Sarajevo, while the other one lived in Sarajevo being bombed by the other girl's brother. For them both, it was water under the bridge. Ancient history. They were young, 20-somethings with English and a good job, and their whole lives in front of them. They wanted nothing to do with the war they had just lived through. I never understood the war. And I never understood how neighbors could turn on each other. And I never understood how these two women could be friends and socialize so soon after their families were trying to kill each other. The Balkans are a truly fascinating place... always been at the intersection between the West and the East, but - unlike Turkey - are firmly physically in the West. Sooooo much history there...
I don't have anything to recommend but I just wanted to voice support for this endeavor. I don't know what bearing witness to these sorts of atrocities does but some part of me needs to believe that it does something. I lived in Bosnia a few years back and even right around the area where it happened people are astonishingly misinformed.
I don't know what the curriculum's like nowadays, but I sure did not get informed of Srebrenica other than a yearly news item. There's a great documentary that came out last week about it that I have on my watchlist, and a podcast about it, but both are unfortunately only in Dutch.
I knew nothing about that massacre until a visit to the museum about it in Sarajevo. Very modern and well done - with timelines, testimonies, numbers... It really hit me hard, and put into perspective the conversation I had with young Serbians less than a week before, about how NATO bombed them "for no reason". It's really crazy how recent this massacre is, and how I probably would not even know about it were it not for our visit to the region. It was not taught in school, and I'm to young for having heard aout it in the news.
I had a Serb co-worker in Budapest. We were walking home after work one night, and he told me that an American ICBM had destroyed the top 4 floors of his mother's apartment building in Novy Sad the night before. We stood on the gorgeous Chain Bridge, looking down at the Danube together, just trying to take in the fact that there was a war going on to the south... on this same river... where his family were being bombed by my country. I still can't process that moment.