Yom Kippur Morning 5769--Never Again!
Posted at 11:36 AM, Monday, October 13, 2008
The headlines in late July absolute electrified me: “Radovan Karodzic placed under arrest in Serbia.” I followed with morbid fascination how as his secret life practicing holistic medicine was revealed. We saw photos of this self-identified poet and psychiatrist with his long white beard and pony tail. His capture moved quite a few journalists to cast back more than ten years to one of the darkest eras in modern history: Serbia's conquest of Bosnia, and the failure of the western powers to do anything of substance to stop it. `Roger Cohen, a columnist with The New York Times, wrote powerfully of that time:
After covering a war, a friend said, buy yourself a house. I did. I came to this French village where church bells chime the rhythm of the days, married here, raised children and parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind.
I had to forget. I had to write a book, so the horror would never be forgotten, in order to forget just enough to go on. There is always a measure of guilt in survival when so many have died. There are faces, in death and bereavement, that can never be eclipsed.
It’s peaceful here. I’d been out watching crows in the stubble when I returned to discover Radovan Karadzic had been arrested in Belgrade, 13 years after the end of the war, to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The years fell away, fear resurfaced, and I’ve been unable to sleep. I find myself back in Pale with you, Dr. Karadzic, back in that two-bit ski resort you parlayed into the Bosnian Serb capital and bestrode with your killer hairdo, back asking you questions you never could answer.
Objectivity and neutrality are not synonymous. The head is useless without the heart. War teaches that better than journalism school. The unseeing eyes of young Sarajevan women penetrated by shrapnel had taught me the rights and wrongs of the war long before I met you. Still I wanted to look you in the eye.
An international court in The Hague will now examine the contentions of the former Bosnian Serb leader. I don’t doubt the outcome. Justice is important — for Bosnia and for amnesia-afflicted Serbia with its everyone-was-guilty evasiveness. But justice won’t change the faces brought back to me now across the years.
Jamie Walker wrote equally eloquently in The Australian:
I still wonder what happened to those hollow-eyed men I met in the autumn of 1992, as the freezing mist closed in on their prison camp in the mountains of northern Bosnia. They were lying in long miserable rows, huddled beneath skinny blankets. The cow shed that made do as their barracks was heated by a single stove.
How were they to survive when the snows arrived, I asked the corpulent Serbian commandant. He shrugged his shoulders in the lacerating cold: the translator, quoting him, muttered "who cares".
The "detention camp" at Manjaca, in those freezing heights above the city of Banja Luka, held perhaps 4000 Croat and Bosnian Muslim prisoners. There were armed guards on the perimeter, but not many. No one bothered to escape, you see. The surrounding area had been "cleansed" of anyone who might offer a man on the run shelter from the cold and the wolves.
The going was difficult enough for our own little convoy as we pressed deeper into Karadzic country. We passed checkpoints, where bands of trigger-happy Serb militia fidgeted with assault rifles and chugged down their ration of liquor, all the while eying us with unconcealed hostility.
Our destination was supposed to be the town of Pale, where the great man himself, Radovan Karadzic, was holding court. Until war came to the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, it was a no-account place in the snowy peaks behind Sarajevo, Bosnia's once-proudly multicultural capital.
Karadzic was a psychiatrist and poet, who had soft hands and a mop of grey hair which fell to his shoulders and peppered his back with dandruff. He spoke English and preferred to be addressed as doctor. Like his political mentor Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Serbia, he had dangerous ideas about Serbian nationalism. When Tito's racial hotchpotch fell apart, Karadzic established his own Serbian republic in Bosnia with military backing from Belgrade.
The war this unleashed became the bloodiest of all the late 20th-century Balkan conflicts, inflicting more than 100,000 deaths and untold suffering. Two million non-Serbs were driven from their homes between 1992 and 1995, rape became an instrument of state terror, and a rich and beautiful land was laid waste before the international community was prodded into action by the crowning horror of Srebrenica, where more than 7000 Bosnian Muslim men were massacred by Karadzic's forces under the nose of the UN.
Richard Holbrook, the US diplomat who helped end the bloodshed, describes Karadzic as the Osama bin Laden of Europe. "He was in my mind worse than Milosevic, and has had become a kind of a Robin Hood figure to Bosnian Serbs," Holbrook said yesterday. "His capture is a historic event."
Perhaps the passage of years has mellowed Karadzic. Maybe he can be persuaded to accept his measure of responsibility for the death and destruction that overtook Bosnia, or to tell what he knows of the whereabouts of his general Ratko Mladic, who must surely be running short of borrowed time.
We will probably never know what became of all of those starving men I encountered in that freezing mountain camp at Manjaca in late 1992.
It was temporarily closed down a month or so later, then re-opened, as the killing and suffering in Bosnia continued in defiance of all the world's hand wringing. At least 1000 of those entered the camp are believed to have died.
An act of contrition from Karadzic won't bring any of them back. But it may go some way to healing the gaping wounds he inflicted on a land that has known too much suffering.
And now on to my recollections. The war in Bosnia played a critical role in making me who I am today both as a rabbi and as a person. I remember almost crying with despair in the early 90's, as reporters repeatedly talked about centuries-old hatred and how complex the situation was. Exactly the opposite was the case. Bosnia prior to the outbreak of war was one of the few corners in the world where religiously-moderate Moslems, Christians, and Jews had lived together for hundreds of years. Geraldine Brooks chronicles the extraordinary harmony of Sarajevo in The People of the Book. Sarajevo played host to the 1984 winter Olympics, then less than ten years later lay devastated as Serbian forces shelled the city from the hills that surrounded it. One of their first targets was the national library—a clear indication of their intention to wipe out memories of Bosnia's multicultural past along with its non-Serb population.
The Serb and Bosnian Serb leaders introduced us to the term “ethnic cleansing.” Hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Moslems were forced from their villages and driven into concentration camps. The United Nations recorded thousands of human rights abuses, but somehow no western nation seemed particularly interested in this poor corner of Europe. When war had threatened upon the disintegration of Yugoslavia a few years earlier, the United Nations had voted to impose an arms embargo on the whole of the former Yugoslavia. What this meant was that the only weapons available were those that had been purchased prior to the embargo. And these weapons were stored in Serbia, where they were made available to all those prepared to fight for the sacred Serb cause. The Moslems of Bosnia pleaded, not for western intervention, but simply for a lifting of the arms embargo so that they too could purchase arms to defend themselves.
I found myself as a Jew reacting fiercely to what was happening in Bosnia. It seemed inconceivable to me that a genocide could be unfolding inside Europe fifty years after nations around the world had promised never to let it happen again. I was still in rabbinical school and living in Philadelphia. A number of us entered an unusual partnership with local Moslems to try to focus attention on the plight of Moslem Bosnians and to bring an end to the arms embargo. We also formed a group within the Jewish community called “Jews Against Genocide in Bosnia.” I found myself going out on public speaking engagements and travelling to Washington, DC, to lobby our elected representatives.
I spoke before a number of Christian groups, and this was a particularly discouraging experience. I remember speaking passionately at a liberal church in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. The fifty or so people in attendance shook their heads sadly, then asked if they could send contributions to assist the refugees. When I replied that what the Bosnian Moslems really wanted was the ability to defend themselves against the Serbs, the group became very quiet. They couldn't bring themselves to do anything that might intensify the violence. The concept of a just war appeared to have disappeared from their vocabulary. Indeed, the World Council of Churches bent itself into all kinds of contortions to justify its opposition to ending the arms embargo. Council of Churches representatives even participated in a tour of Bosnia personally conducted by leaders of Bosnian Serb forces which led them to the stunning conclusion that outside nations could do nothing to stop the violence. I had a revelation then: I realized that as a Jew I had an intuitive understanding that there was such a thing as a just war. I might stand for peace, but I knew there might be times when war could be the only way to a just peace.
Ultimately, a number of us rabbis and rabbinical students decided that we would get arrested in order to bring more attention to the issue. I had shied away from civil disobedience actions in university, but now it seemed to me I had little choice. The dean of our rabbinical school, in agreeing to join the protest, thanked us for asking him. He said that when his children asked him someday whether he had done as much as he possibly could to stop the genocide, he would be able to say yes.
On December 2, 1994, sixteen of us stood in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House waiting patiently for the Park Policeman to load us into vans and drive us down to the station to be booked. I admit it was quite an anticlimax after the days of anxious anticipation. Nowadays in Washington, demonstrators ring up the Park Police in advance so that enough vans can be on hand to accommodate all those who have come to be arrested. I spent exactly four hours at the booking station, paid my $50 fine, and went home. Our little act of civil demonstration drew fabulous publicity, including coverage by several national television stations. The arms embargo remained in force. The war reached its climax in July, 1995, when an estimated 7000 Moslem men and boys were massacred by Serb forces in Srebenica—a town the United Nations had promised to keep safe.
Twelve years later, as I applied for a visa to come to Australia, my criminal record turned up in my FBI background check. For a split second, I fretted that my chances of receiving a visa might be hurt. Then I wondered if I would really want to migrate a country that would condemn me for taking a stand.
The war in Bosnia taught me that there was an appropriate use for the rage and anguish we continue to feel at the horrors of the Holocaust. I cannot bring back the six million of my people who were so cruelly murdered sixty years ago. But I can try my utmost to keep others from meeting the same fate. I am proud that Jews remain passionately involved in fighting human rights abuses and particularly in trying to stop those who would kill or displace others simply because of their race or religion. It is not easy, and it is rarely satisfying. Even after the twin genocide of Bosnia and Rwanda, the leaders of the world still rarely seem prepared to do what is necessary to stop the destruction of a people.
And so we stand witness again as genocide unfolds in the Darfur region of Sudan. The facts are not in question; former U.S. secretary-of-state Colin Powell went so far as to declare that the ongoing attacks against the people of Darfur met all the necessary criteria of genocide, something that had never happened either in Bosnia or Rwanda. Under the terms of the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide, when genocide is identified, all nations are supposed to intervene immediately to bring an end to the attacks. This has still not happened. The website Save Darfur continues to call on the United Nations to send in sufficient forces to keep threatened populations from harm.
As with Bosnia, Jews have been at the forefront of fighting to end the genocide in Darfur. Dozens of Jewish groups, including a large number within the Orthodox community, have organised protests, marches, and letter-writing campaigns. Jewish groups raise money to assist the estimated 2.5 million refugees and are making meaningful contributions to the quality of life of those who have lost everything. At times, it seems like a drop in the bucket when compared with the magnitude both of the crisis and of the world's apathy.
Silence is not an option.
As Jews, we live with a painful legacy. At times, the grief and pain of the Shoah can seem unbearable. What is the lesson, the legacy of that event? Is there something we can pass on to our children aside from the thousands upon thousands of memoirs—each more tragic and devastating than the last? For much of my life, I tried to ignore this chapter in Jewish history. I was committed to teaching about Judaism as a path of joy, of hope, of fulfilment. The Holocaust didn't fit into that picture. So, terrible as it sounds, I ignored it. When I look back on myself, I realize that what I was really looking for was a way to make meaning of the Holocaust. If I couldn’t redeem the six million who died, could I redeem their memories by working for something positive? When I taught my students, did I have a lesson that they could integrate into their lives?
Ultimately, I understood that there is a powerful lesson to be learned: Never again. Never again means not only that never again should such horrors afflict the Jews of the world, but that no peoples should ever again be systematically hunted down because of who they are. Martin Niemoller, a German Protestant minister, became well-known for his chilling statement about the dangers the Nazis posed: “the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. And then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I was a Protestant, so I did not speak up. And then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for anyone.” At a certain point in his life, Rev Niemoller amended his now-famous speech to include an epilogue: “To make sure this does not happen again, the injustice to anyone anywhere must be the concern of everyone everywhere.” That is our holy task: to spare others the horrors we ourselves have experienced. There is much work to be done, but I believe we are up to the task. Let us go forth and do what needs to be done.
