Whaur Dae Ye Lie?

Remembering Srebrenica - 30 years on (this one is not an easy read)

Our friends they came tae protect us

Our friends they bade us bide

Our friends left us standing their naked

Wi nae place left tae hide

In the news feature, the camera comes up a low concrete stair through the back door, which is oddly ajar. There’s a washing machine tucked in the corner to the right, and on top a pair of mucky kids’ trainers. Then we’re into a suburban kitchen, food abandoned in a state of half-preparation, dishes still by the sink.

I don’t recall the exact town in Bosnia or the precise date, but the uncanny familiarity of the empty house had such an impact that I wrote this scene from a 1994 BBC report into my Masters dissertation that year. I wrote also about Irma Hadzimuratovic, five years old at the time and paralysed from the neck down by shrapnel from a Serbian bomb that killed her mother. The wee girl was airlifted to Great Ormond Street Hospital with her father and sister in what was dubbed Operation Irma, a mission that awakened international concern for the impact of warfare on Bosnian children, but didn’t bolster practical peacekeeping efforts on the ground.

I was studying at the time for an MPhil in Philosophical Inquiry, via the European Philosophical Inquiry Centre, briefly located at the University of Glasgow. The programme promised much - diverse communities of philosophical engagement beyond academic walls (I led weekly groups at two Glasgow primary schools and a pub on the southern fringe of the city), the democratisation of critical thinking, and the rigours of Socratic Method, the art of questioning, with an intellectual lineage right back to Plato himself.

Whaur dae ye lie my faither?

Whaur dae ye lie my son?

Whaur dae ye lie my ain true love?

When will the truth be won?

Beyond ongoing sectarian violence just across the Irish Sea, The Balkans War was the first time that conflict and community breakdown felt close for me. And the way in which investigative news stories invited that sense of connection was a big part of that. The new (old) names for emergent European countries at the time - Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina - unravelled what was previously known to most Scots simply as ‘Yugoslavia’ - a place my high school history teacher went his holidays once.

My Masters’ dissertation was titled ‘How to Change Your Mind’, and in it I wrote myself out of a possible career in academic philosophy, with an interrogation of the limits of logic and rational argumentation and an exploration of the transformative power of storytelling and lived experience. Documentary narrative and the epiphanies of life, film and literature, art and music - these were, I argued (I know, I know) far more likely to shift perspective or alter understanding than sharp Socratic dialogue.

For clarity, I think dialogue and logic, and a capacity for critical thinking, matter - a lot - not least in our contemporary culture of toxic discourse. I just think listening and compassion, creativity and connection matter as much, and maybe even more.

I hae sought out yer grave wi my mother

I hae sought out yer grave in vain

I hae sought the bare banes o’ the truth and the men

Faither, whaur are ye lain?

In 1998, three Muslim women from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica visited Edinburgh’s City Chambers. They were dressed in black and spoke through translators - quietly, clearly - about their losses: husbands, fathers, brothers, neighbours and sons murdered by the Bosnian Serb army in a genocidal massacre outside their small salt mining mountain town in July 1995.

Two years earlier, the UN had formally declared Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ within what was otherwise being carved out as an ethnically pure Serbian state under the ultra-nationalist leadership of President Radovan Karadžić. UN troops from Canada first, and then the Netherlands, were stationed in the town, but they were too few and too poorly equipped to protect the local population, and the international community, including the UK, failed to offer any meaningful tactical military support.

On July 11^th 1995, exactly 30 years ago today, Serbian nationalist troops under General Ratko Mladić, occupied Srebrenica. 10,000 Muslim men and boys fled on foot towards the free territory of Tuzla. Over the following week, Serbian troops hunted them down, often even tempting them out of the woods in stolen UN uniforms. Many of these soldiers were not strangers to those they murdered.

Our neighbours they came wi a hundred-year hate

Our neighbours they came wi guns

Our neighbours they came for our menfolk

and they slew them - every one.

8372 Muslim men and boys were executed and dumped in mass graves in farms and factories around Srebrenica. And what the three Srebrenica women in the Edinburgh chamber wanted most of all was to find the bodies of their loved ones, to dignify them with a burial and ultimately to help bring those responsible to justice.

I headed up Arthur’s Seat after they’d spoken, shattered by their testimonies. The song Whaur Dae Ye Lie? wrote itself on the walk, in way that seldom happens.

I hae cried out yer name tae the four winds

Cried out yer name til dawn

I hae cried in the arms o’ yer sister dear

Whaur dae ye lie my son?

Srebrenica was the largest single European massacre since the Holocaust, an act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. The roots of the ethnic division that fomented this are both long and terrifyingly short. Centuries of episodic conflict, post World War II grievance and long cultural memories twisted to political ends. But the municipality had on the face of it been a peaceful, ethnically mixed community for fifty years. This dissolved with astonishing rapidity following declarations of independence by Yugoslavia’s constituent states in 1991.

If you think this can’t happen where you live, you’re wrong. Genocide does not emerge from nowhere. It is built and enabled. There are signs and an arc. Of storytelling.

21 years after the massacre, in 2016, former Serb President Radovan Karadžić was convicted at the Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of war crimes, including genocide. General Ratko Mladić followed in 2021. Many skilled experts from across the world, including Scotland, volunteered their time as mortuary assistants and radiographers, pathologists and forensic technicians to gather the necessary legal, criminal evidence.

The theme of this year’s thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre is -

Remember yesterday.

Act today.

Act where and how and behalf of whom? Make no mistake, genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians is happening right now in real time, on our screens. The documentary evidence required to make convictions on a par with those against Karadžić and Mladić exists already, in plain sight. But do we have the national and international institutions and leaders, and ultimately the collective will and fibre between us, to maintain our systems of law and justice, and to act?

I hae dreamed o’ yer breath upon me

dreamed o’ yer yellow hair

I hae dreamed o’ the sound o’ yer dying love

whaur dae ye lie my dear?

For more information: https://srebrenica.org.uk/

Last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, released this report: From economy of occupation to economy of genocide It implicates many familiar corporations and civic institutions, and names the University of Edinburgh as one of “the most financially entangled”. The US Trump administration has this week threatened to sanction Albanese personally.

The Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee has organised a protest the weekend after this (Saturday 19th July) in Edinburgh, gathering 1pm at The Mound.