A BROTHERHOOD OF SUFFERING HOLOCAUST MUSEUM GIVES VOICE TO MUSLIM VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE
By Eric Mink
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
January 9, 2008 Wednesday
Missouri
Fear? I get it. I’ve been afraid for my physical safety and my
psychological well-being and for that of people close to me. I know
that fear can warp people’s judgment and lead them to do stupid,
even terrible, things.
But closely aligned with fear, yet actually its opposite, is something
I do not get at all, something I can not even fathom: the human
capacity to coolly and systematically create and carry out plans
for the elimination of people on the basis of some largely arbitrary
common trait – a religious belief, an ethnic heritage, a tribal or
national affiliation, a racial feature.
The Nazi extermination of Europe’s six million Jews during World War
II – along with millions of Slavs, Gypsies, blacks and countless others
deemed unworthy of life – stands alone in the scale and sophistication
of its killing systems.
But there is no shortage of similar stains on the historical record,
including the allegedly modern historical record. Every so often, it
seems, one group of humans or another undertakes the vicious business
of ridding itself of members of a group it has come to despise or
find inconvenient. The early 20th century, for example, witnessed
the slaughter of well over 500,000 Armenians – some estimates run as
high as 1.5 million – by forces of the Ottoman Empire in what now is
eastern Turkey and Armenia.
Thirty years later, after we’d come to comprehend the magnitude of
the Nazis’ crimes against humanity, it appeared that we had learned
something. There were the successful prosecutions of war criminals at
Nuremberg, the birth of the United Nations and, in 1948, the adoption
by the U.N. of the international Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
And yet organized, officially sanctioned mass murder has continued,
including – among other instances – Pol Pot’s reign of insanity in
Cambodia in the late 1970s, tribal rage in Rwanda in 1994 and the
forced expulsions, imprisonments, rapes, torture and murders of ethnic
and religious groups in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
As Samantha Power, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, academic and
former journalist has put it, the failure of the world’s nations –
including the United States – to prevent or limit such massacres is
accurately characterized not by the vow "never again" but by the phrase
"again and again."
On the Creve Coeur campus of the Jewish Community Center, the St.
Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center keeps alive the documented
record of the Nazi liquidation of the Jews, the chilling details of its
methodical processes and the stories of some who, somehow, survived
the ghettos, the rail transports, the forced labor camps and the
death camps. The core exhibit marshals all the tools of professional
museum storytelling – composition, lighting, historical artifacts,
still photography, film and other multi-media technology – to create
a powerfully affecting display of Jewish suffering and survival.
And just steps away – in a separate, brightly lit hall filled with
rows of folding chairs – 30 oversized posterboard panels affixed to
the walls and a video presentation bear witness to more suffering
and survival. Not of Jews but of Muslims.
The impact of this simple, low-tech presentation – "Prijedor: Lives
from the Bosnian Genocide" – catches you off-guard. On two Sunday
afternoon visits, I moved slowly around the room, re-learning the
chronology of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the human firestorms
that followed. I learned for the first time the stories of victims
and survivors who eventually made their way to the United States and
the St. Louis area.
The cumulative effect of the information and the personal accounts
sickened me. Then I watched the video.
It is a decidedly unsophisticated production consisting mainly of
interviews of people against a stark white background. The picture
occasionally jumps. The audio has a hollow, echo-y quality that
sometimes requires extra concentration to hear. The interviewers –
Fontbonne University students – are unseen. The on-camera interviewees
are eyewitnesses to, and survivors of, brutality that would be
unimaginable if it did not occur with such regularity – and if the
evidence photos that are edited into the footage did not reveal it
so clearly.
Most of the people tell their stories in Bosnian, then sit silently as
an off-camera voice translates their words into English. Even if you
could not understand either language, you would know from their eyes
– which seem to be peering at images deep inside their own heads –
that they are describing terrible things.
It is important to note that the "Prijidor" exhibit, which focuses on
events involving the cities, towns and villages in the Bosnian district
of the same name, originated within St. Louis’ large and vibrant
Bosnian community of some 50,000 people. Members of a group called
the Union of Citizens of Prijedor brought the idea to the museum, then
worked with museum staff, Fontbonne and Patrick McCarthy, who has spent
years researching the Bosnian genocide, to put the exhibit together.
It’s also important to note that the exhibit draws virtually all its
factual information and data from the report of a specially constituted
United Nations Commission of Experts and other U.N.
documents. The section of the commission report on Prijedor concludes
as follows: "It is unquestionable that the events in the [district of]
Prijedor since 30 April 1992 qualify as crimes against humanity.
Furthermore, it is likely to be confirmed in court under due process
of law that these events constitute genocide."
The 1948 U.N. document establishing genocide as a crime – the United
States did not ratify it until 1988 – defines it as policies and
certain acts of violence "committed with the intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. .
. ."
The Commission of Experts report found that the number of Muslims in
the Prijedor district – who were all but indistinguishable from their
non-Muslim neighbors and represented about half the total population –
fell from 49,454 in 1991 to 6,124 in 1993. The Bosnian Serb forces that
seized power in Prijedor in 1992 pursued policies of forced expulsions
of Muslims (called "ethnic cleansing"); their imprisonment of Muslims
in camps where they were beaten, raped, tortured and starved; and
the outright murder of educated and influential Muslim individuals
and groups of men, women and children.
On Dec. 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel traveled to Oslo, Norway, to accept
the Nobel Peace Prize. In his remarks, the author, philosopher and
survivor of the Nazi concentration camps said that "I have tried to
keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget.
Because if we forget, we are guilty; we are