Don't Call it a Genocide

In Terrorism and Literature, we watched a few films (the paper on Munich I have previously posted). This one was the collection of international shorts about September 11. Each film was exactly 11 minutes 9 seconds and one frame long. The most powerful ones were from Burkina Faso and Mexico. The most pedantic was from the U.S. and directed by Sean Penn. My favorite was the one I wrote about and will likely be included in my upcoming English Honors Project.


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ENG 290 (491)
November 12, 2009

Don't Call it a Genocide
(or: How to Quantify Terrorist Acts and Mass Murder
in Eleven Minutes, Nine Seconds, and One Frame)

You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime [...]
DO NOT FEEL SAFE. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
―Czesław Miłosz, 1950

A duality runs through the "Bosnia-Herzegovina" (Danis Tanović) segment from the film 11'09"01 (Alain Brigand, 2002) of what is shown by the visual cues provided and what can be seen by their showing. As a whole, this narrative unfolds along two historical timelines. One is the history in which the story is obviously framed—being part of a series of stories concerning the U.S. tragedy involving hijacked planes on September 11, 2001. But there is an untold history in this film that lies buried with more than 7,000 bodies in several mass graves in the municipality of Srebrenica. As the film's author, Tanović does little to go digging for the identities of those people murdered a half-dozen years previous to what he presents to us in this narrative, yet their presence permeates the story like the stench of genocide that remains in the soil long after the glossy words of ambassadors and politicians freshen their spring gardens. Instead of preaching from a grand pulpit, Tanović whispers quietly to us about a single day in, principally, one individual's life, half a world away from New York City and the Two Towers of the World trade Center. That day is, of course, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and that person is a displaced widow or daughter in her mid-twenties, Selma—refugee from the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

When this segment opens, Selma lays in bed not sleeping as her clock ticks away the final seconds before midnight and the first moments of September 11. Awake in the dark, the moments of her life literally tick away. She holds a red scarf and measures out lengths of it like Clotho might measure threads of a person's fate; Selma lies in stasis, the long night looming in front of her just as the emptiness pulls from behind her, seen in the small family photo—in which the red scarf she now holds in bed can be seen—propped on the shelf next to the clock, ticking claim on each passing second, marking each empty moment. The contrast between the people in the photograph (ostensibly Selma and her family) and the present surroundings is stark and immediately evidence in the mere atmosphere of the scene. The photograph depicts a sunny day in a lush forest (even though a harsh shadow blots out a large section of the photo), while the room in which Selma lies is dark, which shifting shadows in curious splashes of light. When morning does arrive, Selma crouches next to the river near her house, hugging her legs to her chest in a posture of defensive protection and hollow comfort. She wears the red scarf over her head in Islamic fashion. The river, untethered by any sense of past trauma and never clinging to anything other than its own endless moment, rushes downstream.

Nadim, a legless man in a wheelchair who keeps a sense of humor about the blisters on his feet and his need for new shoes, drops by the house looking for Selma. Here then, are several examples of duality in one portion of the scene. A man who, by some perspectives, is the worst off of our three characters, but injects the only shades of humor in the segment. Nadim also represents the duality of change inherent in the aftermath of war, shown when he replies to Hanka telling him that instead of yelling for Selma as he did, why can't he use the doorbell: "Lower it and I will," he tells her. Life has changed for him and the simple act of reaching a doorbell is beyond his current faculties; the world can't and isn't going to change for him, just as he is never going to have his own legs to stand on. Nadim banters with Hanka (whom we can take to be Selma's mother, but could as well be her aunt or even someone now kindred only due to circumstance), and hears that neither of the women slept last night—"It's always like this on the 11th"—he refuses the common display of courtesy, being invited to coffee, and leaves a bag of "creams and lipstick" for Selma and Hanka to share between them. This bag of relief items seems not only ridiculous to be given to a man, but perhaps pathetic to be given to women survivors of a massacre. A way of helping them stay pretty even in these remarkable times of murderous horror.

Hanka finds Selma at home and lectures her about still living out of boxes six years after. "After" exactly what is part of the untold history Tanović isn't explicitly telling us. Selma gives a response that has probably been said a hundred times before: she'll unpack when she gets home (obviously intent on going somewhere). Hanka ruminates about "home" and how they'll never be able to go "home." She speaks of someone's house being burned again and if that still happens, how would she and Selma being able to survive. Even though the two women live in an apparently comfortable house and have their immediate needs taken care of, they are not home, having being driven from it six years before and still unable to return. Hanka gives Selma the bag of make-up and goes to make coffee. Selma stands where her reflection is cast into a broken mirror. Again several dualities are on display. The mirror can only reflect what is on the outside, and physically, there seems to be nothing to indicate the trauma of the past Selma has experienced. And like the director veiling history from us as viewers, the mirror does not show the scars Selma hauls around with her like the boxes of things from a past that can never be reached again.

Selma has use of the make-up, albeit not in the manner it had been intended. Checking the color of the lipstick by lining some on her hand, Selma uses it to write her protest sign. The people of Bosnia showed a remarkable ability to invent placebo utilities any given item may be subject to in a region torn by strife and warfare (Zlatko Dizdarević). What would otherwise be an innocuous tube of make-up has been transformed into a vehicle of political statement—a cry from the depths of resigned despair. Completing he placard, Selma heads off, as she apparently does on the 11th of every month, to the town square to take part in a monthly protest. En route, she encounters Nadim in his wheelchair, who accompanies her there. Nadim is the only male represented in this segment, although being legless, as he himself might joke, he's only half the man he used to be. Nadim's singular presence examples some small fragment of that untold history about to be revealed to us.

The voice of the radio is already heard when Selma enters the small building designated as the "Association of the Women of Srebrenica." Here, with this piece of evidence Tanović offers, our dual histories merge, clash, and meld: the radio tells of planes crashing into the Two Towers and another one hitting the Pentagon. This is history with which we are familiar. The images we are not shown (hearing this only on a radio) are easy for us to conjure. It is a public history. The weighted history that suffocates the women in the room listening to the radio is a very private history, without regard to how many—or how few—directly share it.

Selma sits down in the room of Muslim women (each wears a colored scarf as a hijab) and listens to part of the news about the terrorist attack in the United States. "After this, we can expect anything," the radio says. "It's total confusion … Pictures coming in from New York show people running in the street… There are many wounded, blood everywhere, everyone is covered in dust." There is little movement or reaction from the women in the room. There faces blank, their hands completely still. After their experiences, they've long ago learned to expect anything.

Selma looks to the back wall of the room, where photographs, maps, and other documents recall their collective tragedy. Included on the wall's montage is a photograph like the one she has at home, next to her clock. Her family; mother, father, and brother. Given that Hanka is her mother, she has lost the males in her family. Just as the radio says, "The number of victims isn't known," Selma stands and says she's going to go to the square for the demonstration, the other women look at her carefully. "Sit down," the woman next to her says, "There'll be no demonstration today. You can hear what's happened." "Exactly," Selma replies, "We have to demonstrate. For them and for us!" The other woman sighs, resigned to listening to the radio tell of the tragedy fallen upon the United States. Selma pauses at the door before stepping outside, passing a large sign with a date and bold red letters: "12.07.95 DA SE NE ZABORAVI." This is the final clue Tanović reveals to us, reinforcing what we already knew: these women are survivors of the Srebrenica Genocide.

The segment closes with Selma going to the square with her three linked protest flags. She is joined only by Nadim, who attaches the end of the flags to his wheelchair and rolls out, a marching line of two people (one of them cripple). As they walk, Hanka appears behind Selma, the other women lined up behind Hanka. They tie their flags together and walk across the vacant town square, in silence. Their protest has become representative of dual tragedies. But just because people were killed by terrorism in the far-off land of New York City, the women of Srebrenica remain alive with their memories and pain.

It is crucial to understand that at the moment Selma stood up in the room of women, the radio made reference towards the number of people dead. This brings to the fore that quantifying the devastation is the basis for classification of a tragedy. The sheer number of dead and wounded gives credence to how much more terrible a particular event may be in comparison to others. This again brings us to the duality within this narrative. On one hand, these women listening to their single radio in an emptied small town in eastern Bosnia have survived a massacre that, when not being denied as to ever happening, is listed by some accounts as the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II. A fact itself which immediately conjures the duality of indirect reference to non-European massacres which might include the systematic mass murders perpetrated by the regimes of Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Hutus—to name but a trio out of several hundred post-WWII examples—and the direct reference to quantifying tragedy into some sort of hierarchical scale.

And using such a scale as our model for this comparison (inadequate though it is), it becomes clearer what these women of Srebrenica have survived. Having been refugees in a designated "safe area" under the protection of the UN, they had their families devastated with Bosnian Serbs systematically murdered all males without any interference from the protecting UN forces. The quantifiers involved place the figure between 6,000 and 8,500 men killed over a period of five days, culminating with the night of July 11, 1995. Srebrenica is certainly one of three jewels in the crown of UN relations involving Bosnia. The first could be heard as early as August of 1993, when the British ambassador, Lord David Owen, stood on the tarmac of the militarily-controlled Sarajevo International Airport and offered words of advice to the besieged Sarajevans, "Don't, don't, don't live under this dream that the West is going to come in and sort this problem out. Don't dream dreams." The third jewel wouldn't come until more than a decade later when, in February 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that Bosnia had not suffered through a "genocide" (Vesna Peric Zimonjic, Jan Willem Honig). The figures just weren't enough to quantify the term.

Another parallel becomes evident and—among many historians, scholars, and interested parties—somewhat more tenuous. This parallel draws a connection between the Bosnian Massacres (we aren't allowed to use the term "genocide" now) and the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. And like the Holocaust, there are many prominent (and not-so-prominent) voices of denial that many of the Bosnian Massacres never occurred, or, at some extreme, were highly exaggerated events taken well out of context. Most of these voices are, not surprisingly, Serbian and high-ranking UN personnel, but—ironically—many critics are from Jewish quarters as well (Mark Chmiel, Petar Pasic, Lewis MacKenzie, Edward Herman). When you sit atop any hierarchy, it may be difficult to accept anything less than that as being worthy of measure.

Drawing back to the film, we can apply Lord David Owen's heart-felt advice to Hanka and Selma at the beginning of the segment. Selma doesn't sleep, so at least she isn't going to fall into a dream that, with the world watching, the "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated in Bosnia by the dueling agents of Serbia and Croatia would be stopped. This may seem a stretch, to equate the comment from Lord Owen with Selma's insomnia, but it cannot be underestimated the effect such advice had upon the conscious and psyche of the Bosnian population: to have an official from what is seen as the world's great protectors (or, if not protectors, at least arbitrators) tell you that your plight and exile is your own problem and quit complaining about it.

Where then, on our scale model, does September 11 rank? Thousands of dead and wounded, all in a few hours time? Is it possible to consider the scale of human devastation in terms only based on the number of bodies left in its wake? In that case which is worse, the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine High School shooting? What about Charles Whitman and the University of Texas shooting in 1966? Who do we vote off the list? Who moves on to the finals and awarded the title of The Worst Shooting in History? Numbers and statistics are not governors of this province. Circumstances and aftermath play a factor. As does good PR work.

So at the end of all this, aside from details of quantification and examples of the evil that spills out from the human soul, what have we learned? After witnessing eleven viewpoints of a single day and the connection with the events in New York and Washington, D.C. (we still seem to forget about that fourth plane in all of this mess) to circumstances in vastly different parts of the world, I have come to wonder: What 11'9"01 story would each of us have to tell? What would I, personally, be able to say about that day; would my perspective resonate on some unseen level deeper than mere facts and statistics and yawping rants atop a soap box in the train stations of the world?

What stories will remain untold in the recorded history of these events?

Danis Tanović wants us to hear at least one of them.

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Works Cited

"Bosnia-Herzegovina." Dir. Danis Tanović. 11'09"01.

Empire Pictures, Inc., 2003. DVD.

Chmiel, Mark. Elie Wiesel and the politics of

moral leadership.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2001. Print.

Dizdarević, Zlatko. Sarajevo: A War Journal.

Fromm International, 1993. Print.

Herman, Edward. "The Politics of the

Srebrenica Massacre."

Z-Net: The Spirit of Resistance Lives.
Z Communications, 7 July 2005.
Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

Honig, Jan Willem, and Norbert Both.

Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime.
London: Penguin Books, 1996. Print.

MacKenzie, Lewis. "Globe and Mail:

The real story behind Srebrenica."

Serbian Way. The Mail Archive,
14 July 2005. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

Pasic, Petar. "Serbs did not commit genocide:

Interview with Dr. Milan Bulajic."
Srpska Mreza—Serbian Network.
Srpska Mreza, 20 May 2005.
Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

Miłosz, Czesław. "You Who Wronged." Światło dzienne.

Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953. Print.

Zimonjic, Vesna Peric. "UN court rules

Serbia did not commit genocide in Bosnia."
The Independent.
Independent News and Media Limited,
27 Feb. 2007. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

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