Remembering Srebrenica

My heart is heavy as I type these words. I just finished watching a 6 minute video of soldiers executing 6 unarmed prisoners in cold blood.

No, this did not happen anywhere in the Philippines. It happened in Bosnia 10 years ago, where Serbian soldiers massacred 7,000 Bosnian men and teenage boys, a tragedy now known as the Srebrenica massacre.

How do you kill that many men and boys? And Why?

In the video it was done in cold blood – they were shot behind their backs, four men first then the last two. I wonder how the last two felt, seeing how their comrades were shot, knowing that the cold guns that killed the others may be used against them too shortly (they were indeed shot at, after being told to haul off the dead bodies first to an abandoned building).

I’ve stared at the end of an M-16 barrel but I never knew how it would be to die from it, unlike these men (the soldiers were using Russian Kalashnikov’s, which a friend told me was the pattern used by the American makers of the M-16). This tragedy has become timely for the current discussion of our grad class on race reporting (more about that later).

I join in mourning those who lost loved ones in that tragedy. I ask forgiveness that many have forgotten it too. I join the prayers of those who thank that this video got out and is now being used as primary evidence in the war crimes trial against those who started the Srebrenica Massacre. And I hope the soldiers who did these burn in hell for all eternity.

Note: I saw the video after I opened my Gmail account and got an update from the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits (http://www.poynter.org/) which alerted me to a posting about the video. E-Media Tidbit’s Steve Outing linked pointed to the website of the PBS investigative program Frontline World, which posted the video on its website (link here: Srebrenica: The Video of a Wartime Atrocity). Series Editor Stephen Talbot says the video has never been released on American TV (but I think we had it on the wires earlier). They also posted a warning of the gruesome nature of the video.