Srebrenica: Remembering the Lessons We Once Learned

The 20-year anniversary of Srebrenica is an opportunity to remember the lessons we drew after the massacre, but seem to have forgotten since.
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A woman prays amid tomb stones at the Potocari memorial complex near Srebrenica, 150 kilometers (94 miles) northeast of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Saturday, July 11, 2015. Twenty years ago, on July 11, 1995, Serb troops overran the eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica and executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which International courts have labeled as an act of genocide, and newly identified victims of the genocide are still being re-interred at Srebrenica. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)
A woman prays amid tomb stones at the Potocari memorial complex near Srebrenica, 150 kilometers (94 miles) northeast of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Saturday, July 11, 2015. Twenty years ago, on July 11, 1995, Serb troops overran the eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica and executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which International courts have labeled as an act of genocide, and newly identified victims of the genocide are still being re-interred at Srebrenica. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)

The 20-year anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre this past weekend was a moment to honor and remember the barbaric slaughter by Bosnian Serb forces of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys over the course of a few bloody days back in July 1995. But it is also an opportunity to revisit the central lessons the international community learned and pledged to uphold in the aftermath of Srebrenica, but subsequently forgot. Lessons we need to learn again.

In a time when mass atrocities are occurring at an unprecedented rate in places like Syria while our willingness to respond to these incidents is weaker than ever, these lessons are highly relevant. A failure to learn - and act upon them - risks replacing the oft-repeated slogan "never again" with a mere "here we go again".

The lessons from Yugoslavia deserve to be revisited. NATO's bombing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina was the tipping point that brought Slobodan Milošević to the negotiation table. The Dayton Peace agreement of November 1995 would never have been possible was it not for this intervention.

What's equally important, NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia was not just a one-off - it had enduring persistence. To safeguard the successful implementation of the Dayton Accords, NATO dispatched a 60,000-strong peacekeeping force into Bosnia to secure peace and prevent new hostilities, replaced in December 1996 with the 32,000 troops strong SFOR force and again in December 2004 by the still active EUFOR force.

In the Balkans, the international community was also willing to revisit its own strategy as the situation on the ground deteriorated. When hostilities flared up in Kosovo in 1998-1999, NATO responded quickly and forcefully with an aerial bombing campaign. Though involving no ground troops, this mission was not risk-free either, with the Yugoslav Air Force repeatedly engaging in combat.

Although the situation on the Balkans admittedly is far from perfect today, it would have been immeasurably worse had it not been for NATO's interventions there. The key take-away is accordingly that international interventions can indeed work, but that they require commitment, persistence and clarity in order to be successful.

Today, by contrast, the situation looks increasingly bleak in places like Syria. Over four years into the Syrian civil war, the total death toll has reached an astonishing 210,000 people according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. And there is no end in sight. If left unchecked, violence in the country will likely continue until a stalemate between Assad's forces, the rebels and ISIS is reached, a process that can take years if not decades. Meanwhile, the human toll is growing by the day - already millions of Syrian civilians have been displaced.

Having refused to intervene at the onset of the crisis in Syria to prevent it from spiraling out of control, the United States and its partners remain reluctant to do anything substantial to save the humanitarian crisis there. The scale of the US-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria is meager compared with previous efforts in Kosovo a decade and a half ago.

While Western leaders dismiss a military solution to the Syrian crisis, the lesson from the Balkans that a negotiated settlement between the warring parties is impossible without simultaneously applying pressure seems to have been forgotten. Similarly, Russia's veto in the UN Security Council should not be a cause for inaction. As Kosovo proved, intervention is sometime necessary even in the absence of a UN Security Council mandate.

Furthermore, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), widely seen as a justification for the UN-supported intervention in Libya in 2011 to prevent mass violence in Benghazi, is no longer on anyone's mind in the Obama administration. This, despite the fact that the White House own "Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities" declared that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States." By not intervening to save the worst humanitarian crisis of today, we risk also becoming numb to other atrocities occurring elsewhere in the world in places such as Ukraine, DRC, and Sudan.

Certainly, humanitarian intervention is never easy and should not be thrown around casually. Ultimately, a strong national security rationale is also necessary for putting American troops in harms way to protect civilians. But in a place like Syria, both humanitarian and national security justifications are clearly there. Here inaction cannot be an option. While intervention may be risky, the wider risks to regional and international security of doing nothing are arguably even greater.

The 20-year anniversary of Srebrenica is an opportunity to remember the lessons we drew after the massacre, but seem to have forgotten since.

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