Srebrenica Genocide (20th Anniversary)

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope.

Every time the story of the terrible events in Srebrenica 20 years ago is told, it is as shocking as it was when the truth was first revealed. As we have heard today, what happened in that small mountain town in the Balkans stands apart as one of the darkest chapters in European history. It is the story of thousands of families who believed that they were in a place of safety and shelter, but who were brutally and systematically put to slaughter. It is the story of how more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men lost their lives and of how rape was inflicted on countless women and young girls as a weapon of war. It is the story of how an entire community were stripped first of their dignity and then of their humanity, just because of the names that they were born with. The crime was described by the United Nations as

“the worst committed on European soil since the Second World War”.

Many of the details of what the victims experienced are simply too harrowing to put into words. That is why it is so important that we mark this anniversary.

I therefore congratulate the hon. and gallant Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) on securing this important debate. He spoke with all the passion and expertise we would expect from someone who served as he did with great distinction in Bosnia. I take this opportunity to thank him for the great service he has done for this House in bringing us together to mark this terrible tragedy. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), and the hon. Members for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), for East Lothian (George Kerevan) and for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) for their excellent contributions to the debate.

What the hon. Member for Beckenham said had particular resonance for me. As a young officer in the British Army, one of my first deployments was to Kosovo during the conflict that took place there in 1999. Although we were several hundred miles away, we could still feel the legacy of what happened at Srebrenica. Forces loyal to Slobodan Miloševic were on the march, again seeking to cleanse towns and villages. I saw at first hand how division and hatred can tear a country apart, ripping apart families and destroying people’s lives. I remember discovering the scene of massacres and the piles of people’s personal possessions. Those memories will never leave me.

We must never allow the terrible crimes of Srebrenica to be forgotten. It was genocide, as has been declared by both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and it is important that we use that word. As we mark two decades since those atrocities, I offer three brief reflections.

The first is that justice must always be done, no matter how long it takes. The perpetrators of those terrible acts must be brought to justice. The international community, including the UK, has made an important contribution to that, through both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Bosnia and Herzegovina state court. Twenty senior Bosnian Serb leaders have been indicted over the past two decades and both Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic are now on trial in The Hague. A further seven people accused of taking part in the massacre were arrested by the Serbian authorities as recently as March this year.

It is right that Britain has provided support to the state prosecutor’s office to help ensure that those guilty of war crimes do not go unpunished. We must continue to stand in solidarity beside Bosnia and Herzegovina and provide what support we can. I would therefore be grateful if the Minister updated the House on the latest efforts that are being made to that end.

Does the Minister agree that we need to extend every possible support to the families who lost loved ones at Srebrenica whose fate is still unknown—a point rightly raised by the hon. Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham)? Many of the bodies of those who lost their lives in those July days have never been recovered, and too many families are still looking for the remains of their loved ones so that they can give them a proper burial. As well as the 8,372 who perished, more than 15,000 men fled across the mountains to Tuzla to try to escape the slaughter. Many of them would never make it. Some were ambushed; others, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, were tricked by forces wearing stolen UN uniforms to lull them into a false sense of security. The locations of many of the mass graves that they were buried in are still undisclosed. That must be resolved as a step towards broader reconciliation.

Secondly, we must make every possible effort as an international community to ensure that such appalling events are never repeated. It is easy to say, “Never again”; the hard part is ensuring that our words are matched with deeds, as the hon. Member for Strangford said. There is a particular responsibility on us, Great Britain, to play our part in living up to that, as a leading member of the United Nations. As the hon. Member for Beckenham said, history has long accepted that failings by the UN contributed to what happened at Srebrenica. Those included delays in providing support to a UN peacekeeping force that was ill-equipped and ill-prepared. As Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General, wrote in 1999:

“Through error, misjudgement and an inability to recognise the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.”

The blame for what happened in Bosnia will always rest with the people who carried out those hateful and heinous crimes, but those who stood by or did not act readily enough also have a burden to carry. Our duty today is to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. We must work together to ensure that the international community has both the will and the capacity to act in response to cases of genocide or crimes against humanity. That approach is enshrined in the UN’s responsibility to protect, but in recent years cases such as Darfur and Syria have reminded us that there has not always been willingness to act. Does the Minister therefore agree that, as we mark 70 years since the signing of UN charter, we must ensure that our actions continue to live up to its founding values, to protect

“the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”?

I welcome the Government’s role in drafting a resolution at the UN to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. That decision was not without controversy; indeed, some Serbian leaders have called for the resolution to be dropped. If anything, the tensions over the resolution remind us of the challenge that remains in healing the wounds of the past.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hywel Williams in the Chair]

[Dan Jarvis]

Before the Division, I was welcoming the role that the Government have played in drafting a resolution at the UN to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. I would be grateful if the Minister could update the House on what progress is being made on agreeing the text of a UN resolution on Srebrenica and what efforts the Government are making to ensure that it commemorates the anniversary in a suitable and respectful way.

Let me raise a separate but related point. The Minister will be aware that the French Government and others have floated the idea of permanent members of the Security Council suspending the use of the veto in cases of genocide. That was not the issue at Srebrenica, but it does have relevance for preventing any future atrocities like it, so I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm what the British Government’s attitude is to that proposal.

Thirdly and finally, we must continue to bear witness to what happened at Srebrenica. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the countless charities and organisations working to ensure that the lessons of genocide are passed on and never forgotten: Remembering Srebrenica, the Fund for Refugees in Slovenia, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Holocaust Educational Trust and many others.

I also welcome the fact that the UK has contributed funds to the memorial complex near Srebrenica. Nothing will make up for the horrors of the past, but the first step we can take to ensure that they are never repeated is to ensure that future generations know what happened in Bosnia in 1995. They need to know that genocide is not just something that happened many years ago at the end of the second world war. It can happen today, and it could happen in the future if we let down our guard.

I end with this reflection. It is particularly appropriate that we are holding this debate today, a decade on from the terrorist attacks of 7/7. In preparing for it, I reflected on an event that I attended in Parliament last week at which I was honoured to meet survivors of the holocaust. Of course, our country is still recovering from the painful blow inflicted on a beach in Tunisia just 11 days ago. Whether we are reflecting on what happened 70 years ago in Auschwitz, 20 years ago in Srebrenica, 10 years ago on 7/7 or two weeks ago in Tunisia, those events are all bound together by the same thing—hatred, extremism and contempt for human life. Above all, that is what we must overcome if we are to ensure that our world is never again darkened by such atrocities. We need to educate all our young people about the importance of tolerance, respect and always challenging racism, discrimination and hatred. If this anniversary reminds us of nothing else, let it remind us of that. That would be the best tribute that we could possibly pay.