Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

When we know of past atrocities we have a duty to recall them and to remind the world of them and their implications. If we let historical crimes slip into the stream of forgetfulness, then not only do we fail the victims and their descendants but we also fail future generations by diminishing their opportunity to learn from the past.

In July 1995 in Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosnian Serb forces, led by Ratko Mladic, committed horrendous acts against Bosnian Muslims, including murder, rape, cruel and inhumane treatment, terrorising of civilians and destruction of property—acts for which the dreadful term 'ethnic cleansing' was coined. What happened in Srebrenica and its surrounds have been formally recognised as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and by the International Court of Justice.

On 12 July I represented the opposition leader and Australia—and I thank the Minister for Foreign Affairs for the diplomatic note—at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Former President Clinton and numerous European heads of government were also present at the commemoration inside the dreadful brick factory where many of the 8,000 innocent Bosnian men and boys were murdered by the invading army.

Between 6 and 11 July 1995, units of the Bosnian Serb army attacked and captured Srebrenica. This was despite a UN Security Council resolution declaring that the enclave was to be 'free from armed attack or any other hostile act' and despite the presence of a UN force comprising a Dutch battalion. Within a few days nearly 30,000 Bosnian Muslims, most of them women, children and the elderly, were uprooted and, in an atmosphere of terror, loaded onto overcrowded buses by the Bosnian Serb forces and transported to Bosnian Muslim-held territory. The Bosnian Muslim males, however, met a different fate. As thousands of them attempted to flee, they were taken prisoner, detained in brutal conditions and then executed. More than 8,000 were never seen again.

At the international criminal tribunal, in the judgment against Radoslav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb commander in Srebrenica, this was part of the testimony:

As evening fell, the terror deepened. Screams, gunshots and other frightening noises were audible throughout the night and no one could sleep. Soldiers were picking people out of the crowd and taking them away: some returned; others did not. Witnesses recounted how three brothers—one merely a child and the others in their teens—were taken out in the night. When the boys' mother went looking for them, she found them with their throats slit.

On the 20th anniversary of the commemoration in the brick factory, I heard the Deputy Secretary-General of the UN, Jan Eliasson, representing the Secretary-General, say:

Let me be clear. The United Nations and the international community failed to protect the people of Srebrenica. This will, and should, haunt us forever. It has fundamentally affected us and is, in many ways, altering our work.

When the UN Security Council tried to adopt a resolution recently to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, it was vetoed by the Russian Federation at the request of Serbia, because the draft resolution had said:

… acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation.

To its credit, however, in 2010 the Serbian parliament condemned the massacre, and three years later the Serbian President, Tomislav Nikolic, made a personal apology. But Serbia's leaders, including its Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vucic, have refused to acknowledge that the massacre was genocide.

All people who care about the prevention of human suffering and the triumph of evil in this world bear a responsibility to remember the terrible events that took place at Srebrenica in July 1995. We need to gird ourselves and have the courage to do what we can to prevent similar tragedies happening again. But to do the latter we need to understand what happened in the past, why it happened and to tell the story, because the perpetrators of evil rely on us forgetting history in order for them to be able to repeat it.

In 1939 an evil man—secretly, he thought—incited his minions at Obersalzberg and urged a war of genocide. He said in secret testimony to those minions, 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' This is the lesson of history. My presence at Srebrenica was a powerful message that Australia remembers those lessons of history, that Australia remembers those genocides and that we are determined, as an important, free, democratic, strong and wealthy country in this world to make sure that those kinds of events do not happen anywhere else in the world as far as it is in the power of this great country to achieve that.

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