By Asghar Ali Mubarak
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Saturday said he feared a massacre similar to the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica could happen in Indian occupied Kashmir and urged the international community to take notice and prevent it from happening.
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the massacre, the premier said he still remembered when the genocide had taken place.
“We were shocked and appalled how this massacre was allowed to happen in a United Nations safe haven. I still feel shock [over] how such a thing could have been allowed by the world community.”
In 1995, at least 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys were chased through woods in and around Srebrenica by Serb troops in what is considered the worst carnage of civilians in Europe since World War II. The slaughter has been confirmed as an act of genocide.
Khan said it was important to learn lessons from the massacre and talked about apprehensions regarding occupied Kashmir. “We see problems for the people of Kashmir. 800,000 troops have besieged eight million people of Kashmir. We are afraid that such a thing might happen there as well.”
He urged the world community to take notice and never allow such massacres to happen again.
“From the people of Pakistan I send my salam and best wishes to the people of Bosnia,” the premier said.
Echoing remarks made by the prime minister, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that the world had a “collective responsibility to ensure that history is not repeated”.
In a tweet, Qureshi said that what was happening in occupied Kashmir and Palestine was “chillingly similar” to the 1995 massacre.
The Bosnian war, which started in 1992, pitted the country’s three main ethnic factions — Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims — against each other after the break-up of Yugoslavia. More than 100,000 people were killed in the conflict before a peace deal was brokered in 1995.
What took place in Srebrenica was a mark of shame for the international community as the town had been declared a UN “safe haven” for civilians in 1993. When Bosnian Serb forces broke through two years later, about 15,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys fled into the woods.
And twice as many terrified residents rushed to the UN compound in what was formerly an industrial zone at the entrance to town, in the hope that Dutch UN peacekeepers would protect them.
However, the outgunned peacekeepers watched helplessly as Serb troops took around 2,000 men and boys from the compound for execution while bussing the women and girls to Bosnian government-held territory.
Meanwhile, in the woods around Srebrenica, Serb soldiers hunted the fleeing Bosniaks, as Bosnian Muslims are otherwise known, killing them one by one.
The killers sought to hide evidence of the genocide, piling most of the bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they subsequently dug up with bulldozers and scattered the bodies across numerous burial sites.
In the years since, bodies have been unearthed and the victims identified through DNA testing. About 1,000 victims remain to be found.
A special UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serbs, including their top civilian war-time leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, to more than 700 years in prison for Srebrenica crimes.
Prime Minister Imran Khan Saturday while recounting his “shocked” and “appalled” memories of Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims 25 years ago, urged the world community to take notice and forestall the recurrence of such genocide in the Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK).
“I remember the day very well. I remember when it happened. We were all shocked. Even when I still remember 25 years ago when it happened, I still feel the shock as to how such a thing could have been allowed by the world community,” the prime minister said in his televised message to the nation and the world community on the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.
More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed after the Bosnian Serb Army attacked Srebrenica, a designated UN safe area, on July 10-11, 1995, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers.
In addition to the killings, more than 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area.
The massacre is termed the worst episode of mass murder within Europe since World War II.
The prime minister said everyone with a feeling of humanity had been “shocked” and “appalled” as to how such a massacre could happen in the safe area of the UN peacekeeping troops.
He urged the world community to learn a lesson from the tragedy and must never allow such things to happen again, referring to the problems in the IOJK where, he said, 800,000 Indian troops had besieged eight million Kashmiri people.
“And we all fear that similar sort of massacre might follow there. The world community must take notice and never allow such acts to take place again,” the prime minister emphasised.
He also conveyed his greetings and best wishes to the people of Bosnia, from the people of Pakistan.
