After the hateful “Punish a Muslim” letters, we must learn from recent history: no society is immune from the consequences of dehumanising rhetoric.
Genocide does not happen overnight. It often takes years, indeed decades, of animosity and hatred before it manifests.
Gregory H. Stanton of Genocide Watch describes in detail the process of how casual racism and discrimination can lead to mass murder in his Ten Stages to Genocide model. The message is that this process is not particular to any country or culture: under the right conditions, it can happen anywhere.
I was reminded of this recently when I paid my respects at the Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery in Potočari, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Potočari is home to the site of remembrance for the 8,000 men and boys who were systematically murdered because of their Muslim faith in July 1995. This was the event now known as the Srebrenica Genocide.
Fifty years after the Holocaust, after we all said “never again”, came Srebrenica – another genocide in the heart of Europe. I travelled there as part of a delegation organised by the charity Remembering Srebrenica, to learn just how a modern society, like Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, could tear itself apart.
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