Aaron Berkowitz – General Assignment Reporter
What constitutes a dispute between multiple parties to be a war? Is it the mass murders that occur in the midst of trying to declare a victor? What if the killing only comes from one side?
Philosophy Professor and active genocide researcher, David Pettigrew would be one of the first to correct anyone who refers to the actions of the Bosnian Serb forces from 1992-1995 against the Bosniak, Bosnian Muslims, and Croatian civilians a war.
Pettigrew teaches a course this semester entitled Global Awareness class titled “An Introduction to Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Stories of Resistance, Rescue and Survival.”
According to an article posted on history.com, the Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for about 100,000 deaths of Bosniaks, (80% of their population) by 1995. Endgenocide.org compared the attack to that of the Nazi’s on the Jews during the Holocaust and the Hutu’s slaughter of almost one million Tutsis during the Civil War in Rwanda.
“At some point early in the genocide the press came with the term ‘ethnic cleansing,’”,said Pettigrew. “For the first year the Serbs had a strategy to attack civilian villages, terrorize people and drive them out. The idea was to create an ethnically homogeneous geographic entity called ‘Republica Srpska.’ [Serb Republic].”
In 2007, Pettigrew visited a secondary mass grave sight, the Budak village in Srebrenica Municipality. He said the exhumation team that he accompanied received 575 coffins last year, with bodies they uncovered from the genocide and 175 coffins this year when he returned. He explained the coffins arrive on July 9, to a warehouse as a part of the Potocari Memorial Center, then they are moved over to the cemetery the next day, and then on July 11, the annual commemorative burial ceremony for Srebenica genocide victims takes place.
“There were some family members of the deceased there as the coffins were being passed along into the warehouse,” said Pettigrew. “They would take the front of the coffin and come through the line. There was one guy coming through the line with a coffin and at the other end was an 11-year-old kid, he had to be the grandson I suppose. Seeing that broke my heart.”
“The kids that I know were lucky enough to get on the bus and avoid being executed,” said Pettigrew. “I heard stories of kids having to walk by a rifle and if they were taller than the rifle they were executed. One boy told me that he was lucky the Serbs were inebriated at the time and he was able to walk past the soldiers and he was able to hide in the back of the bus.”
Pettigrew said many of the Serbs deny that the genocide ever took place and describe the brutal massacring of men and children and the raping of women that took place in the nineties as a response to Bosniak actions prior. Meanwhile, Pettigrew also mentioned the Bosnian Serbs made the Bosniaks wear white armbands in order to identify them during the same time period.
“There were dangers but I wanted to tell the story and tell the truth,” said Pettigrew.
He recalled visiting multiple sites where 70 women and children were burned alive in June 1992, located in Visegrad and are known as “Bikavac” and “Pionirska Street House.”
The first finding of human remains at another one of the sites made it hard for him to breathe, but he realized the importance of what he was witnessing and said he needed to pull it together and keep finding out the truth so that he could share his experience with others.
“What motivated me was that the local population and leadership of the Republica Srpska denying the genocide ever took place. When something so catastrophic happens and people won’t admit that it happened, it just makes you want to tell the story more.”
Memorials for the victims were taken down and destroyed by local municipalities because they were not able to use the word genocide because they found it offensive, according to Pettigrew.
“They said they were going to destroy the memorial so I organized an international coalition to go and lay a wreath, draw attention to it in order to prevent it,” said Pettigrew. “It protected it temporarily, that was in July, but in January they went in act 6 a. m. with heavily armed police and a stone grinder and took the word ‘genocide’ off of the memorial.”
Pettigrew explained that a lot of people believe the Serbs side of the story but it is mainly propaganda. He mentioned that most of the leaders who were convicted of war crimes served 20-35 years because they don’t have a death penalty, but were welcomed home as heroes.
“It’s disgusting,” said Pettigrew. “I know that telling their story will make people more aware and more people need to be aware of exactly what happened.”
Photo Credit: Derek Torrellas