Shameful economy of outrage

You probably don't remember Mirsad Alispahic or Hajrudin Mesanovic or Hamed Omerovic or Azem Mujic or Ismet Ahmetovic. It is, after all, more than six years since July 13th 1995, when Mirsad and Hajrudin were murdered just outside the village of Nezuk. Hamed, Azem and Izmet met the same fate on the banks of the Jadar River.

I know their names only because they were among the first. After that, as the bodies piled up, the victims became, for all but their families and friends, anonymous.

Six years ago, in the heart of Europe, about 8,000 men and boys were murdered in a small place over a period of 10 days. They had been captured by the Bosnian Serb army as they were trying to escape from the enclave of Srebrenica on the border between Serbia and Bosnia. The enclave, which had been declared a "safe area" under United Nations protection in April 1993, was taken by the Serbs on July 11th 1995.

At first the killings were sporadic, with men, women and children being beaten, stoned and stabbed to death. Soon, the massacre became systematic. The men and boys aged 13 and upwards were separated from the women.

Near the village of Meces, 150 Bosnian Muslim men were forced to dig their own graves and then executed. By the next day, the army had brought in excavators to dig the graves, making the process more efficient.

Special assembly points for prisoners were established, among them a hangar in Bratunac; soccer fields in Kasaba, Konjevic Polje, Kravica and Vlasenica; a meadow behind the bus station in Sandici and other fields and meadows along the Bratunac - Milici road. Here, the mass executions were conducted with greater despatch.

For those whose job it was to deal with the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacres, they had a deeply disturbing effect. The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia spoke of "scenes of unimaginable savagery: thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson. These are truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history."

Yet, for the world in general, Srebrenica hell was not a seminal event. Normal TV programmes were not suspended to allow for 24-hour coverage of the story. Sporting fixtures were not cancelled. We did not declare a National Day of Mourning.

Newspapers like the Sunday Independent did not devote their front pages to calls for "horrific" revenge, using the word not with a shudder but a thrill of anticipation.

The international community, which had assumed direct responsibility for the safety of the people of Srebrenica, did not declare war on the perpetrators. Indeed, the perpetrators were subsequently rewarded by being allowed to keep Srebrenica, previously a largely Muslim city, as part of Bosnian Serb territory.

One senior figure, the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Kristic has been tried and sentenced for his role in the massacres. But the two men indicted as having "direct responsibility for the atrocities", Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic, remain at large and efforts to bring them to justice have been minimal.

Why is the quality of our response to the atrocities in the US last week so utterly different? The answer does not lie in the simple mathematics of scale and distance. Srebrenica is physically nearer to us than New York. The number of innocent civilians killed in Srebrenica is probably somewhat larger. The sudden, concentrated time-scale of the murders in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania can be matched in any calibration of evil by the deliberate, intimate viciousness of killing 8,000 people one by one.

The only honest answer is that we practice an economy of outrage, giving spoonfuls to some and oceans to others. We have some internal criterion for deciding who deserves what. It tells us that the victims of cold-blooded atrocity in the US are people like us and the victims of cold-blooded atrocity in Bosnia are not.

And if a Muslim friend were to put it to me that the main difference is that in Srebrenica, Muslims were the victims and in the US they were the perpetrators, I would be stuck for an answer.

I could mutter something about having lived in New York and having dozens of friends and colleagues there, and it would have some validity. But it would still be a pretty shameful admission: compassion that depends on some kind of surface familiarity doesn't have much moral force.

I do not raise the issue of Srebrenica as an excuse for what-aboutery or to diminish the moral and historical significance of last week's events. On the contrary, the appalling failure of the international community to protect Srebrenica or to punish those who made it a living hell is the strongest possible example of the moral decrepitude that results from an unwillingness to stand up to bloodthirsty fanatics.

But what the relative indifference to Srebrenica does warn us of is the immense danger we now face of adopting an implicit code in which some innocent lives are worth more than others. The murder of Americans is not more horrible than the murder of Bosnians.

"Horrific" attacks on Muslim civilians are no more justifiable than horrific attacks on Christians. One of the few good developments of the last 50 years - the notion that human rights are universal - will be utterly compromised if the International response to last week's events does not respect those basic truths.

fotoole@irish-times.ie