Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The horror of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 is totally unspeakable. Some 8,000 people were murdered. There were mass graves. Some 440 children were among the dead who have been identified, while more than 1,000 of the victims still have not been identified. It is an absolutely horrific moment in European history. It is right that we should commemorate it and learn the lessons in order that such things are not repeated. However, if we are not to repeat those horrors, it is very important that we are honest in our appraisal of what happened and how we failed. Otherwise we risk repeating the mistakes of the past. I would say that this is exactly what we are doing.

There is no question about the culpability of Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic. There is no question that they were rotten, racist nationalists who stirred people up to the most foul actions. However, we are being one-sided if that is all we say. Let me read the following account from 1995:

Evidence of atrocities; an average of six corpses per day continues to emerge ... [T]he corpses; some fresh, some decomposed, are mainly of old men. Many have been shot in the back of the head or had throats slit, others have been mutilated. Isolated pockets of elderly civilians report people recently gone missing or detained [...] Endless [...] invitations for [people - I will tell Members who they were in a moment] to return, guarantees of citizens' rights and property rights etc., have gushed forth from all levels.

This is an account from a European Union report cited by Robert Fisk describing the ethnic cleansing of Krajina Serbs after Srebrenica. This was effectively condoned by the western powers and the NATO bombing, which intervened on one side of the conflict and essentially allowed the Croats, led by an equally rotten racist who was also, in the case of Franjo Tudjman, a fascist sympathiser. We said very little about his politics at the time because it suited the interests of the West. Indeed the Vance-Owen plan encouraged ethnic cleansing in that it mapped out in advance of all this the ethnic partition of the former Yugoslavia and encouraged the worst, most right-wing nationalist and racist elements on all sides. The consequences were disastrous for ordinary Croats and Muslims and many Serbs as well.

The reason it is important to balance what we are saying tonight and to acknowledge the culpability of the western powers is that a selective approach to horror, war and obscenity continues today. Rightly we condemn the Assad regime for its brutal suppression, with Russian support, of its own people. However, we remain silent when it is western allies that are encouraging similar obscenities and atrocities. We fail to speak up about how, for example, Israel, al-Qaeda and Turkey are manipulating the situation in Syria and are even threatening the safety of our troops in the buffer zone in the Golan Heights. We do not speak loudly about how Britain, the United States and France arm Saudi Arabia which in turn arms ISIS. These forces manipulate the situation, leading to the sort of horrific atrocities that we are seeing for ordinary people across Syria. When those refugees then seek to come to Europe, we allow 14,000 of them to drown in the Mediterranean - men, women and children. We deny them entry into the European Union or we lock them up in direct provision centres and treat them as subhuman.

In remembering Srebrenica, we have to remember those lessons and end the hypocrisy, double standards and cynical manipulations that allowed those horrors to take place in the first place.

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