Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and I congratulate him on his appointment. Creating an unbearable situation of total insecurity and no hope for the future was the aim of the self-declared President of the Bosnian Serb community in March 1995, a few months prior to the massacre. When the Bosnian Serbs took over Srebrenica on 11 July it was declared by the military leader that they would extract revenge on the Muslim community, and they did. Over 80 sites were used for the execution and burial of almost 8,000 members of the Muslim community. While there were 8,000 victims, there were 19,783 members of the Bosnian Serb community and Serbian nation involved in the massacre and only a handful of them were imprisoned. Very few people will see justice served upon them and very few will see justice for the thousands who were massacred. This, I suppose, is the tragic legacy of Srebrenica.

I commend Senators Feighan and Richmond on bringing forth this motion. In regard to the comments of the UN and EU on ensuring this does not happen again, the greatest insurance that it would never happen again is if those who perpetrated crimes that happened in Europe, within the reach of the EU, faced justice. The fact that merely a handful of those involved were imprisoned tells us, taking into account what is happening in Aleppo and in regard to other atrocities and crimes against humanity, that tragically those who carried out these crimes will not face justice. Worse than this, many of the 19,000 involved are high ranking officials who work in the public service. Where have we seen this before? We saw it in Germany in terms of the tens of thousands who served in the Auschwitz concentration camp and were officials and bureaucrats within the Nazi regime, who ended up working in the Government of East Germany, with the full knowledge of the allied powers and the German Government. The policy in Germany into the 1970s and 1980s was such that the German state turned a blind eye towards the actions of its own citizens against the Jews, minorities and other people, including Slavs, Serbians and the Muslims of Yugoslavia. The irony of this cannot be lost on us - that a democratic country like Germany would turn a blind eye to the actions of people who perpetrated horrendous crimes, genocide on an industrial scale. The Serbian Government, while recognising the mass killings would not recognise it, and barely passed that resolution in its own Parliament, not because it was sorry about the crimes but because not doing so would block its accession to the European Union.That was its only reason for barely passing that vote. That so many current government officials were actually involved in the genocide and crimes against humanity and that the EU does not wish to see them go to jail because it is not worth the bother is telling. As our great poet, Seamus Heaney, once said, history does not repeat itself as much as it rhymes. In his poem on Troy, he said that hope and history rhyme. Our only hope is that they will rhyme again. We have noted the lack of justice for the victims of the Holocaust, during which the Germans turned a blind eye to the actions of the perpetrators, and we now see a similar response regarding the 19,000 who were involved in the genocide in Srebrenica. It tells us about the reality of politics that, on the motion put down the foreign affairs committee to recognise the Armenian genocide, the Government and Fine Gael voted against it. Two million people died in the middle of the First World War, observed, ironically, by the Germans, who were allies of the Turks at the time and who used the events as the basis for their own operations in the Second World War. Despite this, Turkey, along with our own Government, continues to deny that what occurred was genocide. Two million people were wiped off the face of the earth. There have been no consequences for Turkey 100 years on. There is another example in Aleppo in Syria.

The only way we can ensure such events do not happen again is by bringing to justice those who commit the crimes and having them serve appropriate sentences. Time and again, unfortunately, it has been only the history that has been rhyming and not the hope that justice would be served for the people who suffered on the day in question. The UN and Dutch peacekeeping troops failed to fire one single shot to prevent the arrest and capture of the thousands of Muslim men, women and children who were led to their fate. There was a failure by the UN and Dutch peacekeeping forces, and also a failure by humanity itself.