Beyond Reasonable Doubt; the Srebrenica massacre

Yesterday I posted a blog about a film which dealt with the Chechnyan-Russian war. I saw this movie, together with fifteen other movies as I was one of the five jurymembers of the Rudolf Vrba Award at the Prague Filmfestival in 2006.

The festival was extremely well organized; in the heart of Prague we went from one ancient movietheater to another and saw the most amazing museums of the Eastern European continent. Prague was of course FABULOUS! I had my daily coffee at the Slavia Grand-cafe, a meeting place of artists and intellectuals; where the most famous writers, poets and politicians (including Vaclav Havel) had their debates and discussions but also where they smoked cigarettes and pipes while reading the newspapers.

It was a very intense week. And after this week I decided for my own that it's nice to be asked to become a jurymember, but seeing sixteen movies about human rights violations in four days; discussing and judging them, is highly INTENSE. One of the movies which disturbed me very much, they even had to stop the film because I couldn't take it anymore, was Beyond Reasonable Doubts
about the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's humanly unworthy to see young men being deported in trucks while they pee in their pants being shot in the back (These images are really shown in this film, so, don't say I did not warn you!).

As tv-news producer of one of the leading news organizations, 2Vandaag, we had hundreds of stories about this topic; every single day when it all happened in 1995. As we all know, Srebrenica was under the protection of Dutch soldiers; Well, it became a black page in Dutch history. As newspeople we saw the ugliest images of war.

Today, the 31st of March, the Serbian parliament passed a landmark resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, I wanted to tell you about this movie. It's not only a black page in Dutch history, it's a black page in everybody's history.

Here is what the film is about:

Post–war Europe made the promise to never again allow one nation or race or any one group of people to attempt to systematically wipe out another. Yet what happened in Yugoslavia was genocide, executed moreover with the United Nations looking on. The author of this documentary film, Mina Vidakovič, returns to the massacre at Srebrenica and records the testimony of those who survived the ordeal. Direct testimony from those who witnessed the Srebrenica massacre right where it happened, is the best evidence against those who committed the crime. General Ratko Mladič or Slobodan Miloševič, who were behind most the war crimes that took place during the work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are filmed in edited confrontation with the remaining inhabitants of Srebrenica. The director moreover works with video recordings made by members of the military units involved in the massacre. They capture the transport of inhabitants of Srebrenica under the false pretences of fears for their safety, the separation of the men capable of military service from the rest of the inhabitants, and the various methods of the mass murder and concealing the graves. Not all the bodies have been found to date, and that is why it is not even known exactly how many victims there were, which is important in determining the punishment for those convicted. The first minutes of Beyond Reasonable Doubt focuses on the preparation of the Nuremberg laws, followed by the construction of concentration camps, the existence of which some people despite all the evidence continue to doubt. The film by Mina Vidakovič helps refresh Europe's historical memory, so that it does not allow itself to forget any of the genocides of the 20th century.

In remembrance of all that died in this and all other wars..

Sincerely,

Senay Ozdemir