In July 1995, Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell to the Bosnian Serb Army. The 11-day rampage of violence that descended on the town has come to be infamous throughout the world as the single largest act of depravity and barbarism seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Men, women and children were rounded up, starved, abused, raped and murdered by the thousands, their bodies left to fester in mass graves located close to where they fell. Their crime was not espionage or allegiance to a foreign government. They were not soldiers or saboteurs. They were civilians singled out "solely on the basis of their identity."
If you substituted the year, location and perpetrators with 2014, Syria and the Islamic State, the story would read much the same. However, knowing who the perpetrators and victims are is extremely important for our understanding of the role of circumstance, rather than religion, in crimes against humanity.
The massacre at Srebrenica is important for several reasons, especially in light of recent events. Despite the similarities with the atrocities committed by the IS, the massacres at Srebrenica and, in fact, throughout the Bosnian War, were committed by Christians against Muslims. All told, over 8,000 Muslims were murdered by the Serbs at Srebrenica, and many others died in massacres during the war.
What this act tells us is twofold. It first dispels the myth that any religion is inherently and totally peaceful. Second, it informs us that the combination of ethnic and religious strife coupled with an iconoclastic ideology is a more complete recipe for violence and hate than just religion alone. To understand how complex these acts of hate can be, one must understand the background of the Bosnian genocide.
The area comprising what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina has been a traditional battleground between Christianity and Islam. While the racial background of the area has remained unchanged, the religious background has changed frequently. As such, religion developed into its own ethnicity within Bosnia and Herzegovina. By the outbreak of war in 1992, Bosniaks (Muslims) made up the majority of the country, while Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians) and Bosnian Croats (Catholics) made up significant minorities.
Through the years, tensions between ethnic groups in Yugoslavia had only been held together by the remaining power of the dictator Josip Tito; however, after his death and the decline of Yugoslavia, ethnic nationalism was encouraged by those seeking to carve positions of power in the post-Yugoslavian Balkans. One of the most prominent of these groups was the Serbs.
The Serbs of Yugoslavia had been the most powerful ethnic group in the country, with control over much of the government and military. During the decline of Yugoslavia, many Serbs in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina subscribed to theultranationalistic teachings of Slobodan Milosevic, later president of an independent Serbia. Milosevic and his followers sought to create an ethnically homogeneous “greater Serbia.” Unfortunately for the Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this “greater Serbia” included much of the land they lived on. As a result, when the conflict broke out in 1992, a Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide along religious lines was almost assured.
In much the same way, the IS’s atrocities against fellow Muslims, as well as Christians, Yazidis and others, have been done along ethnic and religious fault lines that have been present for centuries. These fault lines have influenced various religious ideologies (such as Wahhabism) that have been used as justifications for horrendous acts of violence, just as Serbian ultranationalism had been influenced by centuries of conflict.
With an understanding of what went wrong in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its similarities to the current Middle Eastern situation, it becomes clear that religion alone is often not the catalyst for violence. If it was, one would expect Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, to be an absolute hellhole. Blaming religion for a far more complex issue not only is a cop out, but also fails to address the other causes of violence could lead to a lack of a comprehensive solution.