Country: Bosnia
Director: Jasmila Žbanić
Time: 1 hour and 44 minutes
Available: Amazon ($3.99 to rent) and GooglePlay ($3.99 to rent)
What It Elicits: Musings on complicity, family survival, war
On 11 July 1995, after five days of heavy shelling, Ratko Mladić led his Bosnian Serb forces into the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica, a cameraman in tow to film the town’s “liberation” and Mladić’s occasional comments denigrating “the Turks” (i.e. Bosnian Muslims) who made up a majority of the area’s inhabitants. As the town fell, 25,000 or so (food-starved) Bosniaks sought refuge in and around a UN base, operated by Dutch peacekeepers. On 12 July, after negotiating the “safe” transfer of civilians clustered both outside and inside the base with UN forces, Mladić’s soldiers separated men from the crowd—those inside the compound were literally handed over by the UN—and began to massacre them hundreds of yards from the UN base. Exactly how much UN peacekeepers understood remains a matter of some debate, but subsequent witness testimony has revealed a bare minimum of grotesque negligence, if not outright willful ignorance, concerning the unfolding slaughter. In total, over 8,000 male victims have since been identified. Srebrenica, alongside the Rwandan genocide (where once again UN peacekeepers, this time Belgian, had been present), informed a view of global politics in the 1990s which excoriated the paralysis of the world’s most powerful nations in the face of targeted killing and condemned UN Blue Helmet rules of engagement and military incapacity. The lessons drawn from both events encouraged quick and decisive humanitarian responses, leading to an (occasionally more) muscular US foreign policy personified most famously by the diplomatic prowess of Richard Holbrooke, backed by NATO air power. In the United States, the necessity of humanitarian intervention, of not standing and watching, became the clarion call of young journalists like Samantha Power and grizzled cultural behemoths like Susan Sontag (who visited Sarajevo under siege and directed Waiting For Godot in the city). Summing up views on how best to undermine support for Serbian President Slobodan Milošević’s Kosovo-based violence in 1998, US Lieutenant General Michael Short succinctly offered up an encapsulation of the period’s predominant thinking, “If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years [because of NATO bombing], I think you begin to ask, ‘Hey Slobo, what’s all this about?’...And at some point, you make the transition from applauding Serb machismo to thinking about what your country is going to look like if this continues.”
The post-9/11 world has been less kind to those views of muscular humanitarian militarism, a skepticism borne of clear US malfeasance and ineptitude in Afghanistan and Iraq (each at least partially justified on humanitarian grounds), the intractability of a series of global conflicts each more complicated and multifaceted than the next, and the political fallout engendered by displaced populations leaving intervention-scarred conflict zones. Declarations underlining the moral necessity of action have transformed into questions over the extent to which deep-rooted political fissures leading to violence can be solved by external engagement. This shift emerged the central theme of Samantha Power’s 2019 memoir Education of an Idealist and her writing, perhaps more than that of any other figure in the policy space, has engaged with these vicissitudes, regardless of whether one thinks she has it right. For if Srebrenica emerged a powerful moral symbol precisely because the distinction between assailant and victim remained so stark, Libya (to take but one example) does not lend itself so easily to Manichean bifurcation. Enter Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, fundamentally a movie intent upon educating its audience. It’s final scene depicts our central character, a Bosnian translator working at the UN’s Srebrenica base who has spent most of the film witnessing UN incapacity and callousness while simultaneously trying to shepherd her husband and two adult sons to safety, returning to her old job as a school teacher of young children after the war has ended. As a film Quo Vadis, Aida? remains less interested in individual Bosnians and more engaged with institutional failures—the central character’s job functioning as the perfect vehicle for us to follow ongoing negotiations and view unfurling events as participant-observer. (The movie, appropriately, follows almost exactly the July 11-12 timeline.) Because Srebrenica was so well documented, in part by Mladić himself, and because Serbian state intransigence meant Mladić did not stand trial at the ICC until 2011, it makes sense to approach this film less from the perspective of commemoration (since the event has elicited, appropriately, much commentary and coverage over time), and instead to grapple with the thorny implications of the institutional failures which led to Srebrenica itself—implications which the film asks us to consider through its focus on the United Nations peacekeepers on the ground. The movie does not offer a novel historical interpretation or a new angle through which to approach UN failure, instead it reminds us of a story easily shoved aside by more recent acts of mass killing in alternate geographies. It asks us to wrestle with the responsibility of standing by as violence unfolds and asks us to witness an ineptitude and paralysis whose outcome we already know. Given recent events from Libya to Syria to Myanmar to Xinjiang to Tigray to Yemen, the question becomes what lessons do we take and apply to a world where the answers feel far less obvious than they once did.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Milcho Manchevski — Before the Rain (1994)
Danis Tanović — No Man’s Land (2001)