Thirty years on from Srebrenica
On 10 and 11 July 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers. The genocide took place in full view of the world, with ancient Islamophobic prejudices revived to serve exclusionary nationalist agendas and enact shameful violence. Three decades on, it is vital to learn the lessons of the past, writes Runnymede Trust CEO Shabna Begum.
The Srebrenica massacre was the culmination of a war that had involved a period of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ – the eviction and deportation of Muslims from their homes, their internment in concentration camps and the use of rape as a weapon of war.
But genocide is not an event; it is a well-rehearsed process. The lead up to the Bosnian war of the 1990s witnessed years of state-sponsored discrimination, persecution and dehumanisation that allowed Bosnian Muslim communities to be transformed from friends and neighbours to foes and foreigners.
The idea of Muslims being an ‘interior threat’ is a familiar Islamophobic trope. It has a long historical lineage in western European societies – including in the UK. In the years following the ‘war on terror’, it has been given added encouragement and activation through a raft of ‘counter-terrorism’ measures that have ushered in the hyper-surveillance and securitisation of Muslim communities. Policies such as Prevent have had devastating impacts, creating a situation where a child as young as four can be referred to a deradicalisation programme because his teacher heard him mispronounce cucumber as ‘cooker bomb’.
There has been well-evidenced criticism of these so-called ‘counter-terrorism’ efforts, which have enlisted and deputised teachers, healthcare workers and landlords into a surveillance system. But these policies are criticised not only for their racist and discriminatory impacts but also for the deep harm they inflict on our human rights architecture.
History teaches us that where we curtail and qualify human rights, we are following a map that leads to a dark place for everyone.
‘A call to action’
Muslims make up 6.5 per cent of the UK population, but in 2024 38 per cent of religious hate crimes were directed towards them. Last summer we had racist riots where Muslims were among those targeted, with mosques attacked and cemeteries desecrated. This, of course, does not even begin to trace the ways this hatred will have articulated itself through institutional forms of discrimination that we know exist in housing, the labour market and educational institutions.
Crucially, these developments cannot be divorced from the hate speech that is increasingly normalised in mainstream political and media spaces, where Muslims using the right to protest are smeared as ‘Islamist bullies’ or treated as sectarian pariahs when they cast their vote. This steady bile of hatred – as documented in our Islamophobia report in November 2024 – has intensified in recent years.
What happens on our streets through acts of individual violence has been enabled and encouraged by our political and media establishment – take Boris Johnson’s reference to Muslim women as ‘bank robbers’ and ‘letter boxes’ and the 375 per cent increase of attacks on Muslims over the following days. It is an act of grotesque displacement to witness this rising tide of hate and not acknowledge the activating role played by successive governments.
I am also alarmed by the despair and fatigue that has crept into conversations with colleagues in the civil society space. There is a sense that the rise of Reform and the steady creep of far-right politics is an inevitability. There is a shrug and tired sigh as conversations shift into political pragmatism mode.
Yet what I observe in those shifts is not political realism but premature surrender and ultimately defeat – and it terrifies me. Because that defeat is not one of theoretical point-scoring but an existential threat to Muslims and all communities of colour, migrants and people seeking asylum in the UK.
That is why the government’s recent commissioning of the Islamophobia working group is so important. This must be the point at which we stand back and observe the lessons of the past, recognise the moral disgrace and international failure of our role in Gaza, and signal a departure from this hideous trajectory of hate that can only descend into further violence.
It is a shame the working group has not attempted to engage widely enough with Muslim civil society organisations and that it has been a struggle to conform to the restrictive parameters of the call for evidence. But the Runnymede Trust has published a paper today on what we know the working group and the government must do to stem the tide of hate and come up with a definition of Islamophobia that can live up to the work that needs to be done.
Today, as we remember the genocide in Srebrenica, we must recognise that this is not a passive act of memorialisation but rather a call to action in the here and now.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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