The Foundry Theatre

Dialogues

A Roundtable on Bosnia

 

United Nations peacekeeping officials were unwilling to heed requests for support from their own forces stationed within the enclave, thus allowing Bosnian Serb forces to easily overrun it and — without interference from U.N. soldiers — to carry out systematic, mass executions of hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilian men and boys and to terrorize, rape, beat, execute, rob and otherwise abuse civilians being deported from the area.”  Human Rights Watch, October, 1995

We knew this was happening – it was being reported every day in the news worldwide.  Regardless of the Swiftian argument as to whether it was to be ‘recognized’ as ‘genocide,’ in Srebrenica, for ten days in July last year, Serbs were exterminating mass numbers of Muslim men and boys.  How do we co-exist with this knowledge?
For The Foundry’s first Dialogue, we invited five people involved variously with the situation in Bosnia, to help us better understand what was going on, what wasn’t and what needs to be now.  We used three contemporaneous news articles as a means to parse how the situation was being reported and what else we ought to know.  

Speakers
Karmen Jelincik
Mandy Jacobson
Scott Johnson
Paula Gordon
Eileen Weiss

 

March 17, 1996:  At the loft of a friend of The Foundry

 

Guest Speakers

Karmen Jelincik & Mandy Jacobson, Filmmakers
Currently making a full-length documentary (Calling The Ghosts) about rape, war and women in Bosnia-Herzogovinia

Scott Johnson, SUNY Buffalo School of Law Human Rights Center
Currently working with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as the first step towards building a permanent international criminal court of justice (ICC)

Paula Gordon, Production Manager, The Wooster Group
Has been back & forth to Bosnia several times (shortly to move there permanently)

Eileen Weiss, Jews Against Genocide/NY Committee to Save Bosnia
Current campaign to urge Clinton to lift the US arms embargo against Bosnia (that he vetoed in Aug ’95)
 

The Articles

NY Times Mar/95
“The report [CIA report on Bosnia leaked to the press] makes nonsense of the view — now consistently put forward by Western European governments and intermittently by the Clinton administration — that the Bosnian conflict is a civil war for which guilt should be divided between Serbs, Croats and Muslims.”

 

NY Times Apr/95
“The siege of Sarejevo continues.  Serbian guns have destroyed the city’s most prominent buildings.  The Serbs hold 70% of Bosnia, and have ‘cleansed’ that territory of its non-Serbian inhabitants.  And the world has done nothing — nothing effective’ — to stop them… The world’s political leaders and diplomats still talk, but they hardly seem to care.  Even the informed Western public’s attention has drifted away.”

 

Human Rights Watch
10/95
“The fall of the town of Srebrenica and its environs to Bosnian Serb forces in early July 1995 made a mockery of the international community’s professed commitment to safeguard regions it declared to be “safe areas,” and placed under United Nations protection in 1993″
Serbian guns have destroyed the city’s most prominent buildings. The Serbs hold 70% of Bosnia, and have ‘cleansed’ that territory of its non-Serbian inhabitants.
And the world has done nothing — nothing effective’ — to stop them… The world’s political leaders and diplomats still talk, but they hardly seem to care.  Even the informed Western public’s attention has drifted away.”