We must listen to the voices of those who feel abandoned

I visited Bosnia with an interfaith group of faith leaders and young people - Muslim, Hindu and Christian - on a trip organised by Birmingham City Council in conjunction with the charity Remembering Srebrenica. The aim was to learn about the genocide in Srebrenica and think about the lessons we might learn for living together here. We stayed in Sarajevo, which had been besieged 20 years ago by Serbian forces. Before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Sarajevo had been a vibrant modern city. Jews, Catholics and Orthodox Christians and Muslims; Serbs, Croats and Bosnians, had lived together, apparently peacefully. A mosque, a synagogue and a Catholic and Orthodox cathedral stood within 500 metres of each other. Somehow, despite this apparent harmony, people turned against each other in hatred.

We may say never again but horrors still happen

I kept thinking back to Berlin. There, too, people had apparently coexisted peacefully, but then hatred and murder broke out. The city, like Sarajevo, was destroyed. After the war, the process of rebuilding was not just about bricks and mortar, but much more importantly about rebuilding a society where people could once again coexist and even live in friendship. In Berlin in 1965, 20 years after the end of the war, the process was only just beginning, with a gradual acknowledgement of the past.

The parallels were clearer and more appalling the following day when we travelled to Potocari. There, more than 20,000 refugees fled from Srebrenica in the hope of United Nations protection. Only 5,000 were allowed to enter the UN base, 15,000 men meanwhile tried to flee to the safe area in Tuzla, 40 km away. Many of those were pursued relentlessly by the Serb troops, and murdered. Those who did not flee were rounded up and murdered too. The few hundred UN troops at the base could not or would not help them. The troops appealed for UN air support, but it was not forthcoming. The women and children who remained were expelled from the army base and eventually driven by the Serbs to the Muslim area after many had been brutally raped.

We met three of the women later. They continue to mourn their husbands and sons. Gradually, the remains of those murdered have been identified but sometimes there are no more than a few bone fragments to bury. The women are left on their own, scraping a living and bearing their grief. They felt, just as the Jewish people felt after the Holocaust, that the world had abandoned them.

Why have we failed to learn? Our history demands of us that we respond to the suffering of others. We are obligated to care for the stranger because we know the heart of the stranger. Our tradition demands that we cry out on behalf of the oppressed, just as the biblical prophets did, even at the risk of our lives. To do so takes courage, especially in the face of danger. Yet it can be done. There were Serbs who helped Bosnian neighbours, just as there were Germans, Poles and other non-Jews who helped the Jews during the Shoah. We still need to learn how to follow their example, how to give ourselves and our children that courage, to stand up for what is right. The history of genocides shows that we cannot let the smallest signs of prejudice go unchecked, for once we become inured to language that dehumanises others, we come to accept their marginalisation and gradually even violence against them. We have to be eternally vigilant. We cannot repair a society until we have learnt the lessons of the past and applied them to the future. We can perhaps never heal the wounds of those who mourn, but we can ease their burden by listening to their voices.