February 16, 21 years after the independence of Bosnia in the bloody genocide where Chetnik Serbs slaughtered women, men, and children for the sake of the “Greater Serbia,” the first Bosnian was registered as a Bosnian.
The number of tweets about this: not enough to make it trending or show up.
Number of Facebook posts on my stream: Two, including one of my own.
Demonstrations and movements made about it: Zero.
Amount of Posts by CAIR or MPAC: Zip. Nada. Goose Eggs.
Yes, that’s right. For 21 years, “Bosnians” didn’t exist legally. Bosnians were the “Other” on the paperwork- the non-Croatian, non-Bosnjak, non-Serb. The “Other”– not important enough to have the identity placed on legal papers or even acknowledged as a separate political group with today’s references to it as “Former Yugoslavia” or “Serbo-Croatian”. In fact, the classes teaching “Bosnian” here at UCLA don’t refer to it as “Bosnian”– it’s the “Serbo-Croatian” language of unidentified people. References of war? The online description of the syllabi goes as far to read material of the “damage done to Serbian theatres” to show how “devastating” the event was.
So the purpose of this article will be to, quite frankly, streamline of why it stinks to be a Bosnian in a Western Muslim community. For the past few years, Bosnians have been slapped with the repercussions of genocide in the face of media, politics, and yes, many Muslim American communities who have demonstrated showed selective attention to which Muslim group problems to focus on. It is hopefully apparent how the ignoring of Bosnian political events, women’s rape, and ISIS recruitment, and existing as a minority within a minority community makes me angry.
This is the 20th year anniversary of Srebrenica, the day in which more than 8,000 (only reported) were slaughtered mercilessly, men forcibly led to the forest, screamed at to dig their graves, and shot until inevitable death. And, mind you, it wasn’t a quick shot, body falls, and dead. These are the elaborated executions in which members dug their own grades, stood upon other fallen bodies, and waited for Serbian officials to shoot the arms, the legs, the limbs, until finally one would either die from bleeding or the bullet would accidentally make its way into a fatal spot. Where are the cries for the Bosnian women who reside in the USA trying to just now, 20 years after it happened, tell the stories of who their rapists were? This year, leaders from the USA, France, Turkey, and many others will join together to bury the dead in Srebrenica where bodies each year are found in layers under the earth. We still count our dead and still search the bottom of rivers for the remains of our neighbours and family members, hoping that someone will have the mercy to tell of our story so that genocide may never happen again..
I can tell you, from my own experience, it’s not that they’re silent. They’ve been silenced by the government stance on the genocide, by the Muslim community who doesn’t care enough to bring awareness, by the universities and government forms that label us as “Serbo-Croatians”, and by many feminist groups who don’t attempt to help/open conversation because of the “white” issue. Where are the advocates to retell the story of people, like my father, who were blinded trying to protect his country, barb-wired and cut-off from food and supplies? The campaigns, the protests, the boycott? And why is it that I have to force people to listen, often being pointed at as “that white Bosnian chick”. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. as of 2014, the Serbian Institute defines of the Bosnian Genocide as a war, rather than an outright ethnic cleansing and praises the leaders of the Serbian political parties as attempting to “solve ethnic issues”.
While Serbian nationalists cracked jokes about Bosnian women last August being raped on public news stations and winking, “At least we know the Serbs got something done down there!”, not a single damn has been given to talk about the issues in Bosnia. The poverty, low economic status, and high rate of unemployment among Bosnian youth seem rather irrelevant in today’s Western Muslim society.
On top of that, add in the ways in which ISIS has been able to successfully recruit over hundreds of Bosnian women and men to leave for Syria in desperate attempts to find some community. Interestingly, psychologist Mia Bloom in her analysis notes that many of these members often join ISIS in search of acceptance as both Bosnian and Muslim through a twisted manipulation of truths that Bosnians face as the legally-established “Other”. Of all the women joining ISIS, why is it that the Bosnian white blue-eyed girls are the ones paraded on Twitter accounts telling potential ISIS members, “Our sisters from Europe have finally joined the fight, ready to fulfill their deen and marry!” It disgusts me that ISIS members PROFIT off the marginalization of Bosnian women and men in between Western and Muslim communities.
While I see so many activists rush to the aid of other ethnic groups and being the first to boycott for or protest the pains of others, Bosnians are often at the butt of the jokes. Bosnians are white, right? Therefore, “white” people don’t really need help because they are privileged. And yes, to some extent, Bosnians are. But let’s complicate this idea a bit: Bosnians are often seen as too “white” to be real Muslims struggling from Islamophobia, racism, and extremism, and yet, Bosnians are often seen as “too ethnic or immigrant” to be American enough. Who wants an immigrant refugee with political asylum in government records, wearing a headscarf, speaking broken English and often with a war-related injury in the workforce? It seems Bosnians are just the people on the side who have uncomfortable stories to tell about how their families got to America but the rest is history- they’ve assimilated upon that crazy war and now they’re OK, right? And, I don’t want to go into racial studies in this article, not because I disrespect it, but because I’m tired of attempting to label myself or figure out what my ethnic/color/racial identity is. Bosnians are humans, like the rest of the world, and the right to be recognized and given the choice to life, liberty, and education over rape, genocide, and death should be inherently clear. I’m tired of going to class to have heated discussions on how the system consists of labeling us and then having a literal class discussion if I am identified as a white woman, an Eastern-European minority, a Muslim minority, or a woman of color. It seems to confuse people when I get told, “Well, you talk like a woman of color. You understand the problem, you’ve had the problem. But erm.. you’re white skinned?” These are the very same people who adamantly criticize the system for placing “the box” but then proceed to have a conversation in which box I am “supposed to be”. My being Caucasian doesn’t necessarily entitle me to the privilege that western, European, Christian groups have, something I’ve learned is referred to as “white-passing”. And yeah, maybe if I didn’t have the hijab I would pass as white. But ask me my name, check my families government records, and my native language, and the cutesy blonde image goes straight down the toilet. My presence challenges the binary and it serves as a perpetual reminder that boxes don’t work for anything but social categorization and for individuals who, like me, don’t have a box to check, we’re the awkward middle ground.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t fit in these social groups, especially when I hear people cracking jokes about “feminism” and angrily rebutting whether or not the word “woman” should be changed to “Womaxtan”. I get their arguments but, while I listen to conversations carefully discussing the complexities of language suffixes and semantics, I struggle just telling the story of people whose current state is so bad that language is the last to come to my mind. And I want to be careful here: I don’t mean to say one is more important over the other. I just want to ask why is it that the plight of Bosnian women’s rape doesn’t even come on the topic of discussion in my Muslim community? Why is it so worthless that our right to sexual freedom and choice and to speak comes not even last? And then I get placed into these conversations with a loss of words: how can I even begin to talk about whether or not I should identify as a “Womaxtan” when at home, I have women just now speaking out in plea of the government that they were forced to swallow spoons as a tactic of torture? I face this year’s anniversary with somewhat fright and sadness. While my contacts in Bosnia now pray to have the body of their relatives found and struggle to push their children through education while maintaining their identity as being Muslim in a country where many children blame the war on Islam, I stand here as the “White Muslim girl” who doesn’t “understand.” The Bosnian Girl who Harps on Genocide.
And there’s something that hurts inside me when I see people throw around the words “genocide”, “war”, and “rape” as if it’s an everyday thing. It hurts, it really does, remembering when I sat with my bestest friend in front of the television and prayed for her father’s body to be found. It stings when people throw around the word “rape” as “one of those things that happen” when I know I’ve stood at the place where mothers dragged their children into the forest, hoping both not to step on the mines that were just freshly removed and not to be found by Serbs. I, as a Bosnian woman raised in a refugee family, do not understand how students can just pick up signs easily for a single day, waive them around, and recognize all at once that this isn’t just a sign: it’s a voice for people murdered mercilessly. People who actually exist and serve as the eternal reminder of innocent blood shed on the grounds of hatred and puritanical ideology. It’s no longer plastic or wood: it is the literal manifestation of death. And then, when I see people exhaust the fun of protesting for the day and put away the signs, I have a pang of sadness: where did the love for justice go? Was this a one or two day show or was it a reactionary moment of anger and release of emotion or was this someone’s heartfelt goal of achieving something?
I don’t want to play into Oppression Olympics: I’m not here to say that the suffering of Bosnians are worse or easier than anyone elses. But I question the political agendas ranging from US government policy, discussions at Muslim community tables, and feminist organizations of choosing whose voice is important enough to be told, and whose voice is the valueless one of “a few numbers”. I’m not here to say these other matters don’t matter; they do. But why is it that many times Bosnians will speak up and their voice becomes lost into an oblivion of politics?
We are marginalized by so many groups who consider us such a minority that our voice doesn’t matter. How many Muslims advocated for the disturbances of Bosnian graves last year in Seattle or stood up to say that joking about rape was wrong? How many Muslims even care to know that their community included a small minority of Muslims whose family was wrecked, damaged, and raped in war?
And I say these things not because I need pity. I really don’t, quite frankly. But I do need people to care more about our ummah, about their stories, and about perspective– regardless of the color of their skin, the background, the language they speak, the ethnic identity. Why is it that I know so many Bosnian Americans here who were shoved off from voicing their problems in Muslim communities? Dumping money at the charity box when Bosnia was flooded last year wasn’t the answer and nor will it ever be.
And maybe I’m caucasian, white, or alien.. Maybe the word needs to be womaxtan. Maybe feminism has issues and maybe it’s the answer to our problems. But I also do know that my ability to voice my own concerns among the plethora of “feminism” and “W omaxtan” debates is often silenced because of my minority status and, if my socially-given status as “white woman” is not in itself a privilege given to others to label me without my consent, well then: I guess I need to get some more schooling done. I’m not a binary, not a box to be checked, and not a cool minority woman to be married off in a “multicultural show” to make mixed Bosnian-Arab or Bosnian-Desi babies (“What color would they be!” I’m asked) and paraded as Wonder-Hijabi-Green-Eyed-White-Bosnian in my community. I’m tired of community members picking me as the exotic girl who adds to the “diversity” of the Muslim ummah like an artifact to be hidden when politics are discussed but proudly brandished as a unique member when needed as proof that Arabs and Desis aren’t the only Muslims in the world.
I’m a human being with a crappy and bloody history who needs to make a real tangible change in her home country and communities. Is it too much to ask my community to take these matters seriously, to take a pro-active process of analyzing the plight of their Muslim brothers and sisters, to not shut down the cries of Muslims in their community on the basis of political agenda? I hope not because, quite frankly, division is the last thing our Muslim ummah needs right now.