It is one of the tragedies of modern times, fueled by the rapid explosion of news and our continuous exposure to world events that we are largely desensitized to pain and suffering in the world, except when it knocks at our own doors. We pick up the news bulletin in the morning with a sizzling cup of coffee in hand, read about genocide in Eastern Europe, or Africa, and quickly move on to the favorite gossip column about a popular actor in town — all in a single breath. The sheer gravity of an individual human life is swallowed in the remoteness of the event and the matter-of-fact reporting of it. More importantly, our habitual emotional response has so inured itself to death and man-made tragedy that we no longer pay any deliberate attention to it. We psychologically abstract the tragedy, objectify it as happening somewhere else to someone else and withdraw into our little world even further. There is nothing wrong with this reaction, it is the human organism’s method of coping with tragedy. If the body and the mind react to every tragedy we see, it will soon collapse into a nervous wreck. Hence we put on a facade of apathy and indifference, take a deep breath, send a wish or a prayer to those suffering and dying, and move on with our daily lives.
Every now and then, a movie or a book wakes us up with a jolt and redefines our understanding of a past human tragedy. We are moved; we cry; we empathize; we feel silently guilty, and we are horrified in ways we didn’t imagine we could be, by what we have just seen or read. Stephen Spielberg’s sensitive adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s “The Schindler’s List” did that for the Jewish holocaust, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prose in “The Gulag Archipelago” did that for the Russian genocide, William Shirer’s minutely researched tome “The Rise and the fall of the Third Reich” did that for unfolding the intent and horrors of tragic Nazi regime. Art has the power — perhaps the only medium that has it — to hold a mirror to ourselves, and the events in the world around us. What a newspaper report or a TV bulletin may not be able to convey, can be conveyed through a brilliant paragraph in a book, or through few minutes of poignant cinematography, or from the nuances of dance movements, or through a few brushstrokes of a painting. Yes, sometimes, art tends to exaggerate, distort a little, tend to infuse fictional elements into a narrative; but in this very act of exaggeration, it grips our attention, how else can it open up our atrophied or desensitized hearts, and educate our minds.
This year, a brilliant Bosnian film “ Quo Vadis Aida?” ( where are you going, Aida?), is nominated as the official entry in the best foreign film category of the Academy Awards. The movie captures the tragic culmination of a three-year violent, blood-curdling period in Bosnian history 1992 – 1995, when the Serbs in a fit of unbridled rage and virulent hatred, unleashed a genocide on the innocent civilians of a small town in Bosnia. For those who may not know the background, here is a quick synopsis. On April 5th, 1992, the republic of Bosnia declared its independence from the Republic of Yugoslavia, which, at that point, had three ethnic groups living together – Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians. The Bosnian Muslims held the majority and sought freedom. This secession by the Bosnians irked the rest of Yugoslavia, and quickly led to a civil war, with the Croats and Yugoslav’s joining forces to reclaim territory from the Bosnians. The civil war reached its ugly and blood-curdling crescendo in July 1995, when an army of Serbs swept through the small Bosnian town of Srebrenica, with the intention of wiping out its entire adult male population and children. Though the numbers are still uncertain, within a week, an estimated 8000 people were brutally “cleansed” and buried en masse in crudely dug graves. After the Jewish genocide during the second world war, this is the first time, an act of genocide in modern times came to light. It shocked the world. What makes this genocide even more tragic is during the period when the town of Srebrenica was taken, NATO had a strong presence in the region, and their task was to prevent any humanitarian disaster from happening. But the NATO presence didn’t matter at all. The Srebrenica massacre was cunningly orchestrated by the Serbs, while the NATO commanders stood helpless without any clear directive from their own Governments on the promised airstrikes on Serbia. By keeping silent and noncommittal, they unwittingly paved the way for the tragedy to unfold.
It took a while for the international courts to declare the tragedy in Srebrenica as genocide, but once they did, those who could be apprehended and held responsible were brought to justice. But many escaped the judicial net. The Serbian army that conducted the Genocide was mostly formed of former civilians, people who had lived alongside the very same Bosnians they massacred. They weren’t professional soldiers, therefore, after the war ended, these make-shift Serb soldiers shed their army vestments and returned to former civilian lives; in many cases, shamelessly living in the abandoned homes of the Bosnians who left their property and fled in the middle of the night to the NATO sanctuary. It is ironic, the Bosnians who survived the genocide, had to go back and live alongside the very Serbs who shattered their lives. It is to their credit they reconciled themselves to the tragedy and able to establish peace back in the region. That is life. War or peace can be established on the same piece of earth. We make the choice.
Jasmila Žbanić’s brilliant and sensitive portrayal of the genocide through the eyes of Aida ( impeccably played by Jasna Đuričić) — a NATO translator struggling to safeguard her family ( husband and two sons) from the impending tragedy, gives us an insiders view of what happens inside a civil war zone. When an ethnic group is uprooted from their origins, given sanctuary in a neutral place, or held captive, with the future bleak and uncertain, human life degenerates into mere acts of survival. Food, defecation, and sleep are the only activities that are possible and normal. Zbanic’s movie starts with the siege of the Bosnian town and the flight of the people into the NATO zone for safety. Her shots capture the feverish restlessness of Bosnians huddled within the NATO sanctuary, while Aida translates the command’s announcements and solaces. Aida juggles between soothing the fears of her people and attempting to save her immediate family from imminent danger. Zbanic’s sensitivity shines in scenes that capture the smaller details in the refugee camp, which can assume great importance in times of crises — sharing a half-burnt cigarette with an inmate in the midst of confusion, a pat on the back, a wry joke – anything that can bring about a semblance of normalcy around. Aida knows the inevitability of the outcome; she knows from the inside the inability of the NATO commanders to order a strike and the indecisiveness of the Global alliance in forcing the Serbs from organizing a purge. With each passing minute, the battle is lost for the Bosnians. But Aida and the others within the NATO camp are helpless; she knows that. Like lambs, the destination of the destinations will be the slaughterhouse to which the Serbs will generously invite them as their only means to freedom.
The movie keeps us rooted in the thick of things, and on the edge. Zbanic’s direction has the viewers resonating emotionally with the Bosnians; we are made to participate in the confusion, helplessness, and the utter hopelessness that awaits those innocent people who have nothing to do with this war or the independence; we are made to vividly sense the subterfuge underlying the talks between NATO commanders and the Serbs, and we cringe at the futility and lack of decisive International intervention before lives are lost, and, more importantly, we share Aida’s pain, anguish, and motherly fury as she tries to gain some favor with the authorities to pack her children and Husband to Safety. With each passing scene, we wait for the inevitable to happen. The power of Zbanic’s screenplay lies in mixing truth with fiction without diluting the power of both.
Like Schindler’s List, this movie will make you cry. You cannot help the tears. A sense of emptiness and incapacity to wrap our heads around such acts of violence makes us sick in the stomach. We realize, very painfully indeed, that the ultimate moral flaw of man is his capacity to annihilate his own species, based on ideas and ideologies. To kill for food is one thing, but to kill for an idea, for a whimsical nation of caste, ethnicity, and religion — is the ultimate blasphemy against life itself.
Hanna Arendt, the philosopher, titled her book on the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial “ A report on the Banality of evil”. When asked why she called it “banality of evil” a curious way of describing evil, she said “ Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” Genocides are the worst human crimes possible because it defies all definition and benchmarks of civic thought and action. Such tragedies make us question what progress is, like the great historian Will Durant did in his brilliant essay “Is Progress Real?” Though During wrote this essay nearly fifty years ago, its essence still resonates with resounding freshness. It is a must-read for all educated citizens. Is man merely a “trousered ape” after thousands of years of civilization? Is all our rationality and progress mere facades, and the deeper truth is that we are inherently violent and flawed? These are disturbing questions? We cannot ignore the fact there are parts of the globe, even today, where minorities are systematically isolated and purged, in some cases as brutally as any of the genocides in the past Whether such events will be labeled genocide or not, only the future can tell, perhaps someday, when mass graves are discovered and a thousand skeletons — young and old – are found buried inside. By then it will be, as always, too late.
“Quo Vadis, Aida? is a must-watch. Pls, do, if you can. I request.
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala