What were you doing in the summer of 1995? The UK was buoyant, just two years away from New Labour’s landslide victory, casting off the yoke of a generation of Tory rule. Tony Blair was leader of the Labour opposition, young and vibrant, still blissfully unaware of 9/11, Afghanistan, the subsequent War on Terror and free from the hubris of the invasion of Iraq. Cool Britannia gave the UK a new global swagger and the dazzling spectacle of Euro 96 was just a year away. Generation X were about to inherit the earth.
In the same summer in Srebrenica, units of the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladić and elements of the paramilitary unit, The Scorpions prepared to partake in the genocide of over 8000 Bosnian Muslims, unarmed men and boys separated from their loved ones, shot and disposed of in mass graves.
Director Jasmila Zbanic’s insidious “Quo Vadis, Aida?” details the encroaching dread through the piercing eyes of Aida, a former teacher now working as a UN translator for the beleaguered Dutchbat soldiers hopelessly outgunned by Mladić’s forces. We see Soviet-made tanks roll through the sunlight as huge slabs of men brandishing Kalashnikovs stroll towards infamy. In a claustrophobic room, the Dutch commander Thom Karremans tries to reassure the terrified leaders of Srebrenica that if the Bosnian Serb Army refuses to withdraw its heavy weapons, “They will be wiped out” by NATO airstrikes. The black rimmed eyes of the Mayor don’t believe a word of it.
The quiet horror of these opening scenes spreads inexorably throughout the rest of the film. Outside the Dutch compound is besieged by 25,000 civilians, a quiet chatter, a subliminal wailing that permeates the air and unnerves the baby-faced Dutch soldiers, their tiny M16 clips emasculated by the sickle magazines of the Bosnian Serb forces. Those 5,000 civilians ‘lucky’ enough to be inside face the industrial squalor of the former factory, the stink of human sweat and excrement makes them seem to be waiting in an abattoir rather than a place of safety.
Quietly, hopefully, and then desperately, Aida performs her function as translator, mother and wife. She sweeps back and forth through the compound trying to save her husband and sons. The Dutch chain of command, abandoned by the UN and the promise of air strikes, disintegrate in front of their charges, menaced and muzzled by Mladić and his cronies. The irony isn’t lost when one young Dutch trooper is lambasted as a “collaborator” by a comrade for revealing the identity of a man trying to escape dressed as a woman. These were the sons and grandsons of men and women occupied and murdered by the Nazis.
When bread, Coke and Toblerone are handed out by the Bosnian Serbs, there is a biblical quality, a chilling role reversal of Jesus feeding the 5,000. Mladić announces himself as the saviour and protector of the Bosnian Muslims, ruffling a young boy’s hair and being filmed comforting women.
“As a man and a general, I guarantee your safety.”
Yet at every step his calculated plans outpace Karremans and his more capable deputy Franken. If the Dutch escort the coaches sent to transport the population to ‘safety’, they will be split up and leave the compound defenceless.
Perhaps the most unsettling part of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is the coda set in the years after the massacre. The reality of neighbours who perpetrated war crimes living in the flat next door or watching a school play chill to the marrow, as do the exhumed skeletons of the murdered innocents laid out in a white room quietly inspected by women, mothers, sisters and daughters like a horrific art installation.
So, what did the UK government do in the summer of 1995? Robert Hunter, the US ambassador to NATO at that time, believes that Britain was the country that did the most to prevent intervention from the UN to protect the Bosnian Muslims. Only this month did the Conservative government narrowly defeat an amendment to a trade bill that would have outlawed trade deals with countries committing genocide when 33 Tory MPs rebelled against Boris Johnson.
Perhaps the rest of the Conservative government should have watched “Quo Vadis, Aida?” before they voted.