We must express our outrage. We must stand up for civilization.
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In the past couple of days I’ve been shocked, along with most of the world, to see the depths that ISIS will go to horrify the world by its treatment of prisoners. The immolation of the captured Jordanian pilot repulsed me in a way that none of their other savage acts have so far.
In my opinion, the scourge of ISIS is not about religious or ideological differences. This group, which is intent on regional and global slaughter, must be rejected and stopped, not just by superpowers or regional interests, but rather by the entire world. The post-1945-world-order—the era of the United Nations—is predicated on global action promoting peace and stopping aggression based on a set of universal human values.
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Part of the reason I find myself so horrified comes from an experience I had in 1993 as a foreign exchange student in Hungary. While I living in Budapest my fellow students and I toured much of the country, and on a trip to the Southern city of Pecs (pronounced Pay-ch) we took a detour and visited a Bosnian refugee camp co-run the UN and Red Cross. It was an experience that I will never forget.
This was 1993, which, historically speaking, was around the beginning of the Yugoslav Civil War. The war was raging and the world was just beginning to understand the extent of what was actually happening. The country was unravelling, old scores were being settled, and ethnic hatred was fueling monstrous acts of mistreatment.
I had a sense, along with the rest of the world, that bad things were happening, but no one was very clear on exactly how this was all playing out. The Bosnians were in a quite a miserable situation. Although Bosnia-Herzegovina was an autonomous republic of Yugoslavia, ethnic Bosnians were scattered across both Croatia and Serbia, with little-to-no protection. The Serbs, in particular, wanted their territory “cleansed” of any non-Serbs. Genocide ensued. But hearing about genocide in the news and being close the survivors of genocidal acts are two different things I found out.
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We walked into the camp and headed over to a common area where we found a woman who appeared to be in her mid fifties. She was open to talking with us so we engaged her in a conversation about the experiences that led her to living in the camp. We had to use two translators (one from Serbo-Croatian to Hungarian and another from Hungarian to English), so the whole process was clunky and awkward.
The woman began by telling us about the assault on her village. She shared how one day Serb tanks rolled into town, followed by armored personnel carriers filled with troops. Once the troops cleared the area of any armed resistance, they conducted door-to-door visits of each household profiling the ethnicity of the various residents.
While we couldn’t understand the words the woman was saying (until translation) we were all struck by the absence of sadness in her demeanor. It was as though she was describing a massive car accident she drove past or a visit she made to a giant shopping mall. She was animated, excited, and dramatic in her articulation, even waving her arms for emphasis.
When the story got to the details of the visit to her home, the translators both stopped momentarily and looked at each and then at the woman. They both gestured to her in a way that asked, “Are you sure you want me to say these words?” The woman nodded affirmatively.
What the translators shared brought all of us, including the translators, to tears. One of my fellow students vomited. The translator said something approximating the following words.
The Serb soldiers came to our front door and quickly identified us as Bosnians. They shot my husband in the head right in front of the entire family. Then they grabbed my daughter and raped her in the next room. Then they rounded us all up and took us to an internment camp where we sat for one month before we were handed over to the Red Cross. Now my daughter and son and I are here.
No one knew what to do or how to react. While we all cried and reacted physically, each of us wanted to do something to help, even if that was merely to expressed our sadness. We each said something like, “We’re so sorry for what you’ve endured.” The woman responded with the same lack of affect as before. She said she had to do laundry and summarily walked away.
Our group didn’t emotionally recover from that experience for two or three days. Even recounting it for this article brings back traumatic feelings for me.
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What followed was almost equally as horrifying. We got to listen to a presentation by a local camp worker about how Serb soldiers were running concentration camps less than 500 miles from where Nazi soldiers had operated concentration camps during World War Two. She even asked, rhetorically, “How could the world allow this to happen again on the continent of Europe?”
We were all appalled, shocked, and horrified at how the world could stand by and allow this slaughter to happen. Thankfully the US, other Western allies, and eventually NATO intervened and put an end to this monstrous aggression.
The world powers’ responses to genocide and other acts of mass slaughter since the Yugoslav Civil War have been spotty at best. But it seems that the UN and other regional military alliances are making genuine efforts to intervene where possible to stop wholesale, ghoulish murders of innocent people. Some situations better than others. No doubt.
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So what does it take for the world to say, “Enough is enough! We won’t tolerate these behaviors and we’ll do whatever it takes to stop them from occurring!” ISIS perhaps hasn’t killed as many civilians as the Assad regime in Syria, but it has savagely attacked Muslim and non-Muslim minorities in its occupied territory (slaughtering the men and selling the women into slavery), deliberately targeted, tortured, and executed journalists and aid workers, and beheaded and burned alive dozens of people for propaganda purposes. I’m not sure I’ve seen too many movie villains who rise to this level of depravity.
Not only is this behavior illegal according to dozens of international laws, it’s squarely at odds with modern humanistic values. Clearly no religion or modern government would condone these acts. ISIS operates like a death cult. It must be stopped. Even assuming that some of its grievances are legitimate, no group gets to act in this manner. Civilization cannot allow it.
Why does the UN exist if these atrocities go unchecked? How can world leaders stand by and permit such things to happen? ISIS leaders make no legitimate demands that anyone can reasonably respond to.
This world belongs to us, the citizens. We have a right to determine how events play out. Our leaders need our consent to govern, at least in much of the world.
We must express our outrage. We must stand up for civilization.
–Photo credit: Lyudmila Topchiy