The WARM Festival 2025 will be held next week in Sarajevo. On this occasion, we are publishing in full the speech by Welsh-Irish journalist and writer Ed Vulliamy, which opened last year’s WARM Festival. The speech was delivered on July 8, 2024, at Meeting Point Cinema, and was later adapted for publication.

photo: Ahmet Avdagić

WARM Festival, Sarajevo, July 8 2021

(Adapted for publication)

Good evening, and thank you for being here, rather than doing something else. I have always loved the epic verse by the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, about a restless soul who sails the seas, enduring many tribulations, mostly the result of his own defects. Back in port, at a wedding, he pins a young guest to the wall, and relates his sorry story. I’ve always identified with the Mariner, and lived more like him than I want to have done – telling people with a willing ear about horror beyond the horizon. But now that I regret my life, I identify more with the wedding guest than the Mariner. Poor sod: he came to a party, to have a nice drink, perhaps meet one of the bridesmaids… and gets stuck with this old git and his tale of woe. What I mean is, you could be out there enjoying yourselves, but instead you are here – and thank you.

It is not for me to welcome you – but to express my gratitude beyond words for the honour of this platform, and words are supposed to be my metier. I wrote a book called When Words Fail, and I hope to God they don’t fail me now.

My attempt to deserve this honour will be by definition a tribute to the coming week, to its ethos and to the space forged by the imagination, commitment and free-spiritedness of Damir Šagolj, Rémy Ourdan, Lejla Hodžić and others. Because this is – outrageously, but thank God - one of the very few spaces and places wherein the obvious can be spoken. Where a simple truth can be acknowledged and shared, such is the toxic contamination of political morality out there, if that is not an oxymoron. This is where the unfolding horror in Gaza will not be silenced by gaslighting about ‘anti-Semitism’. This is the place where discourse on the war in Ukraine will not be diluted. This is the place where facts are true, where excellence is the standard, where discourse is uncontaminated, and where morality walks a straight line.

The subtitle of this discourse speaks for itself: our solidarity, our burden of testimony, our self-evident moral identity with those innocents whose remains lie buried in the earth, as the result of extreme and in some cases genocidal violence. What follows is a defence of those whose bones keep underground wildlife company, against not only those who put them there.

It should be obvious, but it’s not. The title of this lecture demands that we think, look around us to confront many if not most of those who call themselves ‘decision-makers’, ‘journalists’, ‘intellectuals’, ‘diplomats’ and whatever who take inconsistent positions over mass-murder to suit their professed compassion in one direction, but a kind of political autism in another; to suit their ideological vision or other priorities – social, financial – or, for want of a better term, to suit whatever is á la mode at a given time.

This lecture is about being on the side of the bones against what is now more than ever a plague of hypocrisy, double and even treble standards, political calculation, moral autism, narcissism, and intellectual cynicism. This lecture argues that when a children’s hospital is bombed, it is just that, whoever bombed it – whether they be Russians, as happened in Ukraine yesterday, or Israelis, as happens almost every week in Gaza. Unbelievably, the man in Ukraine who sent me terrible updates on the Russian bombing Okhmatdyt hospital in Ukraine is also a keen supporter of Israel’s so-called ‘war’ against Gaza – and overtly its civilians, not just Hamas.

Unlike this man, we are on the side of the children, against the bombers, whoever they are. This lecture comes at the end of an excuse for a career as a journalist and writer during which all I have tried to do is walk a straight line, which not everyone does, by any means, and which turns out to be much harder than it should be. And an examination of what that straight line is: I think it is in the first instance, a pursuit of truth, and truth alone. And in the second, an underpinning of politics or ideology by moral values, not the reverse. It is a protest against those who calculate a position by recourse to politics, convenience or personal interest, in defiance of moral imperative. And thereby a defence of moral truth against moral ambiguity and moral equivalence.

A defence of truth itself, that has no politics or ideology. As Henry Kissinger said – not that he would know much about it – “Truth has the added virtue of being true”.

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I’ll start on very familiar ground, too familiar to most of you, but needs must and please bear with me. Thirty-two years ago, I entered the back gates of the Omarska concentration, rape and death camp near Prijedor. Beheld those prisoners drilled across the yard under the watchful eye of a machine-gunner, lantern-jawed, skeletal some of them, gulping down their watery bean stew, eyes burning with a truth they could not speak, in a canteen beneath what I later learned were quarters for systematic violation of women prisoners. Bundled out of the camp when we tried to make towards a hangar there, and its murderous secret, to Trnopolje, where we beheld the rib-cage of Fikret Alić and others behind that barbed wire fence at Trnopolje.

It was 28 years ago that I finally managed to get properly to Eastern Bosnia, from which I had been barred by Radovan Karadžić awful daughter, to uncover the watery mass grave beneath Višegrad bridge, and began to follow the trail of bones along the byways leading from Srebrenica, Bratunac, Kravica and Glogova. As you all know, there are not many roads in Eastern Bosnia, and for several months after the Srebrenica massacre, and those few there are were heaving with trucks laden with the remains of your people, from primary to secondary to tertiary mass graves, so that even this week, families will bury a shoulder blade from there, a rib-cage from there, a skull fragment from somewhere else, and call it Emir, call it Samir.

We know all this. And we know that Serbia and the RS are lost causes to genocide denial and justification. Irreparably psychotic – a friend sent me a picture from Belgrade yesterday with a big sign above a row of shops in the heart of the city reading, in English: “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs”. To hell with them. These people are not even worth having on our radar screens tonight: there is no point in insisting to them that 2+2=4. To them, it is not even five, it is seven.

What concerns us here by way of point of departure tonight is how the rest of the world above ground reacted to all this.

We also all know the story of how the West betrayed Bosnia. On our side, were Bosnia’s friends: in strange alliances across ideology: Susan Sontag and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the same room, Britain’s Conservative Margaret Thatcher and Labour’s left wing Michael Foot in agreement on this one and only matter. For the rest: the West at best abetted, and was at worst complicit in, the slaughter. We know that the United Nations tried to cleanse their sins at the confessional box of the ICTY – and thereby lies another tale.

But something else happened, that speaks to the present, in Ukraine and in Gaza, as well as in the awful narrative of what I call ‘unreckoning’ for Bosnia. Five years after we found the camps, something else happened, out of the blue. A group of leftists in Germany, America and Britain decided that my colleagues from ITN and I had fabricated the camps around Prijedor in 1992. They used the same methodology as Holocaust denials, focussing on tiny, irrelevant details to propagate a wider, grotesque lie. These were the Internet’s early days, so that even now, if you look up ‘ITN’ ‘Guardian’ ‘Trnopolje’ on google, you will soon find ‘the picture that fooled the world’, of Fikret behind that fence.

The British end of all this had two faces, both catastrophic: on one hand, the degenerate and corrupt right wing government of John Major, and a ministerial team which was overtly pro-Serb. This was the voice that put the brakes on – even sabotaged – any attempt at even the limited intervention (which came mostly from the United States) we all know would have stopped the genocide in its tracks within hours … and it did when NATO finally and tardily intervened, overriding British objections, in 1995. But there was another, differently toxic positioning, beginning with a far-left rag called Living Marxism and a writer called Diane Johnstone, gathered quite a côterie of high profile intellectuals in support for their cause, including Doris Lessing, Fay Weldon and media correspondents at the BBC and Financial Times. Living Marxism was sued by ITN in the High Court in London, challenged to prove their filth in court, and of course lost. But it made no difference. The genocide deniers were joined – blessed almost – by the famous Noam Chomsky, who queried the Srebrenica massacre, putting it in quotation marks during an interview with the Guardian he then succeeded in supressing, for all his advocacy of free speech, with lawyers behaving like mafia gangsters. He accused me of ‘fabricating the story’ and ‘getting it wrong’ over the camps. At the same time, however, the ground around Omarska gave up the secrets the Četniks had tried to hide: hideous mass graves containing hundreds of people, at Tomasica, Hrastovo Glavica and elsewhere. Each time a grave was found, I wrote to Chomsky, asking: “If I got it wrong, who are these people in the mass graves”? I never got an answer.

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So there is my friend Tesma, now a refugee in Australia, herself serially violated in Omarska, though that it not her greatest pain: it is that her son who was also in the camp has since vanished, never to be found. Maybe one day, among the bones of Tomasica, he’ll turn up, as they still do around Srebrenica. Tesma returns to Prijedor for the summer, and when she locks up to go back to Perth, just in case, she leaves the back door of their rebuilt family house unlocked, and food in the larder, just in case.  

For all that the ICTY affirmed over and over again what we wrote about the camps, Srebrenica and elsewhere, the denial and minimalizing of those mass graves has persisted, ever since. While Paddy Ashdown and Bill Clinton did what they could to make the memorial at Potocari what it is now, the dead were faded into history by other quarters. The hard left has never repented on its enthusiasm for Slobodan Milošević’s genocidal endeavour, and the establishment had no problem with that. As recently as 2019, the Austrian writer Peter Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – he had given the main oration at Milošević’s funeral – an overt supporter of the genocidal project, and with regard to the massacre, blathering that nonsensical dichotomy: it had to be done to but it didn’t happen, but it had to be done, but it didn’t happen … Give us a fucking break – make up your mind!

More interesting in its way was the deportment that night of a Polish liberal, feminist writer, heroine of the opposition to the then right wing government in Warsaw: Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded her Nobel Prize alongside Handke. As the Mothers of Srebrenica gathered outside the ceremony, desperate, outraged, she could have done more with five words than most of us reporters with thousands. “I want my prize another day”, she could have said. Or “I dedicate my prize to the women outside”. But no: the money, the ego-trip, the seat in a big black car were more important to this narcissist than your dead, their families and their bones. She clasped Hanke’s arm wearing a lacy glove – it was nauseating beyond belief. None of my Polish liberal friends could see the problem, or justified Tokarczuk’s connivance with genocide for myopic, domestic reasons. A theme in itself: I will let my provincial, domestic problems dictate my view of calamity beyond the garden fence: I will side with genocidaires afar, if it helps me at home.

When I wrote my book about the survivors of the camps, following their scattered and shattered lives over 20 years – it does actually take that long to properly record that strange thing we call survival - I tracked down a man I met in Trnopolje, Dr. Idris, Merdzanić, who had run a pathetic so-called ‘medical centre’ in the camp, with a bottle of Asprin. Two decades later, living in Kiel, Germany, he said: “It is hard enough to find words to describe what happened to us. But to find words for these people is impossible. I have none. It hurts too much. What are they doing?” What indeed, it is a very good question. As Stephen King wrote: “to know horror is one thing, to be told it did not happen is the road to madness”.

Remember, please, those alliances in the destruction, deformation and humiliation of your country: United Nations, right wing British government, Trotskyites and Marxists, liberal literary icon… And the really weird thing to bear in mind as we proceed is that over many of the conflicts we do not have time to consider this evening, especially in Latin America: this same constituency on the left performed admirably. Chomsky and his clan often talk sense and better on the dirty wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the serial genocidal violence against Indigenous Americans, against post-colonial violence …. And it spoke and speaks out for the Palestinians louder than most – we’ll get to that.

The pattern emerges: some mass graves are war crimes, others do not matter, or we’ll pretend they’re not there, or we’ll even give comfort if not support to those who put those bones in the ground.

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I want to take a detour, if I may. Away from genocide, but not mass-murder. I had been based in Italy during your war, and spent more time among you than the living the dolce vita I had planned. I was offered the chance to try again - to represent the Observer in New York, and jumped at the opportunity. (Twice actually, because I returned here in summer 1995 to be with your magnificent 17 Krajške Brigada – the ‘ethnically cleansed brigade’ of camp survivors - on its roll of liberation so nearly achieved, but betrayed by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, and at Dayton by the SDA from here in Sarajevo)

Not many people think of downtown Oklahoma City is a mass grave. But it is. During my first sojourn in America, I got to report the bomb there in April 1995 – and its aftermath - planted by American ‘patriots’, to kill 168 fellow Americans, many of them children because the truck full of explosives was parked outside the creche of the Alfred Murrah Federal building, destroyed in the blast.

I delved deep into the so-called ‘patriotic’ fascist militia movement behind the bombers, and the trajectory of the main protagonist, Timothy McVeigh, from service in the 1991 Iraq war through the neo-Nazi underground. The bombers, plain to see, knew exactly what they were doing, and who they were: a heavily-armed far-right conspiracy against what it saw as a global liberal establishment, a ‘New World Order’ which threatened to undermine the great white American endeavour. They the direct ancestors of the January 6^th rioters, creators of an undergrowth that has become hegemonic in America, the culture of meanness, cruelty and exclusion of ‘the other’, in the person and cult of Donald Trump, the riot of January 6th – and now the election of 2024.

And so in all this I came to befriend Aren Almon-Kok, the charred body of whose daughter Baylee, cradled in the arms of a fireman, was the iconic image of the atrocity. I was invited to celebrate what would have been her 16^th birthday in April 2010. There was a party for her half-brother and half-sister, there were cakes, but no Baylee.

But what was the reaction? For all that the monument in Oklahoma is among the most moving of its kind in the world, few could actually spit it out or confront who the killers were, or what this was: a far-right attack by Americans, on Americans, in the name of America. Al Gore was interviewed at length on the far right in America, without mentioning Oklahoma. The bomb was barely mentioned during the January 6^th riot and its aftermath, although the killers were people who believed in white America, America First, as it later came to be known, now ‘Make America Great Again’. Oklahoma itself makes no connection between the killers of its children and citizens to the current political toxins rampant in America: Donald Trump carried Oklahoma by 66 per cent to 34, though by only one per cent in the city itself.

The incinerated bones in the ground are those of innocent Americans. The people who put them there were fascists killing Americans in the name of America. I know whose side I’m on, and whose side truth is on: the bones.

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If I ask any of you for a coffee or a drink, don’t come! Having had my Italian dolce vita derailed by Bosnia, I thought I’d try again – in New York. I arrived in lower Manhattan for my second, longer stint in America just in time for al-Qaida’s visit that fine September morning in 2001, as a reporter running towards the falling towers against the waves of people running away from them.

Not many people living or visiting New York think of downtown Manhattan as a mass grave. But it is. I was awoken that morning by my girlfriend, with whom I’d had a row until the early hours, so slept clothed on the sofa. ‘Wake up’, she whispered in my ear, having taken her daughter to school and seen the first plane crash in at end of 6^th Avenue, “the World Trade Center’s on fire”. Three thousand people went to work that morning, and by lunchtime they were dead. All along my street, for the awful weeks that followed in Manhattan: desperate photos of smiling people, and the word ‘Missing’. None were ever found. 9/11 had no ‘injured’ list. Everyone killed on 9/11 remained in the ground. So there is Dolores, whose son José worked in a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre, and whose face stared out from those flyers along 11^th street where I lived. I got to know her after the asked to use my bathroom while registering José’s disappearance at a centre for the purpose The New School over the road. I last spoke to her during Covid, to check on her – no sign of José, in the ground beneath Manhattan, and no funeral, nowhere to place flowers.

Another terrorist atrocity against Americans, this one by Jihadists – which perhaps made it easier for Americans to react to. But was it? We know the story, but how did America and world react?

My neighbourhood with extreme dignity. Vigils pitched camp in Washington and Union Squares, tributes laid, messages scribbled, peace flags flown. New York had the perfect monument to the carnage: a great shard of the South tower, still standing. Plans were suggested for a park, with the shard was its centrepiece. One idea was for a mound, the underground shape of this would embrace the dead, like a inverse earthly womb, of death.  Two beams  of light shone into the sky where the towers had been – all this could have been done, they could have stayed.

But it all went wrong. They said New York would not be bowed, and it wasn’t. Up went ghastly ‘Freedom Tower’. The ‘hero hospital’, St. Vincent’s, with whose ancillary staff I used to drink at the last shithole, shotgun shack bar in Greenwich Village was thanked for its efforts caring for wounded firemen and police with closure, and turned into luxury Condos.

Out there in the world: the initial response by the USA and Britain was an understandable but ultimately, botched 20-year incursion into Afghanistan to go after Osama Bin Laden. Afghanistan was, after all, al-Qaeda’s cradle. But then the debacle in Iraq. But then

We don’t have time to go over all of this, but I had been in Iraq in 1991, heading South from Baghdad to reveal as best one could under the circumstances the mass graves of Shiites – mostly in al-Basra - who had advanced as far as the gates of the capital, but been beaten back and slaughtered by Saddam Hussein’s Republican guard. Now, I had the second “best” story of my excuse for a career: an source within the CIA who told me in October 2002, on the record, that the agency, the White House, the Pentagon and the British knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, and the whole casus belli was a lie. I filed the story seven times, and seven times it was turned down - censored, I learned, because my editors at the Observer were the showing the story to the British cabinet and the British cabinet told them ‘Your reporter is wrong’. But your reporter was right, as it happens. Decades later, a Hollywood movie was made about the Observer’s coverage of Iraq, and a heroic whistle blower from within British intelligence – if that is not an oxymoron – played by Keira Knightley, in which Rhys Ifans plays me in a cameo role.

Having carefully faltered in order to deliver Bosnia to the slaughter, the West now ‘intervened’, this time illegally and catastrophically. Back I went to Iraq, this time investigating mass graves of Iraqi’ civilians killed by the Americans and British, under dangerous, unembedded conditions in Fallujah, Nasiriya and Nadjaf. And so I got to meet a man called Daham Kassim, all of whose children bar one - four year old Zainab - were killed when soldiers at an American road block opened fire on his car. They took the little surviving daughter to a military base, but cast her and her parents out of the beds there when they needed them for their own. Daham Kassim – but not his daughter - was in a ward at the same hospital as an American soldier called Jessica Lynch, who was rescued, according to legend- actually handed over by Iraqi doctors who had saved her life. “Four little flowers cut down”, said Mr. Kassim. “Then they put my Zainab into the cold? I tell you, Mister, she died of cold, she died of cold”.

But this is where - and how - it gets weird, in terms of the inconsistencies in the positions people were taking. By standing firm against the invasion of Iraq, I became a darling of all people who accused me of fabricating the Bosnian camps. In the leftist American paper Counterpunch, there are two Ed Vulliamys: the one who fabricates camps and dare confront Chomsky, and the ‘veteran war reporter’ who took on the American and British war machines. Many of the same people - including Chomsky, who accused me of fabricating the camps and wjho belittled the Srebrenica massacre – were exemplary over Iraq. On one occasion, the genocide suited their political position so they denied or endorsed it; now, the aggressor was an enemy, so they were on the same side as me.

Then it all went crazy. I met an anarchist, at a party in London. 9/11, he said, was “the perfect work of art”. (He was, it turned out, repeating the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who called al-Qaida’s bloodbath “the greatest work of art imaginable”.) I congratulated him thus: “It’s interesting to meet a real fascist. Not just one of these Brexit, Le Pen wannabe fascists, but the real thing.” “Whoa, man”, he protested, “hey, like I’m an anarchist”. No, I clarified, to attribute aesthetic value to mass murder is pure fascism. Real fascism – rarer than one would think. But they were bankers, he protested. I countered that they were small traders, elevator engineers, canteen workers, delivery people … “Ah, there’ll always be collateral damage”, he said.

Let’s take a step back. So: Saddam Hussein in 1991: Outrage, but we do nothing about it – roaring silence. Omarska, Srebrenica: for the left, either permissible, or did not happen; or for the West, we’ll let it happen, then prosecute the perpetrators later; for Serbs: justified or denied. 9/11: For the West, Casus belli for an illegal war, for Stockhausen and the anarchist, perfect work of art. Mass graves in Iraq: ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ for the West, war crimes for the left.

For all these people, with their various positions, the mass graves are not full of innocent people murdered by assailants from various quarters, with grieving families and lost lives they never lived, they are pieces on a chessboard, from which different shades of opinion can construct the view that suits them. I’ll have Srebrenica à l’orange with a side of fries, because I don’t care much for Nadjaf with a vinaigrette drizzle – or vice-versa.

These acrobatics were bad enough until the all-out invasion of Ukraine. Now, with the calamity and atrocity in Gaza , it is all much worse.

Let’s fast-forward to Ukraine – that vast terrain of beautiful copper beech and silver birch. Just as your country is one of rivers and mountains: the beauty of the bloodlands.

It had been coming since 2104, and too few of us got involved. Then February 2022, and the onslaught by Russia against a country and its history it says do not exist, a people it says does not exist, speaking a language that does not exist. Another genocide.

When the Ukrainian resistance liberated Bucha and other northern suburbs of Kyiv, they found signs of brutality unseen even during the 2014 occupations. 458 bodies recovered in Bucha alone, among them children and elderly people, summarily executed. Photos were circulated of corpses of civilians, lined up with their hands bound behind their backs. There was a torture chamber in one cellar, and The New York Times reported on sex-slaves – a woman kept naked apart from a fur coat, chained to a post in a cellar, killed by a shot to the head. One mass grave was in a church – St Andrew the Apostle. The Russians used, among others, Radovan Karadzić’s word for all this: zachistka – ‘cleansing’. This was all so familiar to you – Bosnia all over again.

In September 2022, when the Ukrainians liberated Izium, another series of mass graves was found – first revealed to the world, I might add, by our co-host at WARM, Rémy Ourdan, in Le Monde. Of over 400 bodies buried in the forests, of whom all but 20 or so were civilians. Oleh Synyehubov, governor of Kharkiv region noted: “99 per cent showed signs of violent death. There are several bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and one person is buried with a rope around his neck. Obviously, these people were tortured and executed. There are also children among the buried”.

What has been the reaction to all this? This time, the West has for the most part – though not entirely and often tardily – estimably and rightly supported the Ukrainian resistance. It’s awful – no one is pretending anything else – not least since the only winners in a so far unwinnable war have been what Bob Dylan called “You masters of war / Ye that build the big guns”. In a war without a winner, the winner is the arms trade.

But it has to be done. Not to fight is to be obliterated in Ukraine. Hitler could not have been beaten with prayers, more’s the pity. My father was a pacifist from 1939 until 1941, when he wrote a marvellous letter to his mother, a fervent Irish Republican, to say he was joining a combatant unit of the British Army – which was not her favourite institution. “My pacifism cannot be absolute”, he said, “If we don’t stop this, there will be no democracy left in Europe”. “There come times in history”, she replied, “when you men make it necessary to choose between evils. Good adventures, young man. Love Mama”.

From some quarters of the left, and from the Vatican, has come an understandable, even admirable reflection of this pacifist quarter. But not all of the reticence in supporting Ukraine is so principled. Much of it is downright appeasement or indulgence of Vladimir Putin at best, or at worst support for the revived Russian and Soviet imperial projects.

This disgrace transcends ideology. On the right: Donald Trump and a substantial body of the Republican party, France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini (though not, notably, his boss Georgia Meloni), much of the people and both leaders of Hungary and Serbia, and in Britain the new far right leader Nigel Farage, whose recent electoral success was bolstered by his blaming the West for provoking Putin’s war. This is the Putinista, populist European and American right.

But their argument is supported by considerable sections of the left: in Britain, in France, and beyond. The Chomsky crowd buy into Putin’s absurd and grotesque caricature of the Ukrainian opposition as neo-Nazi. Poseurs like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd like to join the chorus on Russia Today television, blaming NATO for Putin’s invasion, and serving Moscow’s infiltration of Western cyberspace and thereby politics.

Much of this is a curious and myopic phenomenon, more of which I’ll get to later: reaction to the reaction, not to what is happening on the ground.  These can be awkward moments in our personal relationships and friendships (I did not speak to my oldest friend for several years because of Tony Blair’s role in the invasion of Iraq). After the invasion of Ukraine, I called my dearest school friend with whom I had demonstrated in London ever since the 1960s over Ireland and Vietnam, on the occasion of a march in solidarity with Ukraine. “I can’t do this one”, he replied, citing Boris Johnson’s support for Ukraine, and this or that article by a hawkish columnist in the Observer. They are not the point, I countered, the point is Ukraine.

More seriously – in the wider world – swathes of the global South were at best indulgent of Putin’s genocidal enterprise. I’ll discount China, Iran and North Korea, because they are straightforward allies of Russia – I’ll focus better on countries that owed a debt to the USSR during their rightful wars of liberation against colonialism, and for independence. For the sake of what follows, let’s take South Africa as an example.

South Africa – a country whose recent history is a cause celèbre of resistance and liberation - has gone to some lengths to avoid condemning the 2022 invasion. An initial call for Moscow to withdraw was itself withdrawn, and while it shunned the basketcases who opposed the UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine, South Africa abstained, along with India and 30 others. Yet again in this dictionary of failure: “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing” as the saying goes, attributed to Edmund Burke. President Cyril Ramaphosa went to Moscow to ‘discuss’ the war with Putin several weeks before visiting Kyiv – a gesture in itself. Russia’s then Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu described South Africa as a “friendly state”. Cocking a snook at the international justice system of which it was later to make use, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor criticsed the ICC’s indictment of President Putin, having failed in its duty to arrest indicted Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir – the first President to be incited by the ICC for genocide. Putin was then at the summit of so-called BRICs nations in South Africa last year. What is happening in Sudan is apparently acceptable to the government in Pretoria, likewise the worst atrocity in Europe since Srebrenica: Mariupol.

Mariupol: worst of all, because out of sight, though never out of mind. While these political postures are made, and hypocrisies traded, the siege, fall and fate of this city was probably the worst war crime within many of your lifetimes until last Autumn, though I make no comparisons, and I don’t trust numbers. We have no idea how many thousands or tens of thousands of people are buried beneath the rubble of that city. When our colleague and friend Mystyslav Chernov filmed his Oscar-winning masterpiece, 20 Days in Mariupol, there were already scores, perhaps hundreds, being tipped into trenches – at first in body bags, then not, by workers employed by the city’s defenders, before it fell, and Chernov was still filming. Now it has done, since which the Russian murder machine will have done as it they will.

Chernov’s employer, Associated Press, has used satellite imagery to identity more than 10,000 sites – sites, not people - where bodies are buried, many around or in the Stari Krym cemetery. Others are believed to be situated beneath new tower blocks hastily built by the Russian occupiers, and sold to families from the deep interior at knockdown prices, in order to ‘Russify’ the city. A cynical and repulsive manipulation of population for which the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a good term: ‘Creating facts’.

Did someone mention Israel? Yes, I did. And so to the carnage in Gaza – spread to the West Bank, yet again - probably the worst since Rwanda in terms of numbers killed over time: the nightmare unfolding as we speak. ‘Creating facts’, as Russia is doing in Mariupol, was the term devised by Begin to describe Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, now centres for death and terror squads from which newly arrived colonial settlers mount armed attacks on civilians living where their ancestors have lived for centuries. In 1983, I made a documentary about the last olive grove to be bulldozed, and the first stone to be laid, for the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. It is now a small city, full of some Jewish families come to make a home in earnest, and others who form the death squads to further subjugate the people they are determined to evict and replace.

They can see the land, their ‘Promised Land’, but they cannot see the people – or rather they can, and want to be rid of them. As has been the case ever since the modern State of Israel was created in 1948, out of the trauma of the Shoah. The suffering of Jewry begat al-Nakbr, the catastrophe of the Palestinians – the beginning of the catastrophe unfolding now.

‘Land clearance’ is a time-honoured colonial notion upon which the United States was founded by puritan Christians, then by industrial capitalism: the so-called ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the white race to settle in land where someone else had been living for millennia, and to ‘clear’ that land by exterminating its indigenous occupants. It goes back in Ireland to the British land-grab, and attempt to annihilate an entire people with calculated famine. As occurred again in 1932 when Stalin attempted to obliterate the Ukrainian people by starving them to death.

Now, Russia and Israel are ‘creating facts’ as best they can. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner – formerly in charge of his Middle East policy – went one better than apartment blocks over mass graves, or killer settler towns: he looked forward to potential investment in real estate along the Gaza coast for the tourist industry, so that one day we’ll be able to sunbathe and sip sundowner cocktails atop the bones. I think if the Martians came and asked: So how does this place work? I’d book them into the A’zza Trump Tower Suites for a week, and tell them to get digging.

But of course, as usual: the reaction in the world cannot be as simple as the outrage demands. In fact, on this one, it’s worse than ever.

There are a couple of hors d’oeuvres to dispose of before we get to the main meal of Gaza. The first is the massacre of October 7^th2023.  When defenders of the Palestinian cause are asked what they think about this, they often hesitate, and point out that the slaughter did not happen in a vacuum, which is true, of course. But what else is there to think about October 7^th other than that it was a heinous, sadistic, brutal massacre of innocent civilians by a death squad? Said and done. Next question?

The other is anti-Semitism. To suggest that there is no anti-Semitism in the opposition to Israel’s genocidal project, past and present, is simply not true. There is anti-Semitism, there always has been, there always will be. But to suggest that opposition to Israel’s long-term attempt to annihilate the Palestinian people in any meaningful sense of existence is anti-Semitic is not only untrue, it is gaslighting, emotional blackmail and a cheap way to demonise, dismiss or neutralise the vast grassroots movement against this ongoing genocide. According to this formula, I’m anti-Semite, apparently, despite having been sent to a predominantly Jewish school by my parents precisely because it was that, and despite having two Jewish daughters whom I love to death.  

If this is anti-Semitism, why are there so many Jewish protestors? The most eloquent speaker at our marches in London is a lady called Emily Stevenson, whose father is British- Jewish and whose mother comes from – wait for it: Srebrenica. Why is the Jewish ghetto in Venice festooned with peace flags, and banners reading: “Never Again for Anyone. Ceasefire Now’. A solidarity group to which I belong in London held a discussion by a wonderful man called Morgan Blanchissis, who runs a group in America called Jewish Voice For Peace. He said something I’ll never forget: “If being Jewish has a moral identity – which is ridiculous, why should any ethnicity have a moral identity? – then it is to be AGAINST THIS”. JVP was among the student groups banned at Columbia University in New York for “threatening rhetoric”. What on earth is going on?

Over the next few days, you’ll have a chance to hear about Gaza as well as Ukraine. Here, I might add, and hardly anywhere else, the two together. We’ll see a film by Inigo Gilmore, in which he tracks down and hears from IDF soldiers who post internet clips of themselves playing with women’s underwear, advertising their businesses surrounded by Palestinian corpses, and boasting of how all this demonstrates their self-proclaimed ‘superiority’. We’ll be subjected to a merciless film about infanticide, in a war which counts a higher quotient of targeted and killed children than any on record.  

We’ll be talking about the unrelenting assaults on women, the elderly and hospitals – with them the medical profession - especially.

A friend of mine who recently resigned from the British Embassy’s Human Rights monitoring team in Israel tells me that what is happening in Israel’s detention centres – especially those in the Negev – in terms of torture, humiliation and even murder in custody make Abu Grahib in Baghdad look like a holiday camp. Our friends at Medecins Sans Frontières, themselves under repeated attack by the Israeli military, have had many of their staff targeted and killed. One doctor we heard from in our group London had been stripped, hooded, beaten, whipped with electric wires and beaten with electric batons and – when found to have nothing to do with Hamas – released naked to walk across the desert back into Gaza. He was one of the lucky ones to get out alive. Israel has made a point of destroying every hospital in the Gaza strip.

We’ll be talking about the bulldozer effect of razing a population along with the buildings in which it lived: portion after portion of Gaza bombed and shelled, its people martialled to order and ‘evacuated’ in processions horribly reminiscent of the Holocaust – their documents held aloft – to be settled in refugee camps, then themselves attacked. We’ll be talking about that time-honoured strategy of starving a people to the edge of extinction; the wilful prevention of basic humanitarian relief.

And we’ll be discussing the mass graves, directly related to the assaults on the hospitals, beneath which Hamas are said to operate, affording the perfect excuse to commit one of the most ghastly of war crimes: assailing the sick, and those who seek to care for them. Mass graves have been found beside and beneath two of the main hospitals: Nasser and al-Shifa. In April, some 300 hundred bodies were found in the Khan Younis complex of Nasser hospital, after its occupation by Israeli forces. Some, my ex-British government source tells me, were probably killed during the attacks on the hospital and buried by the hospital authorities. But not those hands tied, or showing signs of torture, or bullets to the head, indicating summary execution.

In April this year, a mass grave with more than 380 bodies was found at al-Shifa hospital, after occupation by Israel. Many were crushed or disfigured in such a way as to suggest being run over by tanks. In early May, a third mass grave was found at al-Shifa, wherein some of the bodies appeared to have been decapitated, and others apparently buried alive. In all cases, many bodies are attached to intravenous equipment, meaning they were undergoing treatment, while others wore scrubs, meaning that they were treating them.  

Thirty bodies in bags were found in a mass grave under the school at Beit Lahiya, apparently executed while detained.

While the UN has called for "clear, transparent and credible investigation” into the mass graves, the IDF plays a game of which their keen supporters Serbia and the RS would be proud, post-Srebrenica. There is the occasional ‘tragic error’; to suggest the IDF killed these hundreds of people is “baseless and unfounded”. It recalls that effort to explain Srebrenica by mass suicide, or the work of the French UN.

Is it genocide? The International Court of Justice court will decide that. Ahead of that ruling, in a case brought by South Africa – note- I commend to you perhaps the most cogent argument I have read: in the New York Review of Books, aforementioned, by HRW founder Aryeh Neier. Compelling for the fact that he is who he is, that he is Jewish, and for the fact that he initially thought this was not genocide, but has come round – on the evidence – to a view that it is.

What has been the reaction? Forgive me: it has been about as fucked up as one can imagine. For one: the West, which laudably supports Ukraine’s resistance to genocide, facilitate and arms this one, for all the pathetic bleating from the State Department and European governments, wilfully rebuffed by the génocidaire Netanyahu, now indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That at least is simple, and entirely recasts the West, in the eyes of young people around the world, from liberal democracy to genocidal pariah.

But let’s look further, in more detail, starting in Ukraine. To my dismay, some if not most of the best people it has been my pleasure to know in Ukraine not only decline to express solidarity with the Palestinians and people of Gaza, under an even more brutal assault than they, but overtly support the Israeli slaughter. A man who was drafted in to clean up the far right image of the Azov Regiment – with reason now, and success – actually said of Gaza: “I’m with Azov on this one. Kill them all”. Indeed: that would be the plan. Ukrainians are sending round a video on Whatsapp this week of a Russian minister saying that Ukraine does not exist, will cease to exist, etc. etc. She could be Netanhayu describing Palestine!  This is man who just today sends me awful details of the bombing children’s hospital … Er … a children’s hospital!? Hello!? Can they not see the connection? Apparently not. This one is genocide, this one not.

In Europe, a Rector of Glasgow University, a physician called Ghassan Abu-Sittah, was banned from entering Germany, later France, for having been to Gaza to try and help in hospitals under siege. Similar examples abound: close to home: the Bosnian Serb writer Lana Bastašić was brave enough to challenge the ghastly nationalist orthodoxy of her own environment in Banja Luka, for which she was welcome to Germany with a scholarship. Of which was then abruptly stripped the moment she started to profess publicly against the carnage in Gaza. She has since been ‘disinvited’ by Austria, for the same reason.

In the United States, there has been a grotesque display of acrobatics over Gaza, with opinion across a hegemony - right and left - either in outright justifcation of – ergo support for – the slaughter, or hand-wringing over Jewish identity and the end of liberal Israel. Or a kind of moral and political autism which focuses not on the matter in hand in Gaza, but the old anti-Semitism trope and reactions at home: passing on what happens in the ground, in order to assail American students – many of them Jewish – who dare to oppose Israel’s war. 

The significant student protest movement has met with bile and derision from all quarters, including people now writing well-paid columns in the establishment press, having been part of the student hippie and yippie movement against the Vietnam war themselves in days of yore. It feels like geriatric politics - the politics of hatred of one’s former self. But not only them: Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd in the liberal New York Times are conjoined by Fox News and a thicket of hate online from the right, cheering on the mobs which attacked students at UCLA with police blessing. The protests are the only thing in America apart from breathing and taking a pee that unites Trump and Biden, liberal Upper West Side stroller-gridlock and the fascist January 6^th rioters (who hate Jews but love Israel.

I tell you something: anyone like these brave young people who can piss off that political range must be doing something very interesting, and probably dead right.

On the other hand, there’s a hypocrisy from the left: South Africa, so reticent when it came to opposing the genocide in Ukraine is suddenly the main, and estimable agent on the stage of international justice, with its petition to the International Court of Justice. It is especially hard for you to digest here in Bosnia, but you must: many of those who deny or justify the genocide against you, and the Srebrenica massacre here, are to the fore in condemning that by Israel. Noam Chomsky, the gangster-academic who gave the Bosnian Serbs such credibility on the left with his denials and justifications of the violence against you is author of a book entitled ‘On Palestine’. I find myself having to point out to Bosnian friends marching in London that they are surrounded by placards of the ghastly Socialist Workers Party, which was enthusiastic in its support for Living Marxism and the camp and Srebrenica deniers. On another count, many of those most vocal in supporting Vladimir Putin and propagating the ‘neo-Nazi’ fantasy with regard to Ukraine’s resistance are wholehearted and estimable supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Keynote speeches are supposed to answer your questions, but if we ask ourselves: ‘How does this weirdness come about?” I have no answer for you. Other than that people just cannot seem to think outside the box of their own agenda, ego, myopia, or whatever it is. Common humanity evades them as much as common sense. I called my very dear friend, and friend of this festival, to talk it over: Gilles Peress, who was here three years ago, and with whom I went to Srebrenica.

Following his epic, rock-sized book on Ireland, covering decades of much of the best photography of the 20^th Century, Gilles is working on another massive tome – this time the Middle East. His background reading for which begins with the Old Testament. “We have a shallow view of history”, Gilles said, and I told him I would repeat his words to you this evening. “An anecdotal, shallow view which conforms with what we prefer to know, not what was or is. This kind of shit will never end, until we deepen our view of history”. 

One of the most outrageous slurs against the American protestors against Israel’s war is that they set what is happening in Gaza into context – a context of other movements, other causes, other struggles – whether directly related or not. They set it in the history of colonialism, and thereby, by definition, in the story of resistance to colonialism. They relate it to causes closer to home, and to the human body. Well, sometimes insult is a compliment. The whole point of the 1960s insurgency was that it joined the dots. In Gilles Peress’ terms, it cast off a shallow view of history in favour of a deepened one, which sought to understand the narratives of slavery, indigenous genocide, and colonialism from as close to home – for me - as Ireland, to places we might never visit like Vietnam and Eastern Africa. From that deepened understanding came civil rights, earth rights and social movements that are part of democratic fabric now, albeit under threat, beyond the perameters of this discourse.

Here is where we defend those things. WARM is an endeavour ‘sans-frontières’, which joins the dots in search of an enlightened and deepened view of history, and the history of conflict in particular, but not only. On Gaza: three years ago, our Laura Boushnak and our Lejla Hodžić curated an unforgettable exhibition of work by four Palestinian women photographers after an 11-day assault on Gaza which, said Boushnak, took the lives of 67 children. Gilles and I went round it with her and neither of us could speak for the hour it took. This week, one of those photographers – Samar Abu Elouf returns to WARM, with further work, all recent, all from Gaza, focussing on the targeting of children and our journalist colleagues.

Lejla said that the work was so visceral and the selection such a painful one that some of the most disturbing images, mostly concerning children, simply too horrific to exhibit: “they are like some of Gilles’ pictures from here, just too much to bear”, she said. Alongside this work, also awaiting you, is the fruit of a series of workshops held here earlier in the year, themed: Bosnia-Ukraine, reporting the future, which welcomed colleagues from valiant Ukraine to learn from here and teach what they knew. It’s creative multi-media feast of an exhibition, more an experience, to which the great Croatian artist Slaven Tolj has contributed a vision of his own.

The solidarity here, this week and wherever you take it from here – and please do - holds fast. Here, this week, in this city and in this space, we insist that 2+2=4, while madmen and women out there – even supposedly sane men and women - claim it makes five or seven.

We insist on the side of the people in the mass graves against whoever put them there, whoever they are, whatever their politics or sick, twisted justifications. We reject these acrobatics, we reject the political pornography of taking up the cause of one mass grave as a war crime, while dismissing another as ‘self-defense’, ‘counter-terrorism’, ‘imperialism’ or some other such revolting convolution. We walk that straight line here, for all the pressures to zig-zag. We insist on truth.

We are on the side of the bones, straightforwardly on the side of the bones, at Tomasica, Oklahoma, Srebrenica, Ground Zero, Falluja, Mariupol and al-Shifa – and all their kind, in Rwanda, Yemen, Sudan and beyond. On the side of the bones in the ground against whoever put them there – whoever stripped them of lives they never got to live, and drove their families and loved ones mad with grief. We are on Tesma’s side in Prijedor, and that of the son who will never return; we are on Baylee Almon’s side and that of her mother in Oklahoma; we are on the side of Dolores’ and her lost José in New York. We are on Mr. Kassim’s side and that of his last little flower Zainab in Iraq. We are with those beneath the ground, and those who search and mourn for them, in Mariupol, at the Be’eri kibbutz and across the vast mass grave that is Gaza.

That’s what this week, and this festival is all about, and you know what? Much of it will be fun, as well as in earnest, creative as well as pensive. There’ll be music, graffiti art; there will be resistance and vitality. Just be sure to do one thing: when you go to the fun things: for Christ’s sake, stick with the fun crowd, and steer well clear of the Ancient Mariner!