The Muslim Holocaust

The Muslim Holocaust

Today, 11th July 2005, the BBC reported on Srebrenica Muslims burying their dead. (If your browser cannot do hyperlink, the URL is this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4670379.stm). 

The Oxford Dictionary of English, gives the meaning of holocaust as "a sacrifice on a large scale" and "complete consumption by fire, or that which is so consumed; complete destruction, esp. of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre". 

The same dictionary goes on to give the meaning of The Holocaust as "the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis in the war of 1939-1945" 

It also mentions the words, are also used in transferred sense, to describe "of the similar fate of other groups". 

In attribution, the dictionary gave these: "The specific application was introduced by historians during the 1950s, probably as an equivalent to Heb. urban and shoah 'catastrophe' (used in the same sense); but it has been foreshadowed by contemporary references to the Nazi atrocities as a 'holocaust'.  The term is in common use among Jews, but seems to be otherwise relatively rare except among specialists.

My proposition here is the slaughter of Muslim men in that Bosnian town, who were slaughtered simply because they were Muslims, be recognised as the THE MUSLIM HOLOCAUST. 

(1) It was a great slaughter or massacre.

(2) It was complete destruction, esp. of a large number of persons. 

"About 8,000 men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995 in Europe's worst atrocity since World War II." (Source: BBC report mentioned above). 

Do click on this link hosted by the Human Rights Watch for more details and analyses. http://www.hrw.org/summaries/s.bosnia9510.html

(3) the term is not specific to the deplorable Jewish Holocaust of 1939-1945, although in practice it has become common to refer to it as such exclusively. 

"Earlier, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw apologised on behalf of the international community for not doing enough to prevent what he described as one of the darkest chapters of European history since 1945. " (Source: similar BBC report mentioned above).

What do you think?  Do write, this is not a religious issue, it is trying to put things in the right perspective, calling a spade, a spade. 

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Other related reports:

Funérailles de mars 2003, this is in French.  http://www.ssvds.org/srebrenica/mars2003.html

If you can only read in English, besides missing out on a lot of reading materials, you can click on this Swiss based article here: www.stoessel.ch/ bosnia/srebrenica.htm, written by two journalists, "One Day in Srebrenica".

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Update

The Metro of 17th October 2005 reported that the remains of more than 480 Muslim victims of the Srebrenica massacre have been found in Bosnia by forensic experts.  It is the third biggest mass grave found in the Balkan country so far.  "We found eight complete and 474 inomplete bodies, said Murat Hurtic, head of the country's Commission for Missing Persons.  The bodies were exhumed from the fifth mass grave found in the village of Liplje.