From 1947 to Srebrenica and the meaning of “Never Again” 

How a massacre in Europe reminded a scholar and former diplomat of the momentous events in India, 1947, leading him to work on creating a rapport and a connection with the Bosnians with a commitment to “Never again.” 

“This is just a punishment: to live without a complete family, without a whole family, without anybody; to ask questions every night, thousands of questions, and not have any answers. It’s been 20 years since the Srebrenica genocide happened. For me, it’s like 20 minutes. I have been longing for my children until now. I will never wish this kind of life even for those perpetrators.” 

These are the words of Khadija, a middle-aged woman then, who lost 54 members of her family in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995.  

She is the sole survivor of that massacre. I wrote about those horrors and interviewed survivors like Khadija, for my book Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity (2018) and made a film. The BBC series Living Islam (1993) included chunks of the Bosnian experience. 

It is devastating. I can’t even think about it without becoming emotional. 

When the Bosnian massacres took place, I responded very completely and emotionally, for all kinds of historical and personal reasons. 

The civil war between 1992 and 1995 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia led to 2.7 million displaced and 200,000 killed according to UN estimates. The Dayton Peace Agreement ended the war in December 1995, with Yugoslavia broken up into Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. 

I was born in 1943 and saw what happened in the summer of 1947 when India was Partitioned and Pakistan created. Everyone, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all took part in an orgy of violence. I was a mere four-year-old child. I traveled through the killing fields of the Punjab with my family and survived the atrocities around me. This is why I have always been passionate about preventing violence of any kind and have understood its evil nature. 

My sympathy for what was happening in Bosnia led me to try and create a rapport with the Bosnians. I made several visits there, from 1992 to 2014. I got to know the people, and  have great sympathy and love for them. 

I want to make three points. 

First, Bosnians are Europeans, and they are proud to be European. They have a history of living in Europe that goes back several centuries whatever the racism against them nowadays. 

Secondly, they are Muslims, many of them committed Muslims, and they interpret Islam in a way that is modern and yet traditional. I found this to be inspiring and appealing.  

The Muslim world, unfortunately, doesn’t fully know about what the Bosnians have to offer. I had the privilege of getting to know, for example, Dr. Haris Silajdžić, one-time prime minister and foreign minister of Bosnia. We spent a lot of time discussing and comparing Goethe, the great German poet who loved Islam and great mystic poet Rumi. That was the calibre of the man. 

Dr. Haris very kindly asked that my book, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society be translated into Bosnian and for the film to be dubbed into Bosnian. Then he worked with his colleague, Enes Karić, the Minister of Education, a great intellectual to make this happen. The book was retitled Living Islam: From Samarkand to Stornoway and is a companion for the BBC television series.

The Bosnian grand muftis are intellectual giants and scholars, like the present one, Prof. Kavazović, and the former, Mustafa Cerić. There is Mirnes Kovač, the great and brilliant Bosnian journalist, editor of one of their major papers.  

All of them became great friends. Through them, I learned about Bosnian culture and Bosnian people.  

The translator of my book into Bosnian, Prof. Zulejha Ridjanovic deserves special tribute. At the height of the bombardment of Sarajevo, living in an affected area,she would leave her flat early in the morning with the papers that she was translating and go to her office. She said, “If I die, I don’t care, but I’m not leaving my papers.” She prayed to Allah to be allowed to finish the translation before being killed in this war. 

That was her commitment. 

And, by the grace of God, she did finish. 

Perhaps geographical location puts them in this awkward position: For Europeans, they’re still too Muslim. For Muslims, they’re too European.  

But apart from that, they are people who need to be understood outside Bosnia, in Europe, and in the Muslim world. 

We need to understand the people of Bosnia and the genocide in a cultural and historical context, to understand the background – because history is very much alive, and contested.  

Not every Serb is  bad; not every Bosnian is  good. But there are historical processes taking place. There are battles, and there are narratives that are being shaped. 

So, we must understand the Bosnian narrative itself. 

I also had frank discussions with Bosnians I interviewed in St. Louis, Missouri,where they had migrated and settled. They told us they encounter no prejudice. 

“When Americans see us, we are blue-eyed, we are blonde, and they assume we are white Americans. But the moment they ask our name, someone says Muhammad, someone says Ahmed, and suddenly the attitude changes, because then we are seen not as an ethnic group but as a religious group.” 

My third, and perhaps most important point is that we have to think of the future, to remember the famous slogan, “Never again,” which should really apply to all communities everywhere in the world. 

We saw the horrors of what happened during the Second World War, the Holocaust and how the Jewish community was targeted, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we said, “Never again.” 

And yet we saw that, late in the century, in the 1990s, there was another genocide. And we said, “Never again.” 

We prayed that this would stop with that century. And we are into the 21st century now, and we are seeing what’s been happening in Gaza, what’s happening to the Rohingya people. There are so many examples. 

We must step back and, as human beings, committed to trying to improve life on this planet, we need to keep asking: What can we do to improve things? What can we do to build bridges? 

Again, I’m inspired by the Bosnian example, because I never heard any Bosnian say, “We want revenge. We want something bad to happen to our perpetrators, the people who did these things to us.” 

Our holy books, our religious traditions, promote the embrace of all humanity. For me this was such an inspiring human lesson from people that just suffered a genocide. “Never again.”

Islam has a beautiful and compassionate view of humanity. God is Rabb al-Alamin – God of all the universe. The Holy Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him, again, is Rehmat-al-Alamin – he is for all of humanity. The Prophet never said, “I am only for the Muslim community.” 

These are things that inspire Muslims. 

In conclusion, I would say: Let us truly believe in and promote the idea of “Never again.” 

Let us be inspired by this moment of reflection, to think of those terrible events that took place, and that we pray and hope we can say, with genuine sincerity and confidence, “Never again,” whether we are discussing societies in Europe or in Asia.

Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed is a Pakistani-American academic, author, poet, playwright, filmmaker and former diplomat. He currently is a Distinguished Professor of International Relations and holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, School of International Service, Washington, D.C. He has served as the Pakistan High Commissioner to the U.K. and Ireland. 

Adapted from his keynote speech on 21 July 2026 on Remembering Srebrenica during Muslim Arts and Culture Festival (MACFEST), by Sachin Gupta, Global Southasia Fellow and a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts. Boston. 

The session was organised by Qaisra Shahraz, a British-Pakistani novelist, scriptwriter, and founder of MACFEST. Speakers included Asad Zaman, Nezira Cohadovic, Aida Dedic and Azra Dedic. The discussion was joined by Dr. Mike Ghouse (Director of the Center for Pluralism based in Washington D.C), Dr. Amineh Hoti (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University and author of Gems and Jewels), and Frankie Martin (an Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow, American University’s School of International Service).  

This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com. 

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Global Southasia AI policy.

Appreciated the story? Support non-profit journalism. Make a tax-deductible contribution to Global Southasia.

Thank You