Gravestones at the Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica

Today I had a few people ask me why I was wearing a white arm band. And I thought to myself that "why" was a good question. I had been asking myself "why" I decided to wear a white arm band since the day before when I decided that I was going to participate in the event. 


There are many answers to the question of "why":


-Because I want to show my support for the victims of Prijedor. Thousands of men, women and children were ripped from their homes and forced to wear a white arm band so they could be identified as non-Serbs. On May 31, 1992, the first exterminations of non-Serbs took place in Prijedor. This first day marked a period of executions, concentration camps, mass rapes and the ultimate removal of more than 94% of Bosnian Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats from the territory of the Prijedor municipality.


-Because I can't imagine what it was like to be a little girl in the midst of the Bosnian War. When I was 12-years-old I was out playing with my friends, reading books, going to school, and living a fairly peaceful life. But other little girls were not as fortunate. Instead they were being herded into concentration camps and cherry-picked for torture and rape resulting in a slow genocide long after the war had ended. Estimates of the number of women raped on both sides of the Bosnian War are between 20,000 and 50,000. Many women and girls were placed in unhygienic conditions and were repeatedly raped. One camp was dubbed the rape camp and called "Karaman's House" where girls as young as 12-14 were forced to live before they were abused, raped and then sold. 


-Because history has a tendency to repeat itself when it is forgotten. Before the Bosnian War in 1992, the last time human beings were forced to wear a marking was in 1939 when by Nazi decree Polish Jews were forced to wear white arm bands with the blue Star of David to mark them out for extermination. 


-Because a friend of mine survived the atrocities committed in Prijedor and I want to show her and all the other survivors of these despicable crimes that there are people who care. That there are people who know how wrong this was and who refuse to let such a despicable piece of history be swept away and forgotten.


-Because wearing an arm band or placing a sheet in a window is a simple thing to do and means so very damn much. 


-Because....

Love,

Linda 

Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Spanish text.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."


It is a sad fact that many places in our world do not honor this declaration. Cultural Compassion- The Human Chronicles was created to help spread the word about human rights issues that are going on in the world and sometimes in our own backyards. 


Right now, there are questions of human rights violations by Mexican police, Egypt officials are defending sweeps of human rights and pro-democracy buildings, and CPJ has reported that 45 journalists were murdered in direct reprisal for their work, killed on a dangerous assignment or killed in crossfire during a combat situation in 2011.