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While traveling in Bosnia earlier this year, I spent several days with the Mothers of Srebrenica (commonly referred as the “Mothers”), a coalition of genocide survivors who rallied after the genocide to bring justice to the Bosnian Muslim community. They fought to secure land in Srebrenica to bury their children, they helped establish the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial, they compiled evidence to prosecute the war criminals responsible for their anguish and they continue to this day fighting for their community.
The coalition is a group of mothers, each who buried children, brothers, sisters, parents and others during the largest genocide in Europe since the Holocaust. Many of the mothers are still waiting for the remains of loved ones to be found, verified and returned for burial. Earlier this year the UN designated July 11 as International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, acknowledging the 8,372 lives lost and some 8,000 persons still missing from Bosnia alone and even more missing from the war.
When I first arrived, we had a brief meeting with a translator to provide introductions, then we settled into the home where the Mothers host dignitaries and guests, built on the land where such horrible atrocities happened nearly thirty years ago. As most mothers do, they insisted I stay out of the kitchen, settle in and get comfortable, and of course eat everything so generously prepared. My connection with the Mothers felt absolutely natural but also unusual — I couldn’t speak Bosnian and they couldn’t speak English — so we were left communicating without words when our translator wasn’t present for meetings.
The first day I found that I frequently wanted to ask questions about the genocide, or justify my presence by explaining my efforts to help genocide survivors, but instead I was left to communicate only through the essence of human dignity. I realized quickly the only thing they would remember from my visit is how they felt when they were with me, and in a moment, all my other achievements, background and professional experiences were frankly irrelevant.
My time with the Mothers was nothing shy of sacred. They taught me what human dignity looks like and what it feels like. Human dignity is the space we share with other human beings in the essence of who we are — when you cannot speak the language, when you cannot communicate your accomplishments, affiliations or connections. In these moments, the only thing you have is your body language including how you look and respond to the presence of another person, acts of service, and the energy you bring into a space. No matter the context, you have the dignity of who you are in that moment — the inherent and undeniable worth of a human being who is loved and seen and appreciated. I couldn’t help but wonder if their lives would be different if human dignity had been at the center of their communities.
The real test of human dignity is not in moments with our mothers or others familiar and comfortable to us, but rather in moments when the tension of difference or fear of the unknown creates the temptation to question human dignity.
The concept of human dignity has often been discussed as the basis for human rights. This concept is outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Preamble which recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
It goes on to explain in Article 1, “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.” Some credit the UDHR with the first use of the words ‘human dignity’ as an idea of the inherent worth of all human beings.
Yet when human dignity is known in theory only it stays within the comfortable confines of people who look like us or who love us first or who are easy to love. Human dignity must be a lifestyle choice that we adopt which tells us to stop and help the outcast in distress, or make eye contact with the other, or offer a helping hand regardless of the identity of the person seeking help.
The price of ignoring human dignity is human rights violations, violence, and destruction of societies all around the world. We each have a moral imperative to practice human dignity and teach our children and communities how to preserve human dignity.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Kofi Annan taught, “A genocide begins with the killing of one man — not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ begins with one neighbor turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.”
Never have we needed the example of the Mothers of Srebrenica more in our world, never has there been so great a need to understand and practice human dignity in our lives.
Rachel Miner is the founder and CEO of Bellwether International, a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to disrupting the cycle of genocide and creating genocide resistance.