Soundtrack to a Coup D’État

 

Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars

Patrice Lumumba

Max Roach

Andrée Blouin

Malcolm X

CIA director Allen Dulles with his everpresent pipe

Director Johan Grimonprez

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÉTAT                   A-                                                       Belgium  France  Netherlands  (150 mi)  2024  d: Johan Grimonprez

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.                                                                                      —Voltaire

A stark assessment of how little we actually know about modern day history, where everything is cloaked in secrecy, as truth is a liability, telling one tale for public consumption while undermining that exact same position behind-the-scenes.  Nothing new was shot for this film, as it’s all drawn from existing archival material, a truly radical, formally inventive effort, as the amount of research involved here is truly extraordinary, where the entire film consists of footage not shown when the events were happening, providing a glimpse behind the headlines of what the media was not telling you.  Meticulously examining the 1961 assassination of Congo’s newly elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, where not much was known or written at the time, the film documents each and every source, looking behind the curtain at what really happened, creating a chilling portrait of the cruel manipulation of international affairs, where it’s all about the art of deception.  Using American jazz as a connecting thread, including live performance footage, with improvisational music fueling a free form, avant garde, cinematic collage approach, this is something we haven’t really seen before, yet the scholarship in breaking down the various political smokescreens is impressive, using eyewitness accounts, official government memos, recorded United Nations debates, testimonies from mercenaries, CIA operatives, British intelligence, and speeches from Lumumba himself, along with published memoirs by Congolese activists and writers.  The compelling subject matter is dense and often difficult to watch, juxtaposed against various jazz compositions that act as an underlying narrative, from Abbey Lincoln’s haunting rendition of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite YouTube (9:08), a Civil Rights anthem, perhaps the best-known jazz work with explicitly political content, to the deeply soulful Nina Simone - Wild Is The Wind (Live In New York 1964) YouTube (7:00), or her jazzy rendition of a Bob Dylan anthem, The Ballad of Hollis Brown - Nina Simone 1965 YouTube (6:10), which starts and ends the film, to a Congolese song of liberation by Joseph Kabasele, aka Le Grand Kallé, "Indépendance Cha-cha" - Congolese Independence Song YouTube (3:05), where the film is full of contradictions and bumps along the road, with no talking heads or voiceovers, featuring teeny, tiny, academic footnotes onscreen that are hard to read, yet essential for any continuing dialogue which this film hopes to inspire, while the film itself is also two and a half hours long.  Ostensibly a dissection of what was happening behind the scenes that led to the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose government was overthrown in a US-backed military coup, as he was kidnapped, beaten bloody, and tortured by his captors before facing a firing squad, pouring sulfuric acid on his body to prevent identification, saving only his gold teeth as war trophies, where the announcement of his death was withheld for over a month.  A rising star in Africa who essentially advocated a philosophy of Africa for Africans, aligned with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, beliefs that coincided with Malcolm X and many black jazz artists, as American black nationalist solidarity aligned with African liberation, Lumumba broke the yoke of colonialism while espousing freedom and democracy, beliefs that would normally be aligned with the West, sharing the same democratic principles, coming from hundreds of years of enslavement and colonialism, where the immediate outlook was bright, finally having their own country’s interests first and foremost.  But Lumumba posed a threat to the West precisely for those principles, as the West wasn’t ready to break the link of readily available resources coming from minerals that had been plundered from the African continent for centuries, which includes uranium, as the Congo mines were the main source of uranium used during the Manhattan Project to develop atom bombs and harness nuclear energy, a significant factor during the Cold War, where it’s no coincidence that this was happening at the height of the nuclear arms race.  The film addresses a diffuse mixture of base racism, colonial arrogance, and economic greed, less with agitational intent than as an enlightened treatise on injustice that remains just as relevant today.  The foremost film on colonialism is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965), which exposed France’s unwillingness to stop its colonial occupation of Algeria, by force if necessary, part of the French colonial empire in Africa that they were unwilling to grant independence, but the Algerians successfully fought back, starting the spread of emancipation from multiple former African colonies, while stylistically, featuring so much archival footage, the film this most resembles is Chris Marker’s The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977).

Johan Grimonprez is a Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator who studied anthropology, photography, and mixed media at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, receiving a Masters in Video and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York, now teaching at the Belgian Royal Academy and the Film Institute in Amsterdam.  A child of the 60’s, he describes his films as “an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history.”  Known for his critical view of media, corruption, and propaganda, situating themselves at the intersections of art, cinema, documentary, and fiction, the critically acclaimed films and video installations of Grimonprez explore the mechanisms by which fear and ignorance are perpetuated and whipped up in the media.  Informed by a wealth of fully documented media sources, spending eight years researching the film and four years editing it, his work explores the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization, suggesting history has been infected by fear, which has tainted the political and social dialogue, providing instead new narratives to tell a story, where his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities.  With that in mind, this video essay film is about the promise of decolonization, the hope of the Non-Aligned Movement and the dream of self-determination, yet it is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in glove with the military-industrial complex to smother this very dream.  In a choice that might seem perplexing to some, jazz musicians are as prominent as the historical realities, featuring the distinguished voices of Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone, along with some of the giants of jazz, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Max Roach, Pérez Prado, and Melba Liston, among others, with Armstrong and Dizzy Gillepsie sent to Africa on a good will tour as Jazz ambassadors by the State Department, following earlier trips to the Soviet Union in the 50’s, spreading American values worldwide, though some might describe it as propaganda countering the influence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  Playing to more than two million Africans, with newspaper photos following the tour, they found themselves in the eye of the storm, peddling freedom while behind the scenes a myriad of westernized forces led by Belgium, Britain, and the United States, were undermining that very concept from being born in Africa, conspiring to assassinate one of the leading lights of the decolonial movement in Lumumba.  In September 1960, the Congo had entered the UN world body together with 16 other newly independent African countries, but on February 16, 1961, a month following Lumumba’s betrayal, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, writer Maya Angelou and 60 others crashed a UN Security Council meeting in protest of Lumumba’s murder, seen combatively fighting with security, while Belgian embassies around the world came under assault, with demonstrators pelting them with eggs or setting fires, where the hypocrisy of this heinous act was on full display around the world.  President Eisenhower, in an attempt to restore America’s image abroad, sent these jazz ambassadors to Africa, hoping to quell the storm, but when Louis Armstrong realized they were being duped, unknowing decoys in the CIA’s assassination plot, he got on the first plane home, back to a country where racial segregation was still enforced by the law.  Perfectly encapsulated by Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, seen casually smoking his pipe, not to be confused with his older brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State at the time (with an airport named after him), with one brother sending the jazz musicians as camouflage while the other was concocting a murderous coup, this barrage of mixed messaging is an atypical yet clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions under the guise of liberal values, giving viewers a distinct view of just exactly what this meant at the time, where the effects of nation destabilization are still being felt today, as you can draw the parallel with current genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Gaza, and Yemen.  In Belgium, no one investigated their complicity in Lumumba’s murder for over forty years, establishing a parliamentary inquiry in 2001, classifying his murder as a war crime, concluding that Lumumba could not have been assassinated without the complicity of Belgian officers, backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, with Belgium bearing a ‘moral responsibility’ (Report Reproves Belgium in Lumumba's Death), leading to an official governmental apology in 2002.  To this day, there still isn’t much resource material available.  The film is a refresher course on geopolitics, as even sixty years later, armed groups continue to roam the countryside in the Congo threatening ordinary citizens, where according to a 2023 Amnesty International report (Human rights in Democratic Republic of the Congo):

Persistent large-scale attacks against civilians by armed groups and the Congolese security forces fuelled the humanitarian crisis in which nearly 7 million people were internally displaced and thousands of others fled the country.  Armed groups killed thousands of civilians, and the army carried out extrajudicial executions.  Sexual and gender-based violence remained prevalent, with over 38,000 reported cases in Nord-Kivu province alone during the first quarter of the year.  The rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association were routinely violated.  Journalists, opposition members and activists, among others, were subjected to arbitrary detention and faced unfair trials.  Mining projects in Lualaba province led to the forced eviction of thousands of people from their homes and livelihoods, while Indigenous Peoples faced eviction in the name of conservation.

Not unlike Swedish documentary filmmaker Göran Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 (2011), this film encourages thought-stimulating concerns about the international order and the way in which media and music shape our cultural worldview.  Some films have explored these subjects before, like Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (Hyènes) (1992), Peter Bate’s CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH (2003) or Hubert Sauper’s We Come As Friends (2014), where the dominant capitalistic interests are so overwhelmingly in favor of corporate interests like the oil companies, yet they hide their true objectives behind puppet African figureheads who have been given titles and positions of prominence in African “corporations” that have been formed only to bypass laws designed to exclude outsiders from obtaining controlling interests in what are African resources.  Initially there were two Congos, where one was a former French colonial area, while the other was the former Belgian colony.  African directors Mambéty and Ousmane Sembène were extremely suspicious of Western colonialist values and its allegiance to materialism corrupting the African shores since independence in the 1960’s, with Mambéty providing the central thrust of his film, suggesting Africans are “betraying the hopes of independence for the false promises of Western materialism… We have sold our souls too cheaply.  We are done for if we have traded our souls for money.”  Oreet Rees and Pippa Scott’s KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST (2006) exposed the systematic atrocities from Belgium’s 19th and 20th century colonial intrusion into the Congo, becoming the personal domain of Belgian King Leopold II, where they burned and destroyed up to a hundred local villages for rubber plantations, shooting anyone who disagrees, imprisoning the villagers for slave labor, kidnapping the wives of the working men, then cutting off the men’s hands if they resisted or if what they produced was too small, where the history of atrocities is horrendous, yet the underlying method behind this madness was purportedly “bringing civilization to the uncivilized.”  Instead they brought murders and mutilations, which have been historically passed down to subsequent generations, along with a swath of destroyed villages.  You may squirm when you hear then Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens literally speak of an inferior race of people while also claiming Belgium’s colonization of the Congo was “not to satisfy colonial or imperial aspirations but to complete a mission of civilization.”  This film also introduces the dark figure of Moïse Tshombe, a man Malcolm X described as “the worst African ever born,” a backstabbing Congolese official accusing Lumumba of communist leanings and dictatorial rule, leading a secessionist movement splitting the lucrative Union Minière mines Katanga region from the Congo solely for monetary gain, with the full support of Belgium who wanted to secure their interests, flying in paratroopers and surrounding the mines with paramilitary forces.  However, it was America’s rejection of Lumumba that forced his government into turning to the Soviet Union for help, as he inherited a disaster, with the Belgians emptying the coffers of the fledgling state and making sure the Congo never had a chance to develop, as they never trained their replacements, but just left in masse, with resignations in droves, leaving more than 25% of the country unemployed, having little other recourse due to the fragile nature of forming and running a government in a new nation, where allies and resources are essential.  The crisis that engulfed the Congo, impossibly complex, increasingly brutal, ended with a military coup and the three-decade rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a onetime Lumumba ally who went on to govern as a ruthless Western client.  The death of Lumumba, brought down by a combination of Congolese politicians, Mobutu’s army coup, and Belgian “advisers,” with the tacit support of the CIA, the British M16, and the malign neglect of the United Nations, was a signal moment of both the Cold War and decolonization, two defining events of the postwar world, where Lumumba’s story, as depicted in the film, is the story of how they became inseparable, while also providing an expansive view of how the last vestiges of American imperialism, with its policy of meddling in the affairs of others, exactly as they were doing in Vietnam, literally destroyed Congo's hopes for independence.  Along with Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) and Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), we are constantly reminded that the deplorable impact left behind by colonialism is still with us today. 

Even after all these years, it’s simply amazing what was happening at the United Nations in 1960, given prominent exposure on the international stage, as world leaders routinely met on the biggest stage and actually discussed how to solve world problems, something that would seem unthinkable today, as the organization has been stripped of all power and significance, reduced to little more than clerical duties.  One of the stark revelations of the film is how Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro were viewed at the time as enemies of freedom and democracy, yet it is actually the Americans undermining the democracy movement in Africa, while Russia and Cuba, along with a host of African and Asian nations, were actually aligned against the colonial powers, namely Belgium, Britain, and the United States, in support of Africa’s attempts to break free from the devastating effects from centuries of colonialism plundering the resources of the African continent by brutality and force, with the CIA financing resistance armies that raped, killed, tortured, imprisoned, and mutilated African citizens who fought for freedom, assassinating democratically elected leaders, then installing puppet regimes to carry out policies that benefited their exclusive interests.  It’s rare to see Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X united in solidarity with Nikita Khrushchev.  It’s the 1950’s Cold War, anti-communist playbook that we’ve seen before in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, overthrowing an existing government that was preventing the flow of oil to the wealthiest nations like Britain and the United States, imprisoning the Prime Minister, placing him under house arrest, while installing the Shah of Iran, who eventually became a ruthless war criminal, or in Chile in 1973 with Salvador Allende, with the CIA assassinating the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America, then installing Augusto Pinochet as president, a ruthless dictator for twenty years who was ultimately charged with a litany of war crimes, with similar shenanigans also happening in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.  Yet this film focuses on Patrice Lumumba in 1960 immediately after obtaining their colonial independence from Belgium, a high profile leader who was simply extinguished for political expediency, reflective of how the world viewed blacks at the time, still believed to be inferior and subhuman, so his murder was seen as acceptable by agents acting on behalf of the CIA, the Belgium government, and the blatant neglect of the peacekeeping United Nations Operation in the Congo under UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (impossible to believe today, but he held one of the most powerful positions in the world at the time, commanding international respect), with the West labeling him a communist, a completely false accusation, but this demonizing and stigmatization allowed them to bulldoze over his pan-African beliefs, envisioning a unity of African nations, voicing his concerns at the independence handover ceremony, “We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.”  This African solidarity was viewed as a threat to the West, with Lumumba replaced by a puppet government under Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who was a notoriously corrupt autocrat, amassing millions in personal wealth at the expense of the economic deterioration of his own country, where a brutal war left millions dead, using rape as a weapon of war, yet he was more sympathetic to Western interests, where the historic flow of colonial mining interests could continually be extracted out of Africa to the West, where it’s safe to say that not one Congolese has benefited from the wealth extracted from those mines except the kleptocracy running the country.  Countered by footage of Eisenhower’s public promises not to interfere in the policy of the Congo, the extent of just how much the United States resorted to lies and dirty tricks to covertly undermine newly formed democracies abroad is staggering. 

One of the other revelations is bringing to light an enigmatic figure that is barely known, remaining on the periphery of historical narratives that privilege the so-called founding fathers of African independence, with the film re-introducing Andrée Blouin, a mixed-race Congolese woman who threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, an activist and writer, as well as a dynamic, charismatic speaker, mobilizing the Democratic Republic of Congo’s women against colonialism, singlehandedly enrolling 45,000 people into the Congolese Independence Party, heading the women’s wing of the party where she worked to expand literacy, fight alcoholism, and for women’s and children’s rights, rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, actually trading ideas with famed revolutionaries and legendary postcolonial leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré, and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella.  These relationships led the European press to denigrate her as a shadowy communist and “whore,” often called the “Mata Hari of Africa,” a courtesan of powerful African politicians, completely representative of the historically racialized and sexualized representations of women of color in politics, belittling her intelligence and widespread influence, yet in the same breath she is also described as “the most dangerous woman in Africa,” much as the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover in 1962 labeled Martin Luther King as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”  She experienced first-hand the deadly effects of racism at the hands of French colonizers, raised in an orphanage where she endured years of starvation, torture, and imprisonment, fleeing the orphanage at 15 to defy an arranged marriage, but it was as a young mother when the French colonial administration refused to allow her 2-year old son access to quinine, malaria medicine, claiming it was for Europeans only, an ill-fated decision that left her son dead within days, a traumatizing event that led to her radicalization, concluding that colonialism “was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life.”  What little we see of her onscreen is utterly fascinating, as all the other leaders are men, where she is viewed as the woman behind Lumumba, serving as his speechwriter, Chief of Protocol in the new government, and diplomatic liaison to European governments, yet her intelligence and profound influence are unmistakable, taking part in multiple struggles for independence across Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  At the time of Lumumba’s arrest, Blouin was sentenced to death as well but was able to flee the country, leaving her children behind, relocating to Algiers and later Paris.  While in exile, soldiers looted her family home and brutally beat her mother with a gun, permanently damaging her spine.  She wrote her own personal memoirs, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, published in 1983, an excerpt can be read here: How the West Destroyed Congo's Hopes for Independence, but it’s been out of print for decades, republished earlier this year following the release of this film, where cinema, much as it did with Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), or Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, is exposing forgotten and long-neglected female historical figures who were automatically assumed to be less important than the male figures surrounding them, whose contributions never received their due during their lifetimes. 

Where Jazz & Espionage Collide | Soundtrack to a Coup D ...  Greg Lemley video interview with director Johan Grimonprez from Inside the Arthouse, YouTube (42:32)

Quo Vadis, Aida?

 

Writer/director Jasmila Žbanić

Žbanić on the set

Muslim women at a memorial site for the dead

Muslim cemetery

Serbian General Ratko Mladić

Karremans sharing a glass of wine with Mladić

QUO VADIS, AIDA?           B                                                                                                   Bosnia  Austria  Romania  Netherlands  Germany  Poland  France  Turkey  Norway  (101 mi)  2020  d: Jasmila Žbanić

There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps.  Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.                                                                                                                                          —Hannah Arendt from The Meaning of Evil, by James Sias, 2016, The Meaning of Evil - Page 70 - Google Books Result

The break-up of Yugoslavia led to the formation of six republics that achieved their independence in 1992, one of which was Bosnia and Herzegovina.  From the outset, there were ethnic clashes between the majority Muslim population (44%) and the Orthodox Serbs (32.5%), with Serbian nationalist forces initially securing ethnic Serb territory, but war soon spread across the country, with ethnic rivalry evolving into religious hatred, becoming a struggle for territory and changing borders through ethnic cleansing, turning into the first genocide in Europe following WWII.  Serbian forces targeted Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, as more than 8000 (a closing caption tallies the death count as 8,372) were systematically separated from the women and then executed over the course of three days, taken away to be tortured and murdered, their dismembered bodies buried in mass graves while the women were raped.  The core of the horrendous nature of war crimes, torture, mass executions, mass graves, the moving of bodies from one pit to another in an attempt to cover up genocide, are all omitted from the film.  Even so, to this day, right-wing Serbs continue to deny war crimes ever occurred, calling it a hoax and a lie, as it continues to be an open wound and remains one of the worst human catastrophes in the history of Europe since WWII, made even worse because it all took place under the supposed protection of United Nations forces in a declared “safe zone.”  After three and a half years under siege, the town of Srebrenica, only ten miles from the northeastern Serbian border, was declared a U.N. safety zone in 1993 and put under the protection of a Dutch battalion working for the United Nations known as the Blue Berets.  This film, realistically shot by Christine A. Maier, is a fictionalized recreation of that event, opening with a heated argument between U.N. commander Lieutenant Colonel Thom Karremans (Johan Heldenbergh), his deputy Major Franken (Raymond Thiry), and the Bosnian Mayor (Ermin Bravo), as the Serbs were shelling the city with no consequences.  Karremans insisted U.N. forces would start bombing the Serbs from the air beginning at 6 am the next day if they refused to meet an ultimatum to cease and desist, yet this was apparently no deterrence, as they’d been told the same thing before, yet the shelling continued.  Out of sheer exasperation, the Mayor asked what would happen if there was no U.N. response, Karremans indicated he was just a “piano player,” or simply a messenger in this entire ordeal, and could only do what was in his capacity, while also at the table was Aida Selmanagić (acclaimed Serbian actress Jasna Đuričić), a Bosnian school teacher working as a translator for the U.N. forces.  The entire film is seen through her eyes, offering a harrowing experience that can only be described as the insanity of war, as clearly the U.N. was not prepared for the severity of the circumstances.  By the next morning Serbian General Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković), known as the “butcher of Bosnia,” takes the city, as the Mayor is quickly singled out and shot, forcing up to 5000 civilians to flee their homes and take refuge inside the U.N. compound under the protection of U.N. soldiers, as the U.N, peacekeepers represent their only hope of sanctuary, with another 25,000 more left outside the gates on open ground without any food and water, with no toilets, no doctors, and no protection.  No film, however, presents war atrocities with more shattering realism than Elem Klimov’s Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985), which remains the film from which all others are compared.  What makes this distinctive, as a point of comparison, is that it’s told from a female perspective.

Conceived by Jasmila Žbanić, a Bosnian writer/director with a background as a documentary filmmaker who has examined this territory before in her earlier film GRBAVICA (2006), the first prominent local film made in the aftermath of the Bosnian war to focus on the war crimes of mass rape, with tens of thousands of mostly Bosnian Muslim women victims who were systematically subjected to the collective horror by Serbian soldiers.  A touching exposé of collective grief, speaking about an unspoken trauma, offering a point-of-view that is distinctly feminist, the film examines the life of a single mother in contemporary Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, winning a Golden Bear as the Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival where it premiered.  Placing herself on the front lines of anti-fascist women’s world cinema, this film, on the other hand, forces us to bear witness to mass atrocities, as it dramatizes the hours leading up to the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the single worst atrocity of the Bosnian war, with Aida making desperate attempts to save her family, including her husband Nihad (Izudin Bajrović) and her two sons, pleading with Karremans and anyone else who would listen to put their names on the protected list, but they refuse, claiming it is against regulations, believing preferential treatment might incite riots, as they were already dealing with a volatile situation, feeling like a tinder box on the verge of an explosion.  Mladić provides a show negotiations that pretends to include Bosnian civilian input, including Nihad, that suggests there is freedom of choice, yet the civilians are told they can “either survive or disappear,” as Serbian guards control every aspect of movement, with no existing options other than obey or be shot down.  Aida’s sense of increasing panic and desperation provide the central focus of the film, with everyone grabbing her hand, calling out her name, asking her to make sense of the overriding chaos, constantly barraged in this manner as the world around her quickly spins out of control, leading to a kind of Kafkaesque madness, as no one seems to be in charge, leaving all these citizens at risk, quickly corralled into busses and herded into separate groups by armed Serbian soldiers right under the noses of the U.N. commanders, who acquiesce to Mladić and the Serbian military, using attack dogs to guarantee compliance, exactly as the Nazi’s did during WWII.  Knowing that what she translates is dangerously untrue, she nonetheless is placed in the absurd predicament where she is forced to tell a warehouse full of panicked refugees that the Serbs have finished “evacuating” those outside, and that now it is their turn, and that they will be safe.  The most explicit guarantee of weakness is Mladić’s ability to get an armed Serbian contingency inside the compound (though it is also against regulations) under the auspices of searching for weapons or war criminals, but really they’re evaluating the strength/weakness of the U.N. forces themselves, which show no backbone whatsoever, as Mladić’s team walks all over them, relinquishing their authority to the Serbs, becoming enablers, as the “safe” compound and its surroundings inadvertently becomes a site of mass entrapment, in effect, a concentration camp.  This horrible sequence is especially chilling when we realize the extent of familiarity with one another, as it is neighbor against neighbor, classmate against classmate, with many of the Serb soldiers recognizing Aida as their teacher, inquisitively asking about her sons that she has gone to terrible lengths to hide and shield from this very outcome, conveyed with an incalculable dread, as everyone’s hopes for safety are quickly shattered, instead falling under a pall of doom.  It feels inconceivable that U.N. military officers, or any other rational person, could witness the separation of women and men, herded by gunpoint, and not know the playbook, as the systematic murder through ethnic cleansing was originally outlined by the Nazi’s in the Holocaust, but it has been repeated by the Serbs, more recently the Syrians, and now the Russians, who negotiate grandiose promises, such as safe passageways, but then conduct massive assaults on those innocent civilians attempting to escape from the surrounding terror.  This is a chilling reminder, however, of “Never forget,” but clearly people find a way to remain blind to the obvious, as all the supposed safeguard measures were simply forgotten in the name of expedience, perhaps even relieved that someone was taking this massive humanitarian crisis off their shoulders, unwilling to follow through with even minimum reality checks, as none of the supposedly safe transports of separated men, women, and even the wounded, ever reached their destination.    

Aida, onscreen in nearly every shot, almost always seen with a cigarette dangling from her lips, is a fictional character inspired by the experiences of former U.N. interpreter Hasan Nuhanović, a male translator who survived genocide, testified against war criminals, became a chronicler of genocide, writing a book about his experiences in 2007, Under the U.N. Flag: The International Community and the Srebrenica Genocide, and wrote many times on his Facebook page about the troubles he had with Žbanić, as she took artistic liberties with his narrative, preferring to focus on the human dimension of the story, though the men around Aida are real, including Major Franken, who reacts to Aida’s claims that people are being slaughtered by scolding her for “spreading rumors,” and Karremans, whose response to those same reports is to lock himself in his office, grumbling “Leave me alone.”  As it turns out, according to a superior officer, General Hans Kouzy, Karremans was under considerable personal and psychological pressure at the time he was appointed commander of the Dutch peacekeeping battalion in Srebrenica, as he was in the process of an ugly divorce and was not fully focused on his military duties, leaving most of the decisions concerning Muslim refugees to his deputy, Major Robert Franken, who adopted a legalistic, by-the-book approach.  In 2010, Nuhanović accused Colonel Karremans, his deputy Major Franken and others of war crimes for their transfer of Muslim families to the Serbs.  A doctor at the base accused Karremans of lying to the U.N. war crimes tribunal when he claimed he had no idea what would happen to them.  In 2015 a Dutch appeals court decided not to prosecute them (Dutch Court Rejects Prosecuting Srebrenica Peacekeepers), though the court found that both Karremans and Franken had reason to believe that the Serbs were killing at least some of the male prisoners, but due to the lightness of their arms probably couldn’t have changed the outcome, so when the case was appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, they denied to hear the case.  It’s worth noting that other U.N. commanders reacted differently when confronted with similar situations, as a month after the Srebrenica events, some 700 Serbs took refuge in a United Nations base in the Croatian town of Knin, KNIN: 700 SERB REFUGEES STRANDED AT UN BASE YouTube (2:47), after the Croatian army regained area from Serb control.  Croatian generals demanded that some refugees be handed over as alleged war criminals, the same argument used by Mladić in Srebrenica.  The commander of the Canadian peacekeeping forces, however, General Alain Forand, rejected the Croatian demand.  Karremans was promoted upon his return after the war to a full Colonel, but later retired and moved to Spain on account of death threats he received.  Žbanić has crafted an eloquent and conscientious picture that ticks down the moments that inevitably precede historical acts of genocide, made all the more suspenseful from Đuričić’s performance.  The fatalistic predictability of this film, however, unravels like a snuff film, as the doomsday scenario is predetermined from the outset, told with a very heavy hand, feeling ominous throughout, where the gravity even weighs on the viewer, as there is no let up, where the elephant in the room is the underlying theme of ethnic hatred, which is all but ignored by the U.N. forces, and that omission is basically pounded into the consciousness of viewers who are waiting for the axe to fall, as the Serbian promises of safe keeping are simply too incredulous to believe.  Yet the Serbs repeat over and over again that no one will be harmed, no one will be hurt, all innocent people will be safe, with Mladić himself stepping inside a bus filled with Muslim women, camera in tow, claiming “I am here to save you,” and “I grant you the gift of life,” an egregious lie that is meant to instill a sense of calm before the inevitable storm of bullets.  Žbanić leaves out the fate of the women (though we do see a screaming young woman dragged away from her mother) and the wounded and instead focuses on what happens to every one of the men and boys, showing the graphic devastation of their brutal murders, but the camera pans away from their deaths, as the machine gun sound reverberates throughout the calmness of the neighborhood, where all can hear.  When it’s all over, people are supposed to forget the monstruousness they witnessed from their neighbors and members of their communities.  A Serb commander and his wife move into Aida’s apartment after the war because they thought its inhabitants were all dead.  In a quietly devastating sequence, Aida is looking for the remains of her sons and husband years after the genocide, walking alongside many other women through a big hall where human remains and their belongings are displayed on the floor, suddenly pausing, as she begins to sob quietly, her final confirmation that the worst is true.  Released on the 25th anniversary of the massacre, the final aftermath conveys a school performance sequence, still a little unsettling, as animosities persist, knowing most people who committed atrocities during the war will go unpunished, with the camera panning over the parents, where it’s not at all uncommon for survivors to mix with the perpetrators of war crimes in a new societal normalization, depicting a class of primary school children dancing on stage, exhibiting peek-a-boo, see-no-evil hand gestures in an unequivocal, wordless indictment of all nations that stood by and looked away, allowing human atrocities to happen. 

Postscript                                                                                                                                     According to Kofi Annan, the U.N. Secretary-General of the time, “Through error, misjudgement, and an inability to recognize the scope of evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.”

Ratko Mladić was finally arrested in Serbia in 2011, convicted of war crimes in 2017, in part for Srebrenica, losing his appeal for a genocide conviction in 2021, and will spend the rest of his life at the Hague in prison (Ratko Mladić, 'butcher of Bosnia', loses appeal against ...).

In stark contrast, Croatian filmmaker Nebojsa Slijepčević’s Srbenka (2018) adapts controversial Croatian theater director Oliver Frljić’s play based upon a 1991 murder of a 12-year old Serbian girl, Aleksandar Zec, who was tied up and kidnapped along with her mother and father, taken to a mountain retreat, then shot in the head with an automatic rifle, all brutally murdered and their bodies dumped in a garbage pit by a 5-man militia group consisting of a special Croatian police unit near the start of the Yugoslav Wars.  No one has ever been held accountable.