The whole hypocritical show is collapsing and all are rushing to do what they do best: some moral posturing.
Esad Širbegović is a writer and analyst based in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also a member of the International Expert Team at the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada. In 2022, he served as the Director of the International Expert Team for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, focusing on the Srebrenica genocide denial case at the University of Vienna. Esad’s work is deeply rooted in his personal experiences and centres on the critical issues of Islamophobia and genocide
Photo: World Economic Forum
The Bosnian proverb “Ko drugome jamu kopa, sam u nju pada” — “He who digs a pit for others falls into it himself” — echoes today with cruel and almost unbearable irony.
In Srebrenica, Dutch UN soldiers quite literally dug a pit. Inside a United Nations compound, within a declared “safe area,” they dug a mass grave. Into that ground they buried civilians killed by Serb forces under their watch. Into that pit they placed a newborn baby, Fatima Muhić, wrapped in a plastic bag — disposed of like trash.
In that act, the very foundations of international law were not just ignored but physically desecrated—its promise buried in a mass grave, alongside Baby Fatima, discarded in a plastic bag like trash.
They dumped Baby Fatima into a plastic bag like garbage, and with her threw away international law.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that the fiction of international law had long been convenient and useful.
“This fiction was useful,” he said. “This bargain no longer works.” He even described the rules-based international order as a “nice story.”
In Srebrenica, that “nice story” included a body. A baby’s body. In a plastic bag.
Carney was speaking in Davos while walking a careful political high-wire — signalling solidarity with European allies unnerved by Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, while avoiding confrontation with Washington ahead of a looming review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Billions of dollars were at stake. So was Western cohesion.
“All is not lost,” Carney insisted, calling on middle powers to unite and “build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
But for the people of Bosnia, the system Carney now mourns was never “nice” nor just. In July 1995, Srebrenica was a UN-declared “safe area.” Dutch peacekeepers were deployed to protect civilians. What followed is established fact: more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered in genocide.
What remains less known — and far more revealing — is that within the grounds of the UN base in Potočari, just 100 metres from the Dutch battalion headquarters in the former battery factory, a mass grave was dug by UN soldiers themselves.
Among the victims was baby Fatima, born and killed within the walls of a United Nations base under Dutch protection. The Dutch forces did not intervene — they stood by as she was murdered.
This was no accident, no confusion, no “fog of war.” This was cowardice and racism.
For 17 years, the location of that grave was kept from Bosnian authorities. The truth was never in doubt. Dutch peacekeepers had documented every detail — names, times, movements, conversations — with meticulous precision. Their records captured everything except accountability.
The silence broke only in 2012, when two former Dutch soldiers finally spoke. According to Amor Mašović, who led the exhumation, the men were crushed by guilt.
Mašović personally exhumed Fatima’s remains. She lay in a plastic bag, soaked with mud and water. It was a monstrous, uncivilized act — nothing about it was human.
This is the soil beneath the so-called rules-based order Carney now praises as a “nice story.” For countries like Canada and the Netherlands, it was convenient and profitable. They drafted resolutions, polished diplomatic language, expressed measured regret — always after the bodies were buried — all while enjoying the comforts and privileges built on the suffering they ignored.
Canada did not pull the trigger in Srebrenica. But it helped sustain the order that made such outcomes survivable for the powerful and catastrophic for the powerless. Its complicity lay in restraint masquerading as responsibility, in silence framed as diplomacy, in the refusal to confront allies when confrontation carried a price.
The order worked exactly as designed.
And now, the proverb comes due.
As Europe finds itself increasingly exposed — threatened by geopolitical coercion, unsettled by unreliable allies, forced to confront a world no longer organised around Western guarantees — the language suddenly shifts. Confidence gives way to candour. Certainty dissolves into confession.
The pit dug for others is no longer at a safe distance.
“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality,… ” Carney says now, as Europe finds itself on the receiving end of the very erosion it once managed. The pit they dug becomes visible only when its creators begin to fall into it themselves.
Yet there has been no reckoning. No acknowledgment that the “pleasant fiction” Carney rejects now was paid with human lives — with babies, discarded in plastic bags as trash by the very United Nation forces meant to shield them.
Carney’s cowardice is on full display. He cannot publicly acknowledge what is undeniable: that genocide is being carried out in Gaza, just as the world once looked away in Srebrenica. The pattern is the same — atrocities committed under the watch of those sworn to protect, while moral language shields the powerful and abandons the victims.
Fatima Muhić is buried today at the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Her mother, Hava, visits her grave in silence. That silence dismantles every elegant speech about rebuilding the world order. Fatima lived only hours, but her death exposes its core truth: sovereignty for the powerful, procedure for the victims, and disposal for those who inconvenience the narrative.
To mourn the collapse of that system without naming the graves it dug is not honesty. It is preparation — for the next fiction, the next bargain, the next “nice story.”
Srebrenica delivers to the world the merciless lesson of the Bosnian proverb: He who digs a pit for others falls into it himself. Others are mercilessly thrown into it.
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