Imagine it is a hot July day and you are walking among thousands and thousands of men and teenage boys through a forest in Bosnia. As far as you can see, there are men walking – from teenagers, to old withered men.
You are all supposed to gather on Buljim Hill, approximately six miles from Srebrenica, and set off from there, heading for Tuzla, the nearest Muslim territory, which is just over 63 miles from Srebrenica. On the way, you must pass lots of uneven terrain, rivers, mountains, and because this is during the war in Bosnia, minefields. It is never going to be an easy journey, but you have no other option. You want to stay alive.
You meet with all the thousands of others on the hill, and start to assemble into a column. Your uncle, who is with you, tells you it would be best to stay in the middle of the column. You are just 19, so you don’t argue with his decision. Then as others come into your column, you begin to hear a terrible burst of gunfire. The key hill positions are under the control of the Serb military, and this means that they have a good view of you all lining up. They don’t care that you are unarmed.
Their main concern is that you are Muslim, and they wanted you dead. In the confusion of the gunfire, people in the column begin to push forward in a panic, desperate for shelter from the bullets. Bodies fall to the ground behind you, but nobody knows exactly what is happening. The gunfire is relentless, and it feels like it is coming from every angle This is what happened to Hasan Hasanović.
Srebrenica genocide 30th anniversary
11 July this year marks the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. Since then, there have been other massacres and now an ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are lessons to be learned from what happened on that warm summer’s day in Bosnia 30 years ago, and one of the most important is regarding the way that denial of a genocide can be not only the last step of one tragedy, but also the first step of the next.
Riefenstahl
In May, I wrote an article for North East Bylines about the film ‘Riefenstahl,’ the life of Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, and particularly how in her later years after the Second World War she had selective memory about the films she had made for the Nazis and what the consequences of those films might have been. This was not to be the last time those involved in such behaviour had shown selective memory.
Genocide denial
It has been rightly noted that:
“Genocide denial is the attempt to minimize or redefine the scale and severity of a genocide, and sometimes even deny a genocide is or was being committed. It is the final stage of the 10 Stages of Genocide, a processual model that aims to demonstrate how genocides are committed. The goal of genocide denial is twofold: cast doubt on charges of genocide to protect perpetrators, and to silence survivors. Genocide denial is an extended process that requires significant resources. It often begins before crimes are being committed and continues decades after the killing ends.”
It is also noted that genocide denial is dangerous in numerous ways, such as the following:
- It is often painful for survivors of genocides.
- It can be threat to the stability of nations where genocides have taken place.
- In terms of international security, the crime of genocide provides cover for other international crimes.
Genocide denial in Serbia and the Republika Srpska
Yet denial of the genocide at Srebrenica is exactly what is happening at the moment, both in Serbia and in Republika Srpska, the part of Bosnia governed by Serbs.
In 2023, it was reported that for the third year in a row, the Srebrenica Memorial Centre had published a research document ‘Srebrenica Genocide Denial Report 2023.’ This was recorded on the website:
“90 cases of denial of genocide in Srebrenica in the period from May 2022 to May 2023. The report includes media publications on the Internet and statements by public figures in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro that deny, minimize, relativize, or otherwise distort the facts about the genocide in Srebrenica.”
The following year it was stated in a new report by the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, published in September 2024 that Bosnia and Herzegovina had seen an increase in incidents of genocide denial over the previous year.
Bosnian Serb MPs
In that same year, 2024, Reuters noted that Bosnian Serb MPs had adopted a report which denied that the killing of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war constituted genocide. It was also reported that following this, thousands of Serbs had protested against a UN resolution commemorating the atrocity.
Reuters went on to say that:
“The massacre in 1995, which happened in the week after the U.N. safe zone of Srebrenica was attacked by Bosnian Serb forces, was seen as Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two, and international courts have ruled it constituted genocide”.
More denial
More denial was reported in April 2024, when it was said that:
“Yahel Vilan, the Israeli ambassador to Serbia, recently told the Russian State-owned news agency Sputnik that applying the term ‘genocide’ to the July 1995 mass killings of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia presented a distorted picture of the events in question. Vilan declared explicitly that, in his view, “Srebrenica should not be called genocide.””
It was also noted however, that as a matter of fact:
“The Srebrenica massacre by Bosnian Serb ultranationalist paramilitary thugs had been recognized as a genocide by a succession of trial panels and appellate chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as well as by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).”
It has even been argued that the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has:
“… now reached an eleventh stage, said to coined by Hariz Halilovich as ‘triumphalism.’ At this level” … “we see deniers of genocide not just ‘celebrating’ genocide but being officially awarded for it. As this paper argues, from the very beginning, the reckoning with the Srebrenica genocide was divided across ethnic lines and it remains polarized today.”
There has been a politics and culture of 20 years of genocide denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring Serbia and Croatia, which it is argued has seen denial at the political level spill over to a culture of genocide, which is:
“… pervasive, from public spaces to schools, art, sports and popular culture.”
Dangers of Srebrenica genocide denial
This denial of the genocide at Srebrenica is dangerous on a number of levels. It has been argued that:
“… the grim reality is that the Srebrenica slaughter was one of the twentieth century’s most notorious manifestations of genocide. There can also be no question that it was perpetrated by adherents of an indigenous extremist ethnonationalist ideology. This mindset and its proponents are still very much in evidence. Accordingly, the ongoing brazen attempts to deny and distort the Srebrenica genocide do not merely showcase the moral and ideological bankruptcy of genocide deniers. Far more ominously, they constitute a very clear and present danger in that they remind us of the resilience and resurgence of the political extremism that provided fertile ground for genocide in the first place.”
Responding to genocide denial
Given the clear dangers of this genocide denial, it is not surprising then that there has been a response from survivors, one of the groups most at risk from any denial. Indeed, an online platform has been launched to document instances where crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war are glorified or denied.
The ‘Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide,’ the Bosnian NGO that launched the website, Negatorigenocida.info, said in a statement:
“Any denial or glorification will be carefully documented and analysed, and forwarded to the relevant institutions, including the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for further action.”
The group’s president, Murat Tahirovic, maintained that judicial institutions have not done enough to prosecute genocide denial under legislation that came into force in 2021.
Tahirovic commented:
“For a long time, we have been waging a small war with the Prosecutor’s Office regarding the non-prosecution of deniers of genocide and other war crimes. We are continuing our fight against both perpetrators and deniers, as well as those who glorify criminals who committed the most serious crimes.”
Comment
It almost goes without saying that denial of genocides in the past is particularly dangerous at the present, as war and right-wing populism seem to be spreading their suffering like wildfire across so much of the world. Any attempt to deny the genocide at Srebrenica, or for that matter the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or any of the other genocides the world has witnessed can only lead humanity down the dark road to yet another terrible tragedy.
The genocide at Srebrenica was real and denial of it should never be seen as acceptable.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
