The world rightly remembers with pain and grief of the massacre of the innocents in Washington and New York a year ago. The same cannot be said of the massacre of the innocents in Srebrenica. The slaughter of between 8,000 and 9,000 in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces evokes no similar international outpouring of emotion; it is not marked by wall-to-wall coverage around the globe. In justification, the two were very different acts of evil; no one had ever seen anything like the destruction of the Twin Towers — on TV at that.
Massacres like that at Srebrenica are, sadly, not unique. If we complain that that it received nothing near the same level of attention as the attacks on New York and Washington, then we engage in selfish relativism and deserve to be condemned, not least, by Rwandans for ignoring their hundreds of thousands of massacred innocents.
Yet what happened at Srebrenica should not be forgotten or, worse, written out of the history books. That is precisely what the Bosnian Serb government has just tried to do with a vile report that denies that the massacre took place. With its ridiculous claims that exhausted Muslim men imagined the massacre, its accusation that a Serb soldier who admitted taking part in the killings was “mentally disturbed”, and its grim determination to ignore the physical evidence of the mass graves, the report is so patently absurd that many people might say that it does not deserve a response. That would be wrong.
These lies are a calculated attempt to write the victims and their suffering out of history, as if they had never been. It is an outrageous attack on their memory and on the grief and pain of their families and friends. It is an offense against natural justice.
The Bosnian Serb government, facing elections in four weeks’ time, are playing the squalid nationalist card to gain votes. If people believe that the massacre did not take place, then it will be as if it had not happened. For the Bosnian Serbs, still wallowing in their hatred of Muslims, it would mean they did not have to feel remorse or guilt. In their warped thinking, they would become the victims, not the oppressors, and feel justified in clinging on to their bitter hatred of their foes and staying put in their miserable ghetto state.
In many countries in Europe, it is a criminal offense to deny that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. This vicious report, already condemned by the UN and the EU, ought to be subject to similar proscription. The UN, using its very strong powers in Bosnia, should force a law change that makes it a crime to deny the Srebrenica massacres and others in Bosnia. Something has to be done to make the Bosnian Serbs confront reality. After World War II, Germans were forced to watch footage of Hitler’s extermination camps and face up to the horrific truth what had been done in their name; by having their eyes opened, it created a change of heart and mind that permitted modern Germany to arise. There has been no similar attempt with Bosnian Serbs and therefore no change of mind of heart. It is time there was, because without it, the bigotry and hatred, so evident in the report, will remain, and with it the danger that it could bust into violent flame again.
