Slobodan Milosevic’s grim trial continued apace in The Hague this week with the fallen dictator making a flat denial that the 1995 massacres of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica ever took place. What he wants the world to believe are a few big things: The UN Dutch peacekeepers who surrendered control of the safe haven they were supposed to be protecting were wrong about the number of people who had sheltered there. The UN war crimes investigators were making up the sickening details about thousands of bodies they unearthed in mass graves on the edge of Srebrenica. The eyewitness reports of both Bosnians who escaped the massacre and Serb soldiers who were sickened by the carnage were all a fabrication? The satellite photographs taken of the long fresh mounds of mass graves were cynical fakes.
Pretty big claims, but the thought behind the strategy is hardly original. It was Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels who so famously proclaimed that the bigger the lie, the more chance there was of it being believed. Milosevic would seem to be a star graduate of the Goebbels’ school. Maybe he is sensing that he is winning the courtroom tussle, simply because the charges of genocide against him are turning out to be hard to prove. The Kosovo section of his trial has finished with a great deal of telling testimony against Serbia’s former ruler. But privately some prosecution lawyers admit that they have not yet produced conclusive proof, the smoking gun that would show that Milosevic did in fact order genocide, first against the Bosnians and then against the Kosovars.
Milosevic’s claim that the Srebrenica massacres are a fabrication also is not original. Serbian Bosnians produced a report at the start of this month, which absolutely refuted that the carnage had taken place. They attributed the accusations to Bosnian Muslim refugees, mentally disturbed after spending weeks fleeing needlessly from their Serb friends. At most, the report concluded, maybe a 100 civilians had been murdered, by other Serb civilians incensed by similar crimes carried out by Muslims against their own community. Any other dead were Bosnian soldiers who had died of wounds. This colossal act of denial demonstrates how difficult the Bosnian Serbs are finding it to come to terms with the wickedness perpetrated in their name by their former rulers.
This willingness to contradict the stark evidence of history is symptomatic of the incredulity with which shocked German civilians reacted when they were forced to tour Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. They could not believe the appalling crimes they saw because they did not want to believe them. Now within a new generation of Germans, most of whom were born many years after the war, there are arising neo-Nazis who seek to claim that they were all complete fiction. The horrific photographs and newsreel footage was faked, as were the testimonies of countless Allied troops who saw the camps at first hand.
The problem with the denial of history is that you protect your children from having to know themselves through their past. When you do that, you condemn them to repeat history. Milosevic has done no favor to his people.
