Deniers of Genocide

Genocide was generally seen as an extremely rare exception or aberration in human affairs. Today, such minimalist views about genocide seem increasingly dated. The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda have convicted Serb and Hutu extremists for genocide against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Tutsi victims. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has likewise ruled that the Serb massacre of over 8,000 Bosniaks at Srebrenica in July 1995 was an act of genocide. A generation of new scholars has arisen who have pointed out the high incidence of genocide in human history, using Bosnia and Rwanda as case studies to illustrate the wider phenomenon. Genocide has widely come to be seen as something that has occurred frequently, not rarely, in human history, and with this changing perception has come an increasing awareness of the need to take action to prevent it. Yet precisely because the recognition of genocides leads to demands for action to stop them, there have been loud voices raised against such recognition.

The Bosnian and Rwandan genocides have become infamous not merely for the crimes of the perpetrators themselves, but also for the failure of bystanders in the outside world – particularly in the West – to take action to stop them. Indeed, in both cases, Western governments were to varying degrees complicit with the crimes. The French government actively supported the Hutu-extremist regime that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide, while the US undermined the UN mission in Rwanda, just as the genocide was starting. France, Britain, the EU and the UN aided and abetted the Serb genocide of Bosniaks; they upheld an arms embargo that prevented the under-armed Bosnian government forces from defending themselves adequately from Serb assault; they promoted plans for Bosnia’s territorial partition that merely encouraged further Serb attacks; their peacekeepers on the ground collaborated with Serb forces, even helping them maintain the siege of Sarajevo; and they blocked demands from dissident Western statesmen – particularly in the US, where sympathy for the Bosnian victims was strong – for outside military action to halt the killings. In July 1995, Dutch peacekeepers passively surrendered the inappropriately named UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica to Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic’s forces, after senior UN officials had blocked military action by NATO, resulting in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

In order to pursue this policy of collaboration, it was imperative for Western and UN leaders and officials to deny, from the start, that genocide was taking place in Bosnia – just as, a couple of years later, they would equally strenuously deny that genocide was taking place in Rwanda. So Western and UN leaders and officials were, from the start, among those primarily responsible for constructing and propagating a revisionist narrative of the Bosnian war, which sought not only to deny the genocide, but largely to exonerate the Serb killers of responsibility for the outbreak of the conflict and for the killing, and to redistribute blame to other parties, including the Bosnian government and the Bosnian victims themselves (most Bosnian victims of Serb mass-killing were ethnic Bosniaks, but they included Croats, anti-nationalist Serbs and others). Inevitably, this revisionist narrative resembled that which the Serb leaders and propagandists were themselves peddling, for they shared the goal of defusing the international public outcry over the genocide so as to defuse the pressure for intervention.

The goal was also shared, and the revisionist narrative promoted, by certain broader currents of opinion, both conservative and liberal, in the West and the wider world. A powerful strand of conservative-realist opinion, embodied most notably by the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, opposed on principle the very idea of intervention for humanitarian or ethical reasons; it believed foreign policy should be guided purely by the national interest. An equally powerful strand of soft-liberal opinion was uncomfortable with any form of Western military intervention other than participation in peacekeeping missions, and was afraid of the idea of ‘taking sides’; it preferred ‘dialogue’ and ‘compromise’. Soft liberals of this kind assumed that they themselves were the carriers of morality, who alone could magnanimously speak on behalf of the Bosnian victims and ‘reach out’ to the Serb perpetrators, addressing their ‘legitimate concerns’ in order to achieve ‘compromise’. Inevitably, this soft-liberal attitude degenerated into one in which the Serb perpetrators were treated with much greater respect and consideration than the Bosnian victims, who were roundly patronised and despised, and at whose expense all manner of shameful concessions were made in order to appease the side that was stronger and more aggressive. Still more crudely, many Westerners of all political persuasions fell prey to anti-Balkan stereotypes, whereby all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia were viewed as inherently violent, irrational and immoral, so that they made ‘unworthy victims’ on whose behalf no intervention should legitimately be undertaken.

Thus, a revisionist narrative was generated by a combination of Western and UN leaders and officials, Serb leaders and propagandists and conservative-realist, soft-liberal and anti-Balkan-racist opinion in the West and beyond. Since the war ended in the autumn of 1995, the narrative has continued to be promoted by those who, for whatever reason, seek partially or wholly to exonerate the Serb perpetrators of the genocide. Although the narrative’s details have varied, its essence has been remarkably consistent up till the present day.

The revisionist narrative argues, firstly, that all sides were essentially equally guilty, with the Serb side perhaps quantitatively guilty of a larger share of the killing, but qualitatively no worse than the others. This is despite the fact that the most comprehensive study of war-deaths to have been undertaken since the conflict, by the Research and Documentation Centre under the directorship of Mirsad Tokaca, revealed that 83.33% of civilian deaths in the Bosnian war were Bosniaks (Muslims), that in total 33,070 Muslim civilians were killed, as against 4,075 Serb civilians, 2,163 Croat civilians and 376 civilians of other nationalities, and that the overwhelming majority of civilian victims – at least 86% – were killed by Serb perpetrators. These figures include only war-deaths most narrowly defined, and do not include those who perished from cold, hunger, disease, despair or otherwise as a result of the war, but who were not directly killed by perpetrators. Nevertheless, these figures are blithely disregarded in the revisionist narrative, which simply asserts that ‘all sides were guilty of atrocities’.

In its extreme form, as promoted by Serb nationalists and even by some UN officials, the revisionist narrative claims that the international media was actively ‘biased’ against the Serbs; ‘exaggerated’ Bosnian civilian suffering; and ‘invented’ Serb atrocities. It posited an international media conspiracy to manipulate Western public into supporting military intervention against the Serbs. Naturally, no explanation was ever offered as to how such a conspiracy could be organized; nor how to square its supposed existence with the fact that the West was trying very hard to avoid getting into a military conflict with the Serbs. Moreover, the revisionist narrative portrayed the Bosniak victims themselves as guilty of exaggerating or fabricating their own suffering in order to draw the West into intervening on their behalf; even of shelling their own civilians in Sarajevo in order to blame it on the Serb besiegers.

Senior UN officials have been responsible for the spread of the rumours of Bosnian self-shelling, including Lewis Mackenzie, former commander of UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, and top UN civil affairs officials in Bosnia, Philip Corwin and David Harland. Yet they have remained entirely unsubstantiated. Corwin has gone a step further, and contributed to the work of the ‘Srebrenica Research Group’, set up by the outright Srebrenica genocide-deniers, Edward Herman and David Peterson – people who subsequently went on to deny the Rwandan genocide as well. The former French minister Bernard Kouchner, who had played a none-too-glorious role during both the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, subsequently claimed that Bosnia’s wartime president, Alija Izetbegovic, had told him that he (Izetbegovic) had pretended that the Serb forces were running extermination camps in Bosnia, in order to provoke the West to bomb them. Izetbegovic was conveniently dead at the time that Kouchner made this claim, so unable to dispute it.

Nevertheless, the promoters of such claims suffered a humiliating defeat in 2000, when the British media company Independent Television News (ITN) successfully sued the British-based Serb-nationalist-propaganda magazine Living Marxism, which had most fiercely promoted the line that the British media was inventing Serb atrocities in order to demonise the Serbs. Living Marxism claimed ITN’s reporters had published an image of a Bosniak prisoner at the Serb camp of Trnopolje, with the intent of deceiving viewers into believing that the camp in question was a Nazi-style death camp. The British court found that Living Marxism’s accusation was false and that it had libelled ITN, as a result of which, the magazine was bankrupted and forced to close.

Fabrications attempting to blame the Bosniaks for their own suffering have also been made in regard to the Srebrenica massacre. These are notable, because this massacre was the only instance of genocide in Bosnia about which the verdicts of the international courts are wholly in unison. Thus, in the case brought by Bosnia against Serbia, the ICJ ruled in 2007 that the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995 alone was genocide, whereas earlier Serb massacres in Bosnia, although they fulfilled all the other criteria to be classed as acts of genocide, did not qualify, because evidence of Serb genocidal intent was lacking. However, the ICTY, in its recent conviction of Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir for genocide, ruled that genocide was carried out not only at Srebrenica but also at the neighbouring UN safe area of Zepa, and that the group targeted for destruction was the Bosniaks of East Bosnia as a whole, not just those of Srebrenica. Germany’s domestic courts in 1997 convicted the paramilitary leader Nikola Jorgic of genocide, for acts committed in the north Bosnian region of Doboj in 1992; Jorgic appealed his conviction all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, which rejected his appeal, ruling that the German courts’ definition of genocide was consistent with the international legal definition.

Thus, there is disagreement among the international courts over whether other massacres in Bosnia were acts of genocide, but no such disagreement over the Srebrenica massacre. These have not stopped the fabrications of those seeking to shift the blame from the perpetrators to the victims. In his 2009 book ‘First do no Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia’ that regurgitates a version of the revisionist narrative, the American author David N. Gibbs has sought not only to deny that genocide took place at Srebrenica, but to blame it on the Bosniak victims; he presents them, rather than the Serb perpetrators, as having initiated the violence and thereby created the hatred in the Srebrenica region in 1992. In order to make this claim, Gibbs simply airbrushed out of his account the fact that Serb forces had already begun massacring Bosniak civilians in Srebrenica in mid-April 1992, killing at least 74 of them there between 17 April and 8 May 1992.

Others actually deny or minimise the Srebrenica massacre itself. Swedish politician Carl Bildt claims in his memoirs that it only encompassed three thousand people, rather than eight thousand, and that these were ‘prisoners of war’. He presents another four thousand victims as having been battlefield deaths. This despite the fact that, of the eight thousand victims, over five hundred were children under the age of eighteen. This is like claiming that only two and a quarter million Jewish ‘prisoners of war’ had perished in the Holocaust, while the rest of the six million had been killed in battle. This is the testimony of the politician who, as the EU’s special envoy for the former Yugoslavia at the time of Srebrenica, led the EU’s appeasement of Serb aggression.

Thus, one thrust of revisionist falsification of the history of the Bosnian genocide has been to equate the guilt of the Serb perpetrators and the Bosniak victims, through minimising or denying Serb atrocities, or claiming that they were provoked or exaggerated by the victims in the first place. Another, equally prevalent line of revisionist argument has been the attempt to present the war and the Serb atrocities as simply the consequence of the West’s policy, which was supposedly ‘anti-Serb’, or at least failed to take into account the Serb leaders’ ‘legitimate concerns’. Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and other Serb organisers of the genocide are thereby transformed into victims of Western policy whose actions were simply a reaction to it.

The most notorious myth of this kind is that Germany engineered the break-up of Yugoslavia by ‘encouraging’ Croatia and Slovenia to secede from it. More than two decades after Yugoslavia broke up, not a shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate this myth, while a lot of documentary evidence has been produced to show that Germany, in fact, sought to keep Yugoslavia together until well after Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence. This has not stopped authors such as the aforementioned Gibbs from continuing to parrot it – in his case, through grotesque distortion of documentary evidence. The ‘German plot’ myth originated in the propaganda and paranoia of the former-Communist functionaries of Milosevic’s regime and their allies in the Yugoslav People’s Army, who sought to find a scapegoat for the break-up of Yugoslavia that their own policies had caused, and to present themselves as the victims of a German imperialist bogeyman. The myth was then snapped up by others in the rest of Europe and beyond for whom stereotypes of Germans as perpetual imperialists came naturally.

That such myths of Serb victimhood are very easily disproven has been no obstacle to the readiness of Western media outlets to regurgitate them. In Foreign Policy magazine, the journalist Michael Dobbs, in an apparent attempt to be ‘even-handed’ in his coverage of Ratko Mladic’s trial at the Hague, repeated an old Serb-nationalist canard – that the Serb nationalists’ launch of the war in Bosnia was a reaction to anti-Serb double-standards on the part of the West. Namely, Dobbs complained that following the break-up of Yugoslavia, the West had recognised the right of the citizens of Croatia, Bosnia and other former-Yugoslav republics to self-determination, but refused to recognise the same right for the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia to secede from their respective republics. Of course, this was not really a double-standard: the international community recognised the right to self-determination for the individual Yugoslav republics (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, etc.) but not for groups within republics (Serbs in Croatia, Serbs in Bosnia, Croats in Bosnia, Bosniaks in Serbia, Albanians in Macedonia, etc.). Thus, Serbs were treated just the same as everyone else, and Dobbs’s claim of a double-standard is false.

Likewise, the New York Times recently published an attack on the ICTY by the aforementioned Harland, who complained that it had ‘convicted only Serbs’, apparently because other former Yugoslavs (Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovo Albanians) were ‘the West’s friends’. This ignored the fact that many non-Serbs have been convicted by the ICTY, including such senior figures as Rasim Delic, the top Bosnian army commander in 1993-1995; Dario Kordic, wartime leader of the principal Bosnian Croat nationalist party; and Tihomir Blaskic, former commander of the principal Bosnian Croat armed force. It ignored also the fact that two of the most senior Serbs convicted by the ICTY – former Bosnian Serb wartime vice-president Biljana Plavsic and former Yugoslav Army chief of staff Momcilo Perisic – had stood out for pursuing collaboration with the West in the second half of the 1990s.

Such statements are not being made in a vacuum. The struggle over Bosnia is very far from over. Milorad Dodik, the president of the Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska, is pursuing secession and the complete dismantling of the common Bosnian state. His repeated, vocal denials of the Srebrenica genocide form a key part of his strategy of provoking the Bosniaks while heightening the Serbs’ sense of victimhood, so as to inflame tensions and prevent reconciliation. According to Dodik, ‘Bosnian Serbs will never accept that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims was genocide’. Dodik’s regime pays people in the West to propagate genocide-denying propaganda about Srebrenica – such as the Netherlands-based outfit calling itself the ‘Srebrenica Historical Project’, which has received more than $1 million from the Republika Srpska over the past six years.

Meanwhile, Serbia since last year has been run by hardline nationalists, who are only too ready to engage in genocide denial and regurgitate myths about Serb victimhood at the hands of the West. Serbia’s President Tomislav Nikolic is on record as saying that ‘there was no genocide in Srebrenica’. Following the recent acquittal by the ICTY of two Croatian generals for war-crimes against Serbs, Nikolic claimed that the ICTY was merely a ‘court trying Serbia and the Serb nation’. Serbia’s Prime Minister Ivica Dacic claimed the ICTY was ‘not a court, but is carrying out political goals given in advance’.

Thus, the nationalists running Serbia and Republika Srpska today are engaged in denying the Srebrenica genocide, while feeding off the sense of Serb victimhood that is being encouraged by naïve or sympathetic sources in the West. Meanwhile, they are working to undermine the independence and territorial integrity of their neighbours, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. In this sense, the dynamic that was at work during the wars of the 1990s is continuing.