Vesti/News

Nikola Radić Lucati, CHRE

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This year, Serbian commemorations of the “Genocide and Holocaust Remembrance Day “, the May 9th “Victory over Fascism Day” and the new “Belgrade Holocaust Day” have been hollow affairs, devoid of any sincerity and meaning, as they were held against the backdrop of the government lobbying to block the UN resolution on genocide in Srebrenica. The draft of the resolution calls on all members to preserve the memory of the genocide - educate, prevent, and sanction the Srebrenica genocide denial. It is a text aimed at alleviating tensions of the past and establishing a common, factual history of the events that took place almost thirty years ago. The need to protect the ICTY verdicts and establish a common regional culture of memory by a UN resolution stems from the revisionist genocide denial campaign run by the Serbian government and “republic Srpska” - an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina. This state effort involves the support of several international “genocide experts”, and the states of Russia (2015 UN veto), and Israel. Its ambassador to Belgrade, Yehiel Vilan, has denied the Srebrenica genocide on a Russian propaganda channel, finally confirming the genocide denial as the Israeli government’s official position. He also recommended three Israeli historians as authorities on the matter: The esteemed Dr. Yehuda Bauer, IHRA honorary chairman, Gideon Graif, a former employee of “Republic of Srpska”, and Efraim Zuroff, the “Nazi-hunter” who has recently given his reason why Srebrenica wasn’t a genocide:

“...anyone acquainted with that event, as well as with the original definition of “genocide,” knows very well that the crime committed by the Serbian troops does not fit the definition of genocide, for the simple reason that the women and children at Srebenica were ALL released unharmed.” (Authors own misprint and capitalization.)

The historians quoted by the embassy regularly engage in Srebrenica genocide denial on behalf of Serbia and none of them offered any new findings, no thesis of their own, and no factual, yet alternative view of the event in question. All they have ever said comes down to: “It was a great crime, but not a genocide”.

Genocides, including the Holocaust, can be viewed as sets of methodologies applied in the pursuit of a political goal. Many of these are commonly repeated, as the perpetrators of the XX and XXI centuries were learning from the Nazis and previous colonial and internecine conflicts. A comparative method other than quantification by sheer number of victims could be used to analyze the repeated, learned practices of the perpetrators. For instance, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS conducted a reprisal massacre at the Czech village of Lidice. The perpetrators had to set the minimum age for the executions. It was set at 15. In the 1941 Karagujevac reprisals massacre, the quisling Serbian state guard and the Wehrmacht took pupils from schools and boys as young as 11 (a shoe-shine Roma boy, Dragiša Nikolić). General Ratko Mladić’s victims in Srebrenica have been selected as boys aged 12 and up, but the youngest names on the lists are those of two girls aged 8 (Meliha Efendić and Selma Musić). About 1000 of over 8000 victims were minors and elderly, there were dozens of children under 14 years of age. That includes only identified bodies. As children do not carry ID cards, their remains are usually determined by size, and if there are samples and living relatives, checked against the DNA database. The forests around Srebrenica, where the columns of fleeing Bosnians were repeatedly attacked by the VRS army have not been fully searched. There are still at least 800 missing bodies. The denialist historians had to know that singling out children for rape and/or killing in front of the family/group is one of the common methods of the perpetrators and was used during WW2 by both the Croatian Ustashe as well as the Serb Chetniks, with Mladić’s forces repeating it in multiple instances in Bosnia, and Srebrenica as well. The deniers also know perfectly well that at the time of the killings, all of the victims were in custody and under full responsibility of VRS, Bosnian POWs as well as civilians of all ages. The deniers also know that mass killing combined with mass expulsion in execution of a political goal does amount to genocide which is a fact proven in court. The verdicts of ICTY was openly acknowledged by all, including Dodik, the “leader” of “Republika Srpska” and its parliament until the public retraction of its own 2004 report in 2018.

“Horrendous cruel acts have been committed: children have been taken away from their mothers, women were raped, and young men were shot in front of their mothers.”
These are authentic accounts, too precise and detailed to be just stories. It was not a mass psychosis. There are enough victims who are able to tell their stories with a convincing level of detail.” (Jacques de Milliano, Executive Director of MSF Holland, 18 July 1995).

Regardless of the ICTY verdicts, the perpetrators’ confessions, decades of detailed research, survivors’ testimonies, educational work, widely online accessible archives, despite the opposition from international Jewish organizations, such as WJC, and its Vice-president Menachem Rosensaft, Zuroff’s claim that “ALL women and children were released”, echoing from the heights of his home settlement of Efrat sounds not so much as grounded historical revisionism, but rather as a political call for a privileged right to selectively downgrade and legitimize entire categories of crimes, if perpetrated by clients and partners, creating a politically useful precedent. The business of creating “a la carte” special-cases and plausible, justified exemptions from international law, limiting the applicability of human rights charters, UN institutional jurisdictions and local laws is peddling a single product - an idea of impunity, even if responsibility and complicity is beyond doubt and a court-proven fact. It is this criminal and political impunity that is the underlying message being amplified regularly and synchronously not just by Zuroff, but also by Greif, Bauer, Rephaeli, Manoshek, Handke, Chomsky, and other, more discreet, local historians and national intellectuals showing up whenever Serbian diplomacy and media need them. The genocide deniers have all incorporated Serbian state narrative into their statements, such as the veiled threats about the “risk and the importance of regional stability”. Serbia and RS have structured their media drive in parallel tracks for different target groups and locales - GONGO organizations, international historians, “scientific” symposia and conferences, publications, and most of all, generating enough local press coverage to over-saturate the subject. Over time, this has proven difficult to coordinate - In 2021, “Republika Srpska” published “The Greif commission report”, which halved the number of Srebrenica genocide victims. In Serbia, which never distanced itself from this, his book “Jasenovac - the Auschwitz of the Balkans” has enlarged number of the victims of the camp by at least five-fold. These incidents have not only made their author a pariah, but the crude manipulation of victims has managed to show the character of the commissioning governments, willing to adapt historical facts to their needs. This is also the purpose of the sweeping “Law on the rehabilitation” in Serbia, under which almost all significant quislings and collaborationists of WW2 had their slate wiped clean, and the new wave of affirmative history and education was centered on them. Even as the Serb state institutions were recently keen to avoid mentioning the numbers of Jasenovac victims, by maintaining both narratives, the first, of the 750.000-800.000 exaggeration, as well as that of the “We can never know...” ambiguity active, Serbian and RS governments have managed to be in denial of not just the Srebrenica genocide, but also the acts of genocide committed against the Serbian population, as well as the Holocaust in wartime Independent State of Croatia (ISC). This is being done regardless of the established research, primarily the work of Dragan Cvetković. To open the path toward the future of impunity, the Holocaust itself needed to be altered and refocused, turned into a blunt tool for the selection of the genocides approved by those that are in the midst of planning or committing the new ones. Both the denial and the rehabilitation are central to the indoctrination for the future continuation of the conflict.

All that genocide deniers have managed to show that the entirety of legal heritage of the post WW2 war-crime trials, Holocaust and genocide studies, only stand if they can be useful to a client government, and can also be altered and denied at will. In doing so, they have disqualified their careers in historical science, and have unwittingly proven two points: That the investment in Serbian denial of the genocide in Srebrenica as well as Jasenovac is in fact rooted in extreme right wing Holocaust relativization, and that it has nothing to do with the past. (Every investment is always about the future).

“from Israel — they proposed joint struggle against Islamist extremists. They offered to train our men in Greece and a free supply of sniper rifles.” . (Ratko Mladić, former commander of VRS, War criminal, war diary.)

The current deniers have been less vocal during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. They are “the second generation”, of Israeli political pragmatists and operators whose current position has consistently been on the side of Serbia, at least since the Rabin-Peres government. The political “doves” of the Oslo process, as well as their right-wing hawkish heirs, were acutely aware that it could be costly to support nations in their attempts to break away from an oppressor and are seeking international support for independence not just on a historical and demographic basis, but also on humanitarian grounds, as victims of oppression and genocide. The diplomatic relations between Serbia and Israel have begun in earnest with arms deals in support of the Serbian side in 1991, and, after quashing the Oron/Mack demand for evidence in 2016 Israel Supreme Court decision, the unity in denial of the consequences was the next logical step. The position of the 1990s Israeli governments, was, as it is now, in complete opposition to the view taken by the generation of Holocaust survivors, ghetto uprising leaders, post-war Nazi hunters, dissidents, intellectuals, and community leaders that have called out Serbian armies’ war crimes in Bosnia as genocidal as soon as they happened, have taken a prominent role in organizing aid and, when all else failed - lobbying for an intervention. It has to be said that the voices of “the Holocaust generation” are today subject to digital rot, their important letters and statements are archived sporadically and are unable to stem the deluge of current state-sponsored denial.

Simon Wiesenthal, whose name Zuroff’s institution uses, has supported Bosnia and Herzegovina since the start of the war. Eli Wiesel had gone to Belgrade to beg then-president, Dobrica Ćosić to have Karadžić close the concentration camps. Like many, he left with an empty promise and betrayal. Few could sum up the political legacy of genocide in Bosnia better than Marek Edelmann, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising: “Europe has learned nothing from the Holocaust. What is happening in Bosnia is Hitler’s posthumous victory”. None of them had to wait for Israeli government to tell them what to think, or ICTY to form, do its work, and pass the verdicts. Them, and many others who went through the Holocaust immediately knew what they saw, and acted as anti-fascists. They knew intimately that indifference was the first thing that had to be broken. Or, as Edelmann said: “A passive witness becomes an accomplice.”

In Israel, on the “Yom Ha Shoah ve ha gvura” (The Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), at 10, the siren sounds and life stands still. Just after these two minutes, Just like in 1990’s Bosnia, the cycle of killing continues after withdrawal from the agreed truce in feigned negotiation. Palestinians and Israelis will be forced once more to continue counting their dead. The atrocities will be again followed by the strategic dehumanization, denial and control of the narrative. Yet another offer of cease-fire was turned down, this time by the Israeli government. Again, the hostages on both sides will not be freed. The families who have just been given a glimmer of hope they would see their loved ones are seeing their hope turned to nothing more than “one of the priorities”. The government whose police attacks, beats up and arrests the protesting families of the Hamas hostages is the same one that uses AI-driven target selection in densely populated civilian areas, forcing Palestinian parents into writing the names of their children on their limbs, so they could be identified if found under the rubble.

On October 7th, Hamas, as a terror organization did what it was created for. It fulfilled its mission, acting in accordance with its charter and purpose. When it committed its heinous acts, it did so without hypocrisy. It never claimed to be anything but a terror organization. Hamas didn’t even break form on the “silent agreement” it obviously had with Netanyahu government which agreed to be the conduit for Qatari cash funding the terrorist rulers of Gaza. Since at least 2014, Likud coalitions have participated in Hamas funding in return getting not just the relative quiet, but a desired counter party, and with it, a plausible excuse for not advancing the Palestinian statehood, regardless of previous agreements and cooperation of the PA government. However, already on October 10th, unlike Hamas, Israel’s government had stepped away from its own and international law, principles and responsibilities it had toward its citizens as well as the Palestinian population under its control. In disseminating the false story of “40 beheaded babies” in kibbutz Kfar Aza”. the propagandists have followed Serbian 1991 example, the “40 slaughtered babies in Vukovar hospital”, a media cover for the real atrocity - Serbian forces’ mass killing of the its patients at the “Ovčara” farm. In the internet search results, many versions of the false story of Kfar Aza still outweigh the truth. Result of this was the media focus successfully deflected away from the start of the massive bombing campaign, but also, it has provided the public support for the far-right government responsible for October 7th in waging and prolonging the war and atrocities in its quest for victory. That same government also had to be aware that in allowing its PR consultants, its institutional leadership, the esteemed Holocaust experts and its own MFA to enter the spectrum of genocide denial, that the lineage and development of the methods of torture from Jasenovac and Sajmište, through Manjača, Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Dretelj... will be ultimately pointing the way toward places like Sde Teiman.

This increasingly one-sided war of choice, stripped of humanity, compassion, and courage will continue as long as the citizens of Israel and Palestine allow it. They know that the responsibility for their government’ and leaders’ actions is ultimately on them and are protesting daily. Our hearts are with them, the oppressed citizens of Israel and Palestinian civilians in mortal danger, who endure, witness, document, and protest each day, so a just peace and life in dignity may become possible again. When the peace comes, as it almost always does, they will not forget what led to this horrifying war, why it happened, how and by whom. They will both need to establish their own views of history, education, and public memory, as part of their political agency, that solid proof of freedom and true independence. Most of all, Israelis and Palestinians, just like other nations in conflicts - Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Rwandans, Syrians, Ukrainians, and Russians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis will always have that one thing in common - the tragedy and the beauty of their shared history, one borne by facts rather than ideas and plans of previous political generations. History happens only once and comes with a common obligation not to allow it to happen to anyone else.

The wars that started in 1991 Yugoslavia have opened a range of questions - how to address the nationalistic, neo-imperialist regimes’ actions against civilians (and their own citizens), when they are being deliberately calibrated to fall just short of the definition of genocide, yet still fulfill their political goals? How to deal with the symbiotic relations between the seemingly anatagonistic, yet mutually dependent terror groups and governments? How can revisionist, denialist history and indoctrinatory education produced by mutually supportive regimes be countered? How could the work and verdicts of the international courts and forums be protected? In a post-Holocaust, post-Rwanda, and post-Srebrenica world, shouldn’t all genocide relativization and denial be equally and universally criminalized? Should the Holocaust and genocide education finally be made equal and compulsory? Who should establish and supervise its standards, when the states that have committed these crimes after the Holocaust are again relapsing into denial threatening new wars?