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On Tuesday, Austrian author Peter Handke
officially received the Nobel Prize for literature. Any hope for the
unexpected, for the prize to be revoked, did not materialise.
I can list abundant reasons why the choice to
bestow such an honour on this man is so deeply wrong, but these have
been detailed extensively by many distinguished authors and
journalists.
Peter Maass, an American journalist who covered
the Bosnian conflict and subsequently wrote the book ‘Love Thy
Neighbour: A Story of War’, has been especially persistent in
dissecting both the origins and mechanisms of Handke’s genocide
denial in his writing for The Intercept, and laying out the
hypocrisy and ill-will behind the decision of the Nobel Committee.
For this I am grateful. Maass’s reporting on this
subject, rich with depth and dignity, reminds me of the reporting by
both Bosnian and foreign journalists during the tragic years of 1992
to 1995. This was reporting to be proud of, and by risking their
lives, it was journalists who confirmed the Bosnian Serb aggression
and genocide in real time, at times revealing its most sinister
aspects to the global public.
Theirs was an incredibly dangerous assignment, and yet Handke
referred to these journalists as a “horde” and suggested they had
fabricated the stories. In truth, foreign journalists played a
crucial role in spreading the knowledge about the horrors taking
place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their reporting was key to
generating a political will that led to NATO’s intervention in 1995
and to bringing an end to the war.
As a researcher of the Bosnian genocide, I have long been aware of
the discourse of its denial within Western academia. It is a
minority view, but one that is still seen as “legimate” in the eyes
of some publishers and conference organisers. Thus, I have found
myself on quite a few occasions seated across the table from a
genocide denier and have also received ‘peer’ reviews from them.
To be clear, few of these people have been blatant deniers like
Handke; and as far as I know, none of them attended, much less gave
a eulogy at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral, as Handke did in 2006.
The discourse of the deniers I have encountered over the years has
typically been embedded in the rationale of balance, that “no side
is innocent”, that “if everyone is guilty, no one can be blamed
exclusively,” that “we refuse to take sides” and that “we want to be
objective”.
But usually, as our discussions developed, many tried to advance the
idea that Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and the entire
Serb military and political establishment were not motivated by a
hatred of Bosnian Muslims or Bosnian Croats but by their love of the
Serbs and their duty to protect them. “And genocide against the
Bosnian Muslims was just a collateral damage in their expression of
that love?” I remember asking one of them.
Whatever the argument these deniers make, they all frame the Bosnian
war as a civil war, not as a disproportionate Serbian aggression and
war against civilians, and they deny that there was a plan to kill
and forcibly displace Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the
territory designated as belonging exclusively to Serbs.
In line with that, their reasoning goes, any crimes that occurred in
the war were the side-effect of an uncontrolled civil conflict. And
of course, like Handke, almost all of them also condemned the role
of the West and the NATO bombing – the event that made the Serbs the
real victims, in the eyes of deniers.
Part of the genocide denial is one of the most hideous arguments –
that the Bosnian Army targeted its own people. Handke is among those
who have suggested this occurred.
Such views still emerge even in the writings of well-respected
Western academics. Indeed, after any war ends, another war ensues –
a war over the dominant narrative of the conflict. In this case, a
narrative of denial remains prominent enough in the ‘marketplace of
ideas’ that it has even occasionally informed the rhetorical and
historical perspective of other genocide researchers.
I was shocked recently, for example, when I was asked to review the
manuscript of a distinguished colleague, who asserted rather
casually that Muslims in Sarajevo had been shot at by “their own
leadership”.
There was a time when those kinds of arguments made me very
emotional and agitated. As time went on, and as verdicts from the UN
tribunal in The Hague accumulated, many genocide deniers grew less
bold and began to make more subtle arguments. Many even begrudgingly
admitted that the crimes committed by the Bosnian Serb Army in July
1995 against Bosniaks from Srebrenica amounted to genocide.
Still, the deniers have continued to situate the Srebrenica genocide
within what one widely-quoted author downplayed as an “erratic
campaign of ethnic cleansing” and not a systematic campaign of
genocide.
Wartime documents offer irrefutable evidence
I have come to realise that many deniers do not have first-hand
experience with Bosnia and Herzegovina. They have not done field
research or examined primary sources, and many have been influenced
by Serbian propaganda or Islamophobia more generally.
Some also associate Milosevic with leftist ideology, or simply align
themselves with the Serb ‘side’ in the war because they oppose
Western interventions. Hence I have learned that quoting Bosnian
Muslim witness testimonies or offering my interpretations of
relevant wartime political contexts is an ineffective approach to
shifting the perspective of genocide deniers.
Moreover, the former is emotionally challenging for me and the
latter provides a platform for debate that muddles the debate. So,
at some point, I began arming myself with documents verified by the
Hague Tribunal, the authenticity of which has not been contested
even by the lawyers of Serb war criminals; in other words, the
documents produced by the genocidiaries themselves, such as the
transcripts of parliamentary sessions and high-level meetings,
written military orders, and detailed military and political plans.
These documents are the evidence that the genocide against Bosnian
Muslims was not only planned and implemented under the careful watch
of Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, but also with the full knowledge
and participation of a wider political circle, the security sector,
and military actors in both the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale and
in Belgrade.
Whenever talk at roundtable discussions or conferences turns toward
the rhetoric of “uncontrolled civil war” or “the complexities of
proving genocidal intent”, I pull out my stack of documents to quote
the words of the convicted genocidiaries, using their own words and
conversations to establish my argument. And that approach usually
works.
Among these documents is the transcript of the May 1992
parliamentary session in which Mladic said explicitly that the
strategic goals of Serbs could not be implemented without a
genocide.
“We do not have a sieve to sift so that only Serbs would stay, or
[so] that the Serbs would fall through and the rest leave,” he said,
warning that the only way to achieve this “would be genocide”.
Mladic went on to caution: “We must not say that we are going to
destroy Sarajevo… We are not going to say that we are going to
destroy the power supply pylons or turn off the water supply… no,
because that would turn America out of its seat, but one day there
is no water at all in Sarajevo. Why is that… we do not know… We have
to wisely tell the world, it was they who were shooting, hit the
transmission line and the power went off, they were shooting at the
power supply facilities… That is what diplomacy is.”
Genocide denial is no better than ‘fake news’. But, like fake news,
it can also be countered with facts; and in the case of the Bosnian
genocide, there is no better place to reach for facts than in the
archives of the Hague Tribunal.
It is disturbing that members of the Nobel Committee did not look to
these archives, relying instead on conspiracy theory. But it is
helpful for the cause of truth that their negligence and poor
judgment has come to the attention of the public, and so widely.
I may be an optimist, but I cannot help the feeling that Handke’s
Nobel Prize might be bad news for the genocide deniers.
In fact, the light now shining on Handke’s Nobel has the potential
to lift the shadow cast over the truth.
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