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In the hills above Sarajevo, in the small town of Pale, there is a
university dormitory named after Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb
wartime leader who was sentenced to life in prison for the crime of
genocide in 2016.
During the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995, both the Bosnian Serb
military and political leadership were headquartered in Pale, and it
was in this relatively obscure town overlooking the Bosnian capital
where they planned and ordered a genocide. To honour Karadžić by
putting his name on a student dormitory is to revere a man driven to
war crimes by ethno-nationalism. It is but one example among many of
how genocide denial has become mainstream thanks to Bosnian Serb
leaders in the Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska, where this
denial is deep and pervasive.
Indeed, to what lengths will Bosnian Serb authorities go to
implicate Serb youth in crimes committed before they were even born?
Most, if not all, of the students who reside in the dormitory named
for Karadžić are surely Serb, as Republika Srpska was largely
“cleansed” of non-Serbs during the war. It is still rare for
non-Serb students to study at Serb majority universities. Moreover,
I find it impossible to imagine that any Bosniak or Croat student
could step foot in a dormitory named for a genocidaire like
Karadžić, just as I cannot imagine a Jewish student living in a
dormitory named for Hitler.
But, for Serb students, this should not be normalised either. As a
wave of reckoning washes over the world, as statues come down and
buildings are renamed to right the many wrongs in how our histories
have been told, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we must reckon with how
the history of what happened just over two decades ago is being
told.
* * *
During my work as both a journalist and an academic researcher, I
have maintained that the genocide carried out in Bosnia and
Herzegovina should be viewed as a process that began in 1992,
followed a pattern, and culminated with mass violence in Srebrenica.
Edina Bećirević
Academic and author
* * *
The genocide carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a project of
neighbouring Serbia, achieved through Bosnian Serb political and
military proxies. But genocide requires the psychological
preparation of a population through propaganda that dehumanises an
“other” and frames them as a “threat” and the “enemy,”, to
facilitate their recruitment into military actions that result in
genocide or their complicity through silent acceptance. In the case
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was primarily Bosnian Muslims
(Bosniaks) who were identified as the “other” and it was
ethno-nationalism that functioned as the driving force behind
actions by the Serbian state and Bosnian Serb proxies.
Nationalism defines who does and does not have the right to
survival. It is for this reason that lawyer Raphael Lemkin argued
that genocide entails much more than killing – it includes elements
of social and cultural destruction, too. Echoing this, sociologist
Martin Shaw has noted that “defining genocide by killing misses the
social aims that lie behind it.” Yet, most governments do define
genocide by killing, and by the numbers of people killed in single
incidents.
And so, after over three and a half years of “ethnic cleansing” and
some 100,000 people killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was only
after Serb forces overtook the UN safe area of Srebrenica and killed
8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys over several days that the
international community was finally compelled to intervene.
This distinction, between the genocidal crimes committed in
Srebrenica and those committed earlier in the war, was made by most
governments at the time and has been made by many scholars since,
raising questions about how these crimes are qualified. During my
work as both a journalist and an academic researcher, I have
maintained that the genocide carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina
should be viewed as a process that began in 1992, followed a
pattern, and culminated with mass violence in Srebrenica. In part,
this is due to my belief that genocide is distinguished by how the
enemy is understood. Is it the State or a social collective? As Shaw
has explained, “genocidal practices... treat social groups as
enemies.”
The archives of the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
remain unexplored by most academic researchers interested in the
Western Balkans, but they offer important insights into the criminal
minds of individuals who committed genocide and other war crimes in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. And it is clear that for many Serbs tried by
the tribunal, Muslims as a group were viewed as the enemy and as the
target of genocide.
Transcripts from the parliament of the wartime Bosnian Serb Republic
are available, for example, and include discussions by Serb members
of the intent and consequences of genocide. In one session, a member
was applauded by his fellows when he boasted that the city of
Prijedor was no longer a “green” municipality - meaning that it no
longer had a Muslim majority. “We fixed them and sent them packing
where they belong,” he said. In August 2013, it became clear where
these Muslims had been “sent packing” when the largest mass grave to
date was discovered in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the village of
Tomašica, 17 km south of Prijedor.
Among those who very likely applauded the fact that Prijedor was no
longer “green” was Milorad Dodik, then a member of the wartime
Bosnian Serb parliament and now a member of the tripartite Bosnian
Presidency. While Dodik seemed to retreat from ethno-nationalism in
the immediate post-war period, even appearing to be an ally of the
West in rebuilding the Bosnian state and working to restore
inter-ethnic relations, he has since recommitted to his
ethno-nationalistic roots by actively engaging in genocide denial.
* * *
The EU must recognise that opportunities to pressure Bosnian Serb
and Serbian leaders to treat history objectively should not be
wasted. These are not just lost chances to influence educational
curricula or encourage inter-ethnic reconciliation; they are
openings to pushback against narratives of denial that have become
so typical in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
Edina Bećirević
Academic and author
* * *
It was Dodik who opened the dormitory named after Karadžić in 2016,
and Dodik who continues to foster a relationship with Serb youth in
Republika Srpska which can only be compared to that of a captor and
his hostages, locked in a sort of Stockholm syndrome that keeps
young people in the entity captive to an ethno-nationalistic
discourse they feel powerless to escape.
Dodik has the open support of Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić,
and heeds the cues of Serbian leadership more broadly which has led
the campaign of Bosnian genocide denial just as it orchestrated the
genocide itself under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević. Perhaps
it is unsurprising then that Dodik has good relations with leaders
like Putin and Orban. But it is problematic that he is treated as a
legitimate partner by many European diplomats as well.
After all, in international diplomacy, what is the obligation of a
bystander to genocide denial? What is the responsibility of an
international actor who fails to intervene? If the EU is in a
position to influence officials in Republika Srpska by threatening
to end talks until they remove the name of Karadžić from the
dormitory in Pale, shouldn’t they use this leverage? And if they
don’t, aren’t European leaders complicit now as they were when they
looked the other way from “ethnic cleansing” during the war?
The EU must recognise that opportunities to pressure Bosnian Serb
and Serbian leaders to treat history objectively should not be
wasted. These are not just lost chances to influence educational
curricula or encourage inter-ethnic reconciliation; they are
openings to pushback against narratives of denial that have become
so typical in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in the Republika
Srpska, that many Serbs are proud to see Karadžić’s name publicly
celebrated as a “founder of the Republic.”
This kind of revisionism transforms war criminals into heroes and
makes victims out of aggressors, and if it is not called out by
those willing to speak truth to power, it will poison future
generations and challenge the prospect of long-term peace in Bosnia
and Herzegovina.
Edina Bećirević is Professor of Security Studies at the University
of Sarajevo and author of 'Genocide on the Drina River' |
