Shortly before the end of his 12-year term as the High Representative of the International Community in BiH, Valentin Inzko intervened in state penal law by banning the denial of the genocide of Serbs against Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995. Although it has several dimensions, the essence of Inzko’s decision, based on the invasive Bonn powers of the High Representative, is the legal sanctioning of the denial of the Srebrenica genocide. One can speculate as to why this pale and insignificant Austrian diplomat did so. Is Inzko a political idiot who did not understand the potential consequences of his act for the fate of BiH, since neither the Republika Srpska nor the Republic of Serbia recognize the genocide in Srebrenica and will not accept his decision peacefully? Did he decide, at the end of his term, to make a moral gesture to atone for his long-standing policy of inaction and remain remembered by history? Or is he just a political puppet of external forces, primarily the United States, that ordered him to make this decision?
Genocide denial, including the Holocaust, is not a new phenomenon and has various causes. Israel Charny pointed out “malicious bigotry,” that is, uncritical, fanatical allegiance to one’s own race, nation, or religion, which also dismisses the idea that one’s own community may commit such a heinous crime. Sources of denial can be the political, economic, and moral interests of the state, or particular social and political groups and individuals within it. Deniers can also be guided by careerist, pragmatic, provocative or exhibitionist motives. Among the deniers are those who really do not know what happened, those who know it well, as well as those who openly celebrate genocidal violence.
Among the genocide deniers, there are well-known names in academia, and the two cases are exemplary. The French Marxist philosopher and communist Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) is one of the most famous Holocaust deniers. How he did so can be learned from his infamous book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics in which he declared the Holocaust a myth woven to serve the political goals of Jews and Israel. His Holocaust denial is associated with the conversion from Christianity to Islam and the explicit or implicit acceptance of the tenets of “Islamic anti-Semitism”. Prosaic personal reasons are also cited, such as marriage to a Palestinian woman. Either way, Garaudy has turned into an icon of Holocaust deniers in the Arab and Islamic world. By the way, he was one of the Marxists who were frequently translated in Yugoslavia. In the age of Non-Alignment, which was also marked by fantasizing about “Arab socialism”, his book Islam, Culture and Socialism was translated, and on the eve of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, The Living Islam. Printing new editions of the controversial Garaudy’s book was banned in France and other countries, the author was exposed to harsh intellectual criticism and political condemnation, and there were attempts to put him in prison.
Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), a canonical British Orientalist, is known for denying the Turkish genocide against Armenians. In the first edition of The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), he wrote about the “terrible holocaust” of 1915, in which a million and a half Armenians went missing, but in later editions he renamed genocide a “terrible massacre” in which about a million Armenians went missing, as well as many Turks in the relentless mutual conflict. Lewis was known as a Turkophile whose views were influenced by his marriage to a Turkish woman. Together with 68 American university professors, he sent a letter to the US Congress in 1985 expressing doubts about the validity of evidence of genocide against Armenians, acknowledging the “disproportionate” crime of the Turkish government against them, but rationalizing it by claiming that Armenians threatened the Turkish state. The Elie Wiesel Foundation responded to this petition in 2007 with a public letter signed by 53 Nobel Prize winners. Based on a lawsuit filed by the Forum of Armenian Associations of France, the Paris Criminal Court found Lewis guilty and symbolically fined him one franc for neglecting “his duty to be objective and cautious, speaking inappropriately on such a sensitive issue”. The parliaments of France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries have recognized the Armenian genocide, despite strong resistance from Turkey.
These two intriguing episodes were accompanied by the question of how to generally deal with genocide denial. Some believe that it should be legally banned and punished by those who do so publicly. Others think that the denial of genocide is an integral part of freedom of speech, so the legal prohibition is compared to the persecution of religious heretics in the Middle Ages and verbal offenses in dictatorships.
The Srebrenica genocide was verified by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It is recognized by most democracies. It is also recognized by many scientists. But while there is a complete consensus of serious researchers on the genocides of Armenians and Jews, many eminent legal and political theorists and researchers – W. Shabas, K. Southwick, M. Mann, M. Midlarsky, X. Bougarel, E. Verdeja, O. Bartov and others – questioned such a categorization of crimes in Srebrenica. They did not do it because they hate Muslims and Bosniaks, and love Serbs, but because they thought that the crime did not meet the basic legal and political criteria of genocide: the unquestionably proven intention of Serbs to kill Bosniaks, the existence of a state to plan and carry out genocide, selection of the victims, which was limited to men of military age, a lethality threshold that did not jeopardize the physical survival of the Bosniak community because the killed Srebrenica residents made up about 0.4 percent of the Bosniak population in BiH. But theoretical discussions do not matter now. It is important how Inzko’s decision will affect political relations in BiH.
The international legal recognition of the genocide in Srebrenica has deeply violated the Serbian interpretive paradigm according to which Serbs throughout their history have been exclusively victims and never perpetrators of genocide. The backbone of that paradigm is the narrative about the centuries-old genocides carried out by the Muslims, Ottoman Turks, and the Balkan Islamic converts (“poturice”) against Serbs. Muslim genocides against Serbs also extended to the war in BiH in the 1990s. During and after the war, the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia systematically “reported” Muslims to international organizations and institutions for genocides against Serbs in numerous places in BiH, including Srebrenica. And then came the decision of the International Court, which buried those narratives, declared the Serbs “bad guys,” and attached to them the label of a “genocidal people” (“genocidaši”), which they had previously attributed to others. This was largely a symbolic end to the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia – a state in which Serbs were a constituent or co-constituent people in three republics (Serbia, BiH and Croatia) and politically de facto dominated two more (Montenegro and Macedonia), and yet considered themselves as inequal, oppressed and exposed to “genocide,” so they decided to change such a situation by violence. The earthquake that was caused by the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and then by the partial disintegration of Serbia, was so strong that the ground under Serbia is still shaking and will not calm down quickly. Serbia will not easily leave other countries alone, as recent events in Montenegro clearly show.
The Serbs saw the only war gain in the creation of the Republika Srpska in BiH. In order to force Serbs to “return” to BiH, the international community, especially the United States, gave them half of the territory in which they became the absolute majority after mass ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Croats and a separate entity with many characteristics of state within state. Republika Srpska is some sort of a “consolation prize” for other war defeats and losses. The Serbs are holding on to it desperately, and there should be no illusion that they will give it up in the foreseeable future, neither by consent nor by force. Serbs see Inzko’s decision, as well as the entire narrative of the Srebrenica genocide, as undermining the moral and political legitimacy of Republika Srpska and, ultimately, its abolition. Therefore, resistance to Inzko’s decision will be fierce. It may satisfy justice to some extent, but it will deepen the political polarization in BiH and prolong the unspeakable state of emergency in a state that has existed as an international political protectorate for a quarter of a century. Who will control and curb potential new conflicts in it? Inzko certainly won’t. He had already packed his suitcases to return to Vienna.
