Ottawa Citizen
November 15, 2004 Monday
Final Edition

Telling the Truth About A Massacre

It is depressing enough that human beings are capable of mass murder, but the tendency of perpetrators to then deny their crimes is doubly sickening. So the Bosnian Serb government's decision last week to acknowledge the Srebrenica massacre is an important victory for historical truth.

Genocide scholars have long been troubled by the phenomenon of denial. Turkey continues to deny the Armenian genocide during the First World War, even though Turkish soldiers shot tens of thousand of Armenian Christians and displaced tens of thousands more, the latter dying of privation in the desert. Turkey so much wants to see itself as a modern, civilized country that it has erased from collective memory this episode of barbarism. Meanwhile, Holocaust denial, the best known expression of this disease, represents a campaign to rehabilitate Hitler's reputation and to "expose" the perfidy of world Jewry for orchestrating such a hoax.

The 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serbs of nearly 8,000 Muslim civilians in Srebrenica was the greatest war crime on European soil since the Nazi era. Yet ever since, many Serbs and their leaders have engaged in denial. Journalist Timothy Garton Ash once recounted how a major in the Yugoslav army said with a straight face that Serbian forces were merely "driving the Muslims out and the Muslims got frightened, so they started killing each other."

The fiction that there was no massacre has now been laid to rest. The Bosnian Serb government now promises to "take decisive steps to force all persons who committed war crimes to face justice." This last part is crucial, for there can be no true peace in the Balkans until fugitives such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the wartime leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, answer for their crimes.