Rearing the Ugly Head of Revisionism in Serbia
History has shown that the level of inhumanity to those who are demonized to justify the goals of those in authoritarian power knows no bounds. Whether the Spanish Inquisition against perceived heretics (particularly the Jews), the New World explorers like Columbus and Cortez who decimated native people, the slave trade in the United States, the Holocaust, or more recently Isis murdering Yazidi, and the Turks killing and displacing the Kurds. The most devastating events since World War II to happen in Europe on such a grand scale was the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The separation of genders to pursue the mass killings of men and boys, and the rape and sexual assault of women, accentuate the extremes of what are unthinkable acts of cruelty.
I am currently working on a book about one family’s survival, and subsequent escape from the horrors of Muslims being targeted by the Serbian government’s desire to create a “Greater Serbia.” My journey to bring a ‘voice’ to this family, and to all of those who have suffered at the hands of those wanting to erase them from existence, has led me to insights that I would not have found were it not for having my eyes opened to such horrific acts.
Of course, I knew about the holocaust and the six million Jews, and five million more who did not fit the script of what it is to be a superior human in the Nazi doctrine, who were murdered in the concentration camps. I even knew of the attempts that still exist of those who seek to revise history by denying that this ever happened. I have often thought that any denier should visit Auschwitz, or a holocaust museum, or speak to one of the dwindling numbers of concentration camp survivors before making such outlandish claims.
However, genocides of both past and present still exist, and the need to prevent and intercede should be a human imperative. April is Genocide Awareness Month, and in its solemnity it also must deliver to us the wisdom to act.
My research for my new book has taken me deep into both the experiences of those targeted in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and how it is still being played out today in the form of denial, and subsequent revisionist history.
The 2019 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Peter Handke, who is from Austria, but who obtained a Yugoslavian passport secretly through the strong-man Slobadan Milosevic in 1999 it has recently been revealed, had written works denying the myriad of murders committed by the Serbs during the war. One needs to wonder how the Nobel Prize committee in Sweden determined this ‘genocide apologist’ to be worthy of such humanitarian recognition?
At last year’s Belgrade Book Fair held in late October, the Serbian Ministry of Defense promoted a book by a former senior army officer, Nebojsa Pavkovic in prison for war crimes committed in Kosovo during the war.
The ministry also held a debate at the book fair about the legitimacy of NATO bombings during the war to deter Serbia from committing further atrocities, to include two other men who were convicted of war crimes.
The Defense Ministry states the it is “proud” to promote the book and debate as “they have the right to express their views on the historic events in which they participated.”
But the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center accused the Defense Ministry of “openly mocking the victims of (war) crimes” by promoting and financing books and events at the Book Fair.
It also accused the Ministry of denying facts established by the UN war crimes court in The Hague.
There are still many in Serbia who believe that there was justification for the government to engage in war to protect them from “marauding Muslims,” which is part of the current propaganda that exists today. In an interview for my recently published book with a Muslim woman who immigrated to the U.S. as a young child with her family in 1995 told me, “the war never leaves me, but I want to make sure that our stories are told.” She and her family returned to Bosnia in 2005 and 2007 to identify the remains of her grandfathers and uncles murdered by the Serbs, and she told me how painful an experience that was, and how raw that continues to be for them. To this day, there are still many remains waiting to be identified.
It is critical that we not lose sight of how those who wish to revise history to serve themselves, and to justify the nefarious actions of evil-doers, be called out. We need to always be mindful of the truth, seek it out if we are unsure, and to be ever-vigilant of those who wish to alter it.
Jordan Steven Sher is the author of Our Neighbors, Their Voices: True Stories of Immigrant Exodus, (on Amazon) and he is working on a second book that delves into the horrors of the genocide committed by the Serbian government in the 1990s.
