WELCOME TO IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT, No. 518, October 01, 2004

COMMENT: REVISIONISM WILL CRIPPLE BOSNIA'S FUTURE

The West's commentators must not forget or dismiss the suffering
caused during the wars if reconciliation is ever to be possible.

By Nerma Jelacic in Sarajevo

"Thank you for making me realise that I have to deal with my past
if I want to have a future," Satko Mujagic told me on a hot, Bosnian
August afternoon.

We were standing on the very spot where, 12 years ago, he lay beaten,
bloodied and blinded by dysentery - waiting for a final bullet from
a guard who was shouting at him nearby.

We were standing on the site of the infamous Omarska concentration camp.

Not far from us a ten-year-old boy walks up to my companion on this trip,
tugs his sleeve and asks, in English, "Are you Ed Vulliamy?" When the man
nodded yes, the child said shyly, "Thank you for saving my father's life,"
before turning back to the security of his mother's arms.

It is no exaggeration to say that this family unit is together thanks
to the journalist Ed Vulliamy, a man I am privileged to call my friend,
and who is viewed as a saviour by hundreds of other Bosnians.

For Vulliamy and the ITN crew he was with in August 1992 focused the
world's attention on the existence of Serb-run concentration camps
where men and women were raped, tortured, humiliated and killed in a way
that could only have come from the darkest corner of the human mind.

Had these abuses not been exposed, perhaps Satko's two-year-old daughter
would not now be carelessly skipping around and picking flowers on the
patch of grass on which her father once lay bleeding and in despair.

Mujagic thanked me for a very specific reason. The previous evening,
when I asked him if he would accompany us to a commemoration ceremony
that was being held in the Omarska mines, he said he didn't want to come.
Like many Omarska survivors, he said he would rather forget about what
happened there than be reminded of it.

"I don't want to go to that place ever again," he said.

I felt he was wrong to take this stance and tried to convince him
otherwise. Over the past year, having spoken to survivors of the war
from every corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina and from different ethnic
backgrounds, I have come to realise that the past cannot be forgotten.

For the way the past is addressed determines the way in which the future
will unfold. Burying it somewhere at the back of our consciousness
only increases the possibility that the same animosities may erupt
to the surface again.

I now know, through my own feelings and those of my family, friends and
countless encounters with those who lived through even worse horrors,
that the only way to move on is to face the past - to deal with all
its ugliness and horror - in order to be able to achieve that level
of consciousness when a clean break can be made.

Burying or distorting the past is counterproductive.

I did not expect Mujagic to be swayed by my argument, but to my surprise,
the following morning, he knocked on the door of the women's refuge house
where I was staying and with trepidation in his eyes and his future -
his daughter - in his arms said they would both come with us.

Not long after, I encountered a different group of Omarska's victims.

I climbed down into a three metre deep mass grave, and stood among
piles of human bones, clothes and watches, staring down at skeletal heads
whose jaws were frozen in an everlasting grimace of pain. Days after
the grave was unearthed, that distinctive smell of decay still lingered
in the air. The remains of 175 camp inmates, buried twelve years ago,
have so far been recovered from this pit.

A few days later, Satko's story was among those touched upon in an
emotional and thought-provoking article by Vulliamy that was published
by IWPR - see Comment: We Must Fight for Memory of Bosnia's Camps
at http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr3/bcr3_200408_513_5_eng.txt -
in which he argued that the Omarska camp should be preserved as a
monument to the horror that occurred there.

Vulliamy's piece was republished in Bosnian in the Sarajevo weekly
Slobodna Bosna, and subsequently sparked a much-needed local debate
about how the memory of the camps should be preserved.

Other local media visited the camp site and its survivors, some even
interviewed owners of the company that wanted to privatise the mine
within which the camp was located. They too were open to suggestions about
just how they could preserve the memory of the not so distant past.

For the memories are still fresh and true reconciliation impossible until
the past is properly addressed - by all. The victims. The perpetrators.
The observers.

Our trip to Omarska was not accidental. The idea came about earlier
this year when Vulliamy was trying to think of a suitable way to mark
his 50th birthday. I had for some time by then been trying to get him
to revisit Bosnia, to be witness to the changes that have taken place
since his last trip in 1996.

I hope Vulliamy will not mind me saying so, but I feel that he also was
trying to escape from the past. What he saw and lived through would have
left a scar on anyone. And the momentous discovery he made at Omarska and
Trnopolje - another camp only a few kilometres away - was a heavy burden
to carry for 12 years.

"Omarska has haunted me ever after," he wrote in his article. "I kept
meeting survivors or relatives of the dead; in trenches during what
was left of the war, across the diaspora and in The Hague where they
(and I) came to bear witness."

It was particularly important for Vulliamy to come here again - to
remind himself of the horrors he had witnessed - because of a small
but persistent group of revisionists who have repeatedly challenged
what he saw that day back in 1992.

After Vulliamy and the ITN camera crew reported what they saw, the UK's
Living Marxism magazine claimed that the camps captured by ITN cameras
- and brought to life in Vulliamy's article - were fabricated.

ITN subsequently sued Living Marxism for libel and won, and the magazine
collapsed under the cost of the damages they were ordered to pay.

But Living Marxism's defeat did not deter a fringe group of die-hard
Serb apologists in western Europe and the United States who have been
remarkably successful in keeping their version of revisionist history
alive.

Proponents of Living Marxism's stance argue that the West conspired
against Milosevic in order to destroy the "the last standing
socialist bastion in Europe".

Apart from being false, such claims are detrimental to the process
of reconciliation in Bosnia.

In his IWPR article, Vulliamy recounted how a Swedish magazine
called Ordfront, or Word Front, carried an interview last year with
Diane Johnstone, author of "Fool's Crusade", a book that questioned the
number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre, the authenticity of the
Racak massacre in Kosovo, the use of rape as a tool of war in Bosnia,
and the number of people killed throughout the war in Bosnia.

He then expressed his profound disappointment that "members of
the chattering classes, unbelievably, have hailed this poison
as 'outstanding work', in a letter signed by, among others,
Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, John Pilger et al".

It is not hard to understand Vulliamy's frustration. In her book,
Johnstone claims Milosevic did not preside over a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, but rather that he was advocating ethnic tolerance
and harmony amongst Yugoslavia's peoples.

She also casts doubt on the generally accepted figure (as noted,
for example, by the Red Cross) of nearly 8,000 killed in Srebrenica,
claiming the number is "inflated". She further argues that what happened
in Srebrenica was not genocide. "One thing should be obvious," she writes.
"One does not commit 'genocide' by sparing women and children."

If anyone wanted more proof that these claims were false, they could
look to the case of Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb general who
was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia for the crimes committed in Srebrenica.

Or they might look to the 2002 confession by the former Bosnian Serb
president Biljana Plavsic, who admitted that her government carried out
a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

They might even have looked to the admission earlier this year
of the massacre in Srebrenica which finally came from the
government of Republika Srpska itself, at the same time revealing
the existence of 32 new mass graves.

If the perpetrators themselves are ready to admit the atrocities
they committed, why is it so difficult for armchair commentators
to do the same?

Johnstone's book has inflicted new pain on those who matter the most:
those who underwent endless days of mindless torture and survived;
on the brave and almost forgotten women of Srebrenica who are still
desperately searching for their loved ones; and dishonours the memory
of the victims.

But by questioning the established facts, she is also damaging
Bosnia's chances for reconciliation by giving credibility to
revisionists who don't want to acknowledge their wrongs.

Following public outrage over the Ordfront interview, the magazine
apologised for the pain caused. But the resulting infighting
over the decision led to a split in the editorial board, and the
removal of the editor.

This prompted a group of several well-known intellectuals, Noam
Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, John Pilger to sign an open letter
to the Ordfront board, referred to earlier, denouncing the magazine
for "censorship".

"We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting
from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason,
in a great tradition," they wrote.

Less then a week after this letter was mentioned in Vulliamy's
article for IWPR, Ali sent a message to Slobodna Bosna insisting
instead that the letter was a simple denunciation of censorship,
not an endorsement of Johnstone's views.

That may be, but that is certainly not how it was interpreted by
Vulliamy or by Bosnia's victims.

In a response to Ali's denial, Quintin Hoare sent a letter to
Slobodna Bosna supporting Vulliamy and denouncing Ali's claims.

Hoare's letter is bound to provoke further denials and attacks from
the revisionists.

It is surprising how hard it is for grown men and women to admit
they made a mistake, let alone to apologise.

Yet instead of the probable tirade of denial and counter accusations
likely to be provoked by this comment article and Hoare's letter
to Slobodna Bosna, perhaps the esteemed thinkers of the West can
make amends.

Perhaps such commentators can show the victims, the survivors and
their families that they are not living in a merciless unfeeling world.

They should realise that their words have reopened deep wounds and instead
of pouring salt on them they should help heal them - by apologising.

They should accept that their words lend credibility to radical
nationalists who remain active in Republika Srpska and who are still
calling for ethnic and territorial division in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

They should understand how their continuing revisionism over the past
still, today, clouds the future for people like Mujagic's little daughter,
the future of the grateful young boy I wrote about at the beginning of
this article, the future of all Bosnia's children.

Nerma Jelacic, IWPR's Bosnia and Herzegovina project manager, wrote
this article in a personal capacity. Comments to <jelacic@media.ba>

-- IWPR's BALKAN CRISIS REPORT No. 518

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