German reporting shows a consistent lack of knowledge about the genocide against the Bosniaks; everywhere, a lack of precision and a trivialisation of the genocide are evident. There is one phrase that appears at some point in almost every report on the genocide in Srebrenica: ‘8,000 Muslim men and boys’. After the recent 25th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, the phrase could be read and heard over and over again for days – in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on the Arte television network, Deutschlandfunk, dpa, and once in the left-leaning newspaper taz. Yet, every word in the phrase points to serious mistakes. And to something even bigger: a widespread misunderstanding of the genocide against Bosniaks on the part of the media.
Let’s start with ‘8,000’. The Srebrenica Memorial Centre currently gives the figure of ‘over’ 8,372 victims. The centre assumes there are a number of uncounted cases. When entire families were murdered, there was no one left to register the dead. It would therefore be correct to at least write ‘more than 8,300’ instead of just ‘8,000’ or even ‘7,000’, as some people do without mentioning any facts. In any case, the need to round the number downward so massively in otherwise so-precise journalism is astonishing.
8,372 is the number of victims identified so far murdered in several massacres in just five days in July 1995 – not the total number of people killed in Srebrenica, in the genocide, or in the war that raged between 1992 and 1995, mind you. Over 100,000 people died in the entire Bosnian war – in a country with fewer inhabitants than Berlin.
Now we come to the word ‘Muslim’. Bosniaks, i.e. Bosnian Muslims, were not allowed to call themselves Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia. Only in 1971 did they become a ‘constituent ethnic group’, and even then only as Muslims in an ethnic sense, which denied their historical and cultural identity as Bosniaks. They first won the right to call themselves Bosniaks when Bosnia gained independence in 1992.
Catharsis for Europe
It is of course important and correct say that the victims were Muslims; anti-Muslim racism played a major role in the genocide. The mistake lies in exclusively referring to the victims as ‘Muslims’, while in the same text the religion of the perpetrators is never mentioned, referred to instead solely by ethnicity (‘Serbian’). If the victims have for years been called Muslims, then the perpetrators can also be referred to as ‘Christians’. It would not only be correct, but also cathartic for Europe to finally label the perpetrators as white, European, Christians, instead of only as an ethnicity that seems distant and different to most on the continent.
Finally, we come to ‘men and boys’. This part of the oft-repeated phrase makes murdered women and girls invisible, yet over 570 of them have been identified so far. Furthermore, murdered newborns and babies cannot be categorised as ‘boys’ or ‘young people’.
Genocide does not mean ‘killing many people’. According to the UN Convention on Genocide, it is, simply put, the carrying out of one of several possible acts with the intention of destroying a group of people. Mass murder is one method, while others include forced sterilisation, the forced transfer of children from one group to another, and many more.
In addition to this ignorance about genocide in general, there is ignorance about the genocide against the Bosniaks. Biljana Plavšić, Radovan Karadžić’s vice president, saw Bosniaks as ‘genetically deformed material’ and advocated an extreme biologistic racism. In an interview with the Serbian newspaper Svet in 1993, she explained: ‘It was genetically deformed material that adopted Islam’, staties that this gene had become more concentrated with each subsequent generation. ‘It is dominant and dictates their way of thinking and behaving, which is rooted in their genes. And over the centuries, the genes have deteriorated further.’
The deniers’ search for reasons
Systematic rape was deliberately used as a genocidal method to psychologically and physically break Bosniak women and force them to bear children with “Serbian blood”. The fact that 50,000 women were raped during the Bosnian war was not a side effect of the genocide, but part of it.
Deniers often say that Srebrenica is not a genocide because “only” or “predominantly” men were murdered. They often add that the men were armed and that the violence against them was merely self-defence. This is another reason why “men and boys” without contextualisation is so dangerous.
All these mistakes are contained in the short phrase “8,000 Muslim boys and men”. But there are many more. The reporting on Srebrenica reveals shocking gaps in knowledge, a lack of contextual understanding and possibly simply a great lack of interest.
This is also shown by the recurring phrase about war crimes on “all sides”. According to UN investigations, over 90 per cent of all war crimes in the entire Bosnian war were committed by the Serbian side, with the remainder being committed by several other parties.
False equivalencies
With ‘crimes on all sides’, the journalist endeavours to use a seemingly neutral formulation, yet is guilty of trivialising genocide. This applies not only to the explicit use of the phrase ‘all sides’, but also to framing or inaccurate articles that create the impression that it was a balanced war for which everyone bears equal responsibility. The fact that this false equivalency is genocide denial should have been obvious in Germany, at the latest since neo-Nazis began use the bombing of Dresden in their ‘arguments’.
Apart from the fact that all this is not reported on often enough anyway, the editorial teams obviously lack the knowledge to get it right. Texts whose errors are not recognised are used for research and reproduced in a continuous loop. Survivors most often find that they are not recognised as experts, rather being considered ‘unobjective’. This has been a point of critique for years, but it doesn’t seem to get through. This creates a vicious cycle in which familiar mistakes are not questioned, whereas facts seem controversial – and in the end, people then prefer to write ‘camps’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ instead of concentration camps and genocide.
The genocide against Bosniaks has been recognised by the EU, the USA, and numerous parliaments around the world, has been established as fact in court several times, is documented on hundreds of thousands of pages and with the largest DNA identification project in world history. And yet, survivors are forced to endure denial and contradiction time and again, including in the German media. Biljana Plavšić, who posited that Bosniaks had malformed genes, now lives freely in Serbia, where she is celebrated as a hero.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of raped women must live with the psychological and physical consequences, all the while grieving for loved ones who are no longer alive. Sensitive and accurate reporting is the least they should be able to expect.
