Bosnian genocide denial


Bosnian genocide denial is an act of denying or asserting that the systemic Bosnian genocide against the Bosniak Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as planned and perpetrated in line with official and academic narratives defined and expressed by part of the Serb intelligentsia and academia, political and military establishment, did not occur, or at least it did not occur in the manner or to the extent that has been established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice through its proceedings and judgments, and described by subsequent comprehensive scholarship.
These two aforementioned courts have only ruled differently with regard to direct responsibility in perpetrating acts of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ICJ, in a proceeding brought by Bosnia and Herzegovina against Serbia and Montenegro, has only made rulings to the extent in which Serbia was not directly responsible for the perpetration of the crime of genocide, but was responsible under "customary international law" violating obligation to "prevent and punish the crime of genocide".

Nevertheless, in its 2007 judgment the ICJ adopted the ICTY’s conclusion from Krstić's conviction and concluded that what happened in and around Srebrenica from 13 July 1995 was done by the Army of Republika Srpska "with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina as such", which constitute acts of genocide committed".

Background

The Bosnian genocide is widely acknowledged and regarded by genocide scholars as the biggest and worst war-crime perpetrated on European soil since World War II.
It refers to either the genocide in Srebrenica, including villages in the enclave of Žepa perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in summer of 1995, or refers to the wider crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing campaign throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska which was waged during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, committed by units of the Army of the Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
The ethnic cleansing campaign took place throughout the areas controlled by the Bosnian Serbs, and targeted Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. This campaign included extermination, unlawful confinement, mass rape, sexual assault, torture, plunder and destruction of private and public property, and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; it also included the unlawful shelling of civilians, the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property, the destruction of homes and businesses, and systemic destruction of places of worship. These acts have been found to satisfy the requirements for “guilty acts” of genocide, and that, “some physical perpetrators held the intent to physically destroy the protected groups of Bosnian Muslims and Croats”.
Besides ICTY and ICJ, other international organizations and bodies, such as European Court of Human Rights and United Nations General Assembly, have also passed numerous resolutions, declarations and conclusions acknowledging and reaffirming genocide convictions by ICTY and ICJ. Number of national bodies also passed similar resolutions, such as the 2005 resolutions of the United States Congress and Senate, declaring that "the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide". Also, three convictions for genocide have been reached in courts in Germany, where the convictions were based upon a much wider interpretation of genocide than that used by international courts.

Culture and politics of denial

The origins of denial lie with a small group of Serbian nationalists, supported by part of the Serb political and media establishment. The post war situation generated a stance within Serb culture that Serbs were the aggrieved side and that certain historical events had curtailed national goals. Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia at the time, draw parallels from other examples of negationist historical revisionism and denialism, such as Armenian and Rwandan genocide denial.
According to Biserko, the methods range from the "brutal to the deceitful". She noticed that denial, particularly in Serbia, is present most strongly in political discourse, in the media, in the sphere of law, and in the educational system. Investigating "culture of denial in Serbia", Biserko and the University of Sarajevo's criminology professor Edina Bećirević have pointed to this denialism in Serbian society as a "culture of denial", stating in their examination that: "Denial of the Srebrenica genocide takes many forms in Serbia".

Tactics and methods

During the Bosnian war, Slobodan Milošević had effective control of most Serbian media. Following the end of the war, denialism continued to be widespread among Serbians.
Revisionism ranges from challenging the judicial recognition of the killings as an act of genocide to the denial of a massacre having taken place, and uses a variety of methods. The finding of genocide by the ICJ and the ICTY has been disputed on evidential and theoretical grounds. The number of the dead has been questioned, as has the nature of their deaths. It has been alleged that considerably fewer than 8,000 were killed and/or that most of those killed died in battle rather than by execution. It has been claimed that the interpretation of "genocide" is refuted by the survival of the women and children.

Attempted cover-up by means of reburials to secondary and tertiary mass graves

From approximately 1 August 1995 to 1 November 1995, there was an organized effort, on behalf of the military and political leadership of Republika Srpska, to remove bodies from primary mass gravesites and transport them to secondary and tertiary ones. The reburial was done crudely, using heavy mechanized vehicles such as trenchers and baggers. In the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia court case "Prosecutor v. Blagojević and Jokić", the trial chamber found that this reburial effort was an attempt to conceal evidence of the mass murders. The trial chamber found that the cover up operation was ordered by the Bosnian Serb Army Main Staff and subsequently carried out by members of the Bratunac and Zvornik Brigades.
The cover-up operation, undertaken in such a crude manner, has had a direct impact on the recovery and identification of the remains. The removal and reburial of the bodies have caused them to become dismembered with parts of different individuals interspersed, making it difficult for forensic investigators to positively identify the remains. For example, in one specific case, the remains of one person were found in two different locations, 30 km apart.
In addition to the ligatures and blindfolds found at the mass graves, the effort to hide the bodies has been seen as evidence of the organised nature of the massacres and the non-combatant status of the victims, since if the victims had died in normal combat operations, there would be no need to hide their remains.

Official Republika Srpska reports

First Republika Srpska report (2002)

In September 2002, the Republika Srpska government commissioned the "Report about Case Srebrenica. The document, authored by Darko Trifunović, was endorsed by many leading Bosnian Serb politicians. It purported that 1,800 Bosnian Muslim soldiers died during fighting and a further 100 more died as a result of exhaustion. "The number of Muslim soldiers killed by Bosnian Serbs out of personal revenge or lack of knowledge of international law is probably about 100...It is important to uncover the names of the perpetrators in order to accurately and unequivocally establish whether or not these were isolated instances". The report also makes allegations regarding the examinations of the mass graves, purporting that they were made for hygiene reasons, question the legitimacy of the missing person lists and undermine a key witness' mental health and military history. The International Crisis Group and the United Nations condemned the manipulation of their statements in this report, and Humanitarian Law Center thoroughly deconstructed all the reports published by all Republika Srpska commissions, starting with this one whose methods and manipulations were described in their report from February 2019. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described the report as "one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995". Outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures eventually forced the Republika Srpska to disown the report.

Second Republika Srpska report and apology (2004)

On 7 March 2003, the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina issued a decision which ordered the Republika Srpska, among other things, to conduct a full investigation into the Srebrenica July 1995 events, and disclose the results at the latest on 7 September 2003. The Chamber had no coercive power to implement the decision, especially because it ceased to exist in late 2003. The Republika Srpska then published two reports, on 3 June 2003 and 5 September 2003, which the Human Rights Chamber concluded did not fulfill the obligations of the Republika Srpska. On 15 October 2003, The High Representative, Paddy Ashdown, lamented that "getting the truth from the government is like extracting rotten teeth".
The Srebrenica commission, officially titled the Commission for Investigation of the Events in and around Srebrenica between 10 and 19 July 1995, was established in December 2003, and submitted its final report on 4 June 2004, and then an addendum on 15 October 2004 after delayed information was supplied. The report acknowledged that at least 7,000 men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces, citing a provisional figure of 7,800.

In the report, because of "limited time" and to "maximize resources", the commission "accepted the historical background and the facts stated in the second-instance judgment 'Prosecutor vs. Radislav Krstić', when the ICTY convicted the accused for 'assisting and supporting genocide' committed in Srebrenica".
The findings of the commission remains generally disputed by Serb nationalists, who claim that commission was heavily pressured by the High Representative, given that an earlier RS government report which exonerated the Serbs was dismissed.

Nevertheless, Dragan Čavić, the president of Republika Srpska at the time, acknowledged in a televised address that Serb forces killed several thousand civilians in violation of the international law, and asserted that Srebrenica was a dark chapter in Serb history, and on 10 November 2004, the government of Republika Srpska finally issued an official apology.

Second Republika Srpska report revision (2010)

On 21 April 2010, the government of Republika Srpska under Milorad Dodik, at the time the prime minister, initiated a revision of the 2004 report saying that the numbers of killed were exaggerated and the report was manipulated by a former peace envoy. The Office of the High Representative responded by saying: "The Republika Srpska government should reconsider its conclusions and align itself with the facts and legal requirements and act accordingly, rather than inflicting emotional distress on the survivors, torture history and denigrate the public image of the country".
On 12 July 2010, at the 15th anniversary of the massacre, Milorad Dodik said that he acknowledged the killings that happened on the site, but denied that what happened at Srebrenica was genocide.

Republika Srpska rejection of 2004 report and new commission (2018-19)

On 14. August 2018 the People's Assembly of Republika Srpska dismissed the 2004 report and decided for a new commission to be assembled to revise report surrounding events in Srebrenica and area around the town in July 1995. Initiated by Milorad Dodik, then the entity president, and his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party, the move is immediately criticized by international community.
Humanitarian Law Center, in their report signed by 31 high-profile signatories, described this new development as "the culmination of more than a decade of genocide denial and historical revisionism by the SNSD government in the Republika Srpska", adding that the HLC regard this newest initiative to be "illegitimate overall", and that it "represents a flawed response to a legitimate need". The United States State Department issued a communiqué in which they criticized move by Republika Srpska entity officials and institutions, describing it as "ttempts to reject or amend the report on Srebrenica are part of wider efforts to revise the facts of the past war, to deny history, and to politicize tragedy".

Revisionism and denialism abroad

Milošević and his 1990s policies have found support among ideologically like-minded people abroad, who still express support for the late president and his various subordinates in the Yugoslav Wars, resorting to various revisionist and denialist narratives surroundings break-up of Yugoslavia, often implying a Western conspiracy against Yugoslavia and the Serbian people, which culminated with the NATO interventions against Serbia and the Republika Srpska. This support often morphs into attempts to whitewash war-crimes perpetrated by Serbian security, military and para-military forces, and denial of the nature and extent of these crimes.

"Left" revisionists

Revisionists mainly identifying with the "far-left" of the ideological and political spectrum, such as Michael Parenti, Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, Jared Israel, Tariq Ali, the British journalist Mick Hume, Diana Johnstone, and John Robles of Voice of Russia engaged in revisionism and denial of the Bosnian genocide and its various aspects, while blaming the West, the NATO, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, for the Serb and their forces actions, absolving the later of any responsibility of the atrocities carried out, war crimes and genocide.
Edward S. Herman and Mick Hume alleged a discrepancy of over 8,000 victims between the official number of victims and the number of bodies they "found" and attempted to cast doubt over the explanation of the events, while ignoring the long delays in locating mass graves and identifying the bodies by processing DNA. Similarly to their writing on Rwandan genocide, economist Edward S. Herman and David Peterson were engaging in revisionism and denial. In several articles, such as "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre", written by Herman, or "The Srebrenica Massacre was a Gigantic Political Fraud", by Herman and Robles, while repeating claims about political motives by western government and NATO conspirators from Herman and Peterson book Politics of Genocide, authors, concentrating on the Srebrenica massacre, state that Serbs at Srebrenica were actually "killing Bosnian-Muslim soldiers" and, even, that happened in response to the "killing of over 2,000 Serb civilians, mostly women and children, at the location by Bosnian-Muslim army", and that the numbers of executed Bosnian-Muslim soldiers "were probably in the order of between 500 and 1,000 n other words, less than half of the number of Serb civilians killed before July, 1995".
For this complete reversal of reality they rely on information provided by another self-styled independent researcher Diana Johnstone, who herself never set foot in Bosnia. They cite that women and children were largely spared and that only military age men were targeted.
This view is not supported by the findings of the ICJ or the ICTY. What Johnstone, Herman, Peterson, Robles and others omit, but ICTY findings clearly describes, especially in trial judgments of Naser Orić and Radislav Krstić, is that villages surrounding Srebrenica, where alleged killings of Serb women and children, according to this group of revisionists, took place, were in most cases actually Bosnian Muslim villages from where their original inhabitants escaped or were driven out by the Bosnian Serb military offensive with subsequent occupation and establishment of the frontlines, and where Bosnian Serb civilians rarely entered. Meanwhile, villages surrounding Srebrenica, which in fact belonged to Serb population, were heavily fortified and militarized, with villages like Kravica being used to store caches of weapons and ammunition, and from which Serbs launched attacks on Bosnian Muslim villages, as well as on the town of Srebrenica itself.

''Living Marxism''

Living Marxism was a British magazine originally launched in 1988 as the journal of the British Revolutionary Communist Party. It was later rebranded as LM and ceased publication in March 2000 following a successful libel lawsuit brought by the television company ITN.
In the first issue as LM, editor Mick Hume published an article by journalist Thomas Deichmann, who claimed that ITN had deliberately misrepresented the Bosnian war in its coverage in 1992, specifically Serb run concentration camps Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje.
The article "The picture that fooled the world" argued that the report by UK journalists Ed Vulliamy, with Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, following initial reports on camps by Maggie O'Kane and Roy Gutman, while working for ITN, covered the Yugoslav Wars and revealed a gulag of concentration camps in Bosanska Krajina, was faked. In August 1992 Vulliamy and O'Kane had gained access to the Omarska and Trnopolje camps. Their accounts of the conditions of the prisoners were recorded for the documentary Omarska's survivors: Bosnia 1992. Discovery of the camps was credited with contributing to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Deichmann claimed in his article, published by LM in February 1997, that the ITN footage, created in front of Trnopolje concentration camp, featuring a group of emaciated Bosnian Muslim men prisoners, including Fikret Alić, standing behind a barbed wire fence, was deliberately staged to portray a Nazi-style extermination camp, that the British reporters from ITN, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, had actually stood inside a compound surrounded by a barbed wire fence and from there filmed their pictures, and alleged: "It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection center for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished".
However, an examination by David Campbell, professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University, showed that the key claims made by Deichmann and LM were "erroneous and flawed".
The publishers of LM, Informinc Ltd., were sued for libel by ITN. The case initially caused international condemnation of ITN. Among those who supported LM was journalist John Simpson, who in April 2012 publicly apologized for questioning ITN's reporting on the camps and for supporting the magazine.
As one of LMs critics, the journalist George Monbiot, who wrote in Prospect magazine, said that some of the world's leading liberals, such as Harold Evans, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Fay Weldon jumped to the magazine's defense, while others condemned ITN's "deplorable attack on press freedom". He added: "The Institute of Contemporary Arts, bulwark of progressive liberalism, enhanced LMs heroic profile by co-hosting a three-day conference with the magazine, called "Free Speech Wars". With the blessing of the liberal world, this puny iconoclastic David will go to war with the clanking orthodoxies of the multinational Goliath".
Monbiot further emphasized how LM wished its struggle to be seen exactly as a struggle for liberal values, but that on closer look this cause may be less liberal than the LMs supporters would like to believe, and that more careful observer at LM is the weaker its links to the oppressed appears, and the stronger its links to the oppressor. Monbiot concluded that LM had less in common with the left than with the fanatical right.
The libel case was decided against LM and in March 2000 the magazine was forced to close, after defendants failed to present any evidence in their defense. Reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were each awarded £150,000 over the LM story and the magazine was ordered to pay £75,000 for libeling ITN in a February 1997 article. In an interview with The Times, on question "would do it again", Hume commented that they could have got out of the case by apologising but that he believes in "freedom to state what you understand to be true, even if it causes offence", and that he would do anything to avoid similar proceedings in court ever again, but that "some things really are more important than a mortgage".
In contrast, professor David Campbell of Durham University summarised his study of the case as follows:

Denial by officials

Similar to Rwandan genocide denial, Nanjing Massacre denial, Holocaust denial and Armenian genocide denial, revisionists and denialists often claim that the designation of genocide is result of international political conspiracy, which invoked violence in the first place, which is than further exaggerated or completely invented. This mentality is best illustrated by statements such as Roger Booboh's, who declared that "to claim that a genocide occurred is closer to the politics of surrealism than to the truth".

High-ranking local officials

High-ranking Serbian officials have claimed that no genocide on Bosniak Muslims the took place at all:
  • Milorad Dodik and his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party initated revision of the 2004 Srebrenica report twice, in 2010 and recently in 2018/2019, the moves which prompted criticism by international community, describing it as "the culmination of more than a decade of genocide denial and historical revisionism" by the party, Dodik as its leader, and the government in the Republika Srpska. As a president of Republika Srpska, Dodik labeled Srebrenica massacre a "fabricated myth". He stated in an interview with the Belgrade newspaper Večernje Novosti in April 2010 that "we cannot and will never accept qualifying that event as a genocide". Dodik disowned the 2004 Republika Srpska report acknowledging the scale of the killing and apologising to the relatives of the victims, alleging that the report had been adopted because of pressure from the international community. Without substantiating the figure, he claimed that the number of victims was 3,500 rather than the 7,000 accepted by the report, alleging that 500 listed victims were alive and over 250 people buried in the Potocari memorial centre died elsewhere. In July 2010, on the 15th anniversary of the massacre, Dodik declared that he did not regard the killings at Srebrenica as genocide, and maintained that "If a genocide happened then it was committed against Serb people of this region where women, children and the elderly were killed en masse". In December 2010, Dodik condemned the Peace Implementation Council, an international community of 55 countries, for referring to the Srebrenica massacre as genocide. In 2017, Dodik introduced legislation that would ban the teaching of the Srebrenica genocide and Sarajevo siege in Republika Srpska's schools, stating that it was "impossible to use here the textbooks … which say the Serbs have committed genocide and kept Sarajevo under siege. This is not correct and this will not be taught here".
  • Tomislav Nikolić, then-President of Serbia, stated on 2 June 2012 that "there was no genocide in Srebrenica. In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs who should be found, prosecuted and punished. It is very difficult to indict someone and prove before the court that an event qualifies as genocide".
  • Vojislav Šešelj
  • Ivica Dačić
  • Aleksandar Vulin
  • Miloš Milovanović, a former commander of the Serb paramilitary unit Serbian Guard who represents the Serbian Democratic Party in the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly, said in March 2005 that "the massacre is a lie; it is propaganda to paint a bad picture of the Serbian people. The Muslims are lying; they are manipulating the numbers; they are exaggerating what happened. Far more Serbs died at Srebrenica than Muslims".
  • Ana Brnabić - current primeminster of Serbia. On 14 November 2018, Brnabić in an interview with Deutsche Welle denied the massacres of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebenica as being an act of genocide. The Hague Court criticised Brnabić for denial of the Srebenica genocide.

    UN officials and commanders

  • Phillip Corwin, former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia, advisor and contributor to the work of the Srebrenica Research Group said "What happened in Srebrenica was not a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs, but rather a series of very bloody attacks and counterattacks over a three-year period".
  • Lewis MacKenzie, former commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia, in an article titled "The real story behind Srebrenica" resorted to the usual denialist method of underestimating the genocide death toll by playing with numbers. He continually challenged the designation of genocide in 2009 on the grounds that the number of men and boys killed had been exaggerated by a factor of 4, and secondly that transfer of the women and children by bus contradicted the notion of genocide – the women would have been killed first if there had been an intent to destroy the group. Writing in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, MacKenzie expressed his opinion without reference to the detailed arguments published by the ICTY Trial and Appeal Chambers in the Krstic case judgements published several years earlier and confirmed by the ICJ since.
  • Portuguese retired general Carlos Martins Branco denies genocide ever happened in his publication "Was Srebrenica a Hoax? Eyewitness Account of a Former UN Military Observer in Bosnia" in 1998, and his memoirs "A Guerra nos Balcãs, jihadismo, geopolítica e desinformação" in November 2016. He claims "Srebrenica was portrayed – and continues to be – as a premeditated massacre of innocent Muslim civilians. As a genocide! But was it really so?".

    Other individuals and groups engaging in denial

  • Peter Handke, Austrian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019, and who offered to testify on behalf of late Slobodan Milošević at ICTY trials, denied Serb run concentration camps, Srebrenica massacre, reiterated myths that the Bosnian Muslims staged their own massacres in Sarajevo, and compared Serbia's situation during 1990's to the faith of European Jewry during the Holocaust. He offered his opinions in his numerous writings, plays and books dealing with the subject, such as "A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia". Handke lauded Milošević and held eulogy for him at the funeral of the Serbian president. In the opinion of British journalist Ed Vulliamy: " went out of his way to give credence to mass murder and, in this context, as importantly, to lies". Handke reacted to these numerous critiques by threatening to withdraw his latest play about the Bosnian war, The Journey To The Dug-Out, Or The Play About The War Film, from Vienna's Burgtheater, unless media and peer criticism stop.
  • Srđa Trifković, in discussing the paramilitary units of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs's Scorpions at the time, who filmed themselves executing six Bosniak teenagers in a woods surrounding Srebrenica, called the video a "manipulation", insisting it was produced to retroactively justify Western policies and actions in Bosnia, whose aim was also to "inflict a collective responsibility upon the Serbian people", "revise" the Dayton Agreement, and "abolish" Serb entity in Bosnia. His other claims range from denial of an evidences of genocide, and number of people killed in Srebrenica, to denial that the Skorpions were under control of Serbian officials and institutions.
  • Darko Trifunović, who teaches at the Faculty of Security in Novi Sad and helped write a Srebrenica report, insisted that fewer than one hundred were actually executed at Srebrenica, and denied the validity of the genocide verdict passed by the ICJ in case against Serbia, as well as the genocide verdict handed down by the ICTY in the case against general Radislav Krstić. He has written stories alleging existence of "Islamic radicalism" and "terrorism" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which he used to justify denying the validity of court verdicts.
  • La Nation, a bi-monthly Swiss newspaper, published a series of articles claiming that 2,000 soldiers were killed in the "pseudo-massacre" in Srebrenica. The Society for Threatened Peoples and Swiss Association Against Impunity filed a joint suit against La Nation for genocide denial. Swiss law prohibits genocide denial.
  • The Srebrenica Research Group, known for its genocide denial, is a group led by Edward S. Herman, and include two former UN officials. The group published Srebrenica And the Politics of War Crimes , in which they claimed how "contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence and is essentially a political construct".
  • Genocide scholar William Schabas in his 2009 book Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes summarizes the legal opinions regarding the status of the atrocities committed in Srebrenica and throughout the Bosnian war, deeming them ethnic cleansing and not genocide, stating that "Ethnic cleansing is also a warning sign of genocide to come. Genocide is the last resort of the frustrated ethnic cleanser".
  • Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Israel, with a close ties to Serbia and its political establishment, also denies that Serb forces had genocidal intent. He tried to explain that "as far as I know what happened in Srebrenica" doesn't fit definition of genocide. He went on and also tried to explain how he believes that the decision to call it genocide was made for political reasons. Furthermore, he talked about what he called "Srebrenica's comparation with Holocaust", insinuating as if that was something which happens often, and than claiming "absurdity" of such analogy.
  • The Norwegian war correspondent Ola Flyum released two documentaries, A Town Betrayed and Sporene etter Sarajevo, in 2010 to heated domestic debate. They were originally aired as part of the Brennpunkt docu-series by the state broadcaster NRK, although the former was condemned five months later for "violation of good press practice" by the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission, following a complaint by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. Flyum maintained that he wanted to nuance the picture of Srebrenica by also discussing the earlier brutalities perpetrated by Naser Orić in the neighbouring villages. The documentary did not engage in outright genocide denial, yet did construe the massacre as something more spontaneous and chaotic than a planned and calculated action by the Serbs. Flyum also tried in part to shift the blame from Mladić and Karadžić to Izetbegović and Orić, implying that Srebrenica was something of a strategic sacrifice, rather than a planned ethnic cleansing. The decision not to include the ICTY's final verdicts in the documentary was vehemently criticized, in particular by Mirsad Fazlic, the Bosnian reporter of Slobodna Bosna, whom Flyum had interviewed for the film and worked with for four years.

    Reaction to prominent figures' denialism

publicly confronted the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Director for Eastern European Affairs, Israeli Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, for his denial arguing that for him to be able to condemn the perpetrators and mourn victims of the genocide Jewish people suffered during the World War II, including members of his own family, one has to condemn the perpetrators and mourn victims of all other acts of genocide, including the genocide in Srebrenica.
He also criticized and responded in writing to denialists' arguments, particularly underlining those made by Steven T. Katz, William Schabas, and the aforementioned Efraim Zuroff, in a long essay titled "Ratko Mladić’s Genocide Conviction, and Why it Matters", written by Rosensaft and published by Tablet Magazine on a day Ratko Mladić was found guilty for "genocide, extermination, murder, and other crimes against humanity and war crimes" at the ICTY, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
To one of the most important and the most often repeated denialists' arguments - number, intent, and combination of these two, depending on occasion and context - Rosensaft responded with meticulous deconstruction of judicial activity, and analysis of key convictions. He pointed that the ICTY's Krstić Appeals Chamber "unequivocally held that the number of victims was not a determinative factor in concluding whether or not a genocide had occurred", and affirmed the Trial Chamber's conclusion that "the Srebrenica massacre was indeed a genocide because it was an essential element of the intent to destroy the Muslim population of Eastern Bosnia as a whole".
Rosensaft noted an assertion by the late Nehemiah Robinson, the Director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, and a leading authority on the UN Genocide Convention, who said that the term genocide "applies even if victims constitute only part of a group either within a country or within a region or within a single community, provided the number is substantial… It will be up to the courts to decide in each case whether the number was sufficiently large".
To this, Rosenssaft added that "the courts have spoken clearly and unambiguously".
Salman Rushdie, in the Globe and Mail article, from 7 May 1999, described Handke's apologias for Serbian Milošević's regime and denial of genocide, as idiocy.
After Handke's play "Voyage by Dugout" was staged, Susan Sontag declared him "finished" in New York. Other noted reactions included Alain Finkielkraut saying that Handke became "an ideological monster", while for Slavoj Žižek Handke's "glorification of the Serbs is cynicism".
The Bosnian-American novelist and lecturer of creative writing at Princeton University, Aleksandar Hemon, joined in an international outcry, denouncing the Nobel Committee's decision to award Handke a Nobel Prize in literature, in a piece in The New York Times for their Opinion column, published in print and online in October 15th issue, calling Handke the "Bob Dylan of enocide pologists", while the Berlin-based Serbian novelist, Bora Ćosić, denounced Handke:
While coming to Handke's defense, German novelist Martin Walser described the mood surrounding Handke, in relation to his opinions and attitude toward Bosnian Muslims' plight, explaining that Handke "is just being completely dismissed, in every respect morally, politically and professionally" and that all is "part of the war mood which I find a bit frightening".

Readings and presentations

  • - the case of ITN versus Living Marxism; two part series of detailed presentation by David Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, first published in , March & June 2002.
  • , online presentation - SENSE-agency
  • Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Srebrenica – a 'Safe haven', an extensive Dutch government report on events in eastern Bosnia and the fall of Srebrenica.
  • Leydesdorff, Selma. . Trans. Kay Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
  • , Scientific American, 1 August 2006
  • Nick Cohen, "", The Guardian, 16 July 2011