Missing, but Not Forgotten

When the International Court of Justice issued its ruling last month on the case brought by Bosnia against Serbia, I commented on the benefits and the demerits of the judgement. Prominent among the benefits was a clear ruling denoting the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide that Serbia had failed to prevent. Conversely, I argued, malign elements would inevitably draw inferences - such as the supposed exoneration of the late Slobodan Milosevic - that the judgement would not support.

The Balkan historian Marko Attila Hoare has since published an article that argues the judgement was much more damaging to the cause of truth and justice than I had maintained. You can read his comments here. Marko argues: "The ICJ’s acquittal of Serbia for genocide and all related charges except for failure to prevent and punish, is a travesty of justice, one that will serve to make future acts of genocide more rather than less likely."

I hope he is wrong, but I accept that some of the worst elements in political debate – in the Balkans and in the English-speaking world - have taken heart from their interpretation of the ICJ ruling. Inoculation against this type of thing is provided by the important and harrowing witness of those who keep historical memory alive. I’d draw your attention in particular to a man called Adam Boys, who runs the International Commission on Missing Persons. The Scotsman last week described the man and his work:

The hellish war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia from 1992-5 has been over for 11 years now and, simply put, Mr Boys manages an organisation that picks up the pieces and tries to put the past to bed. The International Commission on Missing Persons, or ICMP, is a 170-strong outfit that attempts to find, identify, exhume and piece back together as many as possible of the estimated 30,000 people missing after the Bosnian conflict.

ICMP is widely regarded as the world's leading investigative forensic body, revolutionising victim tracing and identification from Bosnia to the Asian tsunami, and from the smoking ruins of Ground Zero to the killing fields of Kosovo.

Who can say how far this brings solace to families searching for their loved ones? But ICMP’s work is vital for the cause of truth in conflict. Mr Boys makes a brief comment towards the end of the article that has a wider significance than the Balkan wars alone: "'Primarily, we must stop the denial that Srebrenica happened,' says Boys, as we walk around the mortuary, chill in the afternoon light. 'And thus stop the centuries of denial that thus provide motivation for another war.'" There follows, below the article, a dispiriting exchange in which Boys comments temperately and in detail about precisely that case. It is an effective riposte to the phenomenon he refers to as "curiously motivated attempts by revisionist commentators [and] attempts to abuse the issue of missing persons for local political gain".

You probably know the type of "commentators" he means. David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen and I commented on one of them, Diana Johnstone, in the context of another controversy in this post:

Examine [Ms Johnstone's] arguments. The numbers of deaths are exaggerated, though she doesn’t know what they are; many possible victims were in fact exchanged, deported or arrived home safely and the international agencies are wrong to think they were killed; the enclave was left deliberately undefended by perfidious Bosnian leaders, possibly in the hope that there would be an atrocity; the enclave wasn’t a safe haven anyway, but a base for Muslim decapitators; such killing as there was is therefore best seen as revenge and not anything genocidal; the US was hoping for an atrocity so that the UN could be pushed aside; Milosevic was in no way responsible. At every possible point and in every conceivable way Johnstone seeks to minimise the scale and implications of what was done at Srebrenica.

The indefatigable Marko has also written of such propagandists. In another article on the web site of the Henry Jackson Society, he notes: "Not one of these people [i.e. Ms Johnstone, Ed Herman of the misnamed Srebrenica Research Group and their circle] has visited an archive, or consulted the Serbo-Croat-language press, or examined any former-Yugoslav historical documents, or carried out a series of extended interviews with participants in the conflict." (Marko also has particular sport with the capacity for informed comment of a Milosevic defender in the UK called Neil Clark. It’s not an elevated level on which to be politically effective, but I can claim a minor success in exposing – in the face of admittedly incompetent legal threats - the provenance of a dubious historical assertion Clark used to make (and appears prudently to have since dropped), and the real name of his source. It is a US group called the International Strategic Studies Association, whose Research Director declared in 2003 that "all independent forensic evidence points to Muslim casualties [at Srebrenica] in the hundreds". The organisation is not to be confused with the well known and authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.)

Nostalgia for the murderous xenophobe Slobodan Milosevic is something you might expect on the atavistic and anti-American Right. It’s an indication of how far parts of the Left are fungible with the far Right that you find such sentiments in allegedly progressive circles too. As one left-wing American writer Michael Bérubé has aptly put it:

[T]he defend-Milosevic crew has been getting more and more outlandish and bizarre every year, and, like unto loony LaRouchies, they have sometimes been discovered messing with legitimate progressive organizations. If real progressives don’t speak out on this, it won’t be long before we’ll be hearing that poor Slobodan cried bitter tears of sorrow when he heard about the massacre of Srebrenica, even though it never really happened in the first place. And, insult upon injury, we’ll be hearing about this from so-called “leftists.”

The evidence of recent history is as unambiguous as it is appalling. All credit is due to those who make sure it is known and will be recalled by future generations. Let us hope that Marko’s worst fears are confounded, and that the ICJ judgement, for all its flaws, assists in the task of remembrance.