Challenging Denial, Remembering Victims of Genocide and War Crimes

Challenging Genocide Denial: Legacies of the Holocaust and Bosnia explored the legacies of both the Holocaust and the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina, including the genocide in Srebrenica. It was held during Srebrenica Memorial Week, part of a series of events to mark the 27th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica.

I spoke about post-war peacebuilding processes and the important roles that survivors of war and genocide play in promoting peace and justice. Rather than passive victims of violence, survivors have taken up crucial roles in truth-recovery, memorialisation, and other initiatives.

Remembering Victims of Genocide and Enforced Disappearance

On 11 July 2022, fifty more victims of the Srebrenica genocide were laid to rest at the burial and annual commemoration held at Potocari, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Around 8,000 people, mainly men and boys, were killed in the genocide, and over 40,000 people, mainly women, elderly people, and children, were expelled from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995. 6,721 victims are now buried at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. The remains of 1,200 more victims have yet to be found.

At the end of the war in Bosnia, over 31,000 people were recorded as missing and are now presumed dead. Many of the disappeared were the victims of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and genocide. After they were killed, their bodies were often buried in unmarked mass graves and in other clandestine locations.

The families of the missing have endured a long and painful wait to find out information on the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones. The ongoing absence of disappeared relatives is a source of great pain. Disappearance often leaves relatives in a state of limbo, without certainty over whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Without a body to bury, surviving relatives cannot honour the memory of their children, partners, parents, and other loved ones with a funeral.

Locating the Missing, Identifying the Dead

Advances in forensic anthropology have enabled thousands of victims of enforced disappearance from across Bosnia & Herzegovina to be located and identified. Locating, exhuming, and identifying the missing is however hampered by efforts made by perpetrators to hide evidence of their crimes. Victims were killed, buried and their remains were later dug up again and reburied in other locations to try to cover up these crimes. The remains of missing persons are often found not only close to the site where they were executed, but also in secondary and tertiary graves.

Locating the missing, exhuming their remains, and identifying missing persons is a complex process involving many different institutions and agencies. Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons, and the International Commission on Missing Persons, have been heavily involved in exhuming gravesites and extracting DNA samples so that the remains of disappeared persons may be identified and returned to their families for reburial.

Families of the missing are crucial actors in this process. Family associations have taken up active roles by gathering information about disappearances, providing advice and support to surviving relatives, and raising public awareness and understanding of the issue of missing persons.

Challenging Denial, Confronting the Past: The Role of Survivors in Peace and Justice Initiatives

In my talk, I highlighted the important roles that survivors across Bosnia & Herzegovina have played in post-war peacebuilding and justice initiatives. Rather than viewing survivors of genocide, of war crimes, solely through a lens of victimhood, I argued that we should take time to recognise the active roles that survivors play in post-war peacebuilding efforts.

One excellent example of this is the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia held in Sarajevo in 2015. This was a regional truth-telling initiative led by grassroots women’s organisations from across the region of the former Yugoslavia. It was an example of women in civil society – including survivors of various crimes - working together to create an informal truth-telling mechanism. It is grounded in the idea that peace and justice should be built from the ground up, and driven by women at the grassroots level.

At the Women’s Court, 36 women from all Yugoslav successor states testified about violence and injustice that they experienced during and after wars in the region. These were women-only hearings - designed to address the under-representation of women, and women’s experiences of war, in mainstream justice mechanisms such as criminal courts and national truth commissions. The Women’s Court provides an important model of how to ensure that survivors of genocide and war crimes are front and centre of post-war peacebuilding initiatives.

Unlike criminal courts and tribunals, the Women’s Court relied on lay people rather than legal experts driving the initiative. Survivors played active roles in planning, designing, and testifying in the Women’s Court. For example, the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves (Bosnia & Herzegovina) and the Centre for Women War Victims – ROSA (Croatia) formed part of the regional board that organised the event. Survivors were also actively involved in the preparatory process; they helped to decide where the Court should take place, and which themes the Court should address, etc.

Almost three decades since the end of the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina, denial of genocide and war crimes poses an ongoing threat to the country’s peace and stability. Perpetrators of genocide and other wartime crimes are frequently glorified in public spaces. Survivors continue to encounter denial, trivialisation and manipulation of information concerning wartime events. A highly masculinised version of collective memory of war is also being built. Consequently, women’s experiences of war are frequently erased from collective accounts of the conflict.

Building sustainable peace requires challenging narratives of denial and relativisation. It requires acknowledging and responding to the lived experiences of people most affected by conflict. The Women’s Court was an important effort to write women’s experiences of genocide and war into collective narratives of war. The Court recognised the many harms and losses that women experienced; it named those responsible for criminal acts; and called for governments to provide comprehensive justice, and transformative reparations and redress for survivors. In doing so, the Women’s Court challenged the denial and manipulation that survivors so often encounter.

Survivors of genocide and war-related crimes continue to search for the missing, and fight for truth and justice. With courage and strength, they send a message to all of us that creating peace means bringing forward the truth about what happened in the past. It also means providing justice, to redress the damage wreaked by genocide and war.