TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
overnight shift. His home was on
some of the war’s bloodiest
ground — directly across from an
infamous warehouse, where
roughly 1,000 Bosniaks from Sre-
brenica were killed with auto-
matic weapons and hand gre-
nades over several days in 1995.
The coal miner said he’d heard
how the warehouse had func-
tioned as a co-op before the war
— a place where farmers could
sell fruit and vegetables.
He said he didn’t know the
story of what happened there in
1995.
“Nobody told us anything,” he
said.The role of Milorad Dodik
Inzko, the envoy who crimi-
nalized genocide denial, said
Bosnia’s dynamics are often con-
founding — and sometimes
beautiful. He’s seen Bosniaks
who’ve helped to renovate the
Catholic churches of Croats. He
knows groups of friends — Cro-
ats, Serbs and Bosniaks — who
shot at one another in the war
and now get together for drinks.
He calls the country a place of
“many small Nelson Mandelas.”
“But when you get to the level
of politics, you can’t find a Willy
Brandt,” he said, referencing the
former German chancellor who
knelt at a memorial to Jewish
victims of the Nazis.
Critics say Dodik has done
more than anybody in the coun-
try to exacerbate Bosnia’s ten-
sions. Earlier in his career, he
had flattered the United States,
acknowledged the genocide, and
talked about the importance of
Bosnian reconciliation. Mad-
eleine K. Albright, the former
U.S. secretary of state, had called
him a “breath of fresh air.”
But Dodik’s nationalist rheto-
ric has built over the past decade.doesn’t want to ask. He pointed
to the horizon, hills he had hiked
frantically for five days in 1995.
He was one of the lucky ones to
escape the genocide, unlike his
father, uncle and twin brother.
Hasanovic noted a white house
with a balcony, within view of the
memorial center, where men had
been separated from women and
detained.
“A regular Serb family lives
there now,” he said.
He didn’t know of their views.
Many Bosnian Serbs are hesi-
tant about even addressing the
issue of the war crimes. In inter-
views across Republika Srpska,
some said that crimes had prob-
ably been committed, but they
did not rise to the level of
genocide. Others acknowledged,
with contrition, the scope of
what happened. Still more said
they were uncertain what to
think, but went on at length
about crimes committed by Bos-
niaks against Bosnian Serbs —
including an attack on the Chris-
tian Orthodox Christmas Day in- They named Bosniak lead-
ers who should have been sen-
tenced in The Hague but weren’t.
They mentioned that their own
family members, too, had been
killed in the war.
But what stood out was their
sense that politicians were using
the issue for personal gain. Peo-
ple described environmental is-
sues, corruption, their low sala-
ries — the problems their leaders
weren’t paying attention to. They
suspected the preoccupation
with genocide wasn’t in their
best interest.
Down the road from Srebreni-
ca, a Bosnian Serb coal miner
answered the door in the late
afternoon, a bit groggy. He’d
been a child during the war. Now,
at 32, he was preparing for an
While some opponents see a
cynical ploy to win votes, others
say he has developed a convic-
tion that Bosnian Serbs have
been wrongly painted as a geno-
cidal people and need to be
defended. One government offi-
cial, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to describe an unoffi-
cial opinion, said Dodik has
borrowed some of the tactics of
President Donald Trump by rel-
ishing provocations, making un-
substantiated claims and relying
on an unquestioning Bosnian
Serb media — including a TV
station owned by his son.
The Biden administration in
January sanctioned both Dodik
and the TV station, citing graft,
bribery, as well as Dodik’s “eth-
no-nationalistic rhetoric.”
Dodik’s office did not respond
to interview requests. But one of
his close political allies, Nedeljko
Cubrilovic, speaker of the Na-
tional Assembly of Republika
Srpska, said in an interview that
Bosnian Serbs had felt attacked
by Inzko’s law. Cubrilovic com-
pared Inzko to Hitler, and noted
that the diplomat had left Bosnia
— his term having finished —
only days after signing the law.
Still, experts and some politi-
cians say the law is working —
kind of. In an interview, Sefik
Dzaferovic, the top Bosniak lead-
er, said the climate in Bosnia
would have been “completely
different” and less toxic had a
similar law been introduced in
the late-1990s. Edin Ikanovic,
who tracks hate speech at the
memorial center, said he has
seen a dip in genocide denial
from Bosnian Serb accounts in
recent months. (Cubrilovic de-
clined to speak about the subject
of genocide, saying, “I don’t give
comments on things that don’t
need comments.”)
But the law hasn’t stopped
accounts from projecting the
same misinformation from
neighboring Serbia — where
some of the misinformation mi-
grated. And the law didn’t stop
Dodik, at a recent nationalist
celebration, from standing next
to a released war criminal, Vinko
Pandurevic, in a symbolic show
of support.
Inzko’s successor as U.N. en-
voy, German politician Christian
Schmidt, was coy about whether
he would have written a similar
law. Russia has called for the
envoy position to be scrapped
altogether, arguing that Bosnia
should no longer be under a form
of international oversight.
Schmidt has faced calls to revoke
his predecessor’s law — includ-
ing from Dodik himself.
Schmidt, though, said Euro-
pean countries, including his
native Germany, have laws crimi-
nalizing the denial of interna-
tionally recognized crimes. He
said that Bosnia is now no differ-
ent — and the rule applies to
everybody in the country, not
just Bosnian Serbs.
“I won’t revoke it,” he said.Raisa Busatlic contributed to this
report.At the lab, forensic anthropol-
ogist Dragana Vucetic said her
work made the crimes feel like
they had just happened. She
spread out the partial skeleton of
the latest victim identified
through DNA work — a 34-year-
old whose skull and torso had
been found in different mass
graves. A separate brown bag sat
below the exam table.
“Those are the clothes he was
wearing,” Vucetic said.
She unwrapped the bag, and
spread its contents across a silver
table. Khaki pants, caked in mud.
A thick, tattered shirt.
“Here’s a left shoe,” Vucetic
said, reaching once more into the
bag.
Sunlight was coming through
the blinds, and the air was thick
with dust from the clothing. The
next step, Vucetic said, would be
for the family to come to the lab,
confirm the identification, and
consent to the burial — in which
case there’d be one more grave-
stone in Srebrenica. She took an
inventory of the bones, the cloth-
ing, and then she packed every-
thing away.
“Evidence,” she called it.Fighting over memory
Bosnia’s tensions come to a
fore, above all, in the area around
Srebrenica, where some have
dedicated their lives to preserv-
ing the memory of genocide and
others would prefer to forget it.
In the majority-Serb area, war
memorials commemorate the
deaths of Bosnian Serbs — but
the execution sites of Bosniaks
remain unmarked. The genocide
memorial center, across the road
from the cemetery, is run by the
national government and staffed
mostly by Bosniaks. It keeps an
open board position for a Bos-
nian Serb; it has never been
filled.
Most people in the country, on
both sides, had assumed the
situation would be better by now.
The immediate aftermath of the
conflict was a time when all sides
became defensive, but within a
decade there were signs of a
thaw. In 2004, Republika Srpska
released a landmark report ac-
knowledging the Srebrenica
atrocities. Its then-president
gave a televised address describ-
ing a “black page” in history.
Many survivors of the genocide
figured a reconciliation would
begin.
But instead, Republika Srpska
three years ago annulled the
report, drawing up a replace-
ment document — heavily criti-
cized by independent experts —
that downplayed the crimes.
Close to Srebrenica, posters of
Mladic have gone up, and re-
searchers at the memorial center
say a local, Russia-funded Bos-
nian Serb nationalist group is
behind the provocations.
“We’re back to zero,” said
Hasan Hasanovic, 47, who works
at the center.
For Hasanovic, what makes
the country so perilous is that he
doesn’t know what his neighbors
might think. And sometimes heThat move has spurred a back-
lash — and fears of a violent
dissolution.
Bosnia is divided along ethnic
and religious lines: the Orthodox
Bosnian Serbs, the Catholic Cro-
ats and Muslims who are known
as Bosniaks. Serbs are the major-
ity in one of the country’s territo-
ries, called Republika Srpska.
Bosniaks and Croats primarily
live in the other section, the
Federation of Bosnia and Herze-
govina.
In all parts of the country,
unemployment is high. So is
corruption. And Bosnia’s power-
sharing system perpetuates the
tensions of the war: Each ethnic
group is guaranteed a quota of
positions, giving politicians little
incentive to be conciliatory.
Within days of the genocide
denial law, Dodik, the leader of
Republika Srpska, halted his fief-
dom’s participation in state insti-
tutions. He warned that his terri-
tory would set up its own tax
system, its own judiciary, even its
own army — essentially resur-
recting the forces that carried
out the attack in Srebrenica. In
November, a successor U.N. en-
voy assessed that Bosnia was
facing “the greatest existential
threat of the postwar period.”
Dodik, who was placed under
fresh U.S. sanctions last month,
has yet to follow through on the
army threat. But last week law-
makers in his territory voted in
favor of establishing a separate
judiciary, in defiance of the peace
agreement. The potential for
new violence remains real. Rus-
sia has voiced its support for
Dodik’s moves.
In an interview, Valentin Inz-
ko, the U.N. envoy who drafted
the genocide law, said he acted
after seeing an “explosion of
denialism” that the country’s
leaders had seemed incapable of
stopping. Inzko said he knew
there’d be political blowback and
described how he’d felt the need
to test his convictions before
coming to a final decision. So one
day before signing the law, he left
Sarajevo before sunrise and
drove into the countryside. Two
hours later, he was alone amid
the gravestones of Srebrenica.
“You could feel the presence of
those men and boys, my God,”
Inzko said.
He returned to Sarajevo by
noon, his decision “firm.”
Dodik called the law the “final
nail in the coffin of Bosnia.”
Still identifying bodies
Because it happened relatively
recently, and because interna-
tional investigators swooped in
soon after, Srebrenica is one of
the most thoroughly document-
ed genocides in the world.
What investigators found was
a crime scene that stretched for
some 40 miles across eastern
Bosnia, with its epicenter in
Srebrenica, a mining town that
had become a gathering point for
some 40,000 Bosnian Muslim
refugees during the war. The
United Nations had claimed the
area was a safe zone, installing
peacekeepers to keep the Bos-
nian Serb army at bay. But the
army, commanded by “Butcher
of Bosnia” Ratko Mladic, showed
up anyway and took control with
ease. Serb officers separated the
women from the men and boys.
“Just don’t panic,” Mladic told
the crowd. In fact, the men and
boys were being taken to execu-
tion sites. People who tried to
escape were gunned down by
tanks and machine guns.
The bodies were initially bur-
ied in mass graves. But weeks
later, as it became clear the war
might end, they were exhumed
and dumped in sites even more
remote. The forensic analysts
who arrived in the wake of the
peace deal tended to find body
parts rather than intact corpses,
with remains of single individu-
als scattered across multiple
sites. Sometimes bones had been
fractured by excavators and bull-
dozers. Some of the gravesites
were hidden away on the farm-
land of Bosnian Serbs. To this
day, remains are occasionally
found in the forest.
“These are not well-traveled
roads,” said Matthew Holliday,
the head of the International
Commission on Missing Persons’
Western Balkan program, point-
ing to a map of gravesites — 95
and counting. “This was an effort
to conceal.”
Given how human remains
were jumbled in those graves,
the process of identifying the
victims has stretched on, too.
Some 7,000 people have been
buried in Srebrenica’s cemetery
— their identities confirmed —
but experts say the remains of
another 1,000 victims have yet to
be identified. Some of those
remains are missing; others are
housed in a prefabricated lab two
hours north, where bags of bones
and belongings are stacked floor
to ceiling.
BOSNIA FROM A
Genocide’s survivors live next to those who deny it h appened
PHOTOS BY CHICO HARLAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Some 7,000 people have been buried at the m emorial cemetery in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Experts say the remains of another 1,000 victims have yet to be identified.Hasan Hasanovic fled the genocide and now works in the memorial center. For Hasanovic, what makes
the country so perilous is that he doesn’t know what his neighbors might think.“You could feel thepresence of those menand boys, my God.”
Valentin Inzko,
the U.N. e nvoy who drafted the
genocide law, about standing among
the gravestones of Srebrenica