Description
Denial of war crimes and events as a political strategy has many aims and a wide range of tools. Denial can be used to create a new national identity and community. It can also be used to denigrate opponents and harness public support. The institutionalised denial that has developed in the smaller entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Republika Srpska (RS), has passed through several stages. From what Stanley Cohen (2013) calls interpretive denial of the RS authorities that have belittled the committed war crimes, to the current literal denial of atrocities (i.e. that they ever happened), the approach of the leading figures in the entity – especially Milorad Dodik – has been to gradually undermine validity of established and validated facts and forensic evidence. This strategy consists of the creation of ‘truth commissions’ for Srebrenica and Sarajevo, an alternative institution for the investigation of war crimes, new ‘data’ collection efforts, verification and an alternative institute for missing persons, all established or used with the aim to deny facts and crimes. Sanctioned by the RS leadership, these organisations have also obtained high support from RS victim and veteran associations that have been mobilised and organised in order to ‘protect’ the existence of RS and provide evidence that both international and domestic truth- and justice-seeking efforts have been biased, fallacious and fictitious. RS authorities have ‘hijacked’ (Subotic 2009) the terminology of transitional justice – such as fact-finding and truth commissions – to boost credibility of their efforts and seemingly give them a scientific patina. This paper will first document the development of these efforts, analyse the various tools used in the RS institutions of denial (such as presenting corrupt statistics) and open questions about the role of such pervasive institutionalised denial. It will also raise some wider questions about source validation and the role of media.
