Israeli Historian to ‘Correct’ Controversial Bosnia Report after Being
Accused of Genocide Denial
By Sam Sokol
Haaretz
January 19, 2022
Gideon Greif
now agrees that 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces at
Srebrenica in 1995. However, a critic calls the move a ‘desperate attempt at
damage control’
An Israeli
historian accused of genocide denial says he will revise a controversial war
crimes report he co-wrote on behalf of Bosnian Serb nationalists -- an attempt
critics are calling damage control after a months-long controversy over the
report into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
“We will be
publishing a clarification to the report in the coming weeks,” Prof. Gideon
Greif told Haaretz on Tuesday, adding that the new document would answer critics
who
labeled him a revisionist.
In 2019, Greif
was tapped by the government of Republika Srpska, a semiautonomous Serb enclave
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to head a commission compiling a report on the mass
murder of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica
in July 1995.
His findings,
released last summer, were
widely panned by scholars, with most of the criticism directed at his claims
that the massacre did not constitute an act of genocide and his assertion that
“a significant number of remains exhumed from the mass graves belonged to people
who were killed outside the context of mass shootings.”
In a
television interview last year, Greif said that “the number does not exceed
3,714 victims,” a claim he now calls a mistake; the report quoted estimates of
the death toll as low as 3,900.
“We didn’t
diminish even one victim. Not even one victim,” Greif said this week. “It was my
personal mistake so we are going to correct it to publish the truth, and I think
this controversy around the commission will be reduced significantly.”
However, when
asked about the planned changes, Greif appeared to play them down, saying that
“nothing will be changed because there is no mistake concerning the number.
“This is the
number which is mentioned from the beginning onward, there was no different
number: about 8,000. And we do not distort it; we accept it. Of course, we decry
the crimes, naturally. And we will do it even more stronger in our
clarification.”
His latest
comments on the death toll seem at odds with the report, which theorized that
some of the dead were executed soldiers rather than civilians.
“It is
difficult to know with any precision how many people were killed after the fall
of Srebrenica and continuing for several days thereafter,” the report stated.
"Severe reputation damage"
Prof. Jelena
Subotic, a political scientist at Georgia State University who focuses on memory
politics in the western Balkans, questioned Greif’s turnaround.
“I read the
Greif report. The report specifically, in no uncertain terms, claims that the
number of 8,000 victims is incorrect,” she said in an email.
“It is clear
that the current backtracking is the result of severe reputation damage the
authors of the report have suffered. But this does not change the content of the
report and its revisionist nature. The report itself is there for everyone to
see,” she said.
Greif’s
announcement comes only weeks after Germany
rescinded an award for his Holocaust research due to his work on behalf of
Republika Srpska, whose leaders have drawn criticism for trying to
minimize the severity of the Srebrenica massacre .
Bosnian Serb
officials have denied the validity of international tribunal rulings describing
the killings as genocide, while increasing calls for separatism. Some fear that
this could further fracture Bosnia-Herzogovina, a country of around 3.8 million
people, along ethnic lines.
While the
Bosnian Serb president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for
comment on Greif’s planned revision, Markus Goldbach, an attorney for the
historian and a member of the commission that wrote the report, said Greif had
recently visited Banja Luka, the de facto capital of Republika Srpska, to
discuss the matter.
“After
reviewing the criticism and being aware of the articles which were published, we
felt that the criticism [did] us some injustice because we had no bad
intentions; we had no intentions of distortion of history, we had no intention
of making the perpetrators free of guilt,” Greif said.
“We are not
changing anything. We stand behind our report, but we will make things more
clear for the public.”
Menachem
Rosensaft, an instructor in genocide law at Columbia Law School in New York and
the executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, believes Greif’s new
report won’t shift perceptions of the historian.
“His promise
or threat that he and his hapless commission will be issuing a revised report
strikes me as a rather desperate attempt at damage control. On the whole, if I
were Milorad Dodik, I’d ask for my money back,” said Rosensaft, referring to the
nationalist Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency.
“No amount of
prevarication or sophistry on his part can change the fundamental fact that the
parameters of the crime of genocide are set forth in the Genocide Convention and
have been repeatedly and consistently applied to Srebrenica by successive
tribunals,” Rosensaft added.
In a statement
to Haaretz, Bosnian Foreign Minister Bisera Turkovic said that “the genocide in
Srebrenica was determined by verdicts of international courts: the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of
Justice. Any denial, relativization, or misinterpretation of the genocide must
be condemned.”
Bosnia, she
added, will cosponsor Israel’s push for a resolution against Holocaust denial at
the UN General Assembly later this month.