It takes an
acute disconnect from reality to compare genocide with the cancellation of an
award. To assert such a grotesque and wholly unconscionable equivalence would
suggest a delusional mindset, one that perversely places a perceived slight to
one’s outsized, but evidently hyper-fragile, ego in the same category and on the
same level as mass murder.
Such a
scenario seems unlikely, even far-fetched. And yet this is precisely the bizarre
case study presented by Gideon Greif, the Israeli academic who, once upon a
time, did significant research into a particular aspect of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Nazi death camp.
After the
German government let it be known that it was reconsidering a decision to honor
him with its highest civil award, Greif told Haaretz that, "I think that
Holocaust remembrance is under attack -- not just me personally -- so I can’t
imagine that the German government will even consider not giving me the medal,
which I deserve, because this will be interpreted as a denial of the Holocaust."
Greif’s
aggrieved utterance was not a one-off. When the German Foreign Ministry finally
pulled the plug on awarding him the Order of Merit, he doubled down with an even
more over the top analogy that bordered on the profane. "It’s a black stain on
Germany,"
he expostulated. "They are murdering the Holocaust victims for a second
time."
Say what?
Greif went on
to blame "Islamic Brotherhood [sic] organizations" for conducting an antisemitic
smear campaign against him, resulting in the cancellation.
It apparently
never occurred to him that the real reason why no one in their right mind --
outside ultranationalist Bosnian Serb and Serb circles -- wants to be publicly
associated with him, let alone bestow a medal of any kind on him, is that he has
voluntarily and eagerly come to epitomize the denial of the genocide that took
place in and around the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.
A brief review
of the relevant underlying facts may be in order.
It is July 11,
1995. In less than two weeks, paramilitary troops of the Bosnian Serb
proto-state known as Republika Srpska will murder between 7,000 and 8,000
Bosniak men and boys, some as young as 12, who had sought shelter in the
Srebrenica enclave, which the United Nations Security Council had
designated as "a
safe area
which should be free from any armed attack or other hostile act."
From that same
"safe area," Bosnian Serb forces also forcibly and viciously expelled around
25,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men.
In
a
succession of judgments, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia determined that
this massacre
constituted genocide pursuant to the U.N. Genocide Convention. In 2007, the
International Court of Justice held that "the acts committed at Srebrenica ...
were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the
Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such; and accordingly that
these were acts of genocide."
Categorically
rejecting these findings, far-right Bosnian Serb ethnonationalists such as
Milorad Dodik,
the Bosnian Serb member of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina
and a former president and prime minister of Republika Srpska, have spent the
past 26-and-a-half years
repudiating any
suggestion
that what took place at Srebrenica constituted a genocide. They were joined in
this unholy campaign of historical falsification by acolytes in Serbia and
elsewhere, including the 2019 Austrian Nobel Literature Prize laureate
Peter Handke.
Enter Gideon
Greif.
In 2019, the
Republika Srpska authorities
tapped him
to head a purportedly "independent" commission of inquiry tasked with
investigating "the sufferings of all peoples in the Srebrenica region between
1992 and 1995."
Greif’s
selection as chairman of this commission, while cynical in the extreme, did not
come as a surprise. To the dismay of responsible historians, Greif has
repeatedly overstated the number of Serb victims at the World War II Croatian
death camp complex of Jasenovac , often referred to as the "Auschwitz of the
Balkans," where,
according
to
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 77,000 and 99,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma,
and others were murdered.
In 2019 alone,
Greif astonishingly multiplied that estimate ten-fold, setting the number of
that camp’s victims at "at least 800,000",
and
"at least 700,000."
That same year, he was
appointed
a full professor at the University of Belgrade.
Greif’s
background as an Israeli, Jewish Holocaust historian was presumably intended to
provide cover for his commission’s anticipated -- if not guaranteed from the
outset -- exoneration of Bosnian Serbs of the charge of genocide.
He fulfilled
this expectation on steroids. In July 2021, under the guise of
pseudo-scholarship and without any discernible pretense of objectivity, Greif
and his commission issued a more than 1,000-page
report
that single-mindedly denies that a genocide was perpetrated at Srebrenica.
The Greif
Report is
a cringe-inducing abomination
that not only blatantly ignores the various exhaustive, persuasive, and
consistent ICTY trial and appellate judgments, but brazenly engages in the
age-old rationalization of blaming the victims for the racial, ethnic, or
religiously motivated decimation committed against them.
After
submitting the report to Republika Srpska’s president and prime minister, Greif
left no doubt as to why he had been given his starring role on the commission in
the first place. "I am Jewish,"
he explained in an interview on Republika Srpska television, discussing
Srebrenica. "I know what genocide means ... Nobody can tell me what genocide is,
and this event was no genocide. And we proved it."
During that
television appearance, Greif also proclaimed that the number of those murdered
at Srebrenica "does not exceed 3,714 victims." This figure (which he is now
trying somewhat desperately to walk back) just happens to track -- by sheer
coincidence, I suppose -- the equally false and equally
unsubstantiated
narrative put forward by Dodik
for more than a decade: That only 3,500 Bosniaks were killed at Srebrenica.
Small wonder,
then, that there was an outcry of protest this past November when it became
known that Greif was about to be feted with an award. "That should never have
happened,"
said Michael Brand, a member of the German Bundestag. "After all, Gideon Greif
doesn’t spread his lies about the genocide in Bosnia in secret, quite the
opposite, and that’s part of the strategy of denial and relativization."
Someone had
clearly failed to do the necessary due diligence and had not taken the time to
look into Greif’s activities beyond his Auschwitz-related work from two decades
ago. A simple Google search could have saved the German Foreign Ministry
considerable public embarrassment.
And that’s
when the woeful Greif seriously jumped the shark, as it were, by wrapping
himself in a pathetic self-pitying mantle of martyrdom. While he studiously
denies the Srebrenica genocide, he considers not getting a medal as tantamount
to genocide. Go figure.
You know that
something has gone seriously awry when an erstwhile "useful idiot" not only
ceases to be useful but, on the contrary, has turned into increasingly
malodorous political ballast. I rather suspect that by now, Milorad Dodik and
his Republika Srpska colleagues in Banja Luka must be experiencing a severe case
of buyer’s remorse. If I were in their shoes, I’d ask for my money back.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Associate Executive Vice President and General
Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and teaches about the law of genocide
at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities. He is the author of
"Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen" (Kelsay Books, 2021).
Originally published
here