[Previous entry: "Unnecessary Powers"] [Next entry: "Obama lends star power"]

07/11/2005:

"The Wages of Denial"

TEN years ago this week, Serbian forces slaughtered more than 7,000 Muslim men in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Despite the efforts of a dedicated few in Serbia, and despite the war crimes prosecutions at The Hague, Serbia is no closer today than it was a decade ago to reckoning with its war guilt.

For years Belgrade has denied involvement by its citizens in Srebrenica and other massacres of the 1990s. The recent broadcast of a graphic video that showed Serbian paramilitary police executing six young men from Srebrenica should have made it very hard to sustain that revisionism. Amazing as it seems, however, the video was not enough to shatter what Serbian human rights activist Sonja Biserko has described as the country's "state of collective denial."

Fewer than half of Serbs polled last spring believed the Srebrenica massacre took place. And while much has been made of the video's effects on a shocked Serbian public, it remains to be seen where that public will stand once the furor recedes. The Radical Party, which won 27 percent of the popular vote in the last national elections, making it the largest party in Parliament, has already criticized what it sees as the anti-Serb hysteria that "wishes at all costs to put the burden of all crimes on Serbia." Graffiti has appeared in several cities praising the "liberation" of Srebrenica. Rumors circulate that the video was doctored, or that the men committing the crimes were acting independently.

Instead of coming to terms with its past, Serbia has circumvented the issue with the narrative skills befitting a psychopath.
Full: nytimes.com

Well Serbia isn't the only one. I would say the "colonialism was good" talk floating around these days is psychopathic. Jack Straw calls Serbia "a scar on Europe," Africa " a scar on the conscience of the world." A pity these Blairs and Bushes and Chiracs are so oblivious to the scars they leave, and the new wounds they inflict every day.