Holocaust Scholars, Historical Reliability, and the Holocaust Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the most prominent repository and exhibitor of Holocaust scholarship in the United States and perhaps in the Western world. It is well funded, partly with U.S. taxpayer money, and has a considerable research and publications program. The Museum opened to critical acclaim. After almost three years and about five and a half million visits, no substantive criticism of the Museum's representations of history has appeared in respectable academic journals or the mainstream press.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum makes strong claims of factual accuracy. The former Museum director, Jeshajahu Weinberg, writes of "an almost fanatic commitment to historical truth" and boasts of "a very high degree of credibility." Apparently discounting the possibility of errors and perhaps thinking of Holocaust deniers, Weinberg states, "any mistakes would . . . [open the Museum] to critical attacks against its historical reliability." This claim of full truthfulness presumably extends to The World Must Know, a companion text and mirror of the Museum galleries. The World Must Know is subtitled The History of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was written by the Museum research director, and is prominently displayed in the Museum bookshop.
The factual accuracy of the Museum, the credibilty of its historical representations, is easier to examine through the text of The World Must Know than through the narrative presented in the less accessible Museum galleries. Below are listed ten errors, eight from the book and two from a text panel within the Museum. More errors and misleading statements could be cited, but I think the ten sufficiently illuminate the issues. While each of the first seven errors below might be considered of little significance, the number of errors in dates of important events - dates that are not in question and that are readily available - casts doubt on the Museum's historical reliability.
I recognize that considerable scholarly capital and Jewish cultural capital is invested in the Museum's credibility. My hope is that a detailed critical examination of the Museum's representation will lead to quiet change and unimpeachable historical reliability.
Herewith some errors of military history in The World Must Know:
"The German army invaded France on May 17, l940" (p. 68); German forces invaded France on May 12, not May 17; "On June l3, Paris fell to the Germans" (p. 6l). The Germans entered Paris on June 14; "German troops swept to within thirty-seven miles of Moscow by the end of September [l941]" (p. 94). There was no movement of German troops within 200 miles of Moscow in September. The German offensive against Moscow began in early October. The Germans reached the 37- mile mark only in mid November; "By late July [l942], Stalingrad was under siege . . ." (p. 94). Stalingrad was not under siege until late August; "By late July. . . major advances were made in the Crimea" (p. 94). The last Soviet forces in the Crimea surrendered on July 4, l942. The bulk of the Crimea peninsula had been under German rule since l94l.
Moving away from military matters to the origins of the Holocaust, The World Must Know states (p. 63):
"In September l939, Hitler signed an order empowering his personal physician . . . to put to death those considered unsuited to live." The order was signed by Hitler in October, not September.
In its chronicle of Dutch Jewry l940-l945, the text reports (p. 70): "In October l942, deportations to the east began." In fact, the first trainload of Dutch Jews left for Auschwitz on July 15, l942. Himmler watched the unloading of 2000 from the train July l8. By October, about fifteen percent of Dutch Jewry had been deported.
I have written elsewhere of misstatements and obfuscation in Museum material about the numbers of Polish Gentile deaths at Nazi hands. The Museum seldom misses a chance to malign the Poles. The World Must Know states (p. 61): "The Polish army was destroyed within days of the Nazi invasion." In truth, the Polish armed forces fought the Germans in significant numbers for close to a month.
Similar misstatements about Poles are present in the Museum galleries. The text panel entitled "The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" reads: "The Polish Underground was unprepared to aid the Ghetto combatants, who fought the Germans alone." While arguments continue about what more the Polish underground should have done, there is no question that aid was provided: about 90 pistols, 500 grenades, explosives, and, for a few, aid in escaping the Ghetto through the sewers. Another false statement from the same text panel: "The 700 to 750 ghetto fighters had a few dozen pistols and hand grenades." The total of hand grenades was at least 2000 and most fighters had a pistol.
Generally passed over in accounts of the Holocaust are the executions by the Jewish Fighting Organization of Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto. At least a dozen Jews were executed, judged guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. Alfred Nossig, one of the executed, deserves notice in Holocaust studies as a negative role model. He is perhaps unique in having had a cameo role in the first genocide of this century, the Armenian genocide, and of playing a part in the Holocaust.
Nossig was appointed to the Judenrat in late l939 on the order of the S.S. and he reported to and advised the Gestapo. A talented and in some ways distinguished figure, he wrote the first Zionist pamphlet in Polish (1887). He helped found the pioneering Jewish Bureau of Statistics in Berlin (circa 1904). And in l9l5 he was in Istanbul, perhaps acting for the the Germans and probably attempting to interest the Ottomans in Jewish immigration. Nossig had two interviews with Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman empire and principal contemporary publicizer of the Armenian genocide. In his second interview, Nossig drew his chair close to Morgenthau's and in a "friendly and confidential manner" said: "I want to speak to you as one Jew to another . . . You are very active in the interest of the Armenians and I do not think you realize how unpopular you are becoming . . . You are just spoiling your opportunity for usefulness and running the risk your career will end ignominiously."
I suspect some internalized version of Nossig's advice not to risk unpopularity and to watch out for one's career has discouraged Holocaust scholars from looking closely at the content of the prestigious Holocaust Memorial Museum. The complete absence of mainstream criticism of the Museum's inaccurate history, or even a mildly critical book review of The World Must Know demands some explanation. The misdating of such key events as the invasion of France, the German attempt to capture Moscow, the beginning of the siege of Stalingrad, and Hitler's signing of the order for the euthanasia program should at the very least have promoted comment, comment intended to produce correction. The absence of any criticism, of any pointing to factual errors, of any holding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to its declared dedication to factual accuracy reflects poorly on the commitment of Holocaust scholars and academics to public education and to the long run credibility of Holocaust scholarship.
The maligning of the Poles and minimizing of their suffering by the Museum is of more significance than the Museum's general problem of getting the facts straight. The failure of anyone in the community of Jewish Holocaust scholars to comment publicly on this maligning and minimizing of suffering deprives members of that community, and to some extent all Jews, of the moral high ground in response to any Gentile maligning of Jews. A community does have some responsibility for the actions and non-actions of its members.
Jonathan Petrie
Classifying Bosnian Ethnic Cleansing: Genocide or Genocidal?
Now that the war in Bosnia has been at least temporarily pacified by a much too belated massive international intervention, it is time to begin taking stock of what actually transpired under the rubric "ethnic cleansing." For over a year, a UN-sponsored tribunal has been gathering evidence with which to indict, prosecute, convict, and sentence suspected war criminals. Since the virtual occupation of Bosnia by NATO forces, the international court in The Hague is finding the opportunity — despite several road blocks — to inspect in situ the epicenters of major incidents of murderous ethnic cleansing: namely, the mass graves of victims, before they are totally compromised by those seeking to destroy the evidence pointing to their own participation in these crime of mass murder.
Since mass murder of any group points toward genocide, it is of vital importance to classify the precise nature of the crime(s) the court seeks to try. What kind of crime were these acts of ethnic cleansing exactly? In general, what was categorized as ethnic cleansing came in two overlapping forms, both of them violent and both associated with genocide however defined.
The first category of ethnic cleansing consisted of the forceful expulsion of all members of an ethnic group (whether Croats, Serbs or Muslims) from a particular territory controlled or captured by an opposing ethnic group. This act could range from a handful of victims in a hamlet to tens of thousands in an entire city or region. On numerous occasions, these forced expulsions were accompanied by physical violence — both by the destruction of property and by random killings of those few who protested or attempted to resist. The purpose of this small-scale murderous activity was to create a climate of sufficient terror to hasten departure and to discourage those refusing to leave. Thus, for example, practically all those Serbs too old to leave the Krajina district of Croatia were systematically killed by Croats as they took over control. The primary emphasis of this form of ethnic cleansing was on mass expulsion; killing served only as an instrument of expulsion. In other words, the intent was to depopulate a region of a targeted ethnic component of the population and to drive them across a border into a territory not claimed by the ethnic aggressor.
In strictly legal terms, according to the 1949 UN Genocide Convention, this is a recognized from of crime that falls within the parameters of genocide. Mass deportation of an ethnic group, even if it stops short of killing, is legally considered a genocide-related crime because it places in jeopardy the existence of the sub-group's future. It is technically a sub-group because not all were deported, only all those in a specified location whose control was contested by rival ethnic groups. What further modifies the charge of genocide is that in most cases the refugees found themselves expelled to areas controlled by their own ethnos. Thus, the existential danger was more than lessened: this kind of ethnic cleansing (as expulsion/deportation) resembles more that of the Armenians escaping Azerbaijan for Armenia than Stalin's' 1944 deportations en masse of Chechens, Meskhetians and Crimean Tatars into alien territory in Central Asia, when so many died in transit and just as many from the rigors of daily life. Whereas the former is genocidal — potentially existential in nature — the latter is outright genocide on two levels: first, the victimization was so large that the surviving group qua group would have difficulty sustaining its viability demographically; secondly, because of their small numbers, the survivors, in a culturally alien region would disappear via rapid assimilation. In the case of the expelled ethnic groups in Bosnia that is not the case since they found themselves refugees among ethno-similar populations.
The second category of ethnic cleansing that took place in the war in Bosnia was characterized by mass killings, on several occasions numbering in the thousands. In these instances, the victimized ethnic groups, under the pretext of expulsion, were seized and then systematically murdered, in most cases all the able-bodied men who might be drafted to fight against the occupying ethnic forces: that is, what took place recently in Srebrenica. In a few incidents women and children were also killed, but usually they were neither gang raped nor killed, but driven in the direction of a given border. Here, in contrast to the first category, expulsion was used as a ruse to expedite mass killing.
In this case, the charge of genocide is on target. Once all men, women and/or children were killed there is no other interpretation. The killing of the men only is also genocidal in scope. Though the intention may have been military — that is to prevent their fighting — the consequence of killing all husbands and future husbands is to make it impossible to bring into being the next generation, thereby, virtually guaranteeing the group's physical extinction. Because the charge of genocide is valid (regardless of intentions), but can rest on results, then it is appropriate to label this second category of ethnic cleansing as a bona fide genocidal act.
Whether the court in The Hague will further refine the crimes of ethnic cleansing has yet to be determined. No doubt, with each case, as suspects are indicted, extradited, and put on trial, the specific evidence presented in each case will lead to modifications and nuances not enumerated here. Nevertheless, it is safe to conclude that the skeletal outlines sketched out above will retain their validity both for lawyers and future historians. The need for specificity in the case of ethnic cleansing is imperative, especially as it is popularized indiscriminately by the media and applied to different events around the globe, reminiscent of the liberal misuse of holocaust. As long as ethnic cleansing remains associated with some aspects of genocide then one is obligated to spell out carefully and accurately what precisely was genocidal in order to avoid the pitfalls of making blanket accusations by insinuation. In the absence of this, the term "ethnic cleansing" will lose its currency.
One final observation about the genocidal dimensions of ethnic cleansing as practiced in the ex-Yugoslavia. At the heart of the war of Yugoslavian disintegration is the dispute over territory. With the breakup of the Federation, each constituent segment's dominant ethnicity has sought to gain control over regions inhabited by its ethno-kin, whether inside or outside its republic borders. The central battlegrounds for this struggle have, so far, been Croatia and Bosnia. Inflamed by ethno-nationalism, the rush for territory fueled the ferocity of the violence exercised by one group against the other. In short order, the fierce war over territory spawned the policy of imposing mono-ethnicity on captured regions: hence the policy of ethnic cleansing as an extension of territorialism, otherwise known as irredentism.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Mass Rape and Gendercide: Gender Victimization as aspects of Genocide in Bosnia
The 1992-6 war over Bosnian territory has repeatedly been associated with genocide. In an article in this issue, the case is made that the mass killings according to ethnicity by all three ethnic rivals inside Bosnia and along its periphery in Croatia (in Krajina and Slavonja) were essentially territorial in scope. Croats did not seek to kill or expel all Serbs, other than those residing inside Croatia and what was considered Croatian Bosnia; neither did Serbs plan on killing all (Slavic) Muslims, except for those who occupied territory in Bosnia coveted by Serbia. Nevertheless, within those geographic parameters, systematic mass killings of ethnic populations did take place, territorial conquest being the prime, though not the exclusive, motivation.
Nevertheless, calling the expulsions and killings genocidal behavior during the crack-up of Yugoslavia (conveniently referred to as ethnic cleansing) is not precise enough. The policy of territorial ethnic cleansing was carried out via three distinct means that need to be explicitly identified and examined.
The first, mass expulsion or deportation from a region, has already been classified as a genocidal act. The 1949 UN Genocide convention spelled out this crime as a form of pre-genocide and, therefore, tantamount to genocide per se for the threat it can pose to group survival. In most instances this is certainly true, even though under exceptional circumstances, groups forcibly expelled en masse have miraculously managed to survive: e.g. the Chechens and Crimean Tatars in Central Asia prior to their return to their respective ancestral homeland, as well as several North American Indian tribes after lengthy treks to so-called tribal reservations. But these cases should be looked upon as exceptions rather than as precedents "proving" that deportation need not necessarily be as lethal as claimed.
The second and third instrumentalities of genocide practiced in Bosnia, largely by the Serbs (till further evidence is found about Croats and Muslims), fall under the rubric of "Gender Victimization." The term is coined to underscore the targeting of victims, in this context chosen initially for their ethnicity, and then according to their gender. This category of genocidal behavior is found at the confluence of ethnicity and gender. The two examples in question are "Mass Rape" and "Gendercide," the former aimed explicitly at women, the latter at men.
The nature and scope of the mass rapes by Serbs of Bosnian Muslim women in 1993 at the outset of the war over Bosnia has already been briefly examined in an earlier essay (The Genocide Forum I/3, November 1994), "Mass Rape and Ethnic Cleansing: Women and Ethno-genocide." The biological purpose of this act, as a form of interrupting the ethno-continuity of the victim group, was noted as an illustration of genocidal thought and deed beyond the purely criminal and gender-specific. What was not stressed was the profoundly disruptive psychological and social impacts mass rapes were designed to inflict on the rest of the victimized ethnic community: shattered marriages, illegitimate children of mixed ethnic origins, permanent shame and guilt, personal trauma, etc. The primary victims, of course, are women, hence the term "Gender Victimization" within the context of ethnocide.
The second variation of Gender Victimization found in the Bosnian setting is "Gendercide." In this case, the targeted victims are exclusively men. Again and again, Serbs rounded up all the Muslim men of a captured town and subjected them to lethal experiences from torture, exposure and deprivation, and mass execution. The latest example of thousands of men (including boys and older males) wantonly killed was in connection with the fall to the Serbs of the so-called "safe" city of Srebrenica. (See The Genocide Forum II,9) The egregious pretext that the men were soldiers killed in battle has long been punctured and discredited. They were killed not only as a preventive measure to stop their becoming soldiers, but also to prevent their siring the next generation of Bosnian Muslims. Even if that were not the motive (though it can logically be deduced in tandem with the known motivations and the effects of the mass rapes) then the dire ethno-demographic consequences are enough to brand these mass murders as genocidal in scope, especially if seen in the light of endangered future group survival when insufficient children are born to carry on the collective life of the victimized ethnos
Gender Victimization in the forms described above is a refinement of the techniques practiced during the Final Solution. In those years, prior to the campaign of total annihilations practiced in the Extermination Camps, children and the very old were the first selected for death, and able-bodied men and women were strictly segregated so no progeny would be forthcoming. This too was a variation of a policy of selective gender victimization inflicted on incarcerated European Jews. But in Bosnia, the practice has reached a new level of refinement, making identification by accurate classification all the more urgent.
Henry R. Huttenbach
A Requiem for Srebrenica As Europe Watched
There is a powerful ballet, The Green Table, which focuses on the death-makers, the diplomats. While comfortably esconced in their leather chairs, seated according to protocol around a conference table, the negotiators decide the lives and deaths of millions. With a stroke of a pen, fates of entire populations are set in motion. Who shall live? Who shall die? These are questions raised and resolved simultaneously by the architects of the future, by the wielders of power over the powerless. This is how genocide is planned and put into operation — by committee, and this is what the Wansee Conference, which met in January 1942, was all about. And that is how the massacre of the men of Srebrenica took place.
Srebrenica, a Muslim-inhabited city, was one of a cluster of east Bosnian urban centers, in Serbian-held territory, designated as "safe areas" and placed under UN Peace-Keeping Forces. Isolated from the rest of Muslim controlled Bosnia, these oases of Muslims populations, swelled by refugees from surrounding villages, were totally dependent on the UN for food, medical supplies, and military protection. In fact, the UN troops had neither the manpower, firepower, nor political mandate to carry out their humanitarian tasks. The Muslims of these urban enclaves actually found themselves in a trap, a Green Table trap.
On July 6, 1995, Serbian artillery began to bombard the "safe areas," in particular Srebrenica, including locations where 450 Dutch UN peace-keepers were stationed. At the same time supply convoys into the city were blocked, leading to a unilateral decision by the UN contingent to withdraw from the city. Translated: to abandon the Muslim population to the lethal ethnic cleansing policies of the Bosnian Serbs. The next day, fleeing Dutch soldiers suffered one dead and met up with Serb soldiers preparing to enter the city. Not a single NATO air strike was called to discourage the Serbs from their goal to rid the city of its Muslim population. The siege of Srebrenica had begun while the world, the UN, the European Union and NATO, watched unmoved and unmoving.
Each day, hundreds of mortar shells rained onto the hapless people of Srebrenica. Clearly a decision, somewhere, had been taken to sacrifice its inhabitants to the known ethnic furies of the Serbs. No one could claim ignorance. All had sat at the Green Table; all of them knew what fate awaited the 42,000 Muslim men, women and children. After all, it had all happened once before, early in the war, to others — mass graves, mass rapes, mass post-facto international expressions of pious horror, and empty promises.
For a week, NATO and the UN acted only to assure the safety of the beleaguered Dutch soldiers still trapped in the city. The civilians no longer warranted their concern. The battle had become one for the peace-keepers and not for those being denied peace, a classic perversion only possible in a bureaucratized and impersonal setting, when officials gather ponderously around Green Tables. While debates raged over the plight of the UN soldiers, their pathetic reports on the dreadful conditions suffered by tens of thousands of civilians and refugees went unheeded, though widely disseminated by the world's press. By July 11, the city had fallen to the Serbs and ethnic cleansing began in earnest in front of the eyes of the remaining Dutch soldiers.
That day, over 20,000 desperate civilians from Srebrenica — hungry, homeless and unarmed — sought some kind of protection from the shrinking group of soldiers, now ordered not to interfere with the Serbs. Over 1,500 well-armed Serbs backed by tanks and artillery took control of the city and its Muslim population, unafraid of NATO retaliatory strikes. NATO aircraft hovered overhead but only to observe or to offer token resistance, such as an occasional low fly-over. Other than several threats to bomb or to set up road-blocks, the UN military force demonstrated its basic impotence and never called the Serbian bluff. Srebrenica became a prison for its Muslim citizens, all condemned to a merciless policy of ethnic expulsion and worse.
The worse soon followed. On July 12, the Serbs systematically separated all able-bodied Muslim men from the women and children. The latter were forced to leave and told to find haven in Tuzla, but without their men folk and property, far too many to be taken care of by humanitarian efforts then available. As for the men: they literally disappeared. Thousands upon thousands were packed into trucks and shipped into the nearby forests. Witnesses spoke of knifings and shootings. Within 48 hours, Srebrenica was Muslimrein (free of Muslims), a silent city except for its Serbian captors. In two days, over 40,000 Muslims had been expelled: the women and children barely alive as refugees; the men, one feared immediately, all dead, murdered in the woods during those balmy mid-July nights. The world's leaders condemned the Serbs for their "ruthless efficiency." Their policy of ethnic depopulation had, clearly, been well-rehearsed and well executed, thanks to their own deliberations around their Green Tables.
For the remainder of the month, one waited in vain for the men. They never surfaced. Everyone assumed and then knew in fact they were dead, killed in cold blood, all of them — the mass graves have been located — a clear case of genocidal behavior, in 1995, fifty years after Auschwitz, in full view of the international order, of those seated comfortably around Green Tables. By July 14, Bastille Day, it was all over. In Paris, they rejoiced; in Srebrenica the Serbs celebrated victory. In the forests rotted the bodies of the men, murdered because they were Muslim males, and next to them lay the violated bodies of a few young Muslim women also condemned to individual humiliation and then to mass extermination, victims of the same Green Tables. In all, nearly 20,000 perished, all of them deprived of a decent burial. Hence this requiem.
But for whom? Who or what also died in Srebrenica? Much more than Muslims died. What died this past July in a remote corner of Bosnia was also an idea and an ideal; it was Europe. What happened in Srebrenica was Europeans watching Europeans devour Europeans. The mark of Srebrenica will henceforth be branded on all those who seek to uphold the vision of Europe as a high form of civil community. By allowing and watching the events of July, Europe is permanently and possibly fatally wounded. That is why it, too, deserves a special requiem, a finis to "Europe" and a Kaddish to keep alive forever the memory of Srebrenica.
P.S.: On July 16, the same tragedy was repeated nearby,the same genocidal crime was committed against another Muslim "safe area," the city of Zepa. There were some variations: boys as young as 10 years had their throats slit and left in the streets of villages; others were strung up on trees. Girls of the same age were raped, but left alive, bleeding. The end result, though, was the same.
Meanwhile the gentlemen of the UN and EU continue to sit around their Green Tables "expressing concern" for those they condemned to die.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Bosnia's Killing Fields The Memory war
There is no crime without evidence. A genocide cannot be written about in the absence of factual proof. Without the mass graves as testimony of systematic killing, lacking the proof rendered by skeleton-filled crematoria, and not in possession of thousands of deportation lists, one would have been hard put to establish the historicity of the Holocaust. Destruction of information was, therefore, high on the list of the Nazi genocidists. Death Camps (e.g. Treblinka) were to be reduced to their former pristine, rural conditions; camp records were to be burned; and mass graves were to be opened and their semi-decomposed bodies burned to ashes. According to the National Socialist architects of the Final Solution, there was to be no evidence, no incriminating data with which to record the event destined by the Nazis to become a non-event. Only the speed of the Allied advances and of German military collapse disrupted the timetable of destroying the evidence.
A similar drama is now taking place in Bosnia. As NATO forces settle into their respective zones, fresh mass graves threaten hundreds of criminals with being brought up on verifiable charges. Hence the hectic struggle to control the mass killing sites between those wishing to preserve them and those desirous of destroying them. In each of the three Bosnian NATO zones, there are one or more mass graves, evidence of ethnic cleansing, of genocidal behavior. As peace descends on a murderous region, a new war, the struggle for memory has erupted. A race is on for the killing fields and their macabre contents. It is a struggle reminiscent of the story of the Katyn Forest where Stalin's NKVD soldiers buried nearly 14,000 Polish officers in three secret mass graves after having them systematically shot in 1940. The purpose was to decimate the anti-Russian and anti-Communist Polish national elite, above all the officer corps, to offset a post-war resurgence of Polish nationalism. Uncovered in 1943 by the Nazis during their occupation of Poland in 1941-4 of (then) Eastern Poland (the former Soviet zone), the evidence pointed to the Soviets, though they strenuously denied it until Yeltsin openly admitted Soviet guilt in 1993. However, without the actual graves and their bodies, the event would have rested on useless suspicion and speculation and would finally have evaporated from memory and been absent from the record of the war.
And now for the fresh mass graves in Bosnia: their content is political dynamite. They could implicate all three sides, Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosnians, as guilty of ethnocide. A UN-sponsored international court in The Hague has been collecting evidence to indict anyone associated with the killings. Over 58 men have been indicted so far: all have been identified and some located, but not yet extradicted. Except for one Serb sent for trial to The Hague from Germany, all suspects are in Bosnia, eager to destroy the evidence. This they may do, unless NATO intervenes aggressively. But will it? There have been overflights, but little more to assure the integrity of the grave sites.
So far, NATO officials have remained studiously aloof of the problem. Local commanders hide behind their limited mandate: to separate the warring sides and to bring about a lasting cease-fire as a prelude to peace. Ferreting out accused genocidists and protecting mass graves is not NATO's primary task according to official policy pronouncements. Meanwhile, since the arrival of NATO troops to carry out the Dayton Accord, some Serb graves are being opened up by Bosnian Serbs and their bodies removed. Evidence of genocidal ethnic-cleansing is being willfully destroyed under the eyes of seemingly disinterested NATO troops. NATO will neither reach out to arrest "President" Rodovan Karadzic and "General" Rakto Mladic nor take full control of the sites of known mass graves of victims of ethnocide. Satellite pictures show how some graves are being deliberately tampered with; the destruction of evidence, itself a crime, is, so far, being aided and abetted by a largely passive NATO force, that is, by the governments of the peace-keeping troops, including those of the United States.
President Bill Clinton needs to be asked what US policy is in this matter. Each day more evidence disappears; each day the safe futures of genocidists are being assured as killing fields become regular fields again. Sooner than later, all of Bosnia may look like landscaped Treblinka, tranquil with the silence of emptied graves, thanks to a flawed US-guided NATO policy.
What grand strategy underlies this folly? A reunited Bosnia against the will of all its three ethnic warring parties? What raison d'état explains the policy of "neutrality" in the war against memory in Bosnia? It seems as if the spirit of the Nuremberg Trials is being blatantly ignored. Will the legacy of Bosnia be a UN tribunal unenthusiastically supported by the international community and denied of most suspects and of the evidence against them? What a cynical finale to a dreary century! What lessons can be drawn from this episode in the history of genocide, other than plus ça change, moins ça change? It seems as even those who do know history are destined to repeat it! Is that the only lesson? It is not too late to alter the course; but intellectuals must get involved and protest. Or will we have yet another instance of la trahison des intellectuels?
Henry R. Huttenbach