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changed the way we perceive mankind

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similar obfuscation can occur here

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https://roape.net/2017/01/09/genocide-memory-negotiating-german-namibian-history/

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Genocide and Memory: Negotiating German-Namibian History - ROAPE

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Heike Becker discusses calls for reparations for the German colonial genocide in Namibia between 1904-1908. These negotiations are complicated and contested. In New York at the beginning of January, representatives of the Ovaherero and Nama people filed a class act legal claim suing Germany for the…

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The German government refused to acknowledge it as a genocide until 2015.

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"Despite this unequivocal fact, denial of the Srebrenica genocide as well as the crimes against humanity committed across Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 to 1995 remains prevalent amongst individuals and institutions at the highest levels, including the Mayor of Srebrenica, the current political leadership of Republika Srpska and Serbia as well as Russia which vetoed a UN resolution in 2015 to condemn the killings at Srebrenica as a genocide."

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https://srebrenica.org.uk/news/remembering-srebrenicas-2022-theme-combatting-denial-challenging-hatred

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Every year, Remembering Srebrenica selects a theme that reflects an aspect of the genocide that needs to be commemorated, but also speaks to communities here in the UK.

The theme for 2022 is 'Combatting Denial: Challenging Hatred'.

Described by the United Nations as the 'worst crime on European soil since the Second World War', the killings at Srebrenica have been classified as genocide by both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia.

Despite this unequivocal fact, denial of the Srebrenica genocide as well as the crimes against humanity committed across Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 to 1995 remains prevalent amongst individuals and institutions at the highest levels, including the Mayor of Srebrenica, the current political leadership of Republika Srpska and Serbia as well as Russia which vetoed a UN resolution in 2015 to condemn the killings at Srebrenica as a genocide.

Photo Credit: Richard Vize

Whilst such denial and historical revisionism began immediately following the war, the institutional and political denial of the genocide has increased in the last decade and alarmingly forms part of the regular discourse throughout parts of the Balkans. In the absence of a robust challenge or having to face consequences for this dangerous denial, it has been allowed to flourish. Indeed great efforts to embed the distortions and denial in a systematic manner have been exerted.

Internationally, genocide deniers have shamefully been rewarded with recognition and accolades such as the presitgious Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Handke in 2019

Denial brings not only more pain and suffering for the survivors but serves as a rallying call to continue the division and hatred as well as to glorify the murderers. Denial also serves as a significant impediment to peace and reconciliation which can never be achieved without acknowledgement.

As a result, the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko before his departure in July 2021 brought in a law to ban denial of genocide and glorification of mass murderers. However, in response the Assembly of Republika Srpska led by the Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik formally voted to adopt a set of resolutions to withdraw from state institutions including raising once again a Bosnian Serb army, the very institution responsible for genocide at Srebrenica.

Denial is the final stage of the ten steps to genocide and is now being used to break up the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, driven by an ideology of uniting the "Serb world" - an idea alarmingly similar to former President Slobodan Milošević's "Greater Serbia" which underpinned the Bosnian Serb campaign of the 1990s that culminated in the planned, systematic and industrialised murder of just under 100,000 Muslims, displacement of two million people and the genocidal rape of up to 50,000 women simply because of their identity.

This year's twin-aimed theme, therefore, seeks to shine a light on the importance of combatting denial and the need to confront the hatred behind the denial.

In the UK, communities are only too aware of the damaging impact that denial can have for individuals and community cohesion.

Victims of serious crime can often be subjected to further trauma when having to confront perpetrators in a court of law who deny that they have committed their crimes. In addition to denial, the perpetrators seek to minimise what they have done or concoct a version of events based on alternative facts that reverses the blame which is placed upon the victim. This exacerbates the suffering of the victims and can deter many from coming forward to report incidents out of fear of having to face the denial which increases the painful experiences that they have had to endure.

Home Office figures reveal a worrying trend across the country in which the number of hate crimes recorded have doubled in the space of five years. Reported hate crimes have increased by 9% since last year to a record 124,091, with nearly three quarters of those incidents being racially motivated crimes. These sobering statistics underline the scale of the problem which our communities face, yet there are still those who continue to deny the seriousness of the issue which needs to be addressed and fail to take the action required, despite these statistics and the lived experiences of those on the receiving end of such hate crime.

Photo Credit: South Wales Police

Consequently, this year's theme will encourage people to recognise the important role that they can play in combating denial to help build safer, stronger communities.

In an age of social media where many more people now receive their information in snippets from unverified sources online, we have seen the proliferation of fake news making it difficult to distinguish between truth and myths. Divisive propaganda and misinformation is thriving, and clear and established facts are denied and manipulated with minority communities often scapegoated and vilified to create mistrust and promote hatred that threatens community cohesion.

For example, at the start of the pandemic in the UK, those on the far-right exploited the outbreak of Covid-19 to peddle racist conspiracies about British Chinese communities which fuelled prejudices that they were to blame for the coronavirus which resulted in hate crime against these communities rocketing. Similar tactics were used by those possessing anti-Muslim sentiments to portray British Muslims as responsible for not adhering to lockdown rules and spreading Covid by posting images of congregations gathering outside mosques on social media with maliciously false claims that these images had been taken during the pandemic to sow the seeds of hatred and division in our communities.

We therefore hope that the theme will help empower individuals and communities to better understand and confront the denial which emboldens perpetrators and gaslights their victims, in order to help create safer, stronger and more cohesive communities.

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Remembering Srebrenica's 2022 Theme: Combatting Denial: Challenging Hatred | Remembering Srebrenica

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Every year, Remembering Srebrenica selects a theme that reflects an aspect of the genocide that needs to be commemorated, but also speaks to communities here in the UK. The theme for 2022 is 'Combatting Denial: Challenging Hatred'. Described by the United Nations as the 'worst crime on European ...

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American military heroism

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The Herero Genocide

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Between 1993 and 1997, 'Hitler' is briefly outshone by 'Bosnia'.

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Reverences to the Holocaust peak at the Turn of the Millennium. The decline of terms like 'Bosnia' and 'Cambodia' is far more dramatic.

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Searches for 'Rwanda', 'Tutsi' and 'Hutu' skyrocket between 1989 and 1997. Following this, there is a significant decline - but no loss of legacy.

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Rwanda

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ubiquitous in the field of psychology

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the acquiescence of bystanders to the Nazi doctrine

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Milgram and Zimbardo's studies on conformity

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https://www.ushmm.org/remember/days-of-remembrance/resources/why-we-remember

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Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
Memory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand that's where our redemption is.

[Text on screen] Between 1933 and 1945, the German government, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, carried out the systematic persecution of and murder of Europe's Jews. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. The Nazi regime also persecuted and killed millions of other people it considered politically, racially, or socially unfit. The Allies' victory ended World War II, but Nazi Germany and its collaborators had left millions dead and countless lives shattered.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
I think the important thing to understand about this cataclysmic event is that it happened in the heart of Europe. Germany was respected around the world for its leading scientists, its physicians, its theologians. It was a very civilized, advanced country. It was a young democracy, but it was a democracy. And yet it descended not only into social collapse but world war and eventually mass murder.

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
A strong man came to power in Germany whose ideas were that Germany has to create a national community, which would include only the Aryan race, which he considered superior, and all the people who did not belong to the Aryan race could be eliminated. With planning and propaganda, he was able to convince most of the German people to go along with him, insensitive to what happened to the Jews who had basically been their former neighbors. And he managed to build concentration camps and killing centers and finally gas chambers to annihilate six million Jews and at the same time also millions of others, murdered in a systematic, government-sponsored way.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And it's made up of so many people who participated in different ways, who made it possible.

Rev. Dr. Chris Leighton, Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies:
People who follow orders without question, bystanders who watch and do nothing, ordinary men and women simply going with the flow.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The events and the results of the Holocaust were so devastating. It was an extreme that we can barely imagine.

Rev. Dr. Chris Leighton, Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies:
It's so mind-boggling that the temptations to forget and to repress, to just put it out of mind, are very real.

Raye Farr, Film Curator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
But we remember. We remember because it is an unthinkable scar on humanity. We need to understand what human beings are capable of.

Barack Obama, President of the United States:
We gather today to mourn the loss of so many lives and celebrate those who saved them, honor those who survived, and contemplate the obligations of the living.

Kadian Pow, Museum Educator, Smithsonian Institution:
Days of Remembrance is our nation's annual commemoration of the Holocaust-this time that was both a blight on the history of humanity but also a shining moment for the people who were brave enough to put an end to it.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
We are remembering, first and foremost, all the victims, and that is not only the Jewish victims, but there were many non-Jewish victims. Of course, the Jews were the primary target.

Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
The millions of innocent people, including my family and friends, who were killed because they were of the wrong religion, because they had no means of protecting themselves.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
It's also important to remember the rescuers. These were people who risked not only their own lives, sometimes the lives of their family, to save a fellow human being. And we also remember our American soldiers who were fighting to win World War II and in the course of that, liberated these concentration camps.

Col. Michael Underkofler, U.S. Air Force Reserve:
Those that arrived at the camps in 1945 and were just horrified at what they saw.

Carly Gjolaj, Museum Educator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
And that was a huge task for the American soldiers: to help bring humanity back to these people who had been dehumanized for years, to give them medical care.

Lt. Col. Terrance Sanders, U.S. Army:
Looking back allows us to understand how important it is for us to serve in a country where we have the strength and the might and the will to defend those that are defenseless.

Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig, Washington Hebrew Congregation:
So Days of Remembrance is an opportunity for us to remember the suffering that was and the efforts that were made to put an end to such suffering, and it's a call to conscience today in our world to make sure that we aren't the silent ones standing by, contributing to the suffering of others.

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
In 1945, at the end of the war, I would have thought that there would never be another Holocaust, that the world was so shocked by what had happened that the world would not permit that. And yet you see what happened in Bosnia, what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Darfur. So there's still millions of people being persecuted because of their ethnicity.

Sara Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
It's really a moral challenge to us to do more in our own lives when we confront injustice or hatred or genocide.

Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Genocide Prevention Educator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
Those who suffered and died in the Holocaust, we can honor them today by not being silent. Remembering ties the past and the present together with a powerful, simple thread: "This is not right."

Margit Meissner, Holocaust Survivor:
The important thing is that one should not become indifferent to the suffering of others, that one should not stand by and just raise one's hands and say, "There's nothing I can do, I'm just a little one person," because I think what everyone of us does matters.

Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor:
That's not enough to curse the darkness of the past. Above all, we have to illuminate the future. And I think that on the Day of Remembrance the most important thing is to remember the humanity that is in all of us to leave the world better for our children and for posterity.

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Estelle Laughlin, Holocaust Survivor: Memory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand that's where our redemption is. [Text on screen] Between 1933 and 1945, the German government, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, carried out the systematic persecution of and murder of Europe's Jews.

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The Chinese Uyghur Genocide

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The Armenian Genocide

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atrocities that are still ongoing

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References to 'Bosnia' and 'Croat' peak in 1996, but all terms hit lows in the present day.

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is poorly remembered today

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occurred in the 1990s and was given wide coverage

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a working title for the crime was 'Germanisation.'

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Lemkin, Raphael. “Genocide - A Modern Crime.” Free World 4 (April 1945): 39–43.

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they took place in an era of high-speed media coverage.

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Yugoslavia

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Covered as they happened, but left little legacy in the collective memory

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the most powerful countries (UK, US, USSR) were directly involved in it.

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Lemkin's definition of genocide was founded on it.

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The Holocaust