I can never forget the Bosnian genocide. But others are trying to rewrite history
I covered the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and I know what I saw. I traveled to besieged Sarajevo and to ethnically cleansed regions in eastern and central Bosnia where I interviewed victims of rape camps and bombing campaigns, mothers whose children were killed building snowmen, and the relatives of the elderly who were shot by snipers chopping wood to keep warm in the deep Balkan chill.
It left a painful scar that I can hardly bear to touch. Much of it is wrapped in guilt: My colleagues and I lived with the local population and tried desperately to keep their tragic narrative in the public eye. Every shell that fell, every body that lay cold in the morgue where I trudged every morning to count the dead, was a personal failure of a war that should and could have been halted early on.
Now, a quarter of a century later, I find myself confronting a disturbing trend. Scholars, journalists and prize committees are rewriting the history of the horrors that I and so many others lived through.
An American writer, Jessica Stern, has just published a book based on her interviews with former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in genocide. Stern has chosen to call her book “My War Criminal” — a title deeply disturbing for reasons she was apparently unable to see. Karadzic, a former psychiatrist and poet, co-founded the Serbian Democratic Party and served as the first president of the tinpot Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996. In that role, he was directly responsible for many murders, rapes, and acts of torture.
Stern went to Karadzic’s prison cell and let him perform faith healing on her. She let him touch her — an act that baffles me. She fell under his hypnotic spell, describing him as “tall and handsome, with flowing brown hair. A Byronic figure.”
She wanted, apparently, to understand the mind of a man who could abet near-unthinkable crimes. Yet along the way, she chose to forget the victims who should be at the center of the story. [Continue reading…]