Russia insults memory of Srebrenica

By Theresa Bond

Moscow's veto of the UN Srebrenica resolution is a symptom of a culture of lying and denial about history.

years ago today, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were assassinated in Srebrenica. The crime took place in a United Nations-designated and UN-manned “safe area,” where local people had come to look for safety.

Two international courts qualified the killing in Srebrenica as genocide.

Then, last Wednesday, July 9, the worst kind of insult was added to this injury. At the UN Security Council, Russia vetoed a resolution drafted by the U.K. to commemorate the event, condemning the genocide in Srebrenica and denial of genocide more generally. The text did not even mention that Serbs had committed the crime.
What at first sight looked like a mere formality became a confrontation between Russia and the rest of the permanent members of the Security Council (with China, as is often the case, abstaining). It was a painful ethical clash.
Peter Wilson, the U.K.’s deputy ambassador to the UN, was outraged: “Genocide occurred at Srebrenica. This is a legal fact, not a political judgment. On this, there is no compromise.”
Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, had a lot to say. None of the Council members knew Srebrenica the way she knows it, having lived in Bosnia as a reporter at the time of the slaughter.
Power asked: “Why would Russia vote to deny recognition of the Srebrenica genocide?” She knew of course what her counterpart in the UN, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin, would say: The resolution was “not constructive, confrontational and politically-motivated.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the proposal was “totally of anti-Serb nature” and “incorrectly interpreted those events.” The Russian ambassador to Serbia called it “a fabrication.”
The Serbian daily Politika noted that the four-page draft “mentions the word ‘genocide’ 35 times” (the draft that I saw has 27). Samantha Power no doubt knew that, although Serbian Prime Minister Alexander Vučić would attend the commemoration service in Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik had asked Vladimir Putin to veto the resolution when they met on June 18 in St. Petersburg. And Putin consented.

The ghost of Stalin

But there is a better answer to Samantha Power’s question: Russia voted to deny recognition of the Srebrenica genocide because it is in its Soviet tradition to deny. It is a system that always denies, a system that simply does not recognize its past crimes.
When Nikita Khrushchev revealed the extent of Joseph Stalin’s crimes at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, it marked a temporary end to Stalin’s cult of personality, not a repudiation or atonement for a regime that installed Gulags and killed millions.
Putin has taken the Soviet tradition of denial to new depths: The little green men roaming around Crimea in February 2014 were not Russian forces, he maintained — until he stated the opposite. He still denies that there are Russian troops in Ukraine, despite the fact that the troops were interviewed and filmed, and some were killed.
Crimea under Russian occupation is a case in point: a lack of repentance for past crimes can lead to their repetition. It was on Stalin’s order that the entire ethnic group of the Crimean Tatars — almost 200,000 people — was deported on the night of May 18, 1944 from Crimea to Central Asia, with perhaps as many as half of them dying in transit or soon after arrival. (Incidentally, this mass deportation was never acknowledged as genocide, though it fits the definition in article 2 (c) of the Convention: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”)
Soon after his triumphant speech in March 2014, welcoming Crimea to the Russian fold, Putin said: “We must make sure that as part of Crimea’s integration into Russia, Crimean Tatars are rehabilitated and their historic rights restored.” In 2015, for the second year in a row, Putin’s local envoys denied Crimean Tatars the right to commemorate Deportation Day. The same happened on Crimean Tatar Flag Day and the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Crimean Tatars’ self-governing body Mejilis was thrown out of its premises and denied its own television in Crimean Tatar language. In short, they are being denied all symbols of their own identity.
Ten days before the anniversary of the Crimean Tatar deportation, a plaque honoring Stalin was unveiled in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, not long after Russian occupation authorities in Yalta erected a monument of Stalin (with Churchill and Roosevelt looking on attentively). Imagine a statue to Ribbentrop and Molotov being unveiled in Berlin. No, better: Imagine the Bundestag calling for monuments honoring Himmler and Hitler.
Statues of the dictator are a big part of contemporary Russian politics of denial. Stalin’s monuments are mushrooming around Russia and the Moscow City Council has decided to hold a referendum on reinstating a statue of the Soviet Union’s first executioner, Felix Dzerzhinsky, in front of Lubianka, the headquarters of State Security, which Dzerzhinsky founded.
Russian writer Dmitry Bykov recently noted that, “To restore the statue of Dzerzhinsky is a worse disaster than to erect a statue of Dzerzhinsky. When you put it up, maybe you do not quite imagine the full extent of the consequences. But when you reinstate it, you know everything. Nostalgia for Stalin is worse than support for Stalin. Those who supported Stalin in the 1930s may have been mistaken. Those who are nostalgic for him today, they already know everything. There is no way to attribute anything to confusion.
True, “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” But no UN resolution can protect us from someone who studies history — and the history of genocide — in order to repeat it.