Hate and historical revisionism: Looking back on Dodik's interview with the 'Post' - opinion

To anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Western Balkans since the 1990s, Milorad Dodik is synonymous with chauvinism, xenophobia, and historical revisionism. A close associate of Vladimir Putin, Serbia’s hardline nationalist president Aleksandar Vucic, and the Austrian, Hungarian, and French far-right, among others, the long-time Bosnian Serb politician is an extremist without equal in Europe today.

It is for this reason that The Jerusalem Post’s decision to publish a lengthy interview with Dodik (June 14) – during which he engages in extraordinary incendiary sectarian rhetoric against the Bosniak community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, trivializes the unique horror of the Holocaust, and denies the facts of the Srebrenica Genocide – is so flabbergasting.

It’s one thing for the newspaper to have conducted such an interview, ill-advised though it may have been. It is entirely another to have gone ahead with its publication knowing his views.

To begin with, literally no aspect of Dodik’s claims during this interview is factual. Every single paragraph contains at least one major fabrication and most contain several at once. 

In Dodik’s very first answer he falsely claims that the Srebrenica Genocide, a legally established fact ruled on repeatedly by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), “cannot be called a genocide.” He falsely claims that “authoritative experts…have determined that it was not a genocide” when virtually the entire global academic community agrees not only on the facts of the genocide in Srebrenica but also on the broader genocidal nature of the Serb nationalist effort in Bosnia during the 1990s.

The Srebrenica Genocide is the most painstakingly scientifically documented atrocity in modern history. The decades-long excavations and documentation of the more than 8,372 victims of the genocide, all killed during a few brief days in July 1995, are widely recognized as instrumental in the development of contemporary DNA profiling and criminal forensics.

We also have a clear accounting of the genocide committed by the perpetrators in the Bosnian Serb Army themselves. We know the number of buses and the amount of fuel required for the forcible transfer of the Bosniak population, the number of individuals required to guard the prisoners, the number required to carry out the mass executions, the number of vehicles needed to transport the bodies to mass graves, and the amount of equipment and personnel used to subsequently dig up and rebury parts of the victims in dozens of tertiary sites in an attempt to obscure the full scale of the crimes.

Dodik's castigation of the Bosniak community 

Dodik repeatedly makes tendentious references to the fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, maliciously attempting to castigate the Bosniak community as responsible for the crimes of the Nazis and their local collaborators, in particular the Croat ultranationalist regime that headed the so-called “Independent State of Croatia” (NDH), to which the Germans unilaterally appended the whole of Bosnia.

Dodik bandies about the number of Serb victims of the Jasenovac death camp, which is not supported by the US Holocaust Museum and other leading global institutions devoted to the study of the Holocaust. Why? Because he is a proponent of a broader Serb nationalist propaganda campaign that aims to inflate the number of ethnic Serb victims during the 1940s in a perverse attempt to justify the genocide and atrocities perpetrated by the Milosevic regime during the 1990s. This sentiment was neatly encapsulated by a larger banner that was unveiled in the center of Belgrade by a neo-fascist street gang two weeks ago; it read, “The only genocide in the Balkans, [sic] was against the Serbs.”

As in all parts of occupied Europe, there were Nazi collaborators within the ranks of the Bosniak community. 

However, as documented in exhaustive scholarly works – Marko Atilla Hoare’s The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War and George Lepe’s Himmler’s Bosnian Division – these were a fringe segment of the Bosniak population. Even so, in his role as director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, Emir Suljagic publicly apologized for the crimes of the Bosniak collaborators at a conference co-organized with the World Jewish Congress. And he did so in Srebrenica itself, the locus of the Bosniak community’s own painful 20th century.

Suljagic’s actions also echo the efforts of the Bosniak community leaders during the 1940s, who actively sought to aid and conceal their Jewish and Serb neighbors during the Nazi occupation. This is best evidenced by the fact that among the 49 Righteous Among Nations recognized from Bosnia, nearly two-thirds are ethnic Bosniaks. 

This is also why Bosnia, to this day, is still home to the most precious artifact of Jewish life in the Balkans: the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah. This is because the Haggadah, like countless Bosnian Jews, was concealed by Muslim families in Bosnia during the horror of the occupation.

In partial recognition of this special relationship between Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Bosniak and Jewish communities, the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Center and the World Jewish Congress also launched a peace and remembrance initiative in July 2023 to “forge a path of reconciliation, mutual respect, and active peace-building.”

IN CONTRAST, in March 1941, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, a member of the Serbian royal family, committed Belgrade to the Axis. Despite Paul’s swift deposition, the Serbian military officers who orchestrated his removal did not change their decision. In April 1941, the Axis invaded Yugoslavia, and by May 1942, they declared Serbia as one of the first Judenfrei territories in Europe.  This was in large part due to the committed efforts of collaborators like Milan Nedic, the Nazi puppet leader of occupied Serbia.

Despite this, Serbian courts seriously debated Nedic’s legal rehabilitation in the 2010s. He never received such a grant, but other prominent Nazi quislings, like Serbian nationalist guerilla leader Draza Mihalovic, did. Mihailovic and other so-called “Chetnik” collaborators, along with their Bosnian Serb counterparts, such as Dodik, remain widely venerated by Serbia’s nationalist establishment.

Dodik lies even about the most straightforward issues. For example, he falsely claims that Bosnia and Herzegovina are providing Hamas with “weapons and ammunition,” although there is not a shred of evidence, while interviewer Eldad Beck cites a wholly fictitious “growing Iranian influence” in the country. In contrast, the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, one of the leading US strategic think tanks, referred to Serbia as Tehran’s “entry point to the Balkans” in 2023, referencing Belgrade’s acquisition of thousands of Iranian-manufactured attack drones.

Dodik is not even truthful about his own biography. He claims not to have been a soldier during the Bosnian War, but an “opposition politician.” Dodik was briefly an opposition figure in the pre-war Bosnian parliament. But after genocidaire Radovan Karadzic’s SDS declared the so-called “Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Dodik sided with Karadzic’s regime and its breakaway, rubber stamp institutions. Once Serb nationalist forces, led by Milosevic’s Belgrade, began the systematic extermination and expulsion of non-Serbs from eastern and northern Bosnia, Dodik did not oppose or protest the genocide. He turned to war-profiteering.

Dodik’s cynicism is worse still. When he (re)emerged as a major political figure in postwar Bosnia, it was initially as a US-backed reformer who publicly acknowledged the facts of the Srebrenica Genocide and referred to the likes of Karadzic and Ratko Mladic as war criminals who stained the conscience of the Serb people. But when Dodik decided there was greater political profit to be had in nationalist extremism and historical negationism, he changed his tune once again.

No one has a right to trivialize the historical facts and memory of the Holocaust or the genocide in Bosnia – especially not in the pursuit of contemporary hate projects, such as those promoted by Dodik and his backers. The Jerusalem Post owes the Bosniak victims of Srebrenica, and its readers, an apology.

Dr. Emir Suljagic is the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Dr. Jasmin Mujanovic is senior non-resident fellow at the Newlines Institute and the author of The Bosniaks: Nationhood After Genocide.