Denial of Genocide and Other War Crimes Committed in Bosnia as a Form of Collective Memory

Abstract

This article discusses the politics of remembering and forgetting in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the denial of genocide and other atrocities committed in the country between 1992 and 1995 acts as a form of collective memory, or anti-memory. Denial takes place within the context of the social identity construction of the victim group, and is part of the processes of ‘sanitizing’ the national identity narrative of the perpetrators. Denial is thus the logical extension of the social construction of the victim group as a mortal threat; physical annihilation is followed by a process which aims to portray the victims as deserving of their fate, and to recast the perpetrators’ actions as heroic deeds.  The deliberate selection of which facts are to be remembered and which are to be forgotten is the underlying process which connects denial and national narrative construction. In order to preserve a coherent grand narrative of national identity, it is necessary to omit certain facts from the collective historical memory, and to regulate which topics are to be spoken about, and which are to be avoided. Denial, therefore, is a form of memory. It is a conscientious decision on how certain events are to be remembered.