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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2020
I am thankful to be invited to share some reflections on the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and on the actions of scholars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and around the world in resisting genocide and in promoting peace, justice, and respect for human dignity in the face of such a tragedy.
49 The exploitation of demographic fears played a major role in the dissolution of the ethnically and religiously diverse Yugoslavia, as is documented in Silber, Laura and Little, Allan, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: TV Books, 1996)Google Scholar. In the United States, former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions and current presidential advisor Stephen Miller have championed the openly racist 1924 Immigration Act, which slashed quotas for allegedly inferior peoples such as Italians and Eastern Europeans and banned Asians altogether. The two have promoted a return to such policies, and Miller has succeeded in promoting separation of children and parents at the border, slashing of refugee allotments, and pushed against Muslim travelers from specific nations—amid a resurgence of anti-immigrant white nationalists, and Neo-Nazi hate groups. Katie Rogers, “Before Joining White House, Stephen Miller Pushed White Nationalist Theories,” New York Times, November 13, 2019; Katie Rogers and Jason DeParle, “The White Nationalist Websites Cited by Stephen Miller,” New York Times, November 18, 2019; Adam Serwer, “Jeff Sessions’ Unqualified Praise for a 1924 Immigration Law,” The Atlantic, January 10, 2017.
50 For the quote by Handke and a link to a videorecording of Handke making that and similar statements, see Alexander Hemon, “The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists,” New York Times, October 15, 2019. When the author and journalist Peter Maass questions Handke about the Bosnia Genocide at the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm, Handke answered with yet another scatological remark. See Peter Maass, “Nobel Winner Peter Handke Compared My Questions about Genocide in Bosnia to a ‘Calligraphy of Shit,’” The Intercept, December 6, 2019. The far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who carried out the mass-murder of seventy-seven people in Norway, wrote a manifesto steeped in the ideology of radical Serb nationalists, which targets Muslims and “cultural Marxists” as inherent threats to the purity and integrity of European civilization.
51 Sells, Michael, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Kaplan, Robert, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)Google Scholar. Kaplan tells his story largely through the views of religious nationalists, for whom Balkan antagonisms were both age old and existential, but presents those views as facts rather than as constructions of religious nationalist ideology.
52 See Killing Memory: Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage and Its Destruction. Videocassette. Narrated by András Riedlmayer (Haverford, PA: Community of Bosnia Foundation, 1994) and Riedlmayer, András, “From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia's Cultural Heritage” in Islam and Bosnia, ed. Shatzmiller, Maya (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 98–135Google Scholar.
53 Rusmir Mahmutćehajić is one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's leading intellectuals. Many of his works are available in English. See, for example, Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir, Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition, trans. Risaluddin, Saba and R., Francis Jones (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, and Mahmutćehajić, Rusmir, The Denial of Bosnia, trans. Jones, Francis R. and Bowder, Maria (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
54 Broz, Svetlana, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War, ed. Kane, Laurie Hart, trans. Bursać, Ellen Elias (New York: Other Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
55 See Stephen Schwartz, Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook (London: Saqi in association with the Bosnian Institute), 47–73. Schwartz's book offers a superb account of centuries of Jewish life in the pre-Holocaust Bosnia-Herzegovina.
56 For detailed accounts and analyses of the sanctification of genocidal violence, see Sells, Michael, “Crosses of Blood: Sacred Space, Religion, and Violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Sociology of Religion 64, no. 3 (2003): 309–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sells, Michael, “Pilgrimage and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Herzegovina,” in Religion and Nationalism in Iraq, eds. Little, Donald and Swearer, Donald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 144–56Google Scholar.
57 Mostar 2004 Program. 1994–2004. Final Report. Compiled by Amir Pasic (Istanbul: OIC/IRCICA, 2005). The workshops drew eight hundred and twenty-three participants from thirty-one countries, with teachers and students from sixty-eight universities.
58 Timothy Garton Ash, “The Puzzle of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999. For studies that penetrate beyond the ethnonationalist mythology of ancient hatreds, see Malcolm, Noel: Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Perica, Vjekoslav, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lovrenović, Ivan, Bosnia: A Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 2001Google Scholar. One way of keeping in touch with the work of Bosnian scholars, students, poets, and artists is through the monthly bilingual online journal Spirit of Bosnia/Duh Bosna, which can be accessed at http://www.spiritofbosnia.org.