Remembering the Bosnian Genocide

In September 1992 the New Zealand Herald interviewed Hajji Abdullah Musovich, an elderly refugee from Montenegro resident in Auckland, and he talked about the 1924 massacre of Muslim men in the village of Šahovići that he witnessed in his childhood. Renamed Tomaševo, centuries of Islamic heritage (mosques and graveyards) were destroyed and today the valley remains empty of Muslims. The perpetrators of this personal and cultural violence – ethnic cleansing in modern jargon – would probably have been surprised to learn of these murders being discussed several decades later in the islands of the South Pacific. On the other hand, they probably would not have cared. This is the visceral reality of the miasma of Serbian nationalism. In Remembering the Bosnian Genocide: Justice, Memory and Denial, editor Hikmet Karčić has assembled a wise coterie of international scholars to examine the infamous 1995 Srebrenica massacre and query whether anything has really been learnt.