This year marks 30 years since the end of the Bosnia-Herzegovina War, in which an estimated 100,000 people lost their lives. The war culminated in the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. In the massacre, Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” slaughtered more than 8,000 men and boys in a United Nations-designated “safe zone.”
In the decades that followed, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried hundreds of witnesses and sentenced dozens of senior Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, including some convicted of genocide. Meanwhile, the Bosnia-Herzegovina state and foreign donors have poured significant resources into research, victim recovery, and the memory of the genocide.
When the genocide in Gaza began, many Bosnians who had survived the 1992-1995 war noticed striking similarities between their experiences and the suffering of the Palestinians. Many people took to the streets to voice their opposition to the genocidal war in Palestine.
However, many Bosnian intellectuals, especially those who study war crimes and genocide, remain silent. Refusing them to speak out not only undermines efforts to bring justice to Gaza, but also undermines the field of genocide studies.
voice of conscience
Before exploring why Gaza has become such a taboo topic for Bosnian genocide researchers, it is important to point out that not everyone has remained silent. A relatively small group of Bosnian academics, who are not only academics but also active defenders of Palestine and human rights, have chosen to speak out.
University professors and researchers such as Leila Kreševljaković, Sanela Čekic Basić, Gorana Mlinarević, Jasna Fetahovic and Sanela Kapetanović emphasize that there is a moral responsibility not to remain silent. They have led by example, participated in protests, and spoken out publicly.
Velma Burjubašić, professor of political science at the University of Sarajevo, criticized European and other political leaders for expressing sympathy for Srebrenica, while justifying Israel’s actions in Gaza as an act of “self-defense.” Such double standards, she argued, reveal a troubling pragmatism that undermines both unity and accountability.
Genocide scholar Edina Becilević from the Faculty of Criminology, Criminology and Security at the University of Sarajevo said in a recent interview that the massacre in Gaza clearly reflects the dynamics seen in Srebrenica, defined by dehumanization, ideological mobilization and international collusion.
Ahmet Alibasic, director of the Center for Advanced Studies and professor at the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Sarajevo, has also been outspoken. Last year, he co-hosted a seminar entitled “From the Balkans to Gaza: A Critical Analysis of Genocide,” which examined the dynamics of modern mass violence through a “comparison of the Srebrenica genocide, the Sarajevo siege, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Sarajevo-based journalist and media scholar Nijara Akhmetasevic also did not hesitate to draw parallels between the experiences of Bosnian survivors from Gaza and besieged Sarajevo and Srebrenica.
Members of the Sarajevo Feminist Anti-Militarist Collective have been demonstrating in downtown Sarajevo for months, reading out the names of children killed in Gaza and juxtaposing war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories with the horrors of Sarajevo’s own war.
All of these people are responding in different ways to the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s constant exhortation that intellectuals must speak truth to power, link local memory to global justice, and claim space to resist convenient truth-telling politics. Silence is not a neutral stance, but remains a harmful political choice.
“This is not our fight.”
Still, not everyone was spurred to action by Said’s call. Paradoxically, many Bosnian genocide researchers have remained conspicuously silent, even though foreign researchers, among them Israeli genocide scholars Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Shmuel Lederman, have publicly accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza. This situation continued even after the International Association of Genocide Researchers, the world’s largest academic group in the field, passed a resolution in August declaring that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.
Various experts on genocide at the Institute for the Study of Crimes Against Humanity and Crimes Against International Law at the University of Sarajevo, lecturers at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sarajevo, and genocide researchers at the Bosniak Institute of Islamic Tradition are reluctant to comment on Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
The Institute for the Study of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law spoke publicly about Gaza as an institution only after it became clear that a ceasefire would soon take effect. On October 8, it issued an evasive statement without mentioning Israel as the perpetrator of the atrocities. This led some observers to accuse Muamer Jananovic’s institute of taking a calculating and opportunistic approach to the issue.
But perhaps the most notable case is that of Emir Surjagić, a genocide survivor and director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Asked about his position on Gaza in late 2023, Surjagić told Haaretz: “This is not our fight.”
Many Bosnia watchers were quick to condemn his comments and point out the double standards in his position, given that just a year earlier Srjavic had published an op-ed urging Ukrainians to “put down their arms.”
Additionally, under his leadership, the Srebrenica Memorial Center produced a series of case studies on Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan and Ethiopia, with funding from the UK Government, highlighting the early warning signs of mass violence and genocide.
When the Palestinian community in Bosnia and Herzegovina expressed surprise at the lack of solidarity from Srebrenica to Gaza residents and questioned whether the Srebrenica Memorial Center’s relationship with the World Jewish Congress had something to do with the silence, Srejagić responded by accusing it of anti-Semitism.
He even compared Hamas members to the Chetniks, a Serbian nationalist and royalist force that collaborated with German, Italian, and sometimes Croatian fascists during World War II. The Chetniks were responsible for some of the most brutal atrocities, including genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims. Almost half a century later, their enduring ideology fueled war crimes and genocide against Bosniaks during the Bosnian War.
price of silence
It is no coincidence that many Bosnian genocide scholars are silent. Some of them fear the professional repercussions in Western academia and feel that denouncing Israeli genocide would be detrimental to their careers. Many are reluctant to risk external financial support from foreign embassies, especially funds provided by US, UK and European Union donors to their own projects and ‘sideline’ NGOs. Some countries are reluctant to alienate diplomatic partners who still wield influence over Bosnia’s fragile peace.
Of course, none of this justifies the silence of academics working in institutions that are funded by Bosnian taxpayers rather than foreign donors. As genocide researchers whose research is sustained by public funding, they have a duty to serve the public interest, which requires them to maintain scientific integrity, defend evidence-based genocide research, and contribute to global academic consensus without fear of professional repercussions.
When academics, genocide researchers, and public sector lecturers do not speak out about war crimes and humanitarian crises, they contribute to legitimizing discourses that conceal harm. Such discourse frames particular acts of mass violence as unworthy of the same scrutiny applied to other incidents, creating a hierarchy of victimhood that serves political interests rather than universal principles or academic integrity.
Said’s universal call to intellectuals remains relevant and urgent. It is a reminder that we need to move beyond comfortable silence to expose distortions of power and advocate for justice, transparency, and accountability. In his view, silence is a form of collusion that undermines the very pursuit of truth that academia claims to uphold.
In this sense, public intellectuals must never be drawn into the realm of political gamesmanship, where silence about one genocide is exchanged for recognition of another. If their claims become selective, there is a danger that genocide research will turn into a political tool. Genocide scholars would then cease to be independent scholars and become interest groups stripped of the moral pedestal they so easily claim.
By foregrounding Gaza in the Bosnian context, we argue for a new ethics of intellectual responsibility and integrity, one that aligns academic acumen with public accountability and humanitarian justice.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
