In a spring day in 2017, a monument was raised in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, in memory of a terrible mass murder that had occurred there two decades earlier. In a somber ceremony attended by local dignitaries, a 5.5-meter reflective steel monument was raised on top of a grassy hill overlooking the town. Višegrad was the site of some of the worst atrocities that took place during the ugly wars following the collapse of Yugoslavia. Over the course of one summer in 1992, as many as 3,000 Muslims were shot, raped, and drowned in this historic town along the banks of the Drina River. A resort hotel, the Vilina Vlas, was transformed into a concentration camp for the rape of young women. On at least two occasions, dozens of elderly people, women, and children were herded into homes by jeering Serb gunmen and burned alive. Those atrocities are exactly what made the new memorial so jarring. The shining cross was not erected in memory of the Muslim victims of the genocide. It was put up to honor the perpetrators and their allies: Serbian paramilitaries and the Russian volunteers who helped them ethnically cleanse the town.
Nearly two decades after the war ended, Bosnia is still struggling to emerge from the vortex of hatred that destroyed the country during the 1990s. Yet what may be even more alarming is that outside of Bosnia, the memory of the genocide committed against its Muslims has become a source of inspiration for the global far right. The shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand this March wrote the names of Serbian nationalist leaders on the rifle he used to carry out the massacres. During his livestream of the attacks, he played a jaunty song performed by Bosnian Serb soldiers during the war, nicknamed “Remove Kebab,” that has become popular among the online “alt-right.” The Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people during a 2011 shooting rampage, reportedly also showed a “strange obsession” with the genocide in Bosnia, heaping praise on wartime Serb leaders in a manifesto he wrote before his attacks. A domestic terrorist in Pennsylvania who killed a state trooper in 2014 was similarly infatuated with the wartime Bosnian Serb military, posing images of himself on social media in a uniform from the notorious Drina Wolves unit. On websites like 4chan that are helping to breed a new culture of racial hatred and glorification of violence, it’s not hard to find the Bosnian genocide favorably discussed. These new online connections are also helping to foster real-world links between the Western far right and its Balkan counterparts......
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Poster Comment:
What side(s), if any, would you all say was in the right in the Bosnian (etc.) war?
The Intercept has gone wacko peecee on 'diversity issues' but I'm not sure what to make of this piece, not having bothered to follow those post-communist conflicts in Europe as they happened. I knew without asking that DC's involvement was evil. ameriKa made Milosevic a Hitler of the Year, he was clearly suicided, and he sounds like a great man via wikid. in spite of itself.