In July 2021, Valentin Inzko, the outgoing international High Representative for Bosnia–Herzegovina, amended the state criminal code to criminalize the denial of genocide. The law was introduced to curtail persistent denials of the internationally recognized genocide committed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces against over 8,000 Bosniac men and boys in the UN-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in multiple rulings, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007, concluded that these killings constituted genocide. Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency and a long-standing voice of genocide denial, responded with public defiance. He leaned on the findings of two commissions created by the Republika Srpska government in 2019: the Independent International Commission for Investigating the Suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo (1991–1995) and the Independent International Commission on the Suffering of All People in the Srebrenica Region (1992–1995). Both were criticized by prominent scholars for distorting facts and engaging in historical revisionism. Despite public backlash, these commissions were launched with fanfare, particularly emphasizing their international composition. Notably, each was chaired by an Israeli academic: Raphael Israeli, a professor emeritus from Hebrew University, led the Sarajevo commission, while Auschwitz scholar Gideon Greif chaired the Srebrenica commission.
Their participation provoked international concern, as both commissions produced findings in stark contradiction to the established scholarly and legal consensus. While most research and court findings affirm that Bosnian Serb forces besieged Sarajevo for four years, killing some 14,000 people, many of them civilians, the 2021 Sarajevo commission asserted that Serbs in the city were the true victims, allegedly targeted by Bosniac gangs and international terrorists, including the Islamic State, a group founded years after the war ended. The Srebrenica commission similarly rejected the genocide designation, claiming those killed were combatants, not civilians, and that their deaths were intended to eliminate a military threat, not to perpetrate genocide. These narratives contradict overwhelming evidence, including testimony and forensic data, that confirm systematic mass executions of Bosniac males, the use of mass graves, and deliberate concealment efforts by Serb forces.
The denial of genocide serves a broader political strategy in Republika Srpska. By November 1995, roughly 97,100 people had died in the Bosnian War, the majority Bosniac. The U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Accords ended hostilities but entrenched ethnic divisions by dividing the country into two entities: the Bosniac-Croat Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. Though not sovereign, Republika Srpska has many hallmarks of statehood: a constitution, judiciary, police force, education system, media infrastructure, and a distinct official alphabet.
Since the war’s end, Bosnian Serb leaders have pursued greater autonomy or outright secession. Central to this aim has been a deliberate reimagining of history, positioning Serbs not as perpetrators but as victims. Strategies of denial include disputing casualty figures, glorifying convicted war criminals, and discrediting international legal bodies as anti-Serb. As early as 2002, Republika Srpska published a report minimizing the Srebrenica massacre and accusing the International Committee of the Red Cross of fabricating details. In 2004, under international pressure, it created a commission that acknowledged the massacre and estimated 7,000 Bosniacs were killed. Then-President Dragan Čavić publicly apologized. However, this recognition was short-lived. In 2008, the government began financing a new body, the Srebrenica Historical Project, to dispute the genocide designation. By 2010, officials demanded revisions to the 2004 report, and in 2018, the Republika Srpska Assembly formally annulled it. These efforts are driven largely by Milorad Dodik, who has held nearly every major office in Republika Srpska. He argues that because Serbs fought against the Nazis and their Ustasha allies during World War II, they cannot be a "genocidal people." While occasionally acknowledging a massacre, Dodik often minimizes it, framing it as retaliation against Serb civilians or questioning the identity and number of victims.
Dodik’s rhetoric has emboldened broader societal denial. President Željka Cvijanović echoed this in 2019, calling the Srebrenica genocide a response to crimes against Serbs. Such denialism extends to academic and media institutions. Common narratives claim many Srebrenica victims are alive abroad or that recovered bodies are actually Serbs killed by Bosniacs. The state also celebrates convicted war criminals. Murals of General Ratko Mladić adorn public buildings; student dormitories are named after Radovan Karadžić. These figures are not ostracized; they are lionized. Republika Srpska’s identity is deeply intertwined with this denial. Admitting genocide on its territory would challenge the moral foundations of its political existence. Thus, denying the atrocity is not merely revisionism, it is existential.
The controversy surrounding Israeli participation in revisionist commissions stems from a long and complex history of Holocaust memory in the Balkans. During the 1990s, both local and international actors invoked Holocaust imagery to describe atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. News footage of emaciated detainees in Bosnian camps invited direct comparisons to Nazi concentration camps. Victims of ethnic cleansing often invoked Holocaust narratives to make sense of their trauma. Emir Suljagić, a Srebrenica survivor, wrote of reading Holocaust memoirs to cope with survivor’s guilt.
Yet the Holocaust, especially the genocide of Yugoslav Jews, has been marginal in regional historical narratives. Of the 82,000 Jews living in prewar Yugoslavia, 67,000 (82%) were murdered. Despite this, Yugoslav communist ideology subsumed all war dead under the generic label “victims of fascism,” de-emphasizing ethnic and religious distinctions. This ideological flattening also suppressed the reality that most Yugoslav Jews were killed by the Croatian Ustasha in the Nazi puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia, largely without German assistance.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as nationalism re-emerged, memories of WWII atrocities, particularly those committed against Serbs, were reinterpreted through the lens of the Holocaust. Serbian nationalists began comparing Serbs to Jews, portraying both as historically persecuted peoples. Novelist-turned-politician Vuk Drašković declared, “Serbs are the thirteenth, lost and most ill-fated tribe of Israel.” Similar sentiments echoed through literature, politics, and even the Serbian Orthodox Church. This identification culminated in the claim that “Serbophobia” in Europe mirrored the antisemitism of the Nazi era. This narrative of Serbs as ultimate victims became a shield against accusations of war crimes in the 1990s and a justification for denying genocide. The Serbian Museum of Genocide Victims, for instance, stated that its purpose was to “demonstrate the suffering of the Serbian people via the Jews.” It is in this context that Holocaust scholars like Gideon Greif and Raphael Israeli lent their authority to commissions rejecting the genocide in Srebrenica. Greif, who has worked closely with Serbian officials and received multiple state honors, argued that his Jewish identity granted him special authority to define genocide. “I am Jewish, and I know what genocide means,” he declared in 2021, concluding that the Srebrenica killings were not genocide.
Raphael Israeli, who led the Sarajevo commission, has published controversial works labeling Arab citizens of Israel as a “fifth column,” and was reprimanded by the Anti-Defamation League. Ephraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has also publicly rejected the genocide classification. Even Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust scholar, has argued that Srebrenica should be labeled a war crime or crime against humanity, not genocide. These opinions, while not representative of the broader scholarly community, have been repeatedly cited in Serbian and Bosnian Serb media as proof that Jewish experts reject the genocide label. This dynamic has further entrenched ethnic boundaries in historical scholarship and created a form of epistemic closure that obstructs the pursuit of truth. The motivations behind this alignment are complex. Some may be rooted in Islamophobia and the dehumanization of Muslim victims. Others may be more pragmatic, driven by political ties, financial incentives, or access to archives. Though these scholars have faced criticism within Israel and among global genocide experts, their views have nonetheless provided Republika Srpska with powerful rhetorical ammunition.
More broadly, this controversy underscores a recurring problem in genocide studies: the insistence on the Holocaust’s uniqueness as the sole benchmark for genocidal violence. While the Holocaust is undoubtedly singular in many respects, denying other genocides on this basis can obstruct justice and memory. Scholars increasingly argue that the ethical responsibility of Holocaust study includes the duty to recognize and compare other atrocities. To deny the Srebrenica genocide is not only to rewrite history, it is to violate the dignity of its victims.