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Conspiracy Theories, Denial, and the Coronavirus (The New Yorker)
New Yorker Magazine
David Rohde
July 18, 2020
Last Saturday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Europe’s worst massacre since the Second World War. In 1995, in the final months of the war in Bosnia, eight thousand Muslim men and boys were killed in mass executions around the town of Srebrenica. In the years since, their widows and children, along with thousands of other mourners, have gathered to attend an annual ceremony honoring those deaths. It is held on July 11th, the day that the enclave fell to Bosnian Serb forces and the killings began. This year, fear of the coronavirus prompted authorities to limit the gathering to several hundred people. Those who did attend wore masks.
Diplomats from around the world, as they do each year, issued solemn messages of regret for the international community’s culpability in the killings. In a humanitarian half-measure that went fatally wrong, American and European officials devised a scheme in which U.N. peacekeepers stripped Srebrenica’s Muslim defenders of their most powerful weaponry and declared the town a “United Nations-protected safe area.” Two years later, they stood by as Bosnian Serb nationalists overran the town and killed nearly every Bosnian Muslim male they captured. This year, owing to the coronavirus pandemic, the remorseful messages from foreign dignitaries were pre-taped videos, including ones from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the actress Angelina Jolie. Most of the messages focussed on the growing denial of the massacres by Bosnian Serb nationalists, which reflects, in turn, the stalled effort to reunify the country, a quarter century after the killings ceased.
I covered the war in 1994 and 1995, and wrote a series of stories for the Christian Science Monitor that helped expose the killings in Srebrenica. Every five years, I’ve tried to return for the commemoration. Over time, I’ve listened as, despite mounting evidence, Serb nationalists have increasingly denied what occurred. On my most recent visit, in 2015, they flatly dismissed the findings of the largest DNA-identification project in the world, which has matched the remains of 6,909 men with their surviving relatives. Several hundred other men who went missing have never been found. A U.N. war-crimes tribunal has exhaustively documented the killings, exhuming mass graves, establishing the Bosnian Serb military chain of command during the executions, and ruling, in 2004, that they constitute genocide—acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
<snip>
I had told myself that, if a national calamity befell the United States, its leaders and institutions would rise to the challenge. Instead, today, more than a hundred and thirty thousand Americans are dead of the coronavirus—a toll larger, in fact, than the hundred thousand who perished in the war in Bosnia. The virus has also been far deadlier in the U.S., with forty-two deaths per hundred thousand cases, six times the rate of seven per hundred thousand in Bosnia.
Diplomats from around the world, as they do each year, issued solemn messages of regret for the international community’s culpability in the killings. In a humanitarian half-measure that went fatally wrong, American and European officials devised a scheme in which U.N. peacekeepers stripped Srebrenica’s Muslim defenders of their most powerful weaponry and declared the town a “United Nations-protected safe area.” Two years later, they stood by as Bosnian Serb nationalists overran the town and killed nearly every Bosnian Muslim male they captured. This year, owing to the coronavirus pandemic, the remorseful messages from foreign dignitaries were pre-taped videos, including ones from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the actress Angelina Jolie. Most of the messages focussed on the growing denial of the massacres by Bosnian Serb nationalists, which reflects, in turn, the stalled effort to reunify the country, a quarter century after the killings ceased.
I covered the war in 1994 and 1995, and wrote a series of stories for the Christian Science Monitor that helped expose the killings in Srebrenica. Every five years, I’ve tried to return for the commemoration. Over time, I’ve listened as, despite mounting evidence, Serb nationalists have increasingly denied what occurred. On my most recent visit, in 2015, they flatly dismissed the findings of the largest DNA-identification project in the world, which has matched the remains of 6,909 men with their surviving relatives. Several hundred other men who went missing have never been found. A U.N. war-crimes tribunal has exhaustively documented the killings, exhuming mass graves, establishing the Bosnian Serb military chain of command during the executions, and ruling, in 2004, that they constitute genocide—acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
<snip>
I had told myself that, if a national calamity befell the United States, its leaders and institutions would rise to the challenge. Instead, today, more than a hundred and thirty thousand Americans are dead of the coronavirus—a toll larger, in fact, than the hundred thousand who perished in the war in Bosnia. The virus has also been far deadlier in the U.S., with forty-two deaths per hundred thousand cases, six times the rate of seven per hundred thousand in Bosnia.
Read more at link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/conspiracy-theories-denial-and-the-coronavirus/amp
