Tom Bartlett - THE SCIENCE OF HATRED
What makes humans capable of horrific violence? Why do we
deny atrocities in the face of overwhelming evidence? A small group of
psychologists say they are moving toward answers. Is anyone listening?
The former battery factory on the outskirts of Srebrenica, a
small town in eastern Bosnia ,
has become a grim tourist attraction. Vans full of sightseers, mostly from
other countries, arrive here daily to see the crumbling industrial structure,
which once served as a makeshift United Nations outpost and temporary haven for
Muslims under assault by Serb forces determined to seize the town and round up
its residents. In July 1995 more than 8,000 Muslim men, from teenagers to the
elderly, were murdered in and around Srebrenica, lined up behind houses, gunned
down in soccer fields, hunted through the forest.
The factory is now a low-budget museum where you can watch a
short film about the genocide and meet a survivor, a soft-spoken man in his
mid-30s who has repeated the story of his escape and the death of his father
and brother nearly every day here for the past five years. Visitors are then
led to a cavernous room with display cases containing the personal effects of
victims—a comb, two marbles, a handkerchief, a house key, a wedding ring, a
pocket watch with a bullet hole—alongside water-stained photographs of the
atrocity hung on cracked concrete walls. The English translations of the
captions make for a kind of accidental poetry. “Frightened mothers with weeping
children: where and how to go on … ?” reads one. “Endless sorrow for the dearest,”
says another.
Across the street from the museum is a memorial bearing the
names of the known victims, flanked by rows and rows of graves, each with an
identical white marker. Nearby an old woman runs a tiny souvenir shop selling,
among other items, baseball caps with the message “Srebrenica: Never Forget.”
This place is a symbol of the 1995 massacre, which, in turn,
is a symbol of the entire conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia .
The killings here were a fraction of the total body count; The Bosnian Book of
the Dead, published early this year, lists 96,000 who perished, though there
were thousands more. It was the efficient brutality in Srebrenica that prompted
the international community, after years of dithering and half measures, to
take significant military action.
While that action ended the bloodshed, the reckoning is far
from finished. Fragments of bone are still being sifted from the soil, sent for
DNA analysis, and returned to families for burial. The general who led the
campaign, Ratko Mladic, is on trial in The Hague
after years on the run. In a recent proceeding, Mladic stared at a group of
Srebrenica survivors in the gallery and drew a single finger across his throat.
Around the same time, the president of Serbia
issued a nonapology apology for the massacre, neglecting to call it genocide
and using language so vague it seemed more insult than olive branch.
Standing near the memorial, surrounded by the dead, the
driver of one of those tourist-filled vans, a Muslim who helped defend Sarajevo
during a nearly four-year siege, briefly drops his sunny, professional
demeanor. “How can you forgive when they say it didn’t happen?” he says. “The
Nazis, they killed millions. They say, ‘OK, we are sorry.’ But the Serbs don’t
do that.”
Some Serbs do acknowledge the genocide. According to a 2010
survey, though, most Serbs believe that whatever happened at Srebrenica has
been exaggerated, despite being among the most scientifically documented mass
killings in history. They shrug it off as a byproduct of war or cling to
conspiracy theories or complain about being portrayed as villains. The facts
disappear in a swirl of doubts and denial.
A new Bosnian film explores how that refusal to face the
truth can become bizarre, like a hallucination. In the film, one actress plays
multiple characters, each a different Serbian woman with a different reaction
to Srebrenica. One character, a fast talker in a white blazer, suggests the
story has been manufactured. Another, wearing hoop earrings and an animal-print
blouse, doesn’t deny the killings occurred but won’t discuss them either.
“Money, how you live, where you vacation, that’s what we should worry about,”
she says. Yet another character—again, the same actress, this time with chopped
blond hair—seems weirdly pleased to broach the morbid topic. “I don’t often get
the opportunity to talk about guilt,” she says.
Listening to those women is an actor playing a Srebrenica
survivor, who gently prompts them to move past their superficial banter. At one
point, late in the film, he reveals his own obsession: “I often think about a
particular moment, a situation. When mass killings are happening and you are
tied up, and when they are taking you to the pit where they throw in the dead
bodies, and when you see them killing people and you know it’s your turn next,
at that second, that moment right before you are killed, what do you think
about?”
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