As a direct acknowledgment of my modest work as a journalist, I found myself the subject of a letter that Elmedin Konaković, the Foreign Minister from Sarajevo, sent to the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2024. In his letter, Konaković requested that the encyclopedia change the entry titled “Srebrenica Massacre” to “Srebrenica Genocide”—or “the Srebrenica genocide,” as the Bosniak minister explicitly wrote.
Whether by coincidence or not, Konaković’s letter to Encyclopaedia Britannica was sent immediately after my article, “Srebrenica: Say ‘Genocide’ to Make Military Intervention Easier,” was published on the RT Balkan website.
In that article, I argued that the world’s leading encyclopedias correctly describe the crime committed in Srebrenica in 1995 as a massacre, in accordance with academic standards, rather than using the politically prescribed term genocide, because, objectively speaking, the crime committed in Srebrenica was not genocide.
As examples, I cited Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Columbia Encyclopedia, and the Larousse Encyclopedia. I also quoted the conclusions of leading academic authorities guided by scholarly integrity and unwilling to allow their work to be shaped by politically constructed narratives, including Catherine J. Southwick of Yale University and David N. Gibbs of the University of Arizona, who has extensively argued that the narrative of “genocide” in Srebrenica has been used to justify American military interventions around the world.
“The use of the victims of Srebrenica to justify American military interventions is probably the most disgraceful attempt to deceive world public opinion in modern times. The exploitation of the victims of Srebrenica for geopolitical purposes therefore represents their second killing, in which political structures and organizations in Sarajevo are complicit”, I wrote at the time, concluding that, for Sarajevo, sympathy for the victims of Srebrenica does not exist outside the political interpretation of it as “genocide.”
WHАТ IS TRACY GRANT?
In his letter to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Konaković stated that the encyclopedia’s “primary mission is to provide fact-based global educational resources,” while arguing that describing Srebrenica as a massacre was inconsistent “with numerous instruments of international law.” He further claimed that “ambiguous terms,” such as massacre, “directly undermine and insult the victims.”
Britannica editor Tracy Grant accepted what was, in effect, a political request. As a result, after three decades of adhering to what the author considers a scientifically grounded definition, the title of the encyclopedia’s entry was changed, as a compromise, to “Srebrenica Genocide,” while the subtitle now reads: “Also known as the Srebrenica Massacre.”
Konaković’s statement regarding Britannica‘s change of approach, triumphantly published on the website of the Sarajevo government, is itself, according to the author, a small monument to intellectual carelessness and ignorance of the circumstances, as it refers to editor Tracy Grant as though she were a man, despite the fact that she is a well-known British journalist. That Tracy Grant is not a man could easily have been inferred from her first name alone, which, considering Konaković’s concern with semantics, might at least have prompted him to verify who Tracy Grant actually is.
FROM ACADEMIC STANDARDS TO “INTERNATIONAL LEGAL DOCUMENTS”
It has long been well understood that the world of hyper-capitalism, which shapes the politics of the collective West, has exerted considerable influence over the world of academia. Yet, until relatively recently, respected encyclopedias and universities—or at least many of them—had managed to preserve a basic standard of academic integrity.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, or at least its online edition, provides, according to the author, a good example of decline in this regard. The encyclopedia’s decision, after three decades of adhering to what the author considers the scientific approach, to give precedence to a political interpretation and to judicial rulings that remain highly controversial from an academic perspective over scholarly evidence is, to put it mildly, scandalous and establishes a troubling precedent.
Reading Konaković’s statement on the Sarajevo government’s website, and observing what the author describes as his attempt to replace factual evidence with “international legal documents”—in addition to misidentifying the gender of the person to whom he had written—reminded the author of a case from the year he was born, one about which he had previously read extensively while researching instances in which judicial verdicts failed to withstand the test of actual facts.
In brief, following the Irish Republican Army bombings in Guildford, four young people were convicted and subsequently spent approximately fifteen years in prison. Public opinion experienced immediate relief, and the case had a significant impact on British counterterrorism policy.
However, in 1989, the case took a dramatic turn.
It was finally established that the defendants’ confessions had been coerced, that the police had concealed evidence, and that the results of the forensic investigation had been fundamentally misrepresented.
The case of the Guildford Four, together with the similar fate of the Maguire Seven, was never brought to a truly just conclusion. Those responsible for the wrongful convictions within the judiciary were, in fact, rewarded. They advanced to the highest ranks of the British judicial system and, most importantly, according to the author, were never held accountable for the failures that nearly destroyed the lives of innocent young people.
VERDICTS DO NOT DEFINE REALITY
Moreover, information available today indicates that, in the late 1970s, a group of Irish Republican Army members admitted responsibility for the Guildford pub bombing, explicitly stating that innocent people were serving prison sentences for a crime they had not committed. According to the author, the British investigation paid no attention whatsoever to this confession.
The case of the Guildford Four demonstrates that judicial verdicts influenced by political considerations—particularly when they are at odds with the factual record—cannot define reality.
No reasonable person, regardless of what a court may rule, will accept that soldiers killed in combat are the same as innocent victims executed by firing squad.
By politically redefining the crime committed in Srebrenica—which, according to the author, is objectively not genocide in the classical sense of the term—Encyclopaedia Britannica has, in effect, opened the door to revisions of its own content.
For example, its entry on Ante Pavelić does not state that genocide was committed against Serbs, Jews, and Roma during the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Instead, it says that “a brutal program of oppression against Orthodox Serbs and Jews” was carried out. The word genocide does not appear at all in that entry, nor is it used in the encyclopedia’s entry on the NDH.
“To make their state as ethnically Croatian as possible, the Ustaše undertook the extermination of its Serbian, Jewish, and Roma inhabitants with a brutality that shocked even the Germans and occasionally compelled the Italians to intervene,”states Britannica, yet it does not describe those crimes against these peoples in the territory of the NDH as genocide.
ONE STANDARD FOR THE BALKANS, ANOTHER FOR THE FAR EAST?
I have frequently referred to the example of Nanjing in my previous articles, and I consider it highly relevant to our discussion.
In Nanjing, over the course of approximately one month—from mid-December 1937 to mid-January 1938—the Japanese army brutally killed around 300,000 Chinese men, women, children, and elderly people. Even today, construction projects in Nanjing continue to uncover the remains of victims.
Western historiography refers to the crimes committed by Japanese troops in Nanjing exclusively as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing, a terminology that the author attributes to Japan’s importance as a Western ally in the Far East.
Jean-Louis Margolin, the French historian specializing in the history of the Far East, argued in his study Japanese Crimes in Nanjing, 1937–38: A Reappraisal (2006) that the crimes committed in Nanjing did not constitute genocide because, in his assessment, only young men and prisoners of war were systematically killed, whereas the remaining civilians were murdered and raped on a large scale in a less systematic manner.
According to the author, Encyclopaedia Britannica follows this reasoning consistently—except in the case of Srebrenica. The encyclopedia consistently refers to the events in Nanjing exclusively as a massacre, even though Chinese officials have repeatedly maintained that the Japanese occupation forces committed genocide in the city.
FROM AFRICA TO IRELAND, FROM LEOPOLD II TO QUEEN VICTORIA
A similar case can be found in the killing of millions of people (with some historians placing the death toll as high as ten million) in the Congo Free State, which was ruled directly as the personal possession of King Leopold II during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The undisputed genocide in the Congo Free State is described through the system established by Leopold II: the violence of the colonial administration, the methods used to punish the indigenous population, and even the dramatic population decline resulting from the systematic killing and exploitation of the local people.
When someone objects that the Congo Free State represents a textbook case of genocide, it is often pointed out that the legal concept of genocide cannot be applied in the strict sense of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention because, paradoxically, the question of specific intent to systematically destroy a protected group remains legally disputed.
A very similar issue arises with the Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1852), which was, according to the author, substantially caused by the policies of the government in London. The famine claimed at least one million lives and triggered mass emigration from Ireland, reducing the island’s population by approximately one quarter.
One of Encyclopaedia Britannica‘s strengths, in the context of historical, legal, and political classifications, is what the author considers its well-written entry on the Armenian Genocide. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, at some point, someone from Ankara could likewise remind the editorial board how those events are viewed in Turkey and, consequently, how the encyclopedia’s online edition ought to be edited.
The politically motivated editorial change in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica concerning the classification of the crime committed in Srebrenica in 1995, according to the author, provides Serbian intellectuals with ample reason to submit numerous requests to the editorial board, particularly regarding the history of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as well as the wars fought in present-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
How is it possible, the author asks, that after Konaković’s intervention the crime committed in Srebrenica can be classified as genocide, while the crimes committed in the NDH are described merely as “a brutal program of oppression against Orthodox Serbs and Jews”?
Smilja Avramov, the author argues, was correct when she foresaw that “Srebrenica” would ultimately serve to associate the concept of the Holocaust in public consciousness with the Serbs rather than with the Germans—a development that, in the author’s view, is now taking place.
Viewed through the lens of today’s geopolitical realities, the author concludes, it appears “logical” that the Serbs—who suffered millions of casualties during the First and Second World Wars and who refuse to align themselves with the coalition opposing Russia—are portrayed as a “genocidal” nation, rather than those nations and political leaders belonging to today’s Coalition of the Willing and their allies who, according to the author, actually committed genocide.
