After

It isn’t all over when genocide ‘ends’. For the survivors the trauma of their experiences continues, day after day, night after night…and never ends. Part of the pain that the survivors feel is not just the loss of loved ones and the destruction of everything that they help dear but also the denial that continues. Perpetrators and their supporters deny that a genocide ever took place. Even before genocides are ‘over’ those that commit the atrocities go to great lengths to hide their crimes. During the Holocaust the Nazis went to great trouble to hide the crimes that they knew that they were committing. As early as September 1942 the man in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1m Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others would be murdered, went to a place called Kulmhof. The commandant of Auschwtz, Rudolf Höss, visited Kulmhof so that he could see a demonstration of the equipment there. This machinery was used to burn bodies. Höss wanted to find a way to remove all trace of the people who he and his men were murdering in the gas chambers within their camp. Later, in October 1943, the Nazis forced others to dig up the bodies of 40,000 Jews who they had murdered around the city of Minsk. The ‘Sonderkommando’ who they forced to do the job were made to burn the bodies they had dug up so that not a trace of the crime that the Nazis had committed remained. Just a couple of days afterwards, Heinrich Himmler spoke to the leaders of the SS organisation that he commanded. He openly admitted that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews but told his audience that what the Nazis had done ‘has not and will not be spoken of’. Even before it was clear that the Nazis would definitely lose the Second World War they were trying to hide what they had done. They were denying that the Holocaust had happened. This act of denial would be repeated in the genocides that followed. After the murder of 8,372 men and boys in the days after July 11th in 1995 the Bosnian Serbs made a big effort to hide the crime that they had committed. Bodies were buried. They were then dug up and taken to be reburied in other mass graves further away. The perpetrators used bulldozers to dig up the bodies. Unfortunately for the killers satellites were watching as they attempted to hide their crimes.

Even with the proof of what happened established and confirmed by international courts the genocide in Bosnia is still denied. Even the current mayor of Srebrenica, a Serb called Mladen Grujičić, denies that a genocide took place in the town. 39

Omar al-Bashir, the leader of Sudan who unleashed a genocide against people in Darfur, has spent years denying that anything of the sort took place. At the time his government threw aid agencies, who were trying to help the victims of the violence in Darfur, out of the region. He did so not only so that survivors might not receive help, but also to help cover up the crimes that had been, and were, being committed. As Mukesh Kapila recollects al-Bashir’s regime also took a lot of trouble to prevent the United Nations from finding out what was going on in Darfur. The President’s henchmen did everything in their power to make sure that observers were not allowed to get close to places where the Janjaweed and government forces had recently attacked…and made sure that ordinary people in Darfur could not speak freely to UN representatives. It may seem ridiculous to think that genocide can be denied when there are so many facts, so much evidence and so many witnesses. Yet it happens…and when it does happen it insults those who perished. Denial also allows the hatred that brought genocides about to flourish once more and it excuses those who took no action to prevent genocide from taking place. That is why we must all fight against genocide denial, whether it is Holocaust denial or the denial of the Genocide against the Tutsi, the Bosnian Genocide or the genocide in Darfur.

Credit: Remembering Srebrenica