Protest Letter to Professor John Kimberly, Executive Director, Wharton–INSEAD Alliance regarding Edward S. Herman, genocide denier and revisionist of historic facts

February 15, 2013

 

2000 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall

3620 Locust Walk

Philadelphia, PA 19104-6370, USA

 

Professor John Kimberly

Executive Director, Wharton–INSEAD Alliance;

kimberly@wharton.upenn.edu

 

Dear Professor Kimberly:

 

As concerned representatives of American, Canadian, and European organizations and as intellectuals, we are requesting that you distance your organization from the comments made in the exclusive interview by Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he spoke with host John Robles, the Voice of Russia, on his views regarding the events surrounding the Srebrenica Genocide - http://english.ruvr.ru/search.html?q=Dr+Edvard+Herman.

 

Edward S. Herman and other genocide deniers and revisionists of historic facts should not be allowed a platform to continue their hurtful campaign of double killing of the victims of genocide that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

The historic events surrounding the Serbian Army takeover of the United Nations (UN) “safe haven” are of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995, have become well known to the world.

 

Despite the UN Security Council Resolution declaring that the enclave was to be “free from armed attack or any other hostile act,” Serbs launched attacks and captured the town. Within a few days, approximately 30,000 Bosniaks, most of them women, children and elderly people, who were living in the area, were uprooted, and in an atmosphere of terror, loaded onto overcrowded buses by Serb forces and transported across the confrontation lines. Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men of Srebrenica, however, were consigned to a separate fate, as thousands of them were taken prisoner, detained in brutal conditions and then executed. More than 8,000 Bosniak civilians were summarily and brutally executed by Serbs in the days after the fall of Srebrenica.

 

In March 1995, Radovan Karadzic, then president of Republika Srpska, and war criminal currently standing trial for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued a directive, concerning the long-term strategy for Srebrenica. The directive, known as “Directive 7,” specified: “By planned and well-thought out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica.”

 

The extreme gravity of the crimes committed by Serbs is legally and internationally well established through international war crimes rulings. 

 

To borrow from Lemkin’s ‘two phases of genocide’: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.

 

What does Mr. Edward S. Herman want the world to believe?

 

In February of 2010 a group of ‘foreign intellectuals’ published an open letter to President Boris Tadic of Serbia and to the Serbian Parliament, urging them not to pass a parliamentary resolution recognizing and condemning the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The list of signatories is headed by Mr. Edward S. Herman, while other signatories included Diana Johnston, Christopher Black and David Peterson. These are all prominent Srebrenica genocide deniers: people who openly deny not only that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide, but the well documented facts of the massacre itself.

 

It is not surprising that Mr. Edward S. Herman is at the forefront and leading in the deliberate misrepresentation of facts, while simultaneously spreading Serbian mythology – claiming that Serbs were victims of a worldwide conspiracy, and that all sides are equally guilty for what happened during the aggression executed by the Republics of Serbia and Montenegro against the sovereign country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

Mr. Herman continues to ignore the vital facts on the ground that confirm the wars in the Balkans were perpetrated by Serbian aggressors with the aim of carving out imagined ethnic homelands by destroying Bosnia’s common life, multi-ethnicity and the homes of ordinary people. These facts are historically proven and occurred all over Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the Srebrenica and Zepa Genocides.

 

Mr. Herman's opinions have been disproven many times over by the findings of several international bodies charged with weighing the mountain of evidence impartially. In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the case of Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The Hague, ruled that the massacre of Srebrenica's male inhabitants constituted genocide. Judge Meron, one of the judges in the case wrote: “General-major Krstic carried out the genocidal massacre following on orders from former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, killing more than 8000 Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys. They stripped all the male prisoners, military and civilians, elderly and young, of their belongings and identification and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”

 

The European Parliament proclaimed every July 11^th a “day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide,” when “more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys…were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces…making this event the biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the end of the Second World War.”

 

Canada declared July 11th as Srebrenica Remembrance Day, an anniversary that raises awareness of the tragic suffering of the people of Bosnia and honors and remembers those who were killed as a result of the policies of genocide. With this declaration, Canada acknowledges the importance of this event in helping to inform future generations and assist all of us in working towards peaceful coexistence; since closure for the Bosniak people can only be achieved through truth and justice.

 

The United States of America declared the genocide "a stain on our collective consciousness" in violation of our promise of "never again" after the Nazi atrocities of World War II, and stated that "there can be no lasting peace without justice."

  

In other words, to claim the nostrum of “moral equivalence” between the “fighting factions” in Bosnia, as Mr. Herman repeatedly does, is irresponsible. Mr. Herman joins the ranks of other genocide deniers and history revisionists such as Milan Bulajic, Kole Kilibarda, Diana Johnstone, Stephen Karganovic, Sanjoy Mahajan, George Pumphrey, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Vera Vratusa, Nebojsa Malic, and Darko Trifunovic.

 

More concerning is that serious and reputable news sources continue to give legitimacy to those who spread misinformation, like Mr. Edward S. Herman does, without regard to the human implications of their hurtful double killing of victims of genocide in Bosnia. Hijacking genocide and subjecting such historic events to cruel, quasi-academic dissection is misguided and it tarnishes the memory of those innocent civilians who were slaughtered.

 

Mr. Edward S. Herman, and others like him, prevent victims and survivors to overcome what is now known as the “Srebrenica Syndrome” - an inability to get on with their lives because of the lack of definite news on the fate of their lost sons, husbands and fathers – without even going into the physical and psychological suffering of the survivors inflicted by the people which Mr. Edward S. Herman is so eagerly defending.

 

Having Mr. Edward S. Herman on your program, as an alleged expert on the issue of genocide is wrong.

 

Only the lowest form of hypocrisy allows one to blame the victims for the atrocities committed to them; instead of focusing on the guilty and allowing our civilization to live up to the creed of “Never Again.”

 

In the end, no words of comment can lay bare the truth of Srebrenica Genocide more graphically than a plain narrative of the events themselves, or expose more poignantly the waste of war and ethnic hatreds and the long road that must still be travelled to ease a bitter legacy.

 

 

Regards,

 

Sanja Seferovic-Drnovsek, J.D., Med

Director, Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center, sanja.bagi@gmail.com

 

Mirsad Mujovic, Ph.D.                      

Member of the Governing Board of Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center (BAGI), academy@graduate.org

 

Haris Alibasic, MPA

President, Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB), cnab@bosniak.org

 

Professor Emir Ramic

Director, Institute for Research Genocide, Canada, info@instituteforgenocide.org

 

Ajla Delkic, M.A.

Executive Director, Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH), adelkic@acbih.org

 

Professor Dr. Smail Cekić

Director, Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law, University of Sarajevo, info@institut-genocid.ba

 

Professor Dr. Senadin Lavić

President, Bosniak Cultural Association “Renaissance”, Sarajevo, preporod@bih.net.ba