Twenty-five years after the Srebrenica genocide, when more than 8,000 men and boys were killed, that atrocity is still downplayed and individual responsibility for nationalising crimes remains an issue of secondary importance, a panel discussion held in Zagreb on Wednesday heard.

“As long as those crimes are nationalised and socialised in Serbia and Croatia or in some other context, they remain collective crimes and individual guilt remains an issue of secondary importance,” philosopher and political analyst Zarko Puhovski said.

He noted that the unprecedented atrocity had been declared a municipal genocide by an international tribunal, and pointed to frequent manipulation of facts in concrete cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

All of that are questions that are less important when compared to the question of how it is possible that one can still hear at stadiums the chant “Knife, wire, Srebrenica”, Puhovski said, noting that, contrary to expectations, the passage of time, in the public conscience, had not resulted in a demonstration of shame at belonging to the ethnic group that committed the crime.

Historian Hrvoje Klasic said that the denial of the Srebrenica atrocity was not an exception as that phenomenon had happened frequently throughout history, with apologies and acknowledgement of crimes by politicians being hypocritical moves in societies that do everything contrary to that.

“As long as Seselj, Karadzic and Sljivancanin are considered national heroes and celebrities in Serbia, as long as institutions across Bosnia and Herzegovina are named after war criminals and as long as in Croatia the narrative ‘either a criminal or a hero’ is promoted, those societies will have a major problem, so it is hypocritical to say that we accept that what happened there was genocide,” said Klasic.

The head of the Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past nongovernmental organisation, Vesna Terselic, said that the crime in Srebrenica was downplayed even though it had been investigated and facts had been determined beyond a reasonable doubt by ICTY investigators, just as in Croatia and other post-Yugoslav countries other genocides and war crimes were downplayed.

“The question we want to ask those societies and their politicians is ‘What do we do to make the denial of genocide and other war crimes stop'”, said Terselic.