Scholars (Not) Investigating Srebrenica. Academic Feuds and Other Shortcomings

It is now fifteen years since the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (renamed the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2010) published its Srebrenica report. I was one of the authors.^[1] The report dealt with one of the most painful episodes in recent Dutch and European history: the fall of the UN Safe Area of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, when a Dutch United Nations Battalion (Dutchbat)^[2] failed to stop the Bosnian Serb advance. What followed was the massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men, the only act of genocide in Europe after World War Two. The NIOD report had strong national impact and international resonance: it led to the Dutch government’s resignation on 16 April 2002.

Apart from national and international media attention, the report, which had been commissioned by the Dutch government in 1996, became the object of academic reflection in its own right. An exceptional example of a ‘history of the present’, it harvested a mix of esteem and criticism by leading Dutch historians and theorists in prominent journals such as the Low Countries Historical Review (Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, BMGN)^[3] and the Journal of History (Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis).^[4] It was also extensively discussed (together with other, non-academic reports) in two successive publications by a French team of editors.^[5] The Dutch historian, psychologist, and novelist Eelco Runia offered an unusual response, attacking the report from a psychoanalytic position in his article ‘“Forget about it”: “Parallel processing” in the Srebrenica Report’.^[6] Ten years later, Runia has spun essentially the same argument, albeit more elaborately, in a new book which in my view epitomises the current state of inertia, and of diminishing professional and ethical standards that characterises academic research on the Srebrenica genocide.

These responses to the NIOD and other reports make it clear that it is ‘exceptionally difficult to write about Srebrenica’, as historian Vladimir Petrović writes, in spite of the massive amount of evidence and information that has been gathered by, amongst others, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.^[7] Important gaps remain in our knowledge, since ‘information does not readily turn into knowledge’, as this author rightly argues. Some of the responses are driven by self-referential theoretical and moralistic considerations that do not contribute to a better understanding of the Srebrenica genocide. After the NIOD report’s publication, very few scholars have risked burning their fingers with what Petrović calls a ‘tormented field’, which is ‘inhabited by policemen, judges, prosecutors, historians, parliamentarians and high-ranking officials’, and, one may add, survivors, bystanders, eyewitnesses, politicians, NGO workers, and activists, who each express their own (often partial or partisan) perspectives in an increasingly ‘post-factual’ manner. The only recent example of a book that tries to provide a thorough examination of the available historical evidence was written by a journalist, Matthias Fink, which I reviewed in this journal.^[8]

The low point of the hands-off ‘theoretical’, ‘reflexive’, or ‘moralistic’ approach amongst academics writing about Srebrenica is Runia’s new book Het Srebrenicasyndroom. Hoe een historisch drama nagespeeld in plaats van opgehelderd werd (The Srebrenica Syndrome. How a Historical Drama was Reenacted instead of Clarified).^[9] The ‘enhanced’ version of his article from 2004, this weirdly egotistical book shows little genuine interest in the actual events of the Srebrenica massacre. Rather, Runia has chosen to continue a decade-long psychoanalytical crusade against the NIOD Srebrenica research team. As a member of the team and thus one of the individuals targeted by Runia’s criticism, I cannot review the book, which had been my original intention when writing this piece. Instead, I will offer here a personal commentary on the predicament of the historiography on the Srebrenica genocide, where most of the energy goes into waging academic feuds instead of conducting proper empirical research or providing careful analysis and theoretical reflection. The reader should therefore expect not a ‘neutral’ but most certainly an ‘informed’ response, although I will try to be impartial in summarising his argument.

Runia’s key contention is that the NIOD Srebrenica team, instead of illuminating the Srebrenica disaster, unintentionally reenacted it, replicating essential aspects of the traumatic event under investigation. In psychotherapy this is called ‘parallel processing’, whereby the therapist unconsciously repeats key aspects of the patient’s behaviour. Runia draws on Dominick LaCapra, who in his Writing History, Writing Trauma argues that historians, when dealing with traumatic events, often tend to lose their detachment and unwillingly ‘reenact’ certain aspects of the events they study.^[10] Runia’s narrative is mainly organised in an episodic manner, beginning with the presentation of the report, the government’s resignation, and the anger and betrayal he felt when he realised that nobody would be held personally accountable for what had happened. Runia chastises Prime Minister Wim Kok for ‘taking political responsibility’ without actually ‘accounting for the mistakes made’ in response to the NIOD report. He then describes a public debate in 2002 amongst historians discussing the report, where he and Hans Blom, then director of the NIOD and the Srebrenica team leader, were present and where Runia accused Blom of using the same wording to describe the research project (‘a risky project’) as the Dutch military had employed when they began their UN mission to Srebrenica in 1994. Blom rejected Runia’s suggestion of unconscious ‘copying’. Runia has now spent more than a decade obsessively trying to prove his point.

He presents the following ‘arguments’ for his assertion. First, he identifies parallels between the Dutch army and the NIOD, two established institutions that he claims saw their survival threatened by the end of the Cold War and the publication of the last instalment of Lou de Jong’s Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Kingdom of the Netherlands during World War Two, 13 volumes) in 1988.^[11] Both were looking for alternative ‘missions’ to justify their existence. Second, they went about doing this in a similarly stubborn fashion, without mobilising available expertise. Third, both got caught up in an ‘enclave’ situation, being dependent on a single powerful player (Dutchbat on the Serb besiegers; the NIOD Srebrenica team on the Dutch government) for ‘supplies’. Four, recruitment strategies were analogous: as in the case of Dutchbat, the NIOD ‘battalion’ was recruited externally and on an ad-hoc basis, producing a haphazardly assembled team with little esprit de corps, plagued by tensions and unable to write a coherent text. Five, Dutchbat’s tandem leadership (with commander and deputy) was reproduced by the NIOD by having two captains commanding the ship, as it were (Hans Blom and Peter Romijn), and, on top of that, the leadership copied the consensus-seeking style of Dutch politics. Six, the enclave situation was recreated physically: the team locked itself up in a securitised section of the NIOD building in Amsterdam, ‘besieged’ by the Dutch media who sought to penetrate the academic enclave. Seven, the Srebrenica team endured hopelessness, panic, and nervous breakdowns at the end of their undertaking, mirroring what the Dutch soldiers had experienced in the days before the fall of Srebrenica, craving to bring the mission to an end as quickly as possible. And finally, Runia claims without irony that the number of pages of the report corresponds to the number of victims.^[12]

However hilarious some of this may sound, Runia concludes that the NIOD Srebrenica team was deeply entangled in unconscious ‘parallel processing’, which, he claims, manifested itself through improper and provocative behaviour or acting out while interacting with the public. First, he notices the refusal to reach conclusions on the basis of a mass of empirical data, leaving it to the public to do so; this supposedly mimics Dutchbat’s ‘neutrality’.^[13] Second, instead of providing a clear and concise narrative, the report replicates the situation’s messiness, passing on the powerlessness and confusion felt by Dutchbat to its readers. By following the Rankean paradigm of showing ‘what really happened’, the team textually resurrected the event, casting it down at the readers’ feet, Runia argues. NIOD’s third provocation is its condescending attitude when deeming that the Dutch media scandals around Dutchbat’s performance (and the Ministry of Defense’s cover-up attempts) were secondary to the real tragedy. The fourth and final provocation Runia sees is NIOD’s arrogance towards colleagues who expressed criticism, combined with its refusal to enter into discussion with journalists and non-academics. Runia sees this stance as a form of haughty deterrence, a means whereby the NIOD team purported to show itself ‘in full control in this enclave’, warding off any hostile attempts to attack and penetrate the NIOD redoubt.

Being theory-driven and speculative, some of Runia’s ideas sound interesting, but they can easily be challenged: NIOD’s existence was not threatened at the time the project was accepted (a new mission had already been agreed upon), for example, and it did mobilise available and non-partisan expertise and enter into serious debate with the report’s critics. Other points are too absurd to be taken seriously. For me, the most problematic aspects of the book are its self-satisfied and egotistical quality, its lack of ethics, and its refusal to engage in responsible debate, which seems to be a common issue when dealing with traumatic historical events. First, ignoring the local and international UN context, Runia narrows the scope of the Srebrenica tragedy so that it is primarily a Dutch affair. My own research, for example, focused on the local Bosnian setting; in this context, the tendency to zoom in on the Dutch role seems only a form of navel-gazing that obfuscates our view of the entirety of events in Srebrenica.^[14]One has to see the role of the Dutch (which, to be absolutely clear, is nothing to be proud of) within a much broader context and restore a proper sense of proportion. Second, the book reads like a personalised saga that casts the author himself as the main protagonist, an omniscient observer in conversation with himself. He is so persuaded by his own arguments that he deems it unnecessary to empirically investigate the actual psychological effects of doing this research experienced by the team members (although he seems to ‘know’ that some team members suffered mental breakdowns or saw their marriages collapse). He did not conduct a single interview with an NIOD researcher, but that does not stop him from sorting them (following LaCapra) into ‘identifiers’ who relived the tragedy and identified with the victims, and ‘objectifiers’ who kept an emotional distance. This is all rather speculative and shallow, and overlooks, for example, the fact that the team carried out a broad variety of activities; the research tasks were divided in accordance with the disciplinary background and expertise of the team’s members, and resulted in varying consequences.

I would like to refer to another book I reviewed for this journal,^[15] Ivana Macek’s edited volume Engaging Violence. Trauma, Memory and Representation, which thoughtfully analyses how scholars deal with the emotional stresses provoked by this kind of research.^[16] Maček mentions a variety of possible mental and physical responses, parallel processing being one of them alongside forms of vicarious traumatisation. Hence as a psychologist Runia should know better than to make the claims he puts forth: he should know that it is unethical to diagnose individuals publicly and without anamnesis. He belongs to that category of academics, admonished by Maček, who are not interested in the difficult nature of this research and come up with combative and judgmental positions for the sake of ‘scoring points’. Also, even though he characterises his research as a form of ‘participant observation’,^[17] Runia breaches a key principle of this open-ended anthropological strategy: namely, that the researcher should suspend his or her initial assumptions and confront empirical realities in a systematic, open-minded manner, so as to learn, often, that these are much more complex than, and may well contradict, what had been assumed at the beginning.

Runia is right to ask the question, ‘What does the Srebrenica catastrophe say about “us”, the Dutch, and who are “we” that we allowed such a thing to happen?’^[18] He is also correct to argue that the past will be ‘amongst us’ instead of ‘behind us’ as long as we do not attempt to answer uncomfortable questions and confront ‘the bad guys’ within us.^[19] I argue that despite its political abstinence and refusal to adopt the role of an arbiter, the Srebrenica team, of which I was a member, came up with answers to such questions by condemning Dutch politicians for occupying the high moral ground and taking little interest in the actual effectiveness of its decisions. Referring to Max Weber’s distinction between Gesinnungsethik (an ethics of conviction) and Verantwortungsethik (an ethics of responsibility), the NIOD argued that ‘the Dutch’ have tended to lean towards the former ethos, leading to tragic consequences as in the case of Srebrenica.

The NIOD report did redistribute (some of) the blame for the Srebrenica tragedy from the most visible and exposed actors, such as the Dutchbat soldiers, to the politicians and the army generals that took the decision to send them to Srebrenica. In his speech on 10 April 2002, Blom questioned the moral and humanitarian motivations behind the action and the Dutch political ambitions to play a conspicuous role in the international arena, which drove the Netherlands to undertake ‘an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission’. Whereas other countries turned down the request to go to Srebrenica, the Netherlands accepted, being largely unprepared for such a mission and playing down its risks. What the NIOD report indeed did—clearly echoed in the media following its publication—was to put the responsibility on ‘our own’ side, on the shoulders of Dutch politicians, the higher army echelons and the Ministry of Defence, without forgetting others who bore responsibility for the events as well: the Serb perpetrators, as well as the UN and the international community. The Serbs were ‘the bad guys’ (although not the only ones), but it was ultimately ‘the good guys amongst us’ who, with their noble but unrealistic intentions, were responsible for the Dutch malperformance. Whether this answers Runia’s key question is for the reader to judge.

In any case, what this book shows is that rather than doing serious research, it is easier to attack a group of researchers who spent five years of their lives to understand what happened in Srebrenica—some indeed at a personal price— and ‘diagnose’ them collectively as being misguided by their own psychological responses without ever testing the analysis or discussing it with them. One would only wish that the author had used his professional skills, either as a historian or as a psychologist, to shed light on the dynamics that led to the massacre, where much work can still be done (or to examine the role of the Dutch in that drama, if this be the researcher’s priority), or, alternately, to genuinely and empathically learn what this research does to those who pursue it.