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Suljagic, 46, wanted his father to be buried next to his brother, Suljagic’s uncle, who was one of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the space of a few July days in 1995 after the fall of the United Nations safe haven in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia.
A change in the law between 2003 and 2007 allowed him to do so by declaring that relatives of Srebrenica victims could be buried alongside them at Potocari. Then the law changed back, limiting the cemetery to only those killed in July 1995.
Such details, however, were lost on Twitter users who in June wrote: “Emir Suljagic, exhume your father from the cemetery in Potocari!”
The words originated in an article posted on June 10 media portal based in the main Bosnian Serb town of Banja Luka and called vrbasmedia. They were picked up by a number of Twitter accounts heavily engaged in genocide-denial.
One of the accounts goes by the name Bodljikava, or ‘barbed’, as in ‘barbed wire’. Bodljikava has spent years denying that genocide occurred at Srebrenica, as the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as well as local courts have ruled.
Bodljikava joined Twitter in June 2013 and has since posted almost 179,000 tweets. The frequency of tweets and topics she chooses has won her more than 11,600 followers on Twitter, a virtual army for spreading her views on Srebrenica. According to Twitter Audit, most of her followers are real, meaning they are not considered bots.
On June 10, Bodljikava tweeted a copy of the death certificate of Suljagic’s father and accused Suljagic of “using deceit” to portray him as a genocide victim “even though his father, Suljo, passed away on December 24, 1992.”
Bodljikava is one of 20 Twitter accounts identified by BIRN as consistently publishing content over the past 12 months that denies genocide occurred in Srebrenica. BIRN analysed these accounts and concluded that none of them are fake, even though not all of them have the same reach, which may explain why their tweets remain under the radar.
Twitter, said sociologist Sarina Bakic of the University of Sarajevo, “is surely becoming another platform for spreading hate and denying genocide”.
Suljagic said such denial narratives were “dangerous because they pollute the atmosphere on a daily basis” and feed into right-wing discourses around the world, from the Balkans to Christchurch, New Zealand, where a right-wing gunman played a Serb nationalist song referencing Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic while driving to a mosque where he would kill 51 people in March 2019.
“Denial of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the genocidal operation in Srebrenica is an integral part of all right-wing platforms in the region,” said Suljagic, a journalist, politician and current director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial.
“The denial is an integral part of those platforms in the same way the denial was an integral part of the ideology that led to the massacre in Christchurch.”
‘Nothing has been done’
Emir Suljagić in Srebrenica Memorial Centre. Photo: BIRN BiH
In The Hague and in the Balkans, courts have sentenced at least 48 people to more than 700 years in prison for war crimes in Srebrenica. A number of high-ranking Serbs, including Karadzic, have been convicted of genocide, the most recent being Bosnian Serb wartime military commander Ratko Mladic.
Yet on Twitter, revisionism and denial frequently pass unchecked.
Via of a search of Twitter posts over the past year, a period that covered the 25th anniversary of Srebrenica, BIRN found more than 200 tweets containing specific hashtags – #srebrenica, #srebrenica25, #ratkomladic – and claiming that Serbs were the victims of genocide in Bosnia, not Bosniaks.
The 20 accounts identified by BIRN over that period remain online, their tweets untouched.
According to Remembering Srebrenica, a British-based charity, only a handful of several hundred accounts reported to Twitter for genocide-denial last year have since been removed.
“Last year, which was especially important, we noticed an increase in the hate comments, particularly those denying or glorifying the genocide of war criminals responsible for it,” the group said. Of hundreds it reported to Twitter for ‘expressing hate towards of a group of people’, “around six” have been suspended, it said.
Ahmed Hrustanović in Srebrenica. Photo: BIRN BiH
Ahmed Hrustanovic went further.
The Srebrenica imam began using Twitter in late 2019, sharing his experiences since returning to the area in 2011 and trying to reach people for help in compiling a collection of letters written by his father, who was among the more than 7,000 genocide victims. Then the threats started.
“They reach me easily and threaten me and write all sorts of things,” he said.
BIRN found that Bodljikava mentioned Hrustanovic four times last year. When Bodljikava’s posts began being shared widely, Hrustanovic went to the police.
Asked about the response, Hrustanovic replied: “Nothing has been done in that respect.” In Bosnia, genocide denial is not banned by law, while online hate speech is regulated by the Criminal Code, which covers “national, racial and religious hate.”
Hrustanovic blocked Bodljikava and 147 other accounts from which he received insults and threats, but their tweets about him and about the genocide at Srebrenica remain online.
BIRN contacted Bodljikava for comment. There was no response, but a screenshot of the request for comment was ‘tweeted publicly’ accompanied by the claim that, “They are initiating the topic of genocide denial right now when we are opening the topic of false victims in Potocari.”
Within several hours the tweet received more than 240 likes and was retweeted more than 70 times.
Mladic lionised, Oric accused
Ratko Mladić is sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity in June 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR
In July last year, when the world marked a quarter of a century since Srebrenica, dozens of tweets went out denying the events of 1995 and their classification as genocide. Most said that more than 3,000 Serb civilians were also killed in the area during the war, blaming Bosniak troops led by Naser Oric.
“Europe is blind to the genocide against Serbs, but #misesjecamo [we remember]!” said one. Another account, called SerbianMatrix, wrote that “there was no genocide in Srebrenica but only dead people who should have known better than to follow Naser Oric in slaughtering Serbs.”
Oric was initially convicted of war crimes in Srebrenica and nearby Bratunac but then acquitted on appeal in 2008 in The Hague. In 2018, a Bosnian court acquitted him of killing three Serb prisoners in 1992.
While the accounts identified by BIRN condemn Oric, they lionise Mladic as a hero.
“He defended and saved the Serbian people from the aggression of domestic traitors and NATO,” one, under the name Yugoslav Alien, tweeted in December last year.
That tweet remains online, but another more recent one, by Gorica Dodik, the daughter of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, and declaring “Long live Ratko Mladic’, has been removed on the ground it broke rules pertaining to “glorification of violence”.
In early June, Twitter said it had updated its policies and would not allow violent references to mass murder, violent events or specific means of violence in which what it calls ‘protected categories’ were primary victims.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
David Pettigrew, professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University in the US, said that while Twitter had expanded the scope and number of so-called ‘protected groups’ when it comes to hate speech concerning the Holocaust and genocide, “the implementation seems to be a daunting process.”
Noting Twitter’s removal of the Mladic tweet by Dodik’s daughter, Pettigrew said it was unclear why the company had failed to act in the case of Dodik’s party ally, Rajko Vasic, who on June 5 appeared to threaten violence against an elderly Bosniak woman after a church, built in her yard during the war when she was a refugee, was demolished.
“One of Vasic’s previous tweets had been condemned as a ‘criminal offence’ by High Representative [Valentin] Inzko because it threatened another genocide, but I do not believe that tweet was ever removed – probably because it preceded the current policy,” Pettigrew told BIRN.
Earlier this year, BIRN published an investigation showing that the tools used by social media giants to protect their community guidelines are failing in the Balkans: posts and accounts that violate the rules often remain available even when breaches are acknowledged, while others that remain within those rules can be suspended without any clear reason.
According to BIRN’s findings, almost half of reports in Bosnian, Serbian or Montenegrin on Twitter are about hate speech. One in two posts reported as hate speech, threatening violence or harassment in Bosnian, Serbian or Montenegrin language, remains online.
One of the reasons may be that the assessment itself is done in the first instance by an algorithm and, if necessary, a human gets involved later. BIRN’s research showed that things get messy when it comes to the languages of the Balkans, precisely because of the specificity of language and context.
At the time, Twitter told BIRN that it is increasing the use of machine learning and automation to enforce the rules.
“By using technology, more than 50 per cent of abusive content that’s enforced on our service is surfaced proactively for human review instead of relying on reports from people using Twitter,” said a company spokesperson.
