In order to protect future generations, it is of essential importance that there is an educational policy and curriculum about the dangers of the ideology of genocide.
Having that in mind, the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada (IGC) has for several years already been developing activities for the study of the genocide in Srebrenica and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in Canadian schools. Thus, students of Canadian schools in the last two school years had the opportunity to study the genocide in Srebrenica and BiH. Acquiring knowledge about genocide represents an effective way of re-examining fundamental moral questions and structured research of human behavior.
Reflection on these events helps in developing awareness of the values of pluralism and encourages acceptance of diversity in a pluralistic society. That is very important, not in order to relativize the event, what happened cannot be changed, but in order to prevent future possible genocides, to understand how it is at all possible in human society that Srebrenica happened, and to know with that knowledge how to prevent such events in the future.
The genocide in Srebrenica is an undeniable social and legal fact. This is confirmed most explicitly by the final judgments of international courts and the Court of BiH. The trap of the culture of reconciliation in the form of a “culture of forgetting” is very actively and perfidiously imposed on the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica and BiH.
The opposite social process is necessary. Nurturing a “culture of remembrance” as a culture of truth. Only a culture of remembrance, as a culture of objective historical truth, learned in school classrooms, is an obstacle to the production of stereotypes about the victims of genocide. If the genocide in Srebrenica and BiH can without problem be represented in educational policies and curricula of Canadian schools, why and for what reason are there no topics about genocide in educational policies and curricula in BiH? Is there at work a “hidden curriculum” by which the truth is being encrypted to the victims of genocide with the aim of forgetting, a specific form of memoricide, as one of the prerequisites of a new genocide? Who and why forbids” that in textbooks there be found data about final judgments of international courts in The Hague, the Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the Court of BiH?
The International Expert Team of IGC will deal with these important questions and mobilize researchers, survivors, victims, descendants of victims, and witnesses of genocide together with all friends of truth and justice for the purpose of forming a critical mass of the public for a change of attitude of the BiH political establishment toward educational policy and curricula about genocide and other crimes.
Education and upbringing in the learning process are important components of socialization, in which certain knowledge, values, norms, customs, and culture are adopted in the function of remembrance and permanent memory. That is a permanent obligation of present generations toward all victims of genocide in Srebrenica and BiH.
