Genocide accusations were weaponized as signals to launch genocidal attacks
Evidence
By the time the Bosnian conflict began, the national mythology, hatred, and unfounded charges of actual genocide in Ko sovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had been shaped into a code: the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide. In 1992, witnesses began to notice a pattern in the atrocities by Serb forces in Bosnia. A massacre would take place in a village immediately after the local news announced that the Croats and Muslims were about to exterminate Serbs. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 194
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the general pattern of manufactured crisis claims preceding violence (Congo, Rwanda’s RTLM radio). — connects to: Belief in a transnational Tutsi extermination conspiracy was manufactured to justify Hutu massacres — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 76; The internet enables nationalist extremists to advocate genocide — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 202
- SEED: Could be an essay angle: how propaganda not only precedes but formally synchronizes with violence — the local news broadcast as a triggering signal.
Related
- Genocide in Bosnia shared structural features with dismissed U.S. militia threats (similarity 0.79)
- Historical victimhood narratives can be mobilized to incite new genocides (similarity 0.79)
- Balkanism falsely frames Balkan violence as fated by history or blood (similarity 0.78)
- Serbs exaggerated the Kosovo threat as genocide despite real Albanian violence (similarity 0.78)