Physical destruction of mosques enabled wholesale rewriting of local history by nationalist mayors.
Evidence
After all the mosques in the primarily Muslim town were dynamited and ploughed over, the new Serb nationalist mayor declared: “There never were any mosques in Zvornik.” Destroyed with those mosques was the evidence not only of the Muslim heritage of Zvornik but also of five hundred years of shared living between Christians and Muslims. History could now be rewritten according to the desires of those who wished to claim that this land was always and purely Christian Serb. In May 1993 to celebrate Zvornik’s new status as loo percent “pure” and cleansed of all Muslims, the mayor dedicated a new church, renamed a local, formerly Muslim village “Saint Stephen,” and kissed a crucifix. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 62
Categorization
- XREF: Directly instantiates the ‘history is manufactured’ theme; parallels the INCITE journal chapter and Olweus cycles where erasing material evidence precedes ideological re-education.
- CANDY: The mayor declaring ‘There never were any mosques in Zvornik’ after ordering them dynamited is a grimly memorable, quotable line.
Related
- A church was commissioned to commemorate an ethnically cleansed city (similarity 0.81)
- Cultural destruction was performed to make later denial plausible (similarity 0.80)