Even as European politicians and journalists continue to fulminate over the denial of freedom in Putin's Russia or Xi's China, they are more than happy to stamp out freedom of expression in Europe itself.

The other day, Bosnia and Herzegovina made it illegal to deny "genocide." One must correct that statement right away because Bosnia and Herzegovina didn't actually do anything. The country took no sovereign decision arrived at by elected representatives. Instead, amendments to the country's criminal code were decreed by the outgoing High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, and published in the country's official gazette, without any legislative consideration or debate ever having taken place.

Inzko has, needless to say, never been elected to anything. He is a bureaucrat appointed by something called the Peace Implementation Council, a body comprising 55 countries and international organizations, set up to oversee the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Accords. The accords formally brought the Bosnian war to an end. The unelected Inzko has been High Representative since 2009. Inzko, needless to say, is not from Bosnia. He is an Austrian diplomat of Slovenian descent. He is paid about half a million euros a year. His replacement also has no ties to Bosnia: Christian Schmidt is a member of the German Christian Social Union who served as a German minister of food and agriculture from 2014 to 2018.

Though an unelected bureaucrat, whoever holds the position of high representative is far more powerful than any of Bosnia's elected politicians. Back in 1999, the-then high representative, Carlos Westendorp, took it upon himself to fire Nikola Poplašen, the elected president of Republika Srpska, the Serb part of the two entities that came to comprise the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina that emerged from the 1992-1995 war. Poplašen's crime was refusal to accept the a decision of an international panel of arbitrators that the strategic town of Brčko be removed from Serb control. In addition, Poplašen sought to dismiss as prime minister the Western-favored Milorad Dodik. Dodik however didn't need to be fired. he subsequently resigned in protest over the Brčko arbitration panel decision.

Arbitration panels, high representatives--if the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina sounds like a colonial outpost run by imperial rulers hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, that's because it is. Indeed, the governor of the country's central bank is appointed by the International Monetary Fund.

No surprise then that the changing of the criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina clearly falls within the jurisdiction of an unelected, international bureaucrat. Breaking the new law, in the words of Valentin Inzko, the law's creator, would be punished by prison terms ranging from six months to five years. According to a CNN report, this punishment would be meted out to anyone who "publicly condones, denies, grossly trivializes or tries to justify" the genocide or war crimes committed during Bosnia's 1992-1995 conflict. The decree also recommends prison terms for anyone engaging in "recognition... (and giving of) mementos, or any privileges" to convicted war criminals.Clearly, Inzko's decree goes far beyond what is usually referred to "genocide denial." Instead, Inzko seeks to deem it a crime to call into question the official approved version of history of the wars in the Former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

How does this official, approved history run? That the wars that took place in the Former Yugoslavia were not triggered by by the insistence of its republics and provinces to seek independence without bothering to negotiate the terms of their exit. That responsibility for the humanitarian crises that bedeviled the successor states of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia rests not with those who insisted on secession at all costs, and those who, willfully and recklessly, served as the secessionists’ enablers. That war was not inevitable once the European Union and the United States accepted, or more accurately, encouraged, the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the face of fierce opposition from at least 40% of its population—the Serbs—and probably from a substantial majority of Yugoslavs.

That it wasn't the U.S. and E.U.'s bizarre decisions, granting statehood here, refusing statehood there, conjuring nations and states out of thin air while making others disappear that caused the wars. No, blame attached to the most implacable opponent of Yugoslav dissolution, namely, Serbia and the Serbian nation as a whole. The world must be forced to accept that the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo weren’t about the E.U.’s and the U.S.’s premature recognition of the secessionist states and their non-negotiable decree that arbitrary administrative boundaries created by the Communist rulers of the SFRY should serve as international frontiers. It wasn’t about millions of people suddenly finding themselves citizens of states to which they didn’t want to belong; no, it was about the aggressive war waged by the Serbs scattered throughout Yugoslavia to create a “Greater Serbia.”

No questioning of this official narrative is to be permitted. Understandably so--for it seriously undermines the rationales for NATO's existence. The report in Politico quotes Inzko as informing the three-member presidency:

I would like to emphasize that there can be no reconciliation without the recognition of crimes and culpability.

Hate speech, the glorification of war criminals and revisionism, or rather open genocide and war crimes denial, prevent societies from facing their collective past.

They represent the repeated humiliation of victims and their closest of kin, while also prolonging injustice and endangering peaceful social relations.

This of course is standard boilerplate: no peace without justice, no reconciliation without prior retribution. The truth is the opposite. The perpetual demonization of the Serbs, the ceaseless attribution of responsibility for wars and war crimes almost exclusively to the Serbs has created bitterness and justified resentment and has postponed any reconciliation in Bosnia into the indefinite future.

Interestingly, CNN reports, that very same Milorad Dodik, whom Westendorp had sought to protect back in 1999 and who is now the Republika Srpska's representative in the country's joint presidency, responded to the new decree by warning that this could lead to the dissolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina:

This is the nail in Bosnia's coffin. The Republika Srpska has no other option but to start the...dissolution.

Yet another brilliant maneuver by the arrogant Western powers that bring chaos and conflict wherever they go.