Earlier this morning the Sarajevo Times received comment from Victoria University in Australia on their recent decision to remove a quote discussing the ethnic cleansing and genocide that took place in Bosnia, from the subject ASA1024 Applied Human Rights.
A spokesperson for Victoria University expressed the following to the Sarajevo Times:
“The decision to remove this particular quote is not a reflection on its accuracy or validity, but rather a recognition that examples need to be carefully chosen when dealing with topics as sensitive as human rights.
“On reflection, it was determined that the quote was overly explicit and that discussion on this matter, and related human rights abuses, could have been facilitated without the level of detail provided.
“Victoria University aims to provide a safe and inclusive space in the class room where controversial topics, such as this, can be explored and discussed freely by all students, without fear or judgment.
“We apologise for any hurt that the use, or removal, of this quote may have caused.”
An identical response from Victoria University to the Sarajevo Times was published yesterday in SBS News.
Namely, Victoria University in Australia has recently removed content about war crimes because ultra-nationalist Serbian Youtube Channel complained.
They removed and apologized for a lecture that spoke about the ethnic cleansing and genocide that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the country’s 1992-1995 war.
The works specifically cited were written by renowned reporter David Reiff (who reported directly from the war zone) and the philosopher Richard Rorty. Both are experts in their fields and wrote about factual, witness verified events.
The reason they censored and apologized for the lecture is that a Reddit group and Youtube Channel run by ultranationalist Serbians bombarded the University with emails and phone calls.
It is stated that a video was also posted on YouTube in which American Charles Cather, who replaced his native Chicago with Novi Sad, actually spoke about this topic. Namely, Cather usually shoots videos on YouTube and often talks about Serbia and the hospitality of its population. In the video below, he actually talked about people mostly condemning Serbs for the 90s and that he felt that kind of relationship living in that country for 10 years and traveling the world.
“When I tell people that I live in Serbia, they immediately wonder if there is still a war in which they did not actually allow Muslims to be above them. However, the community of Serbian students in Australia is the last thing they need to hear about that past during lectures, because why would it be Serbia, Australia and what they did to the Aborigines, as well as the Americans to their natives, can be taken as an example, and I certainly don’t think anything bad about those countries, but I do say how things stand. Albanians did to the Serb population in Kosovo and Metohija, nor to what Bosnian Muslims did to Serbs, but only to what Serbs did to Muslims or Albanians in the war,” he said among other things in the video.
