Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Among Bonhoeffer’s more well-known writings were his smuggled-out Letters from
Prison and The Cost of Discipleship. These and other writings continue to be regarded as
playing an important role in Christian rethinking of the relationship with Judaism in
the aftermath of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust (Shoah). His student,
Eberhard Bethge (1909–2000), later published the definitive biography of his teacher in
1977, titled Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Unresolved is whether Bonhoeffer should be
accorded the status of a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem, the State of Israel’s Holocaust
Memorial Authority, as a question continues to linger as to whether he was directly
involved in the saving of Jewish lives. A recent (2004) assessment of Bonhoeffer is found
in Stephen Haynes’s book The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portrait of a Protestant Saint.
Booh-Booh, Jacques-Roger (b. 1938). Special representative of the UN secretarygeneral
in Rwanda (November 1993 to June 1994). In the aftermath of a series of murders
of Tutsi in late February 2004, Booh-Booh reported to UN headquarters that there
was no evidence that the killings had been “ethnically motivated.” When genocide broke
out in Rwanda in April 1994, Booh-Booh played down the seriousness of the killing by
pooh-poohing its systematic nature as well as how widespread it was. Many in the international
community voiced concern about just how impartial Booh-Booh really was for
someone in his position. Not only was he a close friend of Rwandan president Juvenal
Habyarimana (1937–1994), but he was also close with the leadership of the extremist
Hutu-dominated MRNDD (Mouvement Républicain National pour Démocratie et le
Développement or the Republican Movement for National Democracy and for Development)
and associated with some who became the most notorious leaders of the 1994
Rwandan genocide, including Jean-Paul Bagosora (b. 1955).
Bophana, a Cambodian Tragedy. This 1996 film, which was produced by Rithy Panh,
who, as a teenager, fled the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia, portrays the true and
tragic story of two young intellectuals, Bophana and her husband. Disgusted by the corruption
of the Sihanouk regime, Bophana’s husband joined the Khmer Rouge, the Communist
underground movement. During their separation, the pair stayed in contact
through the love letters they wrote one another and, eventually, they were reunited after
the fall of Phnom Penh. Ultimately, however, they were denounced, arrested, tortured,
and forced to make false confessions. In 1976 both of them were executed by the Khmer
Rouge.
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia-Herzegovina was, and remains, a much-disputed region at
the crossroad of empires, dating back to Roman times. The Romans, Byzantines,
Ottomans, and Hapsburgs all sought to gain control of this strategic Balkan territory, and
all left their mark, especially in the form of a multiethnic population consisting of Croats
(Catholics), Serbs (Christian Orthodox), and Bosnians (Muslims). Under Josip Broz Tito
(1892–1980), the region became the heartland of the former state of Yugoslavia’s military
industries, whose engineers and managers were largely drawn from the urban Muslim population,
not from the more rural Croats and Serbs. During World War II, some Bosnian
Muslims collaborated with the Croatian Ustashe in the formation of a Nazi puppet state
called Greater Croatia. The memory of this was not lost on future generations of Serbs,
especially when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the early 1990s. During the Tito
decades, between 1945 and 1980, Bosnia’s population became the most ethnically integrated
and assimilated, via intermarriage and economic growth. This was not, however,
enough to stem the tide of hostile ethno-nationalism that was revived following Tito’s
BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
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