Hello Srebrenica, hello Sarajevo, hello everyone who’s watching or listening.

My name is Peter Maass. I reported on the Bosnia war for The Washington Post in 1992 and 1993, and then I wrote a book about it called “Love Thy Neighbor.”

I’m a journalist, and that means I don’t have the qualifications to deliver an academic paper. What I do is tell stories, true stories, so what I’d like to do today is tell a two-part story about the role of journalism in chronicling and remembering genocide.

I’d like to start by quoting a line from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s great Vietnam book “Nothing Ever Dies.” The book is about the memory of war, and in it he wrote that “all wars are fought twice: the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”