CIAO DATE: 11/03

War Guilt and Responsibility: The Case of Serbia
I. Diverging Attempts at Facing the Recent Past

Ana Devic

March 2003

Social Science Research Council

The assassination of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12 that took place in broad daylight in front of the Serbian Government in Belgrade has put in question the course of the country's reintegration in the international arena. From the perspective of international policy makers, especially those in the neighboring European Union, the moving away from international isolation in Serbia has been considered only a matter of time and strategy after the demise of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and after his extradition to the Hague International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2001. The killing of the prime minister, who was for long lauded as the prime mover of political and economic reforms, sheds a different light on what is still sorely needed and missing in the Serbian public space, and what could serve as a buffer against the future dramatic violations of the course of reforms. The murder of Djindjic indicates, above all, that there exist powerful groups in Serbia, enriched and armed during the Milosevic era of international isolation, who have much to lose should the country start dismantling the structures of authoritarianism and corruption, and opening the files of war crimes and human rights violations of the past decade.

In my essay I would focus only on one segment of the troubled recent history of Serbia, during and after the Milosevic era, the element which has made the murder of Zoran Djindjic possible and even predictable. The issue I want to discuss is that of cultural change, defined here as the need to make concerted public efforts at coming to terms with and accounting for what the Serbian elites and other citizens thought, planned, and did during the 1990s decade of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Since the only significant international pressure in this direction, in contrast to those for economic and political reconstruction, has come, indirectly, from the ICTY actions, one is led to believe that it may be sufficient to rely on the local elites and civil society groups in Serbia who would jointly move in the direction of the needed cultural breakthrough. But such has not been the case after the 2000-2001 demise of Milosevic's reign.

The other two contributors to this section address the issues of the Serbian guilt and responsibility as well. Eric Gordy discusses the features of the ordinary people's reception of the ICTY trial of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, and relates them to the problem of their low trust in both domestic and international institutions. He suggests that the impact of the ICTY in Serbia would be limited to legal sphere, and that changes in the political culture would need to be generated elsewhere. Vojin Dimitrijevic argues that the most dangerous obstacle to confronting the recent past in Serbia (in Croatia as well, and other states involved in the Yugoslav wars) is the peculiar re-reading of the history of Western nation-state building in Serbia, the one that justifies ethnic cleansing with the goal of the protection of territory for one's own people. Such ethnonationalist perceptions of justice, which have survived the demise of Milosevic's rule, depend and feed on the survival of ethnonationalism in the neighboring "enemy" states. Jointly, as a form of "transnational ethno-justice," they cannot yield any objective reception of the ICTY trials or stimulate reconciliation in the region.

In this essay I set the problem of the survival of culture of ethnonationalism in Serbia against the agenda of the "normalization" of nationalism in the post-Milosevic era, pursued by the political elites hesitant to denounce and break away from the ways in which power and resources were acquired and distributed during the Milosevic era. The role of civil society actors in making public the issues pertaining to the role which Serbia played in the Yugoslav wars may be decisive. However, after the fall of Milosevic, the local antinationalist civil society seems to be even more easily marginalizable. Which directions of work are available for them?

To try to address the complexity of the theme of the Serbian culture of nationalism, and how it could be done away with, I would briefly remind you of the steady avalanche of ethno-centric apologetic narratives of the Serbian history that had been well documented by, among others, Serbian antinationalist and antiwar intellectuals and activists. Simultaneously, despite the fact that for over a decade Serbian audiences have been flooded by the mentioned myths that glorified or lamented over the Serbs' alleged historical victimhood, selfless humanness and generosity, there is little evidence that would suggest that Milosevic's regime survived and was able to wage wars primarily because of the enduring sentiments of animosity toward certain non-Serb ethnics. What a range of studies on the grievances and discontent in Serbia, conducted during the 1990s, do suggest, is that the regime survived due to the culture of passivity and fear that was maintained by the policies of isolation that Milosevic's regime orchestrated. However, it is important to note that the siege mentality has also prevented the survival or emergence of any alternatives to the official exclusivist ethnic and national identifications. International actors, too, contributed to this sense of social and political disorientation and acquiescence.

Subsequently, the regime did not fall due to some acute awareness of the cultural disfiguration caused by ethnonationalism, but mainly as a result of the sequence of relative openings to the world that Milosevic's regime had to introduce periodically, and especially following the 1995 Dayton peace accord, which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Over time, the series of halfway re-entries in the international institutional environment had created an unbearable contrast to the steady impoverishment and status degradation of the majority of population.

In the period following the October 2000 change we find a seemingly paradoxical situation: greater openness to the West is paralleled, according to different surveys, with the persistence (if not rising) of ethnic stereotyping of Serbs' ethnic neighbors and a lack of publicly expressed and supported accounts of the recent past of Serbia. The Milosevic period's wars and war crimes against the neighboring countries of former Yugoslavia are addressed by the dominant media and politicians solely as part of fulfilling Serbia's obligations toward the ICTY, and not the issue that could or should be problematized culturally, or socio-psychologically. In many ways, the defensive culture of ethnonationalism is still there, most manifest in the commentaries on the work of ICTY versus Slobodan Milosevic, where individuals rarely conceive of the court as anything more than instrument for punishing Serbs. Alternatively, the ICTY is perceived as a national sports entertainment. In both cases, the events that serve as bases for the Court's charges and trials are not seen as bearing any relation to a viewer's immediate environment or perceptions of culture and identity.

Several public polls conducted in 2001 found out that 52.5 percent of respondents in Serbia could not name a single war crime committed by Serb forces in Bosnia, Croatia, or Kosovo. Nearly half, however, could name at least three crimes committed against Serb civilians by other forces. The former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his chief military commander general Ratko Mladic - the two leaders most wanted by the war crimes tribunal - are still considered the two "greatest defenders of the Serb nation," according to the poll.

The media have done little to enlighten their audiences. State-controlled broadcast stations are in the hands of politicians who - while fierce opponents of Milosevic - are reluctant to revisit the past. Two of the biggest private TV stations are owned by former Milosevic cronies.

Defensive, ethno-centered identification can be observed also in the sphere of popular perceptions of Serbia's relation to the West from where funding for "democracy" and "economic reconstruction" is to be received. The image of "living under a US (especially) and EU dictate," i.e., doing "what the West forces us to do" is not projected only by the parties now in opposition, namely, Milosevic's Socialist Party and Vojislav Seselj's (by now awaiting his trial in The Hague) ultra right-wing Serb Radical Party, but it has also routinely colored interviews with the Yugoslav President Kostunica and a number of other actors in the Democratic Opposition (DOS) coalition.

Identities that are visible, and, one would thus hypothesize, politicizable, are still mainly those of ethno-centric nature. One of the most remarkable manifestations of the politicization of ethnic identities in the direction away from facing the recent past of Serbia is the birth and demise of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, appointed a year and a half ago by the then Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica.

The ambition of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was to dig deeper into the past, beyond the most recent violence and seek out the "historical reasons for Yugoslavia's collapse as much as who did what to whom during the wars of secession that followed." The commission's performance, from the start, was not promising. It received a $20,000 annual budget from the authorities only in January 2002. Its office was staffed by one secretary, with two computers and an internet connection. Two of the prominent members of the Commission, law professor Vojislav Dimitrijevic and historian Latinka Perovic, well-known for their anti-nationalist stance and activism, left the Commission at its start, doubting whether it could and should engage in broad historical work, rather than assisting the public in facing Serbia's role in the past wars and ethnic cleansing operations in the neighboring countries. They also doubted whether the Commission could perform its reconciliatory role, while not having experts from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo among its members, and not guaranteeing safety to the witnesses of war crimes from these countries who would be eventually invited to testify. When the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia officially ceased to exist in February this year, and was replaced with the union called Serbia-Montenegro, the Commission was dissolved before it was ready to open its first case.

The work of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was marked by its exclusion from its team and negative attitude toward the two most prominent local organizations engaged in documenting human rights violations in Serbia: the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and the Humanitarian Law Fund. Civil activists from these two forums, who had produced the most comprehensive accounts of war crimes committed by the Serbian side during the 1990s, and had subsequently engaged in urging the post-Milosevic elites to seriously address the issues of guilt and responsibility, have not only become further marginalized in the last three years, but are subjected to contemptuous remarks by various prominent members of the DOS coalition who favor the approach to the recent past espoused by the now defunct Commission. Some of the reasons for the acceptability of the Commission's treatment of guilt and responsibility are summed up by Olga Popovic-Obradovic, a Belgrade law professor: "Instead of hearing witnesses, particularly victims, the Commission seems preoccupied with delving into the state crisis of the socialist Yugoslavia and social conflicts that led to the war." When asked to assess the prospects for re-emergence of the Commission in the near future, Nebojsa Popov, a long-time antinationalist activist and prominent sociologist, stated that it was bound to fail if the people who led to the war remained in control of parts of the government.

The obstacles to the work of civil activists toward establishing a local record of Serbia's responsibility for the conduct of war and war crimes must be, thus, placed against the background of the post-Milosevic political culture, which the Belgrade sociologist Vladimir Ilic has called "normalizing" or "democratic" nationalism. This post-2000 Serbian nationalism was defined by one of the leading members of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation as a 'European' branch of nationalism, which extols its own nation above others because it is a product of a democratic process. Because of its "democratic birth" it provides necessary integrative glue for its "core-nation" and binds all citizens into a legitimate polity worthy of loyalty and patriotism. In this picture, the blame for the decade of nationalistic wars is put on the shoulders of the ousted authoritarian regime, while Serbs are presented as principal victims of Milosevic's policies. The latter are portrayed as the legacy of Communism, which had supposedly created an unnatural break in the Serbian history. The "bête noire" of communist totalitarianism thus becomes a mantra and an alleged antipode of "democratic nationalism."

The latest endeavors in Serbia to "normalize" its nationalism by endowing it with integrative and "participatory" features reflect two defensive agendas. One has to do with the continuous denial of the new Serbian authorities to open a public debate on war crimes committed by Serb forces in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. The other may reflect the intent to co-opt members of the local civic anti-nationalist scene into the ranks of victorious parties. While the latter are still being criticized for "patriotism deficiency" (if not "treason," as the language of the Milosevic era would have it), i.e., the supposedly "unnatural inability to criticize other nations," they are simultaneously invited to establish an alliance with the "democratic nationalists." The strategy of uniting the previously irreconcilable blocks - nationalist intellectuals and antiwar antinationalist activists - seems to have already borne some fruits, as it is documented by the fierce six-month long debate over the primary culprits and victims of the Milosevic era between the former antinationalist and antiwar comrades that took place in the second half of 2002 on the pages of the once leading anti-Milosevic Belgrade weekly "Vreme."

Departure from the culture of ethnonationalism thus seems to be too complex of a task to be entrusted to the Serbian elites alone, especially in the light of their repeatedly confirmed inability or unwillingness to confront powerful survivors of the former regime. On the other hand, Serbian civil society actors, who have a long history of producing non-nationalist accounts of the politics of conflict and violence in the region must find new ways of positioning themselves vis-à-vis the cast of the post-Milosevic "democratic nationalism" and ordinary people in Serbia.

(and should) form different alliances from those espoused by Serbian "democratic nationalists" have mostly grown out of the circles of antiwar activists of the early 1990s and the activities that were necessarily initially pan-ex-Yugoslav in scope. Their efforts included maintaining private, activist, and professional ties to the like-minded individuals in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the rest of former Yugoslav republics. This observation brings me to my last point: Efforts to overcome amnesia of the recent past in Serbia through facing its role in organizing and committing war crimes on a mass scale must intensify by doing precisely what the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation has deemed irrelevant, i.e., by launching collaborative projects on the issues of war crimes and responsibility that would include social scientists, historians, and journalists from different parts of the former Yugoslavia. One such project is under way, coordinated by the author of this article whose work on the project is supported by the Global Security and Cooperation Program of the Social Science Research Council. The project's agenda includes a series of conferences taking place in different successor states of the former Yugoslavia, which would serve to generate, maintain and check the work progress of its trans-national research teams. The edited volumes resulting from the project are intended to be included in the university graduate curricula in all ex-Yugoslav states and recommended for use at other universities in the region. A scheme of comprehensive media coverage of these cross-border events could yield results in diverse segments of civil society. Since the project has been initiated by civil society actors from Serbia, but has involved, from the start, participants from other ex-Yugoslav states, it has a potential for becoming a more serious and upsetting contender of the culture of "normalizing nationalism."

Ana Devic is a native of Novi Sad, Serbia-Montenegro. She has obtained her M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of California at San Diego, specializing in the sociology of nationalism, knowledge and intellectuals, and studies of social movements. After teaching for one year in Ankara, she has pursued a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. In 2002, following a one-year research appointment at the University of Bonn's Center for Development Research, she has accepted associate professorship in political sociology at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Her GSC Professional Fellowship project is entitled "Toward a Post-Ethnic Civil Society: Cooperation on Issues of Conflict, Violence, and Transition between the Successor States of Former Yugoslavia." Ana Devic's current scholarly interests range from a critique of nationalism studies from perspectives of the sociology of everyday life to analyses of the impact of foreign democracy-building aid on the post-socialist and post-war societies in Southeastern Europe.