Balkan Witness

NEW Only Integrating Bosnia Will Complete the Balkan Mosaic Fifteen years since the Srebrenica atrocity, people’s consciousness in Serbia remains largely unchanged, blocked by organized amnesia and relativization. The younger generations in Serbia need to know the truth about the 1990s, even though they themselves are not responsible for the crimes committed during the period. These generations must progress beyond the interpretation that Serbs were only victims. Only the creation of a lasting peace will prevent repetition of those crimes, which involves remembering and telling the truth about the wars of the 1990s. By Sonja Biserko, Balkan Insight, July 8, 2010

Radovan Karadzic's New-Age Adventure His fictitious fugitive life as a quack medicine peddler. By Jack Hitt, New York Times Magazine, July 26, 2009

Dealing with impunity in Serbia: options and obstacles (Executive summary) The brutality of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution in the 1990s took the world, and many Yugoslavs, by surprise. While the region is certainly not the only one in recent times to experience mass violations of human rights, its location in the heart of Europe provoked a special sense of shame and responsibility among the international community, which led to its engagement in conflict resolution, peace-building, and development measures, not least in the field of transitional justice. Yet despite this investment, willingness in the war-affected states to confront their past and end impunity for the crimes then committed remains weak, sustained only by the persistence of democracy and human rights activists, and the range of carrots and sticks offered by the international community to take up the measures it proposes. By Impunity Watch, July 2009

Action to Combat Impunity in Serbia: Options and Obstacles Examines the root causes and nature of impunity for crimes committed by the Serbian state and citizens during the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution during the 1990s. The 86-page document presents research findings, along with policy recommendations drawn from wide-ranging policy consultations with state and non-state actors for better achieving truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition of grave crimes against international law. By Impunity Watch, December 2008 (PDF)

The Renegade Smug in their ethnocentricity, certain of their own superiority, indifferent to the cultural, religious, and political concerns of their neighbors, all the Serbs needed in 1990 was a leader to lead them into disaster. The most repellent crimes in the former Yugoslavia had the enthusiastic support of people whose education and past accomplishments would lead one to believe that they would know better. The role of the patriotic intellectual in Serbia was to make excuses for the killers of women and children. As for journalists and political commentators, their function was to spread lies and then prove that these lies were true. I was being asked by my own people to become an accomplice in a crime by pretending to understand and forgive acts that I knew were unforgivable. By Charles Simic, New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007

The Denial Syndrome and Its Consequences: Serbian Political Culture since 2000 Since the outbreak of the War of Yugoslav Succession in 1991 and the subsequent atrocities, a significant portion of Serbian society, including the upper echelons of the government, has displayed symptoms of the denial syndrome, in which the guilt is transposed onto the Croats, Bosniaks, and Kosovar Albanians. This syndrome is also associated with a veneration for the victimized hero. In the Serbian case, it has also been associated with efforts to whitewash the role played by Serbs such as Milan Nedic and Draza Mihailovic during World War Two and has reinforced feelings of self-righteousness in Belgrade’s insistence on its sovereignty over the disputed province of Kosovo. --Sabrina Ramet, 2006

Bosnia-Herzegovina will win its law suit in The Hague Perspective on Serbian war crimes. -- Srda Popovic Translated from Dani (Sarajevo), 12 May 2006

Winking at a blind man -- Miroslav Filipovic Translated from Helsinška Povelja (Belgrade), nos 91-92, January-February 2006

The Wall of Denial Despite mountains of evidence, many Serbs refuse to accept that a massacre took place. By Nerma Jelacic, Stacy Sullivan and Ed Vulliamy in Srebrenica, IWPR, July 6, 2005

Serbia in the vicious circle of nationalism This study is an effort to bring to light new forms of nationalism in post-Milosevic Serbia and show that Serbia has not yet found an alternative to nationalism. -- Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, December 2003

Political Propaganda and the Plan to Create "A State For All Serbs." Consequences of using media for ultra-nationalist ends. Report compiled for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) by Professor Renaud De la Brosse, February 2003 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 (PDF)

Serbia is sick with indifference The Serbian people have spent thirteen years listening to Milosevic's media, the state and private TV stations which, by order of the Leader, spouted hatred against their neighbours and made them indifferent to war crimes. The same media, using the same frequencies and managed by more or less the same individuals, are now in the service of the new government. They do not forget the heroes from the past. Thus BK TV forwarded New Year's greetings from its viewers to Radovan Karadzic in the Bosnian mountains. -- By Bozo Nikolic, Monitor (Podgorica, Montenegro), February 8, 2002

What did your dad do for Milosevic? The author finds collective amnesia in Serbia, as people assure him that, all along, they hated the dictator and supported the resistance. -- Tim Luckhurst, The New Statesman, October 16, 2000

Serbia Under the Threat of Fascism Former mayor of Belgrade Bogdan Bogdanovic discusses the nature of Serbian nationalism. -- Published in Monitor (Podgorica, Montenegro), June 18, 1999

Beyond Victimhood On the Serbian opposition to Milosevic -- Lawrence Weschler, April 12, 1999

The Complicity of Serbian Intellectuals in Genocide in the 1990s The war against Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s was planned by Serbian intellectuals and authorities long before the first Serbian attacks. In the fall of 1986, the Serbian Academy of Science and Art, representing Serbia's most prominent intellectuals, issued a memorandum demanding that Serbia's borders be expanded. By Philip J. Cohen, in chapter 2 of This time we knew: western responses to genocide in Bosnia, edited by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Mestrovic, 1996. (Excerpts available at the link shown.)

Srdja Popovic: an exiled Yugoslav speaks The Serbian anti-nationalist human rights lawyer discusses the evolution of Milosevic's political power and his exploitation of nationalism. Milosevic's "policy will end in a catastrophe. The weakness of the opposition makes it more probable that it will be the catastrophe of the Serbian people. ... The military defeat of the Milosovic government is in the best interest of the Serbian people. It is something that every good Serbian patriot should wish for. ... If I see somebody trying to murder somebody else, of course my duty is to try to stop him. I'm not saying that by doing so and applying violence to the situation, I'm actually trying to help those people lead a good life. I don't know what they will do once they leave the scene. What I see Serbs doing in Bosnia is committing an act of aggression against a state that has been recognized by United Nations, and I see them committing genocide. I think that both of these things should be stopped. Of course, stopping it would not solve the problem of how these people will live next to each other in the future, but first you have to stop the crimes. The international community has an obligation to do so, under the Convention on Genocide and the Charter of the United Nations. They have an obligation to use force to stop aggression, and to stop genocide." Interviewed by Slobodan Drakulic, Peace Magazine (Toronto), March-April 1994