There was a flurry of media attention when Serbian president Boris Tadić visited Vukovar in October 2010, where he was met by the Croatian president Ivo Josipović. Tadić visited the mass grave near Vukovar and asked for forgiveness for the massacre carried out by the Yugoslav National Army and Serbian paramilitaries in the autumn of 1991. It was the first time that a Serbian president had expressed his profound regret for this crime.
Josipović, who in the first year of his presidency had done more than any of his predecessors to promote reconciliation, then visited the village of Paulin Dvor, where Croatian paramilitaries had killed eighteen Serbian civilians and one Hungarian in December 1991.
These were impressive gestures by the two heads of state, designed to bring the vicious cycle of war to a symbolic close. A few days later, the Bosnian tripartite presidency also joined in by calling for reconciliation. Bakir Izetbegović, the newest member of the presidency, said he apologised “for every innocent person killed by the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
While this frenzy of reconciliation activities attracted a large share of praise from the international community and the people of the region, many voices were also raised in criticism. Weren’t all these well-meaning gestures and expressions of remorse simply political theatre for the benefit of the world community? Where were the lists of prisoners of war who had disappeared? When would stolen cultural property be returned to Croatia? When would refugees return to Krajina?
It has always been difficult to believe politicians in the Balkans, even when they seem to be acting with the best of intentions. But we must start to believe them if we are to progress down the path of reconciliation. We need to start taking their words seriously and assume that their gestures indicate a serious intention to change perceptions and attitudes towards each other’s countries. The political willingness to bring about reconciliation demonstrated by Tadić and Josipović was as clear as that of former Croatian president Stjepan Mesic when he officially apologised in Belgrade in 2003. In March 2010, the Serbian Parliament also passed a “Declaration on Srebrenica”. Although it stopped short of using the word genocide, it clearly acknowledged the responsibility of the Serbian army for the massacre of 8,000 Bosniaks in July 1995.
Capitalism 1, patriotism 0
Ever since the war in Bosnia ended in 1995, there has been much talk of reconciliation – first and foremost from abroad. A great deal of money has been spent on garnering the opinions of international experts, almost as if reconciliation were a branch of rocket science, rather than being about “settlement, understanding, compromise” between neighbours, as defined by the dictionary. After endless rounds of meetings, the experts came to the conclusion that what was needed was for people to work together. Well I never. They came up with a whole series of recommendations on how this might be achieved – as if the people of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo need to be told.
They only have to look at the region’s criminal scene to see that there is already a certain amount of bottom-up collaboration going on. Undeterred, people are calmly carrying on with the kind of criminal activities that had been normal before the war, from the smuggling and trading of fuel, weapons, people and tobacco to contract killings. Businessmen at all levels are also working together, sometimes overtly, sometimes behind the scenes. The Slovenes were the first to start exporting their products to Serbia: capitalism 1, patriotism 0.
When Tim Judah, a journalist for The Economist who knows the region very well, published an article about the “Yugosphere” in 2009, he unleashed a huge storm of protest, especially in Croatia. He wrote about the unbroken collaboration and cooperation going on at all levels, which shows that the former Yugoslavia is still effectively functioning as a single entity, despite the fact that nationalist ideology condemns such collaboration as “anti-patriotic”. “Times are hard”, writes Judah, and it is natural that people try to exploit the advantages of a common language and the fact that consumers are used to having certain products.
Judah tells how in the last few months alone numerous new initiatives have been announced: the founding of a railway company jointly owned by Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia; a meeting between the national lottery companies of Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, with a view to agreeing a merger; the signing of an agreement on the extradition of criminals between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia and Croatia; and an agreement on military cooperation between Serbia and Croatia, to name but a few.
It was clear from the criticisms levelled at the article that it was not so much the examples of collaboration that people found offensive, as the use of the word “Yugosphere”. Yet not even the most hard-line Croatian nationalists (who, it should be noted, also condemned Slovenia for blocking Croatia’s entry to the EU) could deter Croatian businessman Emil Tedeschi from expanding his market into Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. Tedeschi prefers the term South Eastern Europe, while others prefer Western Balkans – anything, so long as it doesn’t include the prefix ‘Yugo’. Nothing illustrates more clearly how nationalist sentiments and values withstand the test of time, regardless of how collaboration works in reality.
Undeterred, people are calmly carrying on with the kind of criminal activities that had been normal before the war, from the smuggling and trading of fuel, weapons, people and tobacco to contract killings.
The main difference between reconciliation efforts over the past fifteen years and today is that for a long time there was no real political will behind the endeavours. The new impulse has come from a new generation of politicians who are much more committed than their predecessors to seeing their countries join the EU. Long considered a rogue nation, Serbia has now stepped up and signed a number of important agreements. The country has become a member of the RCC (Regional Cooperation Council, formerly the Stability Pact) and signed up to the CEFTA (Central European Free Trade Agreement) and the PFP (Partnership for Peace), a military cooperation programme established in 1994 between NATO and, to date, 23 European and Asian countries.
This should serve to strengthen Serbia’s negotiating position on the issue of abolishing the need for visas to enter the EU and help to forge closer ties to the EU itself. While the EU’s attitude towards Serbia joining the Union can hardly be termed enthusiastic, it is recognised in Brussels that stability in the region is inextricably bound up with each country’s hopes of joining the EU one day, irrespective of when that might actually be.
When business people continue to collaborate, Croatian publishers take part in book fairs in Belgrade, national football teams play each other and ordinary people visit their relatives across the border without being suspected of treason, is there even a need for an official policy of reconciliation? Or should it be left to spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives, as a few prominent commentators have suggested?
If we look at the Croatian press, we still find someone like Tim Judah being accused of “Yugo-nostalgia”, or a Croat businessman being called a traitor because he sold his factory to a Serb. There is still opposition to the idea of a hotel or shipyard being bought with Serbian capital. According to surveys, the majority of people in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are far from being reconciled with the idea that their neighbours are no longer their enemies. Is it not reasonable to believe that, were citizens left to their own devices, reconciliation would take at least a few more generations?
Neither war nor peace simply happen spontaneously. Wars are the result of political will, primed by inflammatory rhetoric that creates a concept of the ‘enemy’ and justifies aggression. The same goes for peace and reconciliation processes. They need to be initiated and conducted from the top, spreading values downwards that are the exact opposite of those promoted in war, namely tolerance and collaboration. If reconciliation between France and Germany, for example, had been left to the ordinary man in the street, a united Europe would still be a hundred years off.
The precondition for reconciliation, and the fundamental principle that underlies it, is justice. But there can be no justice without truth. Without a legal system for trying war criminals – in which the truth about crimes committed in recent wars is revealed – every attempt at reconciliation is bound to fail.
In Croatia, the main obstacle to reconciliation is the absurd conviction, cultivated and nurtured over nearly two decades, that the Croatian army cannot be guilty of war crimes because it was acting in defence of the nation, with the result that war criminals are regarded as war heroes. For this reason, the International Criminal Court in The Hague is seen as an enemy institution – and not as a vehicle for uncovering the truth.
If a culture of denial existed at both public and political level in Serbia before the Declaration on Srebrenica was issued, then Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina has also made much more difficult by its special status as a divided country. Not just divided administratively, but psychologically and emotionally: victims and perpetrators live together in the same states, the same towns, maybe even in the same village on the same street.
Promoting different values means constructing a different psychological framework. It is no longer necessary to persuade citizens to collaborate across state borders: they are doing that already. What is needed now is to send out the message that collaboration – visiting, trading, working together, breaking down negative perceptions of each other – is not only politically correct but also politically desirable. It should be possible for a Croatian writer to publish a book in Serbia, or for a Croatian musician to put on a concert in Serbia, without being pilloried in the media, as was the case until very recently.
But how does a government get such a message across? Perhaps indirectly, such as by supporting common initiatives, from regional agreements like the Regional Cooperation Council or the Partnership for Peace, to smaller-scale initiatives such as singing competitions or the muchtrumpeted school exchanges. Not surprisingly, the mass media has an important role to play. It is from the mass media that values seep into everyday life, not the other way round. If the government were to start systematically promoting anti-nationalist values, public TV channels would probably follow suit. Not necessarily because they felt that they had to, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that broadcasters would soon recognise that reconciliation was the order of the day rather than nationalism and hate. In any case, private TV channels are less prone to spreading nationalist propaganda and always concerned about their ratings, so they would be very likely to jump on this particular trend.
If reconciliation between France and Germany, for example, had been left to the ordinary man in the street, a united Europe would still be a hundred years off.
Sending out positive signals to the neighbours is a useful, but short-term strategy. A new government, a new dominant political will, can still quickly swing public opinion back towards nationalism again – which is precisely what happened in the 1990s. In order to really establish different values, we need a longterm approach, with a primary focus on teaching an understanding of history. If the process begins by trying war criminals, it needs to continue with historical research and the publication of history books and textbooks. Teaching an understanding of history needs to be based on fact, not myth and ideology.
A glance at today’s history books provides all manner of contradictory information. For example, 65 years after the end of the WWII, the Croats are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that the only time in history when Croatia was ever independent was when it also happened to be a fascist puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH ). Indeed, the first president of the newly established state of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, never tired of insisting that the new Croatia was built on the foundations of the old one. The Croatian constitution, however, says just the opposite, that the new state is founded on anti-fascism – showing that Croatian society is still divided over its past.
In all post-Yugoslavian societies, people are used to living with such contradictions. During communism, their memory was usually at odds with history. It is easy to disseminate propaganda in a country that is ruled by communist ideology, folklore and myth, and where there is a dearth of concrete historical facts. After 1945, it was claimed that 700,000 civilians had perished in the Jasenovac concentration camp during the NDH era, while some four decades later a more realistic 60,000 became the accepted figure. The precise number of NDH soldiers and civilians executed in Bleiburg just after the war ended is still a matter of dispute, but it runs to the tens of thousands. It was hard for people to imagine that Tito’s glorious army could have committed war crimes. Generations of Yugoslavians grew up with the contradiction of not being able to question the ‘truths’ contained in school textbooks, while being told very different stories at home. It was easier not to challenge the dogma.
Too little history, too much memory
So far, there has been too little history and too much memory: this is one reason why people were so quick to take up arms in the 1990s. History books and textbooks are as much a part of the problem as they are a part of the solution. Historians should stop behaving as slaves to the current ideology and start presenting facts.
But education is a long drawn-out process. Any education process aimed at bringing about some form of reconciliation has to be about much more than simply correcting textbooks. To bring about reconciliation, society needs a consensus. To articulate the truth, there needs to be a public forum. Any responsible society interested in reconciliation should be able to do this, as was the case in Germany. Culture can serve as the forum for this debate. The question is: how can arts and culture foster reconciliation, while mainstream culture and its institutions – for example the Serbian and Croatian Academies of Science – promote nationalism? Like mass media, culture serves as a vehicle for nationalist propaganda before and during wars. It would be wrong to talk of the reconciliatory role of culture and arts as if they were independent of political will.
Our expectations of culture generally tend to be too high: we hope that culture will help us create a better, more peaceful and more just society. Underlying this idea of the potential role of culture in the process of reconciliation is a belief that artists and intellectuals, and educated people in general, are somehow beings of a higher moral order. Because they are educated, they should by definition know better than the rest of society. However, this is not necessarily the case.
It has been proven time and time again throughout history that culture is ideally suited to being used for propaganda purposes, especially in totalitarian regimes. Why? Because the morals of artists and cultural bureaucrats are in fact no different to those of anybody else. Moreover, in the former Yugoslavia (but also elsewhere), there was a tradition of cultural servility to the regime – indeed there was barely any other type of culture worth the name. Then again, this can be understood as a kind of survival strategy, where selfpreservation forced artists and intellectuals to effectively become employees of the state. So it is no surprise that it was precisely this group of people who were disseminating nationalism in the 1980s. Writers, academics, journalists, members of cultural institutions – educated people became cogs in the nationalist propaganda machines. Their task was to create a sense of ‘others’ within society in order to persuade people to commit to the idea of armed conflict, to war. They did their job very well.
An emblematic image from 1993: Radovan Karadžić – poet, psychiatrist and the president of Republika Srpska – standing in the hills above Sarajevo. Alongside him stands the Russian poet Edward Limonov, shooting a machinegun in the direction of the city.
It has been proven time and time again throughout history that culture is ideally suited to being used for propaganda purposes, especially in totalitarian regimes.
When talking about the role of culture in the reconciliation process, we should not ignore its capacity to produce ideology and propaganda, to manipulate people, to prepare for and justify mass murder. However, the opposite is also true – if culture can be turned into a nationalist propaganda machine, then, in a democracy that allows the free circulation of ideas, it can also be a key element in the reconciliation process. But this can only happen if projects supported by the state are free from political abuse. Compared to other activities, such as arms procurement, culture can achieve a great deal with relatively little cost. Only a fraction of a country’s budget is normally allocated to culture. It might just be worth investing a little more.
To a greater or lesser extent, a process of reconciliation is already underway and has been for some time. It is almost two decades since the wars, and a whole new generation has grown up. But if this new generation is to be the one that should consolidate the progress of reconciliation, then the news is not good. In a recent opinion poll among high school students between 17 and 18, only 27% think that the NDH was a fascist state, while more than 40% think that Croats in Croatia should have more rights than citizens belonging to national minorities. 40% are against prosecuting Croat soldiers for war crimes and every second one of them (49 percent) is against Croatia joining the EU. Even if this opinion poll is not representative of all Croatian youth, it serves to remind us that nationalist values are still highly influential. This mini-snapshot of the new generation offers little in the way of hope to a government that wants to demonstrate its political will. However, it should also motivate us to act quickly and decisively if we truly want to achieve lasting reconciliation before the end of this century.
Ultimately, one cannot but notice a kind of paradox at work within the territory of the former Yugoslavia. First came independence and then the destruction of Yugoslavia in a series of bloody wars. Tens of thousands of lives were lost. A conservative estimate for Bosnia alone suggests that some 100,000 people died. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced or resettled, not to mention all those who were maimed and orphaned. Between 30,000 and 50,000 women, mostly Bosniaks, were raped. Now, a mere decade since the tragedy, all the newly established independent states want to join the EU and live in union with neighbours who, historically speaking, they were killing only yesterday.
Why fight for independence? Why go to war? Was it a civil war? Was there only one aggressor? How many victims were there on each side? It is hard to find answers to these kinds of questions, and convincing the public to accept them is even harder. But in order to succeed, reconciliation programmes must deal with these questions at all levels, and this will require the necessary political will. Reconciliation does not come easily and it takes time, but it might take less time and be easier if there is real political will, starting with governments, that leads to a top-down process of reconciliation. At least, one would like to imagine that such an approach is worth trying, given the failure of the last 15 years of laissez-faire. The latest news is that the Serbian President Boris Tadić has visited Croatia for the second time in a month – this time accompanied by more than 70 Serbian businessmen.
