Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy

started arriving from the Western countries on 24 March 1999 [the date bombing began], ran off with their tails between their legs to THOSE SAME COUNTRIES. Pretty patriotic, isn’t it? The new millennium, it seems, brings us a lot of surprises. One of them is the “remote-control patriot.”

      (Olja Bročić, 31 March): If by Saturday morning that man is not on a helicopter to Scheveningen or in a Yugoslavian jail, I will ask for political exile in any foreign country, tear up my Yugoslav passport, and forget I ever lived here. I authorize RTV B92 to publish this statement as they choose and forward it to the president of Yugoslavia and to the Ministries of Internal and Foreign Affairs. (ZoranP, 31 March): All the people who have gone to stand by Slobodan should do just that, they should be with him. I hope there is space for all those people.

      Here the proposition was offered that in order for Serbia to move into the future, it needed to separate the character of the recent past, personified by Milošević, from the self-perception of identity on the part of people in Serbia:

      (Raina von Kraemer, 31 March): he has to disappear, first of all from the HEADS of his “admirers.” There is no need to talk about him anymore. Let’s start a new life—. WITHOUT HIM

      This perspective might simply illustrate the level of resentment directed toward the former dictator. But it could mark a perceptual step toward generating an account of the recent past: to objectify it in some way, initially probably in a negative way. Here the argument seemed to be that if people were able to imagine Serbia as Serbia-without-Milošević, then new possibilities could be opened.

      The brief overview of readers’ comments here suggests that the arrest of Milošević sparked a debate over questions of responsibility and a search for a usable understanding of the preceding ten years. Concerns over factors like threats to sovereignty, imposition of collective guilt, and resistance to moral posturing on the part of powerful countries did begin to emerge as justifications, and have constituted obstacles to the further development of this debate.

      Both subsequent events and an intervention by Milošević himself would play a role in the development of the discussion that began in late March 2001. The day after his arrest, Milošević filed an appeal in which he declared that he had not stolen money but rather had diverted it from the state budget to finance paramilitaries in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus introducing a point domestic prosecutors had wanted to avoid and international prosecutors had been trying to prove. Not long after Milošević’s arrest the news story broke in Serbia about the “freezer truck case” discussed in Chapter 1. The importance of these events might be understood as showing first that people accused of crimes no longer themselves denied things that other people denied for them, and second that violations could be traced through a chain of command to the highest sources and so could not be dismissed as incidental.¹⁸ The claim that the state was defending itself against the freezer truck victims could only seem plausible in an environment where open discussion is made inaccessible, and that at least seemed to be no longer the case in Serbia.

       War and Identity in War Diaries

      Questions of national identity were already complex before the collapse of SFRJ. At various moments, a series of Yugoslav states promoted or backed away from the promotion of a synthetic “Yugoslav” identity, encouraged or discouraged the public expression of ethnic, national, and local identities, and made efforts of varying intensity to subsume particular identities to a concept of “brotherhood and unity.” In the post-1945 period identity issues invoked the fear that expressions of ethnic or national pride could grow into nationalist displays, which risked raising the unresolved question of guilt for the behavior of nationalist movements during World War II.¹⁹ The complete rejection of “brotherhood and unity” by nationalist regimes after 1990 also involved an effort to dismiss the association of nationalities with the crimes of the World War II period Serbian and Croatian quisling states—a concern that is especially apparent in the polemical historical works of Franjo Tudjman.²⁰

      The wars of succession that followed the dissolution of SFRJ did not have the effect of freeing national identity from constraints imposed by a guilty past. Instead they burdened these identities further with a consciousness of a guilty present. This is clearly visible in an examination of diaries and autobiographical works produced in Serbia during the war period. A number of writers produced “war diaries” examining events they had experienced or witnessed, and exploring their own responses to them. There is no way of knowing how many people shared the impressions offered in these works, most of which were consciously presented as an alternative to official “patriotic” propaganda, but enough of them were produced that they might be considered a meaningful subgenre of contemporary Balkan literature.²¹

      First, writers displayed a keen consciousness of the way that Serbs were perceived in the world as the primary perpetrators of atrocities. Mileta Prodanović tells of meeting an old and prominent East European writer at a conference. “I shook hands with the old man (who was the only Nobel laureate I had ever met personally), told him where I was from, and at once noticed a change in his blue Slavic eyes.”²² Discomfited by the writer’s gaze:

      I understood. The old man was disappointed. The questions which he really, undoubtedly, wanted to ask me could be, for example: “And how many unfortunate Bosnian children did you slaughter with your own hands? Did you participate in mass rapes? Are you a relative of one of the leaders of the paramilitary formations, or maybe just one of the ‘weekend warriors’?” I ran to my hotel room, ripped off the top of the plastic container of red ink for my “Rotring” pen with my teeth, spread the ink over my shirt, and rubbed it on my hands. When I returned to the lecture room, I could see the relief on the face of the old poet. It seemed to me that he even nodded his head a little bit.²³

      Other writers tried responding directly to the negative global reputation of Serbs, rather than taking refuge in bitter humor. Vladimir Arsenijević quotes an e-mail message he wrote to an Albanian friend:

      My compassion really and naturally belongs only to people, regardless of their nationality and/or religion. I know that everything we have been going through in this country for the past decade or so is simply a long chain of consequences of our President’s irresponsible and highly destructive behavior. You say that people are suffering here just for the fact that “they are Albanians” and I totally agree with you—they do—but you should also know that what you are concerned with is just one part of the big problem. Because many more people than just those of Albanian nationality have been going through enormous problems here, for a very long time now. It is a kind of inverted nationalism to think that only those citizens who are of non-Serbian nationality suffer here. There is no favouritism in this society, you can be sure of that. Everybody is Albanian here, and this is not just an apt, if shabby, analogy….

      And as for us, Bashkim, people like you and me, Serbs as well as Albanians, those who suffered a lot although they never caused any of this to happen, well—we are just flesh, valueless bodies for both parties to play with. That seems to be our most common ground. I’m sorry to say that. Because this is what Our region has given us, such a hideous legacy. We are Nothings. We can easily be killed, and hardly anyone would blink, but many would cheer, because—we are Those Who Are Easily Killed. And, even if we manage to escape the borders of our misguided, stupid, sad countries, we are still not in a position to shake off that negative identity. Our countries, small and miserable as they are, nevertheless remain stronger than us.²⁴

      Regardless how they approached the problem, all these writers needed some reply to what they recognized as the international perception of collective guilt about Serbs. Sometimes this took the form of satirizing the imposition of an unwelcome identity, sometimes it took the form of attempting to find a specific social location for blame, and sometimes it took the form of skepticism toward Serbian identity itself.

      However, other people’s stereotypes about Serbs were not the only burden that faced Serbian writers. They also had to develop an approach toward inflated patriotic models of identity that were offered up constantly in state-sponsored media. At the same time that media in other parts of the world generated the image of Serbs-as-war-criminals,