The Hague, who instead of honest and fair trials have sentences prepared in advance by their American mentors.
(Boris, 31 March): Do the people who are doing the arresting know what is waiting for them tomorrow if they are not cooperative?
Other writers argued that since Milošević had committed both domestic and international crimes, he should be tried for both. Sometimes this was expressed jokingly—for example by the Vojvodina politician Nenad Čanak, who suggested that Milošević should be tried in The Hague and then serve his sentence in a Serbian prison (where conditions are worse than in the resortlike Scheveningen prison used by ICTY):16
(aca, 31 March): It would be best for us to offer some compromises to the West … first, that we (the Serbian people) try and convict him, then after his fiftieth year of prison we send him to The Hague. Or better, we should clone him … we’re satisfied, they’re satisfied….
Some writers who advocated extradition expressed this as a desire for revenge, although several writers advanced the thesis that by trying and convicting the person responsible for organizing and financing war crimes, guilt could be transferred from the social collective to an individual:
(Vlada, 31 March): I don’t know how people can still support and feel sorry for him after all the evil he has brought us. Did he regret any of the lives that he gambled away? Let him go to The Hague if he has to!! He doesn’t deserve any better. (marko, 31 March): Arrest that murderer, traitor and WAR criminal Milošević. Send him immediately to The Hague so we can remove the guilt from the whole Serbian people … just do that and show that you are for change, for a better future, for equality between people without regard to religion, nationality or political belief, don’t forget we are in the 21st century.
Clearly more was at stake in the question of extradition than an assessment of the charges or of the legitimacy of ICTY.17 People who wrote in to give an opinion also expressed general orientations about sovereignty, the nature of individual and collective responsibility, and the use of ICTY as an instrument in domestic and international politics.
Is Milošević Serbia?
Also at stake in the controversy over the arrest was the extent to which people recognized a personal stake in the fate of Milošević. Through this dispute the question was raised of whether people continued to identify Milošević as a symbolic (if no longer official) representative of the Serbian people. Here the clearest signs of willingness to break with the recent past could be observed, as many writers not only rejected any identification with Milošević, but criticized the people who did:
(Petar, 31 March): I really enjoy the comments from people who see the arrest of Milošević as their own shame, and the people who think it is a shame “for the whole Serbian people.” I am ashamed too, but only because this bloodsucker was arrested only after almost fifteen years of robbing and pillaging a country that was once beautiful and that once had a future. I can only hope this is the beginning of sobering up and real denazification, although I think the job will never be finished, because I have the impression that what people hold most against Milošević is that he didn’t succeed in creating Greater Serbia.
People who made a connection with Milošević on the level of identity were accused by these writers of a sort of false consciousness—here the question of authenticity of experience was raised, with Milošević supporters being identified with a nationalist diaspora that is pictured as both more extreme than the domestic population and also as uncaring and alien, not sharing the fate of people living in the country:
(Dejan, 31 March): I like all the messages coming from “patriots” and “great sons and daughters of Serbia” from the diaspora. I personally know a ton of heroes who, as soon as our “humanitarian aid packages” 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
