they are victims, and should feel angry and helpless. This requires dismissing some real troubles, or explaining away some real situations.
On the other hand, there is a distinct consciousness that, while inflated claims were promoted regarding “maintaining threatened identity” or “resisting the New World Order,” the countries making these were in fact small, remote, and politically marginal. Prodanović offers an ironic self-location which begins with an interrupted story:
organizations for the protection of animals began a campaign for the permanent protection of the striped-neck swan. These recently little-known birds have their habitat in…. Well, after all, it is not important where their habitat is—the average resident of the civilized world cannot pronounce the name of that country. The most important things are principles and the determination to sacrifice oneself completely for the sake of an idea.
These are just a few additional reasons why we, East Europeans, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of perfect democracy to our small and lost-in-East-European-space homelands, even when it is now possible to buy at our kiosks condoms in thousands of shapes, colors, flavors, and fragrances, and not just the Czechoslovakian “Tigar” brand like in the time of the single-party dictatorship, still try to emigrate to one of those states where so much attention is paid not just to the rights of people but also various types of animals, to one of those countries where order, peace, and mutual respect reign, where even in times of senseless racial violence one can sense an unusually high degree of political correctness.
The governments of the great democracies of the West, of course, would be faced with insurmountable problems if they tried to cram masses of morally, materially, and mentally neglected people from Eastern Europe into their clean cities, into cities with well-maintained facades and rows of well watered flowers, if they let these lazybugs into the hives where every worker bee knows its place. To prevent this undesirable migration, invisible barriers have been placed in the form of visas. People of the East, it is known, fear two things—drafts and bureaucratic procedures. About the East European fear of drafts, those murderous currents of air in rooms, about the awful diseases one can get by exposure to drafts, entire tracts have been written—the fear of bureaucratic procedure is less well researched, but no smaller. This fear is well known to great and small strategists in the West, and so in order to receive a visa, aside from the rigid conditions, barriers have been established in the form of numerous questionnaires, which people who wish to feel the enchantment of orderly countries, or even to settle in these countries, must fill out in the unpleasant waiting rooms of embassies and consulates, after long waits in line29
The passage suggests that the antipatriotism of these writers did not function as substitution. The transparent lies and overwrought nationalist rhetoric of the regime did not force many people to believe that the regime’s external opponents (whether these were regional competitors, the NATO alliance, or an abstractly conceived “West”),30 or even internal opponents (epitomized by the opposition political party leaders) were necessarily any better.
Instead, there seems to develop an ambivalent attitude among these Serbian writers toward their own identity as Serbs. This is bolstered not by some other nationally structured alternative, but by taking refuge in various aspects of individuality. Arsenijević explains his friendly relationship with the ethnic Albanian writer Xhevdet Bajraj partly by the fact that neither was nationalistically inclined, and both liked the same kind of music. Marković talks about his inspiration by (and eventual disillusion with) organizers of protests around Serbia after the end of the bombing campaign, but by the end the most probable vision of the future he can generate is:
When the moment of liberation comes, the most important assistance we can get will be—psychiatric. We will need a whole lot of good doctors who will have the will and the knowledge to wrestle with the effects that the last decade or more has left us.
And in that awakening of mental health it will be most necessary to establish a basic criterion: what is normal and what is not. I know that is not easy and that these things change, depending on the society and culture in question, but this will really be a special case, worthy of the deepest observation. This country will be an Eldorado for future scientists, something like a laboratory with live people instead of white mice.31
Under conditions where a small group felt prepared, like the writers discussed here, to offer some kind of more or less moral stories to their readers, but many more were certain that they have gone through a period of madness that may not have ended, it is easy to understand why “public opinion” may not be so apparently solid.
The discourse of responsibility came out of the confines of antiwar groups and people engaged with it as a vocation, and began its public life with events like the ones presented in this chapter. At all points it was a complex and uncertain process, and by no means was there any certainty that “confrontation” or “catharsis”—psychological terms used by politicians—would take place. The examples here indicate an interplay involving several unstable elements. On the one hand people began openly discussing their experience of historical events and of themselves and their social environment. On the other hand the discussion was subject to balances of political forces and unpredictable events that would see the feelings articulated mobilized in varying directions. The evolution of the discussion was not predictable from the way it began.
In hindsight we know several things the observers cited here did not know in 2001: the Milošević trial dragged on for years and ended without resolution; institutions failed, emerged, and changed; and things that once appeared to be clear became confused. In short, the story continued.
Chapter 4
Approaches to Guilt
As long as the Milošević regime controlled most media in Serbia, denial and claims of victimization were the most generally available perspectives on guilt. In other countries of the former Yugoslavia, rejection of the possibility that crimes were committed constituted, at least for some people, an essential part of national identity and national pride.1 Two weeks after Slobodan Milošević was sent to face trial in The Hague, ICTY presented the government of neighboring Croatia with indictments against two army generals, Rahim Ademi and Ante Gotovina. After a bitter political debate, the government accepted the indictments and agreed that the accused would be delivered for trial. However, just as large displays of public sympathy in Croatia in February 2001 interfered with the arrest and trial of General Mirko Norac, accused of the massacre of Serb civilians around Gospić in 1991,2 in July there were also indications of a current of denial in public opinion.3 A group of ten prominent Croatian athletes, led by the tennis champion Goran Ivanišević, published an open letter against the indictments, declaring: “This is an effort to alter the fact of who is the victim and who is the aggressor. The only truth is that Croatia was the victim, and its generals and soldiers were heroes.”4
The position advocated by the athletes had considerable resonance in public opinion,5 though it was not the position of a series of Croatian governments. President Ivo Josipović and his predecessor Stjepan Mesić have been outspoken in advocating for the need to acknowledge and try crimes committed by Croatian forces. However, for states whose legitimacy derives in part from the celebration of their wars for independence, the argument over responsibility represents an ongoing source of controversy. Recognition of the guilt of people who committed crimes risks calling into question the wars that were fought and the independence that was gained through them.
The legitimacy of Serbia’s statehood depends far less on perception of the aims of the wars as legitimate (though the legitimacy of the Bosnian Serb entity depends on this very much indeed). Serbia neither gained nor fought for independence, but was an entity from which other states declared independence—a condition that strengthened security in the continuity of Serbia’s statehood while undermining its
