Mediating international and domestic demands: Mnemonic battles surrounding the monument to the fallen of the wars of the 1990s in Belgrade (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Since 2012, when the Serbian Progressive Party came to power, the wars of the 1990s became the focal point of the official memory politics and crucial for the political legitimacy of the SNS government. The populist discourse of the return of the national pride is central to state-sponsored memory work, arguing that the previous governments and international community coerced the Serbian nation to feel ashamed about its heroes and victims of the 1990s wars. The current regime uses the fact that the previous governments did not focus on the 1990s in their memory politics as a demarcation line and source of legitimacy. Because of the SNS and their political allies, the Serbian people are finally allowed and able, as the dominant narrative claims, to remember their heroes and victims with pride. The government builds its political legitimacy on its commitment to the industry of memory, which involves large-scale commemorations, usage of media technologies, cultural production and new ways of disseminating the dominant narratives. This paper analyses the memory politics of the 1990s wars and outlines the problem of historical revisionism in contemporary Serbia from the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević until today. The first section of the paper offers an overview of the memory of the 1990s wars during the first decade after the fall of Milošević. The expectations from the democratic changes quickly turned into disappointment as the new state authorities showed the lack of willingness to confront the questions of guilt and responsibility of Serbia and its forces during the 1990s wars. Various patterns of denial and relativisations are analysed. The central part of the paper focuses on the period since 2012 and populist state-sponsored memory politics. To facilitate a better understanding of the war narratives, commemorative practices and the emergence of the 1990s wars in official memory politics, the paper explains the main characteristics of populist memory politics. The paper proceeds to analyse the interpretation of the 1990s as liberation wars, the national program of commemorations and the industry of memory, focusing mainly on Operation Storm, the Kosovo war and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the focal points of official memory politics. The final section concludes with a brief outlook on memory activism and its challenges in facing the industry of memory from above.
A Difficult Past in Serbia: The State-sponsored Project of Remembering and Forgetting - ASN 2012
All post socialist Western Balkan states are engaged in the process of impression management, through state sponsored projects, whereas most of the work is done in a subtle and less visible and intrusive way, with the intention of imitating spontaneous, natural and authentic processes. The basic argument outlined in this paper is that Serbia has managed its contested past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I show here that the state sponsored practices in Serbia are part of impression management strategies which serve multiple functions and meanings: on the one hand they tend to present Serbia as a democratic and progressive state, but on the other hand, they reveal Serbia`s problematic relationships with other nations. Through the content analysis of the highly important official state document "State Program for Commemorating the Anniversary of the Historic Events of the Serbian Liberation Wars", I show that the new Serbian calendar is made both to meet European expectations and further Serbia's interests to join the EU, while also expressing feelings of animosity, injustice and frustration as a means of settling historical accounts. This protocol reveals new re-constructed master commemorative narrative which presents Serbia as nation state with deeply democratic foundations through the eternal struggle for freedom, antifascism and anti-Semitism. I also emphasize here that the creation of the Serbian cosmology of otherness, as portrayed in this newly constructed Serbian calendar, discloses inner tensions and fractures, as well as contentious relationships with "significant Others", in this case of Europe, Croatia and Kosovo Albanians. 1
Just as norm-complying states adapt their practices to expected behaviors, post-conflict states are forced to adapt their practices and rhetoric to better resist pressures to comply with particular norms. Building on this insight, this paper analyzes three mechanisms through which the ruling elite in present day Serbia strategically constructed commemorative arenas for the purpose of dealing with the opposing demands and norms made both on the international as well as the national level: 1) de-contextualization of memory contents, 2) creation of social narratives of suffering and 3) promotion of the Holocaust memory as a screen memory. These are strategies of silencing which prevent public debate, representation, negotiation and are intended to reduce the tension between the contradicting demands at the international and the domestic levels. I suggest that the gap between the local and global forces and the changing role of the state, makes it possible for memory content to become a currency, a means of achieving certain real or symbolic benefits.
Just as norm-complying states adapt their practices to expected behaviors, post-conflict states are forced to adapt their practices and rhetoric to better resist pressures to comply with particular norms. Building on this insight, this paper analyzes three mechanisms through which the ruling elite in present day Serbia strategically constructed commemorative arenas for the purpose of dealing with the opposing demands and norms made both on the international as well as the national level: 1) decontextualization of memory contents, 2) creation of social narratives of suffering and 3) promotion of the Holocaust memory as a screen memory. These are strategies of silencing which prevent public debate, representation, negotiation and are intended to reduce the tension between the contradicting demands at the international and the domestic levels. I suggest that the gap between the local and global forces and the changing role of the state, makes it possible for memory content to become a currency, a means of achieving certain real or symbolic benefits.
The concepts of monumentality and collective memory have not been neglected by discourses concerning national identity. However, insights favouring forgetting and counter-memory are considerably new approaches reconstructing identities and redressing tragedy after pronounced violence. Erecting monuments is often a strategy towards building and inciting public memory and defining the nation, but they can also be used as a means of masking histories and manipulating national narratives – this is seemingly the case in a number of post-war monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia. The interplay between cultural heritage, memory, and space is a huge component of national identity; the installation of monuments memorializing non-Yugoslav celebrities throughout the newly defined states serve as a means to reconstitute identity, redefine heritage and avoid the celebration of a painful past. By consolidating existing theories on nationalism, identity and memory, this paper will examine the potential consequences of this manipulation of public space. Through a discussion of the way in which identities can strive to strategically avoid the state in the ‘non-commemoration’ of the nation and its inflicted traumas, I hope to demonstrate that the state is always present: that even through neglecting it – it is always referenced, that the framework of political sociology can operate, not just by identifying and treating the state as an actor, but also by simply acknowledging the state as spectre.
The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution, 2020
Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, this book analyses the politics of memory. Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second World War and its aftermath is understood and interpreted. The glorification and romanticisation of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, more commonly referred to as the Chetnik movement, has become the central theme of Serbia’s memory politics during this period. The book traces their construction as a national antifascist movement equal to the communist-led Partisans and as victims of communism, showing the parallel justification and denial of their wartime activities of collaboration and mass atrocities. The multifaceted approach of this book combines a diachronic perspective that illuminates the continuities and ruptures of narratives, actors and practices, with in-depth analysis of contemporary Serbia, rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and exploring multiple levels of memory work and their interactions.
Dealing with the Contested Past in Serbia - Decontextualisation of the War Veterans Memories
This article addresses the protracted process that took place following the wars of the 1990s through which the war veteran populations in Serbia were fragmented, alienated and marginalised. The main assumption in this paper is that gaining control over the veteran populations was a crucial step in silencing any public reckoning with the nation’s criminal past. Drawing on the case study of the top-down reframing of the war veterans’ memories, I show that the most effective strategy was found to be first to fragment the veteran population and then to encourage them to de-contextualise and reframe their memories replacing concrete historical suffering with abstract remembrance. This resulted in the reinstitution of Serbia’s former national narrative of Serbian victimisation. It is suggested that the Serbian case of collective memory reconstruction after the wars of the 1990s is a prime example of how post-conflict states may mediate their contested past in order to bridge the gap between domestic demands and those of the international community.
'Achieved without Ambiguity?': Memorializing Victimhood in Belgrade after the 1999 NATO Bombing
This paper examines the memory and narratives of the 1999 NATO bombings through a spatial lens, discussing how the debates surrounding memorial architecture reflect the multiple, and at times conflicting, understandings of the NATO bombing. By analysing the competition to reconstruct Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) from its ruins, this article discusses the tensions and challenges brought by narratives representing victimhood in Belgrade after 1999. It examines how understandings of victimhood have been spatialized through urban memorials, situating the RTS competition in the wider landscape of memorial representations of the NATO bombing in Serbia. Developed using a bottom-up process, the competition for the RTS memorial reflects both the opportunities and the limits of memorial architecture. While the competition and overall debates mirror general trends of memorial architecture in the context of European politics of regret and trauma, the limited scope of the memorial and its marginality in the cityscape both reflect and enhance the continuing obfuscation of the past in Serbia. Fifteen years after the NATO bombing, a memorial park named 'Lest We Forget' was inaugurated in Belgrade's Košutnjak forest. 1 Located in front of a studio of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), the memorial consisted of 16 hornbeam trees, one for each fatal casualty of the bombing which actually occurred a few miles away at the headquarters of RTS situated in the centre of the city on 23 April 1999. The bomb-site itself has lain in ruins for years, with only a small memo
Memory Politics in the Former Yugoslavia
Rocznik Instytutu Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2020
This article provides an overview of some of the most prevalent topics in post-Yugoslav memory politics as well as on some of the scholars working on these issues, focusing on the commemorative practices of the Second World War and the wars of the 1990s. Thirty years after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, the discourse of post-war memory politics continues to dominate nearly all of the successor states, even though two of them have seemingly left the past behind to join the European Union. While the wars of the 1990s created an entirely new memoryscape in the region, they also radically transformed the way in which each country commemorated the Second World War. Although the article examines in-depth the collective remembrance of sites of memory, such as Jasenovac, Bleiburg, and Knin, trends across the broader region are also addressed. The work of young scholars, as well as experienced researchers, who have introduced innovative approaches in memory st...