Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy

       Preface

      This book traces the dialogue over the legacy of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Serbia as it developed after the Milošević regime was formally removed from power in October 2000. Casting the topic in these terms is already certain to raise controversy, even before the presentation moves into details. Some readers may respond with shock, and ask how dialogue is possible over events that fall below an absolute moral bottom line. Some others may respond with indignity, asking how an accusation that is contested can serve as an initial premise. Some others may contend that the question is incorrectly postulated, and that examining a dialogue about perpetrators in a community that also contains victims is in some way tendentious or disrespectful. What responses of this type would indicate is something that the presentation will explore: twelve years after the process of accounting for the record of that regime has begun, there is very little that is settled or unchallenged in public memory in Serbia. Beginning with factual dispute over basic elements such as the character of the violence that took place and the number of victims, disagreement is very much alive and very passionately engaged over questions of responsibility, over the degree to which the state or public is involved in or obligated by the historical record and over the question of what kinds of responses are sufficient. The debate expands into questions that could be thought of as moral in character, including whether the public can be conceived of as identifying with victims or with perpetrators, and whether the effort to “confront the past” (as the widely used and varyingly understood phrase has it) addresses a genuine social or political need.

      It is not surprising that these issues should be surrounded by controversy. It would be more surprising if they were not. Although a strong case can be made that fact finding, prosecution and punishment, official apologies and accounts, and the generation of open public dialogue are necessary as a means of moving Serbian society out of a past characterized by authoritarian rule, confrontation, and isolation, there are two facts that cannot be ignored. First, almost everything that has been done in the field of transitional justice has been undertaken in response to external pressure and conditionality. Second, there exists no real precedent for the expectation that a society recently emerged from violence of the type seen in the wars of Yugoslav succession would produce both institutional and cultural accounts, and do so both willingly and quickly.

      Before the UN founded the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993, it had founded no international tribunals. The most frequently cited precedent was the International Military Tribunal based in Nuremberg (most observers prefer to forget its counterpart based in Tokyo)—not a voluntary initiative at all but one imposed on Germany by occupying forces that had defeated it in a war. For all the magnification of the Nuremberg legacy, it has become a historical commonplace that public discussion of the kind that was hoped for in Serbia did not begin in Germany until two decades after the Tribunal: at a point when most people who could be directly tied to the Nazi regime were no longer participants in the competition for political power (and when the presence of one who was tied, chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, provided a focal point for debate and confrontation—does anybody remember anything about Kiesinger aside from the fact that Beate Klarsfeld smacked him in the face?). The transitional justice initiatives in Serbia could plausibly be regarded as the first international effort at postconflict justice. In the domestic context it could also be considered precedent-setting, as the second half of the twentieth century saw a number of post-regime change and post-civil war initiatives in the world, but no corresponding effort to address large-scale violence against civilians occurring in an international conflict. It might be fair to say that