Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy
to the conflicts (wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo) caused you to change your thinking or position about the role (responsibility) of the warring sides?” an overwhelming 85.5 percent answered in the negative.20 Despite this somewhat discouraging result from the point of view of efforts to promote information, the survey results suggested some potential ways in which efforts to disseminate information might have a more meaningful effect. The results indicate a wide gap between the sources of information people trusted and the sources they actually used. Asked to name their primary sources of information during the war, responses broke down as shown in the first table. When people were asked what sources of information they trusted, the structure of responses was different, as in the second table.
| RTS-TV/state media | 80.4% |
| Independent papers (Blic, Glas, Danas) | 67.9% |
| Stories of witnesses | 62.3% |
| Stories of relatives | 45.5% |
| State-controlled papers (Politika, Ekspres, Novosti) | 43.1% |
| Independent radio/TV (ANEM, B92) | 42.4% |
| Personal experience | 17.4%21 |
| Source | Trusted | Did not trust |
| RTS-TV/state media | 23.2% | 42.5% |
| State-controlled papers | 28.8% | 36.5% |
| Independent papers | 44.7% | 17.9% |
| Independent radio/TV | 62.4% | 16.2% |
| Relatives | 68.6% | 16.2% |
| Witnesses | 62.2% | 15.4%22 |
The results suggest that efforts to shape opinion by using media already inclined to participate in a campaign of reshaping opinion would suffer from some important limitations. First, the question of availability of information arises—why did people tend to use most the sources of information they trusted least? The answer would most likely have to do with the structure of distribution and availability, and immediately suggests that one source of disjunction between events and perceptions has to do with the quality of information people receive. Second, aside from the broadcast programs offered by ANEM and B92, respondents expressed the most faith in interpersonal sources, particularly relatives and witnesses. The personally close category of “relatives” attracts more trust than the potentially unlimited category of “witnesses.” Here, as in the attribution of responsibility, distance is a factor. International media, especially the programs sponsored by governments with an eye toward influencing public opinion in Serbia (such as the VOA and BBC language services) are not mentioned, but the distance of these sources might interfere with the level of trust they enjoy. The same might be said of international nonmedia sources, such as statements from international governments, the United Nations, or ICTY.
The clear implication here is that if minds were likely to be changed, the way that would happen would have to be through the stories people tell one another, rather than the stories people are told by institutional sources. To offer a concrete example, Serbian prosecutors did not declare an intention to investigate Slobodan Milošević for war crimes after the ICTY indictment, or after demands for prosecution by European and American politicians, but after domestic media revealed a case in which there was clear indication of efforts to remove evidence of massacres on the part of high state authorities.23
An earlier survey by the same agency raised related questions. Here respondents were asked about the possible guilt of specific individuals and about the prospect of cooperation with ICTY. While a great majority believed that Milošević was probably guilty of corruption, treason, and electoral fraud, only 10 percent believed he was guilty of war crimes. Most respondents expressed some degree of opposition to cooperation with ICTY, especially to extradition. About half responded that Serbia should cooperate with ICTY only in exchange for international aid.24
The findings of surveys asking directly about the question of responsibility and the role of ICTY may only get us so far, however. We have seen from the review of results presented above that some findings are contradictory, that there are problems with regard to how widely information is believed, and that public opinion on concrete questions is more likely than not in a state of transition. Given the not entirely clear findings of survey research on questions directly related to guilt for violations of international law, it might be instructive to explore some indirect avenues toward the question.
In the first place, institutions that might deal with questions of guilt had weak credibility at the end of the Communist period and continued to be largely discredited afterward. In 1999 a survey indicated that just 23 percent of citizens expressed faith in the judiciary as opposed to 45 percent who did not.25 This put the judiciary well behind institutions with traditional authority (65 percent trusted the military and 14 percent did not; 56 percent trusted the Church and 18 percent did not), and behind some other institutions remarkable for their corruption and lack of credibility (the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts was trusted by 45 percent and distrusted by 18 percent, police were trusted by 39 percent and distrusted by 35 percent).26 Yet the judiciary “scored” higher than political institutions, whose authority was rejected in the survey by majorities ranging from 51 percent (opposition parties) to 62 percent (ruling parties).
In relation to institutions that could approach questions of responsibility more informally, traditional institutions like the military and the Church enjoyed relatively high levels of public trust. The military was, however, poorly positioned to engage in an exploration of the recent past because of its extensive complicity in the worst events of the period. The same could be said for the Church.27 Media were similarly distrusted, privately run media (trusted by 19 percent, distrusted by 37 percent) somewhat less than state-run media (16 percent, 61 percent).28 Perhaps in searching for institutions that could be helpful in addressing psychic and emotional needs related to responsibility, a residual high level of trust was still enjoyed only by cultural and educational institutions.
These general points regarding perceptions of institutions, though, are at best signpoints along the way to the fundamental question, which is how people perceived themselves in the light of the experience all of them shared to some degree. Some interesting research has linked the power of nationalist mobilization to the various dimensions of personal powerlessness people felt during the declining years of SFRJ.29 This current of research continues a trend of general lack of hope for the future already noted in the 1960s, but which became overwhelming in Serbia in the 1990s.30 A meaningful change in feelings of hope and self-efficacy would not be likely to occur without major changes in social and material conditions, but also without a fundamental transformation of values and self-perceptions. Such processes are neither impossible nor unknown, but they occur slowly and subtly, and are unlikely to be massive. In this regard, public opinion surveys are unlikely to be of much help at all. The indicators we are after are mostly cultural in character.
What this early snapshot of public opinion probably does show is that Serbian society in 2001 was neither wholly prepared for the confrontation with the past that was being demanded of it nor did it entirely reject the idea. There were institutional weaknesses that made a quick engagement less probable (if quick engagement was indeed ever probable): these included a political and legal establishment with severely degraded credibility, a media system largely discredited