Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy
restrictions on their capacity for active engagement.
The data also suggest that any efforts or initiatives to promote campaigns for public engagement would have had to meet several conditions in order to succeed. They would have to be perceived as having their origins in the society rather than being imposed from without. Within the society, they would have to be perceived as originating from or involving institutions with meaningful public credibility. They would have to be perceived as taking into account not only calls for regret but also sources of grievance. And they would have to involve, not only authoritative sources directing discourse toward the public, but active exchange of discourse among the public.
Further on in the text, analysis of the work of ICTY and related initiatives will show that these efforts did not meet the conditions described above and so did not make the expected contribution to the process of developing a discourse around guilt and responsibility. In this regard, they were not helped by a political and institutional structure that was either unprepared for the challenge or declined to take it up. This meant that much of the work of developing an understanding of the recent past took place not in the field of politics and law, but in that of culture.
If the surveys cited so far have offered representations of latent or existing public opinion around 2001, the explorations in the following chapter draw on cultural expression to get at what might have been emergent public opinion.
Chapter 3
Moment I: The Leader Is Not Invincible
The previous chapter indicated that public opinion surveys offer at best a mixed view of the state of public opinion just after the end of the Milošević regime. Part of the reason for this may be that opinion was in fact mixed, as could be expected in a period when a strongly ideologized form of control of information was coming to an end, and when uncertainty remained regarding what might follow. Another part of the reason may be that opinion was still in formation, just as political institutions and the parties and movements that would influence them were also in formation. Many of the perceptions and understandings that would become important in the years to follow were in negotiation in this period. While it may be uncertain what perspectives were dominant in 2001, contention between residual and emergent perspectives was clearly visible.1
This chapter explores some of the negotiation that took place around these perspectives by examining two cultural-political moments: (1) the discussion of the arrest of Slobodan Milošević at the end of March 2001, the moment at which it became clear that the former absolute ruler was neither untouchable nor invincible;2 and (2) the emergence of the literary genre of “regime memoirs,” in which writers would, using diary, fiction, and polemic, generate an account of the meaning of the period that had just ended.3 It was in cultural sites like these that positions and themes were elaborated that would come to define the discussion over the following decade.
Initial Responses to the Arrest of Milošević
As criminal investigations commenced following the inauguration of Serbia’s government in January 2001, major political actors frequently insisted, sometimes instrumentally, on the independence of prosecutorial and investigatory agencies. This was clear when Vojislav Koštunica refused (before, several days later, relenting) to meet with Carla Del Ponte, chief ICTY prosecutor, claiming that cooperation with the Tribunal was not a responsibility of the federal president. The ministers who met with Del Ponte echoed the arguments about separation of powers. When the U.S. government imposed a deadline of 31 March 2001, by which time Milošević had to be arrested or economic aid would be blocked, several Serbian government representatives argued that they could not order police to make an arrest or complete an investigation without compromising the independence of law enforcement.
Milošević was arrested nevertheless, just in time to meet the deadline—an event that marks a symbolic break, consolidating the power of the incoming regime. It is one thing to defeat an opponent politically, and quite another to hold this opponent politically responsible, to puncture the perception, built up over years, that he is above the law. Nobody who saw Milošević driven off to the Belgrade central prison believed afterward in the myth of his invincibility.
The government that carried out the arrest spoke about it very little while it was taking place and immediately afterward. Many government figures either would not give information or, in Koštunica’s case, did not seem to know themselves what was happening.4 One vice-president,Žarko Korać, was shown around the world claiming, inaccurately, that Milošević had already been arrested half a day before he was. Federal premier Zoran Žižić declared that the arrest “is not under the jurisdiction of the federal government.”5 Prime minister Zoran Djindjić told reporters that he had not been following events on the night of 31 March, but had been watching the popular film Gladiator with his son.6
The strange silence of the people in charge probably derived from complicating factors. First, there was the danger, which turned out to be exaggerated, that the arrest might lead to confrontations or violence between supporters and opponents of Milošević.7 Second, any declaration that Milošević was being arrested would inevitably lead to the question of what he was being arrested for, a question people in power preferred to avoid as it raised subsidiary questions of whether international oversight should be accepted and whether people in Serbia or elsewhere had the most legitimate claim to being Milošević’s victims. Third, the U.S.-imposed deadline for financial assistance was controversial. Every official statement declared that arresting Milošević right on the deadline day was a coincidence, but these declarations were not generally regarded as persuasive. So government representatives had good reason to avoid the question of whether they were more interested in establishing the rule of law or acting out of a more practical financial logic that looked like blackmail.
People outside the government showed none of the reticence of their political representatives. I followed just one popular channel for public comment: the postings in the “comments on the news” section of the web site of Belgrade’s B92 radio. This section invites people to send responses to news items, which are then published on a separate page. What follows is a categorization of several of those comments (in my translation) as a broad picture of the responses people shared about the arrest.8
The Process of Arrest as a Reflection of the Nature of the New Regime
The arrest itself was a process full of confrontations and confusions lasting from 7:00 P.M. on Friday, 30 March, until Milošević was finally taken into custody around 4:35 A.M. on Sunday, 1 April. During those thirty-four hours, there were small clashes between the police and Milošević’s personal military guard and private security, there were contradictory statements from media and government spokespeople, and there were some brief gestures of heroism on the part of Milošević’s supporters and relatives.9 Although the arrest was eventually carried off without major violence, it looked like an organizational and tactical fiasco.
The first comments responded to the inability of the police to make the arrest swiftly, and interpreted this as a sign that the new government was either incompetent or continued to fear Milošević:
(Aleksandar, 31 March): Milošević is not God above all people and law that he can resist arrest. (Beogradjanin u Washington DC-u, 31 March): [he came to power in] 1986, and now 15 years later he is still laughing in all our faces.10
(Mirjana Grkavac Maksimović, 31 March): Is our police really so incompetent that it needs so much time to arrest one person? How can Milošević reject an arrest warrant? Who is in charge here?
Other writers focused on what appeared to be the insubordination of Milošević’s military guard. Prime Minister Djindjić had stated in January that the military unit at Milošević’s residence was “guarding the house, not the person,”11 but the guards refused entry to the police on the grounds that they were not invited visitors. The police had to remove the military guard from the gate by force. Some writers interpreted this as a sign of that the army remained loyal to Milošević, especially since it continued to be commanded by his last appointee:
(Mile,