Transcending Fratricide

This ninth edited volume of the Nomos series of ‘Southeast European Integration Perspectives’ broadly addresses the topic of reconciliation in post-confl ict societies of the Western Balkans. It includes an introductory chapter followed by thirteen contributions, in which the editors Srđa Pavlović and Marko Živković of the University of Alberta in Canada outline among the main challenges for the Western Balkans ‘accomplishing reconciliation and maintaining political stability in a society that is divided on the issue of war guilt and responsibilities for crimes’ (18). However, since what ensues relates only rather loosely to the above mentioned challenge, the reader must search carefully indeed for the thread that binds all the contributions together. Structurally, the chapters approach the post-conflict situations in the Yugoslav successor states from the points of view of different academic disciplines and with different levels of analysis.

In the first chapter, James E. Waller tells the story of ‘fratricide’, all the way from Cain and Abel’s Biblical ‘brother killing’ to Raphael Lemkin’s 20th century definition of genocide. Waller states that his focus is the ‘politics of naming’ of atrocities, in terms of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity, all of which are relevant to the process of post-conflict reconciliation. However, Waller then proceeds to make brief mention of the categories’ application first in general and then with particular reference to the international courts (ICTY, ICC and ICJ) in relation to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. However, as a result this first chapter has little relevance to the rest of the volume.

In a contribution described by the editors as the ‘navel’ of the volume, Hariz Halilovich and Ron Adams, looking through a socio-anthropological prism, tell the story of zavičaj which the authors tell us describes in this case a prewar multiethnic Bosnian sense of belonging, of attachment to place. Halilovich and Adams examine how that sense of zavičaj was lost but then recreated after the destruction of the village of Klotjevac, near Srebrenica. When Serb forces destroyed Klotjevac in 1992, many Bosniaks fled to Srebrenica; but today the majority of those who survived the attempted genocide have reluctantly come back to what is now a part of the Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authors point out that Klotjevac today has been ‘recreated’ by ‘cultural practices, embodied memory and social networks’ (159) in which returnees, survivors and foreigners are incorporated into the same zavičaj.

While Halilovich and Adams’s analysis of Klotjevac adopts an anthropological approach, Andrew Gilbert discusses the ‘politics of historical imagination’ in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina at a different level of analysis. He argues that the ‘master narrative of antagonistic ethnic difference’ dominant due to the ‘violence of the 1990s war’, has not legitimised the state we know today (171). The socialist historical imagination allows people to understand their history in terms of the united struggle against fascism but ‘the events from World War II that the socialist master narrative occluded, as well as the principles of groupness that it stigmatised, […] remained to be revived when political circumstances changed’ (170). That analysis works mostly at the national level and provides insight into relations between ethnic groups.

The volume contains two interesting case studies dealing with postwar reconciliation in Montenegro and Kosovo. Pavlović, actually one of the editors, discusses the case of the Morinj Camp based on Montenegrin territory, where Croats were held after being taken prisoner of war by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) during the siege of Dubrovnik (1991-1992). Pavlović presents a compelling study of what took place in the camp and the cover-up staged by the Montenegrin government to deny its involvement in the 1990s wars. His fieldwork includes interviews with Croat prisoners, as well as a few guards and interrogators from the camp. What emerges is a fully detailed account of atrocities committed then and the failure since of the government to facilitate retributive justice. The second case, presented by Isabel Ströhle, addresses preferential treatment of veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in postwar Kosovo. That chapter is based on considerable fieldwork, including interviews with dozens of KLA veterans, as well as local and international policy makers. Ströhle convincingly shows the failure of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to enforce a civic model of social justice. The ethnic divide was reinforced by the award of the right to social welfare to KLA veterans, who have used memory politics to claim social rights as repayment for their service in the war of independence.

Both Mitja Velikonja and Tanja Petrovićdiscuss the potential of ‘Yugonostalgia’ in regional reconciliation. According to Velikonja, nostalgia for socialist Yugoslavia is usually cast aside by dominant nationalist, patriarchal, and neoliberal ideologies since it is reminiscent of the formerly prosperous coexistence between the nations in the region (119). Breaking up that earlier state of affairs was the first task of the nationalists during the 1990s, but other ideologies similarly seek to fill the void left by socialist ideology. Velikonja continues to build the argument that ‘Yugonostalgia’ holds emancipatory potential, expressed through criticism of current society rooted in a Utopian view of the socialist past. Petrović adopts a similar stance to explore the discursive representations of ‘Yugonostalgia’ in former Yugoslav societies. Her analysis gives intriguing insight into the way Europeanization is incorporated into the national agendas nowadays as she argues that the values represented in nostalgia for socialist Yugoslavia are much more compatible with European values than the nationalism that shapes the national agendas.

With an altogether diff erent approach Nebojša Petrović evaluates the psychological ‘readiness for reconciliation’ in the western Balkans. He discusses various sociological and psychological studies done in the region, before turning to his own study, which he says, consists of ‘semi-structured interviews with twenty-five ordinary people from central Serbia’ (237). The study highlights sensitivities among Serbs about the past, and presents an intuitive approach to possibilities for reconciliation. In sharp contrast stand the conclusions of Dejan Guzina and Branka Marijan. Building on a study of the literature on the viability of power-sharing agreements and the role of civil society in post-conflict societies, they evaluate the power-sharing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia that has resulted from the Dayton (1995) and Ohrid (2001) agreements. The authors reach the grim if predictable conclusion that both political systems and civil societies are weak and that support is needed from international actors, but they recognize that at the same time that would undermine ‘the very principles of local ownership’ (210).

The contributions of Stefano Bianchini, Wladimir Fischer and Ian D. Armour are off-topic, but well written and interesting in their own right. Bianchini discusses the resurgence of nationalism in times of crisis and can deploy particular expertise on the economic crisis of the 1980s in Yugoslavia. He claims that for EU too there looms a similar retreat to nationalism as occurred in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, at least if further austerity policies are imposed. From his work based on the analysis of a selection of Croat and Serb magazines from the 1980s, Fischer argues that ‘from the 1950s onwards, nationalist traditions were catered to in the framework of Yugoslavism, which was itself nationalist in a new, multi-nationalist way’ (71). Hence, when nationalist discourse became dominant in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, it was within a framework that already provided for national categories. Armour meanwhile presents a historical account of Austro-Hungary-Serbia relations in the second half of the 19th century, with its focus on the work of the Serbian Historian Vasilije Krestić. Armour argues that Krestić’s ‘portrayal of anyone but the Serbs as manipulators and hegemonists’ implies that Serbs are ‘blameless victims’ (107) and shows how Krestić’s work serves the diplomatic interests of Serbia in the region and that it was matched by the policies of the Croats and other forces within the Dual Monarchy, thereby Armour places Serbian victimhood in perspective. It could be argued that all thee authors have addressed the underlying problems of the wars of the 1990s and are therefore dealing with issues that are subject to post-confl ict reconciliation, but that would be a stretch.

The final contribution comes from Lenard J. Cohen and draws on his book written with John R. Lampe Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans (2011). Here, the argument is that democratisation is a key ingredient in the process of reconciliation, and Cohen describes political developments in the region and their relation to the spread of the liberal democratic values adopted by the urban middle classes. He remains optimistic from his birds-eye view of politics in the Western Balkans; rather a contrast to certain of the contributors who are perhaps more sensitised to the political problems in the region. A bright ensemble of chapters of high quality, this volume does however read somewhat like a scholarly journal and so runs the risk of seeming attractive only to scholars of post-conflict reconciliation, whereas some of the less specific individual articles are just as worthwhile. Overall, then, although individual chapters are all interesting in their own right, the book does rather lack cohesion.