‘Achieved without Ambiguity?’ Memorializing Victimhood in Belgrade after the 1999 NATO Bombing

Memorial Architecture between Politics of Regret and Conveyed Meanings

Memorial architecture and the engagement of architects with traumatic pasts and societal responsibility have been in the limelight of the architectural profession in the 2000s, after Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial (2004) and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (2001) in Berlin. After the Second World War most memorials to historical events were built on the actual sites of the events, although memorials in Yugoslavia were placed on sites of partisan battles or fascist concentration camps. However, in recent decades, memorial construction has become a feature of urban centres, positioned at a distance from actual sites of commemoration, but closer to urban populations. For instance, Holocaust memorials, for decades built mainly at the sites of former Nazi concentration camps, have begun to appear in the centres of cities like Berlin, and have therefore become embedded in the everyday practice of coming to terms with the past. Memorial architectural projects then became part of city-making, and architects competed among themselves with daring designs and creative engagements with the past. In a time of what Jeffrey K. Olick calls the politics of regret, memorials came to embody the dominant narratives of their societies^[10]—in Germany, for example they were connected with the pre-eminence for the Germans of coming to terms with their past in their own sociopolitical landscape.^[11] In Berlin, the embracing of coming to terms with the past was reflected in the memorial architecture of repentance and became part of the collective identity. In Latin America, challenges to transitional justice processes after dictatorship found echoes in struggles to erect memorials to the victims of political violence.^[12] In the former Yugoslavia, despite expectations of international transitional justice, coming to terms with the past has been deemed incomplete and unconvinced, because of political complexities and continuities, but also the relatively short time that has elapsed.^[13] Analysis of commemorations of the NATO bombing in Serbia takes place then in this intersection of memorial architecture paradigms resulting from a dominant world politics of regret and a local framework resistant to coming to terms with the past.

Memorialization emerged as an ‘attempted agency of legitimization of authority and social cohesion’,^[14] with monuments and memorials not merely cultural representations of the social memory of groups, but intrinsically connected to political processes, including identity-building.^[15] In the Yugoslav socialist period, monuments performed a spatialization of ideology, highlighting partisan struggle not only through traditional figurative forms of representation—particularly in the earlier period—but also through modernist abstractions erected on historical sites. As Senadin Musabegović has underlined, ‘monuments were used in an effort to master the past in order to control the future’.^[16] As tools in a process of representing narratives based on assembled memories and erasures, memorials simultaneously embody and convey specific and selected parts of the past:

‘Monuments are nothing if not selective aids to memory: they encourage us to remember some things and to forget others. The process of creating monuments, especially where it is openly contested, as in Berlin, shapes public memory and collective identity.’^[17]

By contrast, other engagements with the past have been open-ended. In response to politically framed monuments and memorials came the anti-redemptive architecture of counter-monuments. Designed to avoid glorification of the nation, counter-monuments are necessarily open-ended. The seminal countermonument, Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument against Fascism in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, was designed to depend on people’s interaction, as it was lowered below the ground when a number of people signed their names against fascism. The ultimate objective was that it should eventually be buried completely.^[18] Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, able to evoke an individuation of each life and loss and to invite personalization and appropriation through gestures such as flowers and candles, opened a new avenue for architects to embrace memorial architecture.^[19] While officially sanctioned memorial architecture continued to emerge in cities, counter-monuments influenced the production of memorial architecture around the world, with architects and artists involving the public and aiming to challenge established practice and sanctioned meanings and narratives. Within this framework of the specific sociopolitical context and the global trends of memorial architecture, I will now turn to the spatial dynamics of memorialization in Belgrade after the NATO bombing.

Seeing Like a State. Memorializing Victimhood in Milošević’s Belgrade and Beyond

Near the confluence of the Sava and the Danube rivers in Belgrade lies the Friendship Park, today an overgrown grassy precinct with winding alleys among extensive shrubbery. The vertical silhouette of a monument stands out. With an aesthetic reminiscent of the stalinist socialist-realism of the early socialist years, its appearance contrasts with the late modernist ensembles within and around the park—the solid Palace of Serbia, previously the Federal Executive Council of SFR Yugoslavia; the Ušće Business Tower, a steel and glass reconstruction of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CK); and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Yet paradoxically the monument is the newest structure of them all. It is the monument to the 1999 bombings, the Eternal Flame, embodying the state’s response to those events as an architectural expression of the state’s official memory narrative.

A man in his sixties sits on a mound nearby. ‘This is the monument to the victims of the bombings of 1999,’ he says. ‘This was mentioned on a plaque before, but vandals have dismantled some of the plaques […]. This was put here by Milošević and his wife. But it’s true, this happened; there were victims, we were victims, this was history.’ For that man, aware of the monument’s original meaning and history, the place recalls the memory of suffering and relates to the victimhood of the nation. Yet for passers-by unfamiliar with the monument, the absence of plaques and the general lack of care for the site reduce the communicative power of the memorial and the emotional tension it could otherwise trigger.

However, the Eternal Flame was erected as a monument to Serbian resilience and heroism, and not one of victimhood. Sculptors Svetozar and Svetomir Radović designed and built the monument in 2000 on the initiative of Mirjana Marković, leader of the Yugoslav Left party and the wife of Slobodan Milošević. Marković composed the text adorning the monument, by which it was dedicated as a monument to the Serbian people’s resistance to NATO aggression, and listing the countries which attacked Serbia.^[20] Then-president Milan Milutinović said at its opening ‘This fire will be a beacon of light for present and future generations, a witness that Serbia will defend freedom as long as people live in these areas.’^[21] Its verticality and socialist-realist aesthetic mirrored those monuments to glory and heroism appearing in various socialist landscapes. At a time when international memorial architecture preferred horizontal expressions of both groundedness and victimhood, the Eternal Flame appears both as stylistically anachronistic and discursively dislocating, by re-centring the narrative on heroism and resistance rather than defeat and victimhood. The official narrative at the time attested to a defiant and victorious Yugoslavia, which despite its vicissitudes and encirclement by hostile neighbours and an unreliable international community, was able to resist and be heroic. The narrative was thus placed on the continuum of the socialist Yugoslav trope of heroic resistance, which began with the partisans’ struggle as a foundational realm of memory for the socialist federation. It was within that framework in which both the state act of memorialization and the general discourse of architectural reconstruction after the NATO bombing took place. Immediately after the bombings, Yugoslav president Milošević announced the beginning of a reconstruction plan for the entire country, including the capital Belgrade. He echoed the words of Tito’s programme of reconstruction of socialist Yugoslavia after the Second World War—and its message.^[22]Nevertheless little reconstruction was actually done under Milošević and the Eternal Flame’s light was switched off after the uprising of 5 October 2000, when Milošević was ousted (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2

The Eternal Flame, monument erected in 2000 at the initiative of Mirjana Marković.© Gruia Bădescu

None of the various successor governments advanced particularly clear or coherent narratives about the past. That reflects the ambivalence of politics in Serbia today, caught between the European option, for which it has to pay the price of giving up Kosovo, the symbol of Serbian suffering; and the nationalist option, connected with the old and particular relationship with Russia.^[23] Unclear about both their country’s present and its future, Serbian politicians are similarly unclear about the recent past. Correspondingly, Serbia’s post-Milošević memorial acts eschewed the triumphalist line of the Eternal Flame, which was itself doused and marginalized. Marković’s text referring to NATO aggression and listing blameworthy countries was removed.^[24] While the military Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia contributed to repainting and a certain amount of essential repairs, the local authorities claimed to be unable to provide funds for maintenance, declaring that the monument is essentially illegal since it was built in 2000 not in accordance with legal procedure. As for new memorials, all were modest, especially in comparison with other war-wrecked ex-Yugoslav neighbours. Croatia commemorates its dead as heroes and serenely blames Serbs in a country-wide landscape of bold memorials,^[25] while in Bosnia all three groups, including the Bosnian Serbs, memorialize their dead with monuments and immaculate monumental cemeteries.^[26] By contrast, in Serbia memorialization has remained elusive to this day. The occasional memorials to victims are usually small and, tending to be under the patronage of the church, many of them feature an Orthodox cross. However, this is not attuned to any sense of atonement or mediation of narratives of victimhood and perpetration. Rather, it is connected to a general obfuscation of the past, derived from the ambivalence of narratives. Various post-Milošević regimes have advanced to different extents an unapologetic line on the past, while obfuscating guilt and responsibility and inserting various allusions to Serbian victimhood.^[27]

As Lea David showed in her study of the decade-long debates surrounding the memorial to war victims in Belgrade, obfuscation of the past as a specific memory politics clashed with various collective memories, such as the memories of victims of wars waged by Serbia, or Serb paramilitaries from other republics. It clashed too with the memories of Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, or those of veterans, leading to general displeasure for all stakeholder groups.^[28] A committee of sculptors, historians, architects and representatives of the Army and the City Assembly was put in place to organise competitions and juries, which were contested and discussed by a variety of groups. The resulting memorial, unveiled in 2012 to a design by young architects Jelena Pančevac and Žarko Uzelac was a monument to ‘the victims of the wars and defenders of the fatherland from 1990 to 1999’. It was an unlikely juxtaposition of categories that was contested by organizations representing both groups.^[29] The structure itself reflects a reluctant memorial gesture: the state showed its willingness to commemorate, it sponsored a memorial, but the result was a compromise aiming to satisfy everyone, and thus no-one. It reflected the general politics of the past, dominated by obfuscation, ambivalence, fuzziness, rather than clear stances. I would argue too that the same memorial reluctance is equally evident if we look at it through a ‘spatial lens’. Although the memorial is located in the important transport interchange of Savski Trg, the busy railway station square, it has been placed on an elevated platform and is separated by a wall and greenery from a crowded bus stop. While the separation is functional, it is also visual: you cannot see the memorial from the bus stop, nor from other busy points of the square, for that matter. The only clear view of it is from Nemanjina street, from where a plaque is visible surrounded by a shallow water channel. Even when one can see it, the memorial appears poorly scaled, as it is too small for its expansive, windswept platform. The design is minimalistic and the inscriptions barely visible (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3

The memorial to victims of the wars and defenders of the fatherland from 1990-1999.© Gruia Bădescu

While state narratives and memorialization strategies in Belgrade changed in the 2000s in relationship to political transformations and the various uses of the past, the effects on memorial urban space seem to have been minimal. While states are usually deemed to be entrepreneurs of memory, the peripheral role in Belgrade of memorials of the 1999 events suggests that no clear, coherent memory trope is embraced strongly enough by the state to give confident shape to any urban site as a powerfully evocative memorial. As such top-down approaches seem to be limited, we shall now turn to another category of city-makers — architects — and investigate whether in their professional debates and actual designs they related to the memory of the bombings and if so, how.

Making Sense of Ruins and Narratives. The Radio Television of Serbia

The competition for the conversion into a memorial of the ruins of the Radio Television of Serbia headquarters occurred almost fifteen years after the NATO bombing. The historicist wing of the RTS building—which also consists of a modernist wing with a glass exterior—was bombed by NATO on 23 April 1999, an action NATO justified with two arguments. First, they claimed that it was necessary ‘to disrupt and degrade the command, control and communications network’ of the Yugoslav Armed Forces. Second, NATO stated that the RTS headquarters was a tool of the propaganda war through which the regime was orchestrating the campaign against the Albanian population in Kosovo.^[30]Adding to the general criticism in Serbia of the attack, international NGOs like Amnesty International^[31] and a number of leading intellectuals in the West protested against the bombing of such a non-military target, with Noam Chomsky famously accusing NATO of targeting journalists and thereby freedom of speech itself. Furthermore, there was an international and domestic outcry when it was found that sixteen people had been inside the building as it was being bombed. The regime and the media blasted NATO's crime against civilians. This was the ultimate proof, they said, that NATO had committed criminal aggression against the people of Serbia.^[32]

The families of the victims of the bombing, as well as journalists and witnesses, gave another version of events. After NATO had given warning to the Serbian government that they would bomb the building—in order that staff might be evacuated—the director of RTS indeed evacuated the journalists but declared ‘compulsory work duty’ (radna obaveza) for members of the technical staff who were to remain at work during the night of the bombing.^[33] In 2002, a Serbian court sentenced the director of RTS, Dragoljub Milanović, to ten years in prison for an ‘offence against public security’. The court decided that he had been forewarned about the attacks but that he had deliberately ordered the staff to remain.^[34] Nevertheless, families of the victims considered Milanović no more than a scapegoat. Their representatives stated that there was evidence of memoranda in which the Generalštab, the Supreme Defence Council, as well as other ruling party members ordered the director to keep people in.^[35]

The families of victims argued that the guilt for the deaths of civilians lay with both NATO and the government, as the former launched the attack and the latter deliberately placed the workers in mortal danger in order to raise the number of civilian victims in an attempt to discredit NATO.^[36] In 2015 Noam Chomsky compared the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ murders to the killing of the sixteen, who were actually mistakenly described as RTS journalists; whereupon Žanka Stojanović wrote to Chomsky in the names of the families of the deceased. Stojanović protested that in Chomsky’s analysis, Chomsky was exculpating the Serbian government in power at the time of the bombing of any responsibility or guilt for the deaths, instead identifying NATO as the sole perpetrator of the crime. The families objected that throughout the country ‘criminals present themselves as victims […] while the rest of Serbia is silent’.^[37]

While the families’ accusations gained a certain visibility in the media and in publications, the RTS bombings continued to be used by the regime as a symbol of the criminality of NATO’s attacks. The regime’s statements, bolstered by RTS’s messages of institutional grief, conveyed to the public a sense that the ruins of RTS are special in the overall scheme of things because of their extra dimension of human loss, which invests the site of martyrdom, almost with the quality of a shrine. A small memorial plaque was placed outside the ruined building, asking ‘Why?’ and listing the name of victims, and every year on the anniversary of the RTS bombing commemorations take place on the site. Then in March 2014 the memorial park ‘Lest We Forget’ opened in Košsutnjak. However, the design competition for the ruined RTS wing opened new debates about memorialization through the direct involvement of the families of the victims, who were critical of the official narratives.

The idea of erecting a memorial was also present in other reconstruction debates in Belgrade. For other centrally located ruins in the city, such as those of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army and the Ministry of Defence (the Generalštab), some expressed the opinion that reconstruction ought to have a memorial dimension to it. Nevertheless, the dominant perspective from architectural circles has favoured faithful restoration to the original state, invoking architectural quality and special histories such as that of the Generalštab which was built by the renowned Serbian modernist architect Nikola Dobrović.^[38]However, unlike the Generalštab, an emblematic building of the socialist regime and important in the architectural history of the city as well as the political and military history of Yugoslavia as a whole, the small building of the RTS at No. 1 Aberdareva Street was an architectural underdog. Designed in 1939 originally as a canteen for poor students on behalf of a humanitarian organization under the patronage of the Queen of Yugoslavia, the building’s use was changed a number of times and in time it became increasingly marginal in its spatial relationship to the city centre. Its architect was Rajko Tatić, chief of the Queen’s Technical Bureau, with a preference for and experience with neo-byzantine designs.^[39] The location of the site near St Mark’s church, built in the tradition of the Serbian Morava school, supported the romantic-national design of Tatić’s canteen. War halted the canteen’s construction, and after it Tatić adapted the building to its new purpose as a film studio for the state Avala Film studios. The design was altered, with the removal of the oval windows characteristic of the romantic interwar style. After 1963 the building became the headquarters of RTS, and in 1989 was given a modern extension designed by Milomir LuŽaić and Dragoslav Marčić.^[40] While the building was originally intended to form a Serbo-Byzantine ensemble with St Mark’s Church, by the end of the 1980s it had ended up being dwarfed by its modern extension, as well as by the modernist House of Pioneers designed by Ivan Antić.

The RTS memorial competition was organized by the City of Belgrade through its Investment and Housing Agency, and by Radio Television of Serbia, with the support of the Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade and the Belgrade City Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. The jury was led by Spasoje Krunić of the Faculty of Architecture, and was composed of four architects who represented various institutions—including one unlikely candidate from Radio Television of Serbia itself. There were also three representatives of the families of the deceased.^[41] These latter included the same Zanka Stojanović, who had previously acted as spokesman for the families and had written the letter to Noam Chomsky. By showing such respect for the bottom-up nature of the initiative, the composition of the jury gave a voice to the families of those killed in the NATO attack, and empowered those subsequently affected by the deaths. It transcended the general scepticism that architects trained in socialist Europe in the ‘demiurgic tradition’ of architecture felt about the consultation of the local beneficiaries. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a great many modernist architects held the view that laymen were not to be asked their opinions, nor consulted—just as a doctor would not ask a patient’s opinion on diagnosis and treatment. Against that background then, the almost numerically equal status of architects and laymen in the jury was an important departure. The legitimacy of the presence of representatives of the families in the jury could be interpreted as a moral one, for they were the ones most directly affected by the tragedy and they were the initiators of the memorial. The legitimacy of their presence was emotional too, in that their experience and suffering would provide a unique insight into the memorial proposals.

The goal of the RTS competition was the ‘development of a memorial that will testify to the tragic perishing of the employees of Radio Television of Serbia during the 1999 NATO bombing of No. 1 Aberdareva Street in Belgrade’. Furthermore, it was stated that ‘the essence of the artistic and design solution is a dignified marking of the site of the tragedy of the RTS employees’. The design brief outlined as a task for participants to ‘use their artistic, architectural and technological solutions’ in order to ensure that the memory of the deceased be integrated into the design, including the possibility of displaying documents of the ‘tragic event’.^[42] There was one mandatory element: the preservation of the ruin. The RTS design brief stated that it was mandatory to save and preserve the current form and ‘the remains of the facility’s architectural elements (walls, ceilings and roof construction) up to the vertical plane directly behind the second window of the demolished façade on the south-west side, along all floor levels’. This prescribed element invested the ruin with the role of a mnemonic device of the NATO bombing. The ruin thus became the centrepiece of the design, the architectural-mnemonic foundation of the project.

The language of the design brief goes beyond the call to address questions of memory and commemoration, by making mention of the ‘tragic event’, ‘tragedy […]’, ‘horrific image of the ruin’, which subtly bound it to the narrative of victimhood and suffering. The title of the competition itself, in its English translation, ‘Competition for the Preparation of the Preliminary Design of the Memorial to the RTS Employees Perished during the NATO Bombing’ highlights the lyrical, melancholic word ‘perished’. However, by using the neutral term ‘NATO bombing’ instead of the ‘NATO aggression’, invoked by Milošević’s regime and by conservatives to this day, it distances itself from the narrative of the former regime.

The prescriptive nature of the competition, the normative frame of memory and the capacity to transform the site are accompanied by a paradoxical criterion for evaluating the solutions. Overall, the criteria for the jury are the customary ones and include the display of originality but also of the considerateness, rationality and readability of solutions. It is stated that the readability of the design should be ‘achieved with no ambiguity and understatement, while respecting all given requirements’. But how can such a memorial be unambiguous? Andreas Huyssen commented that ruins are ambiguous par excellence, they trigger ambiguous messages about the past and about decay.^[43] On the one hand, ruination becomes a metaphor for the human memory itself, erodible and unpredictable. According to Kathleen Stewart, ruins are an ‘embodiment of the process of remembering itself’.^[44] On the other hand, ruins have a ‘fundamental ambiguity’,^[45] their disparate fragments and traces are difficult to weave into an eloquent narrative.^[46] In the case of Belgrade, for some people ruins can trigger memories of lived experience, for others they project the victimhood of the nation, while some are reminded of a larger picture of war, and the crimes of the regime.^[47] Furthermore, while readability and ambiguity are understood from the rubric as measurable, noticeable characteristics, the very act of asking for an unambiguous design for a memorial of an event that triggers so many interpretations and responses is itself paradoxical. The one unambiguous fact is that sixteen people died. The other—the reasoning for their death, the reasoning of the attack, the senses of guilt and responsibility, the various geographical scales of the Yugoslav conflicts, all serve to complicate the picture.

The authors of the winning design responded to the complexity of the situation by engaging with the theories of art, emptiness and duality. Neoarhitekti were the architects who won the competition, and this was not their first foray into dealing with sites affected by the NATO bombing. They participated—achieving a honourable mention—in the 2005 competition for the ‘New gates of Belgrade’ which aimed to reconfigure the site where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs still lie in ruins. They framed their concept for the RTS memorial in Gillo Dorfles’s writings on art between the logical and the mythical, the organization of the design in Giangiorgio Pasqualotto’s emptiness aesthetics and included Jean Baudrillard’s duality in order to discuss the form. The architects explained their design through Dorfles’s work on the aesthetics of ruins and the imaginary in architecture. For the Italian art critic, aesthetics should focus on culture as a whole, including symbols and metaphors, fantasy and myth. The architects focused on one of his remarks on the affective response to ruins:

‘whenever you find yourself in front of the ruins of the architectural past, be it theMayan pyramids in Uxmal, or the ruins of pillars of Selinunte, we cannot fail to feel touched by some irrational wire [,..]'.^[48]

The ‘irrational’ connects ruins to the mythical, but also to the Freudian uncanny. They are physical and present, but through their incompleteness and their symbolism of destruction and decay, they are un-homely, uncanny, deformed (see Fig. 4).

Figure 4

The winning design of the RTS competition. ©Neoarhitekti

Neoarhitekti suggested that the key to the project is the stratification of past and present in layers that should be both visible and distinguishable. The goal was to achieve an experience of emptiness, which they ground in Pasqualotto’s emptiness aesthetics. A space that has become empty in our perception could not be replaced by any other architecture but one which enhances the emptiness, the void. The form is unmistakably architectural. Architecture is described as a formalized image which expresses Baudrillard’s duality between eternity and hindrance.

In front of the ruins, a plateau consisting of bricks from the original building supports sixteen kinetic sculptures, which is the only particular reference to the human lives lost, being a direct representation of the sixteen victims just like the sixteen hornbeam trees in the Košutnjak forest memorial. The architectural insertions are seen as layers with the aim neither to annihilate nor replace, but to stress the violent destruction. ‘Architecture is only a lens, an aperture of the camera, through which we are framing the actual character of the place’, with emptiness embedding understandings of silence. The team used the repertoire of the language of destruction—ruins and the void that remains—in order to create a place. In doing so, they responded to the call of Andrew Herscher to see the relationship between violence and architecture as a creative force, rather than as an interpretation of architectural destruction as nothing more than an impact of political forces.

The second and third prizes focused on the creation of a public space, inviting the visitor from the Tašmajdan Park into a seemingly hospitable and homely environment of park-like space. However, they create thereby the setting for what James Young, building on Anthony Vidler and Sigmund Freud, calls uncanny memorial architecture, as it estranges itself from the visitor as soon as he enters. This uncanny memorial architecture encompasses

‘the stabilizing function of architecture, by which the familiar is made to appear part of a naturally ordered landscape, will be subverted by the antithetical effects of the unfamiliar’.

Furthermore, by enshrining the ruin at the centre of the memorial, all these projects advance a concept of arrested decay. The ruins do not remain mere ruins but perform the role of representation of the moment of destruction. They are to be preserved as such, and should not continue to decay. By stopping time at the moment of destruction, the project also aims to stop the corrosion of materiality through material means.

The memorially uncanny comes across not only through the architectural design, but also through the aim of the compe ition itself, being about

‘that memory of historical events which never domesticates such events, never makes us at home with them, never brings them into the reassuring house of redemptory meaning’.

All the top three finalist designs carry a hint of the deaths of the employees, aim to create a space for memory and mourning, but do not engage with the context and meaning of the NATO bombing. They concentrate on one event, which is what they were asked and intended to do. They serve as memorials and memory-fixing spaces and not places of engagement with the past war nor with debates about responsibility going on within Serbian society. They become uncanny memorial acts, which, like the Jewish Museum in Berlin, ‘leave such events unredeemable yet still memorable, unjustifiable yet still graspable in their causes and effects’.

While the competition brief and the finalist entries engage directly with the deaths of the sixteen employees of RTS, there is no inclusion of the wider context of the 1999 bombings, nor with the general subject of the past to be dealt with in Serbia. As such, it remains a memorial to the sixteen dead, while not engaging with the ruin as a symbol of the attack on the city. The materiality of the ruin and of the city fades into a supporting background through this anthropocentric reading of violence. I argue that this is produced by the ambiguity and tensions that mark the events of 23 April 1999. The bombing of RTS highlights precisely the tensions that mark the memory of the 1999 NATO bombings in general: the city as a target of the NATO alliance, with civilians killed and property destroyed, versus the actions of the regime that in the interest of emphasizing its own national narrative of suffering and victimhood was willing to sacrifice its own citizens; and the role of the RTS in the ‘propaganda machine’ of the regime.

However, the lack of explanation and contextualization of the bombing in the designs of the memorial comes not only from the ambiguity surrounding the events themselves, with regard to who was responsible for the civilian deaths. I argue that it is also rooted in the ambiguity surrounding the NATO bombings as a whole, as well as the general politics of obfuscation of the past in Serbia, where difficult conversations about the entirety of the 1990s must be avoided. Consequently, the call for an unambiguous design effectively neglects the complex canvas of political and cultural discourses surrounding the past, especially this specific past in Serbia. While nominally being a memorial engagement with the past, it does so specifically within a memory framework which does not engage with the multiple layers of meaning of the past and the nature of war.

The obfuscation of the past also comes through the analysis of the spatial relationships between the ruin–memorial, its surroundings and the city as a whole. This is the only ruin that the city authorities have envisioned as an eventual memorial, one which will not be affected by any other type of reconstruction but a work of memorial architecture. Certainly, the choice is well supported, being a particularly powerful ruin because of the human victims associated with it, as a symbolic ruin for the entirety of the NATO attacks, with their material and human impact. Nevertheless, it is beset by marginality and lack of visibility, which reflects in fact the general process of dealing with the past. Just as with the memorial for the victims and veterans from the railway station square, the RTS memorial is in the paradoxical position of being both central and marginal, affected by actual lack of visibility from most points around it, with walls, buildings and topography designed to block the view. The memorial for victims and veterans is both visually and functionally separated from most of the passers-by and users of public transport by its elevation and a wall covered in greenery. Similarly, the memorial to RTS is next to the central park and boulevard, but visually obscured. Therefore, the city authorities have both catered to the need and the call to build memorials and ascribed them central locations. However, analysing their altered scale the spatial accessibility and visibility of the memorials, the structures have emerged as peripheral and marginal. The spatial relationships mirror their own overall role in coming to terms with the past in Serbian society—necessary as normative tools for international acceptance but blurred and obfuscated in practice.

Figure 5

The marginality within centrality of the RTS memorial: spatial relationships between the RTS memorial, Tašmajdan Park, St. Mark’s Church and the Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra. Bing maps modifi ed for the purposes of this article by Gruia Bădescu

Conclusion

We have seen that the spatial memorial engagement with the NATO bombing in Belgrade has included practices that echo memorialization practices of such instances of the politics of regret and trauma existing elsewhere (e.g. Germany and to some extent other places in Europe, certain Latin American societies), but performing it through a simultaneous marginalization. The two memorials already erected by the state are peripheral and unkempt, and serve more to obfuscate memory rather than perform it. The memorial to the victims of the Radio Television of Serbia is a bottom-up initiative constrained to evoke a particular group memory of victims and engages neither with the full set of events nor their context.

The effusiveness of memorials of the entire NATO bombing campaign in Serbia can be situated in relation to state politics of non-engagement with the past of the 1990s. By obfuscating the meaning of the bombing campaign, the state thus evades any discussions about causality and responsibility, while paying lip service to memorialization trends by perfunctorily erecting memorials just to satisfy this call. The RTS competition dislocated this tendency through its bottom-up nature and by creative engagement with multiple narratives of victimhood. The indications for the competition for the RTS brought architects to create designs able to make sense of the multi-layered meanings of victimhood and guilt, responsibility and resilience. The resulting design could provide an avenue for such debates to continue and to grow; and to stimulate a process of memorial engagements that are more akin to counter-monuments in their goal to be open-ended and challenge official narratives. The ambiguities of the meanings of ruins and the open-endedness of such approaches to memorial architecture could have catalytic effects on revisiting the narratives of the NATO bombing and the 1990s in general in Serbia.^[49]