Do we need resolutions or a resolution?

Written by Srdjan Garcevic

During my primary school years, just after the toppling of Milošević in 2000, I was high on the many programs about peace and reconciliation in the Balkans that were running primarily on B92 TV. I decided to do my bit for reconciliation at home, or rather in my primary school in Belgrade. The first step was speaking to a friend who joined our class as one of the many Serbs who left Sarajevo during the war. I asked him about his experience of the war, and he told me that one of his best friends was killed during a shelling. Then I asked what he thought the Serb responsibility for the war was. Although we were entering puberty, I was very aware that I should not press the question further after my friend seemed to be at the same time on the verge of punching me and tearing up.

This lesson was valuable, especially when I went to Sarajevo, and the topic of the conversation, inevitably, from all sides, led to their painful and horrific wartime experience. Trying to get people to accept abstract narratives about some of the worst parts of their lives is a fool’s errand and, in many ways, a cruel idea. Forcing people to think and say that their family or friends were murdered or expelled for a “good reason”, or, worse, a “just cause”, or that they were saved by "evil" is ultimately something that you will never really get them to do without genuinely draconian measures. Indeed, the earliest Greek tragedies precisely dealt with the inhumanity - even cursedness - of sacrificing familial bonds for various political aims.

However, that does not mean that it is necessary to create a fact-based (rather than purely moralizing) historical narrative where people understand what happened and can at least understand the scale of atrocities and losses perpetrated and endured by all sides and how they were, tragically, interconnected.

This is why most political resolutions, no matter how earnestly pushed for, seem useful in theory but may, in practice, become more of a barrier to true resolutions of past enmities.

Most recently, in the case of the Montenegrin parliament, it decided to follow up its resolution on Srebrenica with a similar resolution about Jasenovac, Mauthausen, and Dachau.

The decision to commemorate the crimes of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and Nazi Germany does not seem so odd given that many families of Montenegrins have been affected by WWII, either by rising to fight the Axis or through the racial policies of NDH. For example, my grandmother’s family were expelled from their Sarajevo home to Nikčić for the simple crime of being Serbs. Her father was almost executed, and the graveyard where her infant brother was buried was destroyed.

The resolution, however, riled up the Croatian government despite their legal and cultural discontinuity with the NDH and the lack of similar responses from Germany and Austria.

Although the Croatian parliament passed a very similar resolution related to Holodomor in Ukraine just last year and was one of the 84 countries, along with Montenegro, to vote for the resolution commemorating Srebrenica in the UN, they saw this move by the Montenegrin parliament as antagonistic and manipulative, purporting that it only serves to overshadow the UN resolution on Srebrenica, rather than a need of Montenegrins to remember their victims.

The accusation of being "manipulative" with the victims is a mainstay in such spats. The situation is only made worse when people in charge of remembrance and reconciliation do not seem up to scratch, whether in terms of their attitude to facts or prospects of peace. While it is understandable, on the human level, to be somewhat biased against those you perceive as responsible for the death of your compatriots and your family, it is an urge that one needs to temper when in charge of official institutions in charge of telling these horrific stories, especially to a global audience. Sadly, one recent example included a prominent person in charge of remembrance making light of recent violence against civilians of another ethnic group. In contrast, indeed, some politicians make it their schtick to care about war crimes without ever allowing them to be investigated impartially.

These phenomena are sadly inevitable, and one can always cry hypocrisy. As Rory Yeomans, a British historian and key researcher into WWII war crimes in NDH, eloquently put it in his recent piece for Balkan Transitional Justice / Balkan Insight: “It also cannot be healthy that some victims of genocide and mass murder should be commemorated in the name of reconciliation and good neighbourly relations while commemorating others is seen as inflammatory and provocative ethnonationalism, not least because such a twin-track approach is fuelling resentment and the nationalist capture of the past.”

However, the main question should be whether all these resolutions resolve anything.

My primary school friend and his family moved back to Sarajevo in the mid-2000s, hoping to rebuild their community. When we met at an old ćevapi place in the city centre in 2011, he said he was hanging out with his friends from universities of all ethnicities and how things were improving.

When we met a decade later, in 2022, his view of the situation was grimmer. He thought society in Bosnia and Herzegovina was deeply divided. His view is sadly evidenced by the increasingly fraught state of the country. Maybe it is time we push for the resolution of the real problems rather than for more resolutions, which do not seem to help.