Serbia begins to come to terms with its dark past

7. 4. 2010. Source: The Edmonton Journal, April 7th 2010

Legislators condemn massacre of Muslims, but refuse to call it genocide In the early hours of the morning last Wednesday, the People's Assembly of the Republic of Serbia adopted a Declaration on the Condemnation of the Crime in Srebrenica with 127 votes in favour and 21 against, out of the total of 250.

The supreme legislative body in Serbia had thus made the first step in what could mark the beginning of a long and arduous process of facing the dark legacy of the 1990s. It initiated a public debate which will inevitably expand and gradually cover a wide spectrum of topics relating to recent past. During the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, the small eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica was one of several UN Safe Areas. On July 11, 1995 the town was stormed by the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of generals Radislav Krstic and Ratko Mladic.

Between 7,000 and 8,000 men and boys were separated from their families and executed. In 2001, at his trial in The Hague, Krstic became the first man found guilty of genocide over the most ferocious crime committed in Europe since the Second World War. The presiding judge, Theodor Meron, called the massacre in Srebrenica genocide. He described Krstic as a man who had "personally agreed to evil" and as "a participant in a joint criminal enterprise to commit genocide." The court said the fate of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica "would be emblematic of that of all Bosnian Muslims."

In his defence, Krstic argued that the number of victims was "too insignificant" to be considered genocide. Mladic is still at large. It is important to note that Srebrenica was one of several towns in eastern Bosnia where crimes of similar nature had been committed, but none of those had been deemed genocide. Killings of civilians in Foca, Zvornik, Vlasenica, Bratunac, Rogatica, and Visegrad were neither less brutal nor evil than the killings in Srebrenica. In the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad alone, some 3,000 Muslim civilians were killed in the summer 1992.

A Bosnian Serb resident of Visegrad who was an eyewitness to the killings said to the author of the book Genocide on the River Drina (Sarajevo: Memorija Library, 2009), professor Edina Becirevic, that everybody knew what had happened there in the summer 1992, but nobody was willing to talk about it because "all Serbs from Visegrad had benefited from the genocide committed against their Muslim neighbours."

For many years, numerous human rights organizations lobbied the Serbian parliament and government to pass a resolution that would acknowledge and condemn this crime and designate July 11 as Remembrance Day commemorating Srebrenica and the genocide committed there. Serbian authorities consistently ignored this initiative. In 2005 a number of non-governmental organizations from Serbia drafted a resolution condemning the Srebrenica atrocities, which was then sponsored and tabled by two members of parliament.

The resolution was never put on the parliament's agenda. The timing of the current declaration and the motives behind its adoption are many. Considerable outside political pressure and the need to strengthen Serbia's bid for the EU membership candidate status may have been factors. The desire to present Serbia in a different light on the eve of the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legality of the Kosovo declaration of independence might have speeded up the adoption of this document. It is unfortunate that it was political opportunism, rather than sincere intent of the Serbian political and intellectual elites to face the recent past and draw lessons from it, that motivated the passing of this declaration with the slim majority.

The 12-hour-long parliamentary debate illustrates how dire the situation in Serbia really is. On the one hand, a sizable section of the country's political spectrum advocates the adoption of European values and a speeding up of the EU integration process. On the other, those who are still fond of late Slobodan Milosevic and his political discourse used the parliamentary debate on the declaration to refer to the Srebrenica genocide as a "Serb Army's brilliant military operation."

The fact that the rhetoric of a world conspiracy against the Serbs still permeates all faucets of life and the portraying of the Serb nation as the sole victim of the wars of 1990s constitutes the official historical narrative gives much reason for concern. The adopted document has its fair share of shortcomings. The most obvious and the most troubling is the absence of the term "genocide" in its wording.

Protesting this, members of the Belgrade-based Youth Initiative for Human Rights gathered in front the assembly building around 2 a.m. on March 31 and on the pavement spray-painted in red the sentence "That Difficult Foreign Word Genocide." They were promptly arrested, but were released five hours later while the cleaning crew worked diligently on erasing the spray paint.

Equally significant is the failure of the parliament to clearly distance itself from crimes committed in the 1990s in the name of alleged Serb national interests. These shortcomings, however, could not lessen the fact that adopting of the declaration, albeit imperfect, represents a step forward.