SRĐAN ŠUŠNICA - Graduated in Law and Master of Cultural Studies [Switzerland]
GENERATION OF LIVED HISTORY
The war does not end with the cessation of the conflict. Survivors continue to carry it deep inside them. The way post-war society relates to war affects individuals and shapes transgenerational memory.
- How has the generation that lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region during the wars in the former Yugoslavia – and especially during the genocide in Srebrenica – experienced and shaped this history in the past 30 years: through personal memories, reflections, but also through narratives in the media, films, books, textbooks and rituals of remembrance?
"Before answering, I would try to determine whether the generations that witnessed the war on the ruins of Yugoslavia, very often in addition to being direct or indirect victims of it, perceive the time after the war as peace at all or only as a truce? These wars, especially in Bosnia, remained simmering as (pre)war states, not only because of deep traumas and tragic stories that are transmitted in private and in the public space, but because the root cause of the war was not eliminated either by peace treaties, nor by subsequent trials and interstate dialogues. What were the original motives and goals of attack, conquest, siege and genocidal killing was not eliminated, but legalized in ‘peace’. For 30 years, we have been living in a truce, that is, in a negative definition of peace, as the absence of organized violence. In that truce, the seeds of new conflicts were sown, or rather, left, because neither within Bosnia, nor in the region, nor on the side of the Anglo-European ‘developed, democratic’ world, the challenger of the war was recognized and labeled as a challenger; state policies, ideologies and territorial appetites of neighbors were not labeled as aggressor appetites and have not been prohibited; the attacked state community and its citizens were not recognized as victims with the right of reparation; (para)armies of neighboring states and their incited and organized rebel forces were not recognized as aggressor in their campaigns of conquest. Even the apparent genocidal intentions of the invaders, with the exception of Srebrenica, were not recognized as such in other ravaged and cleansed parts of Bosnia even 30 years later, although the motive, procedure and effect were the same.
Did the Dayton-Paris ceasefire have an alternative? According to Kant's considerations, peace, positively defined as the protection of the highest human values (life, biological and economic survival, property serving that survival, etc.), surpasses all other values, including justice. Within besieged Sarajevo, on average, 3 to 4 civilians were killed daily, i.e. in the total war activities in and around Sarajevo on 'both sides', i.e. 9 to 10 people were killed. Every day of the extension of the war, or its continuation, would mean the continuation of killing. This is a fact that simply must be considered, but also the blackmailing logic of war, as the imposition of will on the opposite side by force.
If it were not for the ceasefire, the Army of BiH and the Croatian army would have occupied Banja Luka and most of the then RS, which would have caused thousands of new deaths and suffering, as happened to the rebel creation RSK and its population a few months earlier. Maybe my family wouldn't survive. I might not be able to write this right now. Perhaps I would be a bitter 'nationalist' in exile on the outskirts of Belgrade. In a really lived life, in June and July 1995, while Serbian military and other forces were preparing and committing genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, my peers and I were preparing and going to the graduation celebration for my generation!? Yes, while Serbian 'heroes' killed hundreds and thousands of people a day, in the name of Serbdom, in the name of 'us', 'little Serbs', 'the future of RS and Serbian things', I and we, mostly all 'endangered', and in fact protected 'little Serbs', were choosing suits, sang 'Gaudeamus Igitur' and danced on our prom. There is something perverse about this graduation celebration, which I became aware of only years later, not only in relation to the murdered Srebrenica residents, but also to the fallen soldiers and the war, as well as the destruction and Heraclitus' 'father of everything'. As in some present and future techno-parties of young 'pacifists' in the immediate vicinity of the largest refugee concentration camps in the open.
The truce in Bosnia has a dilemma as old as philosophy: does the truth lie in the whole, as Hegel claims, or whether the whole hides an untruth, as Adorno claims. The war was initiated by the most armed nationalist ideology, relying on Hegel's absoluteness of spirit over time and which is incarnated as truth only when it is rounded up as a whole. As a Greater Serbia or as a remake of the Croatian banovina of 1938? The attacker thinks, if we win, we will show everyone that we were 'right' from the very beginning. The truce was made relying on Adorno's thesis that the whole is the false – leaving fragments of your, our 'truth' and 'untruth' to form a new reality. A part of the conquering ideology will be recognized as the so-called RS, despite the fact that it is the formation of planned, desired and realized genocide. Its ethno-exclusive and essentially crypto-fascist foundations will be ignored and the right of this population to live 'their fragment' of the truth will be accepted, including the life in the delusion that there was no systematic cleansing of the non-Serb population, and the justice, honor and expediency of our fight 'for the honorable cross and golden freedom'.
My generation, which started high school at the beginning of the war in Croatia, in the then still whole Bosnia, and graduated at the end of the war in something called 'RS down to 49%', found itself in a new shock-normality in which the issue of victory or defeat remained foggy over our heads. Who is the victim and who is the criminal, who is the winner and who is the loser, who fought a morally justified war, who did not. These are the first questions when it comes to the balance of a war. In Serbian, conditionally to say the side of the challengers and attackers, this shock-normality implied dissatisfaction with the 'defeat of the idea of joining Serbia'; pain over tens of thousands of people who died in vain; bitter taste left behind by Serbian war propaganda, slogans, rhetoric, flags and, above all, promises of unification; silence about genocidal crimes against their neighbors, which was often confused with contemptuous and vengeful rejoicing. Citizens in the RS entity have largely remained under the influence of official politics and manipulation of the memories and emotions of the regime media in Serbia and RS, and mostly unable to articulate an autonomous, personal or social culture of remembrance, and thus an authentic social response to the issues of the bloody recent past. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps the essential reason lies in the fact that RS is a community that, despite the propaganda about sinless creation and (self)justification, is deeply aware of its silence. It is aware that it was created on the conquest and abduction of others, the suppression of the different and the hiding of crimes in mass graves. It is aware of how amoral and unconscious it is to (self)justify crimes against its own non-Serb neighbors in 1992 by using the example of 'Jasenovac' and crimes against Bosnian Serbs in World War II. In fact, if the whole is true, then this argument can serve as a claim 'we are not guilty of killing non-Serb civilians in 1992-1995, but the NDH and Pavelić in 1941 are guilty. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have done that.' It translates as 'but they have killed us'. The problem is that such a timeless absoluteness has no end, neither moral nor historical. In order for a whole such as the continuum of the 'spirit' of Serbian countries through time and space to be true, facts must be erased, fixed, feigned, and interpretations must become mythomania. Like retouched old photographs in which Draža's Chetniks' disappear 'from their embrace with the Nazi occupiers'. From erasing a fact to burning a living man is half a step. All the worse for the facts. As expected, then even the war crimes against Serbs in the RSK in 1995 are not the fault of the HV generals, but Serbia and the RSK regime!? And so on into the future and the past. But if the whole is the false, then we are doomed to a fragmented truth and at best to a conscious silence, which may be just typical of my generation and other close generations. These are blackmailed generations. Blackmailed by the post-war omerta, in which one is loudly silent at the level of society and loudly denies the level of politics, glorifies even louder and exposes it to brutal revisionism and the fabrication of 'facts'. Similar silence, denial and glorification will be found in Serbia, but also in Croatia, from which conquering policies originally moved on to Bosnia, with the observer quickly realizing a systemic lack of awareness, secession at the epistemological level, about what happened in Bosnia in 1992-1995, when, how and why. The society there simply does not know what Bosnia is and how people there lived, fought, killed and how they live again after the war. This is the paradox of Hegel's 'truth as a whole'. Due to the war of conquest in Bosnia, and then in Kosovo, the state Serbia brought itself to the brink of political existence, and it systematically degraded its society, so that in the end its average resident would know less about Bosnia, even about today's RS, that crown war booty, than about Greece, Austria or France. Meanwhile, on the other hand, people will be offered fragments of the truth about the illusion of the whole, a narrative about a great victory, a successful defense of the state, but also about the necessity of sacrifice, as the basis of life. It is one big patch of the truth fragments of a truce.
Within this framework, I have the impression that generations of witnesses of Yugoslavia and the war in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo (born until about 1980), as time has passed since the end of the war, have increasingly faced unbearable tension between three contradictory tendencies.
The first tendency is to very loosely or not at all define the character of the war and the responsibilities of the instigators of the war by international institutions and before all Western actors with a dominant (Western) narrative about the 'civil' war of semi-wild peoples on the edge of civilization. The most developed Western countries of the world have never accepted that aggression qualifies as a war crime in the ICC statute and in international public law. Aggression remained a political issue and it is not allowed to be officially assessed morally and legally. War and aggression are left as instruments of the policy of the stronger. In Bosnia, there was an international conflict without the designation of the aggressor, except for modest indications in the introductions to the judgments of the Hague Tribunal. The second tendency concerns the official propaganda narrative, still superior to the invaders, the official Belgrade and Zagreb, which from the very end of the war politically justified and glorified rebellions, self-declarations, sieges, conquests and ethnic cleansing of territories in BiH for ethno-exclusive entities and large-state projects. Both addresses do this through the dehumanization of Bosnians, Bosniaks and Muslims. Even today, this torrent of half-truths, fakes and lies in the service of the legitimization of aggression against the neighbor, division and destruction of Bosnia by ethno-national and religious standards, actually fit nicely into the fact that in international relations, the law of force does not care about the 'force of law'. The force of law is a moral order reserved for states and communities, and relations between states and communities are still dominated by the right of force in which the stronger can impose his will on the weaker by force. Even today, segregation in education or discrimination of citizens in political rights on the basis of identity are portrayed as glorious achievements of our 'just struggle' but, in fact, never recognized as conquering and genocidal war against the unwanted. The third tendency concerns completely intimate and factual testimonies about the war of all those involved who felt it on their skin, regardless of their name and which 'side' they were on. As the first post-war years of 'silence' and 'attempts to forget' pass, as the truce increasingly (only) resembles normal life, and as it strengthens the legitimization narrative, new momentum and triumphalism of the entity invaders (encouraged again from the outside), this tendency causes disbelief and frustration of the traumatized, the bitter, angry and deceived. It turns out that the victims, those who were attacked, attacked themselves, surrounded, besieged, imprisoned and killed themselves. In short, Bosnia before the war as if it never existed (especially as a communist and socialist republic), and the lives of its inhabitants as if they were dreams, because as an unrecognized state-victim of unrecognized aggression, it is condemned to a truce, and its citizens to a coil of mutually conflicting fragments of truth.
In all post-war decades, the ceasefire in Bosnia repeatedly proved that such peace did not establish a moral order or a state as a persona moralis, a state of law, the rule of law, because the great and small powerful men, each for their own interests and motives, made the basic rule (not the law or the norm) of international relations 'the right of the stronger' to permeate legal norms and political practice. How to expect the rule of law in a country where the so-called "light-bearers" of Western civilization have legalized an entity that never existed before, and whose only purpose of origin and existence was and remains the conquest, genocide and cleansing of the territory from non-Serbs? How to expect the rule of law in a country where ceasefire provisions do not allow numerous decisions of international criminal and human rights courts to be incorporated into its legal life?
The only winner of the war in Bosnia is actually the writer of the Dayton-Paris peace, but he will never live in Bosnia."
A GENERATION BORN IN HISTORY (THOSE BORN IN 1995)
Thirty years later, we are once again witnessing the shaping of history amidst political manipulations of narratives. That is why transgenerational memory is required to carry a culture of remembrance and responsibility to the truth – in the name of future generations who must learn how peace is built and preserved.
- How does a generation born in the year of the Srebrenica genocide today understand this history? And how did growing up in this heritage shape their sense of identity, memory, and responsibility?
"I can hardly imagine the vacuum of memory in which generations born after 1980, and especially after 1990, live. These generations are completely left to a new reality. Far from it that those generations do not feel the balance of war, losses, and even their own refugee and war destiny and poverty. Numerous studies have shown the impact on the child's psyche and the structure of the personality of organized violence, wars, deaths of soldiers and brutal injustices and crimes against parents, from the earliest formative age. In this vacuum of their own memory, these generations are condemned to the memory of the family, and perhaps more often than not to the stories of peers and (semi)official narratives from religious communities, the media, virtual space and politics. Maybe that's their advantage? And maybe a disadvantage? No one can know that. They may be more free and more resilient, and they may be more vulnerable to the transgenerational transmission of war trauma, but also to (self-) radicalization throughout family history.
For the generations born before 1980, which have a formed, already accepted memory of Yugoslavia and the pre-war era and war, memory as a function of cultural and ideological formation is already embedded as a tool of reflection, judgment on war and the post-war time. For these generations, memory is both a gift and a curse. A gift, because they have a mechanism that employs the ratio, an authentic memory, and why not say also a nostalgia, with which they can compare and evaluate the new reality; and a curse because they often consciously and unconsciously renounce this gift of authenticity and personality and leave their memory to be formed by conflicted and ossified policies of memory and propaganda. So for the generations born after 1980, personal memory was almost unburdened by this historical breakdown, but it also did not develop into a 'political or social sense', except possibly as a strong personal reflection of parental memories. Again, maybe it's luck in the accident.
There is a 'joke' that I heard with my own ears on the beginning of the war in a Banja Luka cafe: 'Generations born after 1975 do not remember Tito, those born after 1980 do not remember the Olympics, and those born after 1985 will not remember Muslims and Croats in Banja Luka'. A terrible 'prophecy' in a joke. When you ask today's resident of Banja Luka who was born after 1990 or 1995, whether Bosniaks and Muslims live in Banja Luka, he or she will answer positively and demographically correct. But in this fragmentary truth there is no fullness or whole, but it does not have to be in order to be normatively true. And the question is whether the truth about the life of non-Serbs in Banja Luka before the war and the pogrom over them during the war can be told as one absolute. If one were to try, this last pogrom would be justified by some previous pogrom. A more true memory and narrativization of events and processes can be told through a plural culture of memory, as an urban memory, as a tolerant and plural selection of memories that unites rather than divides, perhaps as rituals of memory that slowly turn into the fabric of the history of a city or homeland. Today, generations born in the war and after the war are just crippled for such a multiperspective culture of remembrance of the space in which they live. Such a plural culture of memory is hidden and physically suppressed in most post-Yugoslav societies, especially in the so-called 'Serbian countries' from post-war generations. It takes strong self-reflection, a strong motive, a lot of critical conversations with older generations and persistent digging into remote and semi-mouldy archival material that no one wants, for generations born after 1990 to acquire such a plural picture of the recent past of their city or homeland. In countries with obsessive archiving and writing, the plural culture of memory, although still ideological (and which is not), is within reach and often generations are immersed in it immediately in kindergarten.
Life wants to thrive in Bosnia, society requires movement, and paradoxically, processes are imprisoned by regime policies, memories and a peace treaty?! The question for all post-war generations, especially those born after 1990, is whether I want my life, sometimes decisively, to be influenced by what has been signed by three or four now dead people? Those dead men and their armies, even the state, are long gone (Croatia drowned in the EU, FR Yugoslavia fell apart), but here the peace treaty is still there, so the question can rightly be asked who really needs it? Who needs such a selection of memories of the dead and dead policies?"
TRANSGENERATIONAL MEMORY DYNAMICS (1995-2025)
Society in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still marked by war traumas. Prevailing ethno-national policies keep citizens in fear, under constant threat of a new war – for their own interests. Politics has instrumentalized trauma.
- How – and whether – generations from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the regions that lived through the wars in the former Yugoslavia, especially the events of 1995, and the generation born that same year have shaped mutual understanding of the past? To what extent are their views aligned today – and how do they differ?
"This is, in fact, a question of alternatives. Alternatives in the collective processing of the past through the selection and comparison of memories and the intergenerational exchange of reflections on the memory of past days of peace, war and truce. In intergenerational exchange and communication on important topics, we can create social alternatives to official and often war-glorifying and militant policies of remembrance. In the answer to the previous question, I gave one view of the differences between generations that have authentic memories of Yugoslavia and the war and those that do not. These do not necessarily have to be relationships between parents (relatives) and children. It is a much wider transgenerational scope, such as teacher-student, professor-student, all the way to the workplace and the sports club, generally the relationship between the elderly and the younger.
The narrative of older generations about the past in our countries often had, and still sometimes has, the form of epic lamentation, in which the narrator often placed himself at the same table with long-dead persons and ancestors. In such an epic consciousness, modern political and media manipulation will, in a few weeks, turn a long-ago massacre and injustice into an emotionally close event that is actually happening 'now' for the contemporary, and in which the contemporary's never-before-known grandfather or great-grandfather comes to life as a 'victim here and now', and the contemporary is presented with his contemporaries and neighbours as the 'culprits' and 'criminals'. This kind of epic is also present in new media and virtual formats of social networks, of course in a completely new aesthetic of transhumanism and dystopia (short videos, memes, game culture, short political messages, and the like), and therefore without that familial closeness between the narrator and the subject. The catchphrase of such an exchange between the older and the younger generation is always 'you don't know how it really was... now I'll tell you...'. There is no dialogue and no learning in such an exchange, it is family or virtual propaganda. For a mutual understanding of the past, mutual or intergenerational respect and a grain of honesty towards oneself are needed, so that the dialogue about the past does not become the sowing of new germs of hatred.
It is less important whether the understandings about an event or process in the past are aligned between (conditionally speaking and in relation to the time of war in terms of) the older or younger generation, or not. The process of exchange is important, and even more important is the will to enter into the exchange and honesty with oneself. Generations talk to each other about the past that concerns them, not about some other past. In this process, reading and attempting to theoretically or philosophically conceptualize and reflect our own reality and what we hear/read about the past that is important to us will not help. The social alternative starts with this process.
In societies bearing the burden of unprocessed or semi-processed post-conflict trauma that spans several generations, the importance of the process (for) writing and archiving in a broader sense cannot be emphasized sufficiently. Post-war tensions between the whole as truth and fragmentary truths, between personal and factual and legal-political and then ideological-political (regime-related), tensions between the Dayton ceasefire and real life 30 years later, between conquering ideologies and denial of the then and now and factual truth about crimes, tensions between new-old conquering momentum and propaganda and political responsibility for the aggression against Bosnia – are simply intolerable, to say the least.
Let's take, for example, only the initial question of identity that is first raised between generations. The amount of paradox in e.g. (pro)Serbian and (pro)Croatian great-state narratives about Bosnia as Serbian or Croatian, or about Bosnia as a country to be divided into three parts, is such that societies in Mostar and Banja Luka, if they were to get rid of their great-state, and essentially parish phantasmagorias, could create future generations of literary Nobel laureates. Just imagine a conversation between a Croatian or Serbian baby boomer from Ljubuški or Banja Luka and his digital grandson about why he, his grandson, is called a Croat or a Serb, and he was born in BiH, and why he must love and strive for Croatia, or Serbia, more than the country in which he was born!? Such phantasms of the spirit have no other way of telling themselves than as an epic and Hegel's whole in which the truth is hidden. Because only when the digital grandson develops from the bud, through the flower to the fruit and dissipates as the so-called A Croat or a Serb from BiH, only then will they know the truth and it will be clear from the very beginning. And the grandson is digital because he looks at himself on the screen with his grandfather, and that is because he was born and lives in Berlin, and when he grows up he will be a Berliner and a German. The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the looting of Bosnia by Belgrade and Zagreb, at first armed and now political (although new battles are not excluded), have made, as never before in the history of BiH, that being a Croat or a Serb in BiH has become an absolute category without remainder. There are no more fragmentary truths, about the pre-war homeland, village, custom, folklore, speech and language, about inter-confessional origin and life, about the pre-war class, favourite store, comic strip or sports club, etc. Being a Croat or a Serb in BiH means the whole and totality. According to Adorno, as a whole and totality, it is untrue. One should talk about the reasons why this is so. How the native population in its homeland became a diaspora of the neighbouring country. Here is just one example of a possible transgenerational exchange. I am sure that similar conversations could take place within the topic of what is, where and why to be a Bosniak, and how 'Bogumili', 'Zmaj od Bosne' and the like fit in. But here he would note that in the real space, among the people, 'Bosniakism' as a reception and autoreflection of an identity construct given from above, has not yet reached that level of exclusivity and totality, and especially not that level of earthless paradoxology as the currently operating constructs of 'Serbism' and 'Croatism' (which, although misplaced long ago, were nevertheless well educated precisely in socialism). Although it must be said that the absence or lagging behind in achieving an exclusive totality of (self)identity and unity among Bosniaks (in relation to others) often worries the more zealous part of the elite, just as the great Serbs and Croats are worried about any personal escape from under the yoke of Serbism and Croatism. Again, it is not a problem to be called one way or another, the problem is not to see that it is untrue in totality. The alternative is already to ask a question.
I have given here an example of possible intergenerational conversations about identity, because from that to the intergenerational understanding of our recent and dreary past there are not even half steps. Paul Valery noticed this a long time ago, asking himself, I paraphrase, why someone is who they are and what they call themselves. The totalitarian answer is because it is such and such by blood. The truth lies in the fragmentary truth about his class position – that he/she is who he/she is, because the vertical pyramid of hierarchical and class society has assigned him/her a place, role and national name without the possibility of (simple and easy) choice.
Post-war Bosnia, but also the region with its contradictions, is a source of stories and paradoxes that cry out for writing, archiving, memorialization, speaking through art or scientific discourse. But it is also a source of political frustration and new drifts of politically and religiously-ideologically motivated hatred. Again, it is a demographically dying space of very lively negotiations and talks about just and unjust peace, about morally justified and unjustified war, reworking and confronting the past, even with loud silence and persistent attempts to successfully get along with ourselves. All this is not a fixed-term project, but it is dealing with the past in such a way as to give an opportunity for a more peaceful, equitable, cultivated, pluralistic and less tragic life and culture of remembrance.
Does such a ceasefire in Bosnia and the region have an alternative today and tomorrow? And if so, what kind? Certainly. The alternative is created not only by politics or the order imposed by war and force, but also by society. A society of the free, equal and brave enough, with all that a plural society adds to itself. I think that in Bosnia and the region there are authentic socio-critical and creative responses to all these post-war tensions and trauma that write their own synthesis of human-narrative, literary-artistic and historical experiences of war and crime. A synthesis that transcends borders and identitarian barriers. It often does so outside the control of politics, which tries to impose official rituals and memories, i.e. ideologized points of support of various pseudonational, essentially ethno-folklore, identities."
REGIONAL FUTURE: TRANSGENERATIONAL MEMORY, HERITAGE OR TRAUMA (2025-2055)
Thirty years after the war, ethnic identity still dominates the civic. In post-war society, the structure of ethnically divided space often makes civic initiatives impossible, as they are automatically attributed an ethnic sign.
- How could political, social, educational and cultural development in Bosnia and Herzegovina – and more broadly in the region – affect how transgenerational memory will be preserved, reinterpreted or denied in the next 30 years?
"I think this question continues to raise the topic of alternatives. On the one hand, you have disintegrative and conflicting narratives; the rule of small, unfinished, parochial and complex ethno-religious identities; conquering and mini-imperial policies and the arrogance of neighbours; ethno-party cartelization and rule by means of a magic formula 'the fruits of nationalist religion to the people (or citizens), and to the elites the fruits of corruption and transition'. And this is the sphere of the formally political, the sphere of state party apparatuses that have hijacked the state and its resources from the citizens, and which operates from above. On the other hand, despite the great influence of the party-state apparatus, Bosnia and the countries of the region have nevertheless developed a relatively autonomous cultural-linguistic and communitarian social dynamic. At all levels, intellectual-academic, socio-economic, media, artistic, everyday life. That this is the case is evidenced by the constant waves of autonomous and spontaneous protests in all countries of the former Yugoslavia. Even excluding party- and state-coordinated protests, there is still no generation that has not participated in protests against the new ruling political and tycoon classes in the last 30 years, in Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro. Protests, public rebellion and outcry are processes of questioning the difficult topics and self-reflection of every citizen about their life and place in a given political context. Even the most difficult topics are opened, without even wanting to. Everything gets questioned, and the biggest taboos fall. And this is essentially a feature of the dialectic, whether it is the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis or Marx's thesis-antithesis then revolution. This creates space for eruptions of empathy, nostalgia, but also catharsis through the adoption of simple knowledge and facts about the recent past, that is, for catharsis through confronting one's (and family's) bygone life and memories, but also through a clash with the official culture of oblivion, the culture of lies about the recent and distant past imposed by the new political caste in its search for its own definition in the new globalist neoliberal context (what we are, who we are) and in an attempt to construct a narrative about the antiquity and continuity of 'our' capitalist-bourgeois (often monarchist) heritage and the national 'golden age' that goes with it. In these turbulent processes, one should not search for and strive for continuity or petrification of memory, concretization or marbleization of memory (e.g. Skopje, etc.), one should avoid the violent and historicist transformation of archives and memories into 'history now and immediately'. It is necessary to recognize and push the dialectical power that contains facts, archived and social, cognitive memory. The power to question, not to write, but to create history. History is created continuously, and it is very rarely written down. The power to produce political polarization along various horizontal and vertical lines. In this polarization lies the fate of transgenerational memory, which will necessarily come into intergenerational conflict. Without this conflict, there is no hope for the development of society and a new dynamic. Neither in post-war Germany nor in post-war Bosnia, there is no development, no catharsis without conflict with the parents' generation and clearing up within the family-generational circle.
From the war, post-war and trauma of the nomad-refugee, as well as from the intergenerational conflict, which is essentially a conflict of ideas on the horizon of old and new times, memories and nostalgia, an entire creative cosmos has actually grown in this post-Yugoslav space of ours (and in connection with it). It should be borne in mind that in the last 30 years an ocean of human, primarily artistic, scientific and literary-narrative creativity has grown that had its source in the topic of wars in the former Yugoslavia. Almost unfathomable. Imagine, in addition to the tens of millions of pages of the Hague Tribunal archive, several hundred more filmed feature-length, short, documentary, animated and other film forms; several thousand novels, prose, memoirs, poetry and other literary materials; dozens of theatrical performances; hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant journalistic forms; hundreds of thousands of scientific-academic and study-analytical works. And all this in dozens of languages, present and active in more than 50 countries of the world. It is a dialectical waterfall, for which official, daily-electoral, politics has no sluice. The forces of restoration and rehabilitation of the worst historical patterns of governance, which want to write a new history of ideas and a new course of history, can hardly move this creative cornerstone. They can only resort to biological annihilation and the burning of libraries, but even that is no guarantee of creating an identitarian and political tabula rasa.
In these conditions, the totality of the future course that social memory or culture of memory will move in should be viewed as a kind of resultant and direction of movement spontaneously created under the influence of various forces."
GLOBAL FUTURE: TRANSGENERATIONAL MEMORY, INDIFFERENCE OR REVISIONISM (1995-2025-2055)
In the modern world, geopolitics is rapidly conditioning historical narratives and transgenerational memory – openly trading influence in conflicts and party choices through daily-political revisionism.
- How could global political disruptions, conflicting international historical narratives, and changing norms on justice and human rights shape the ways in which knowledge of wartime events from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the region will be transmitted, challenged, or withheld across generations over the next 30 years?
"After the question of the alternative, in this sense, the question could perhaps be asked whether such a regional 'ceasefire', i.e. a 'peace' that has retained all but one unresolved cause of the war, has a regional and international, i.e. a future on which the forces of global political, economic-technological and ideological movements can be projected?
In the last 30 years, we have witnessed that in light of the unresolved causes of 'our' wars, this 'peace' in a neoliberal key has only intensified the main consequences of the war, embodied in the eradication of Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Croatian, Kosovo, Vojvodina and Macedonian, and why not Slovenian (erased) inhabitants from their cities and homelands. It has made it difficult or impossible for refugees to return to their pre-war habits; it has enabled the so-called transition in which the masters of war, the party nomenclature, war profiteers and smugglers have become a new class of capitalists and masters of life; it has left nationalist parties and their ideological projects intact; it has enabled the white-collar banking and other speculators and money launderers from the West and the East to benefit from the torn and destroyed society and economy; and most importantly, it has not set up an effective barrier against the disintegrating influences of Zagreb and Belgrade on BiH. In this regard, he did not allow the development of an ideology that would, in the conditions of a modest democratic tradition and limited institutions, at least slow down the ethno-religious-party cartelization of societies and give a chance to humane, social and sovereign policies to reintegrate society, economy and politics. For example, everything that was on the political scene in 1990-1992 in BiH exists and is only called by other names today. It is not genocide, but a mass outflow and flight of the population to more rational living spaces. It is not war, but the permanent psychology of war and the threat of conflicts. It is not refugees, but cheap labour. It is not armed aggression, but various mini-imperial concepts, mini-Schengen, Greater Serbian and Greater Croatian declarations and assemblies, non-papers and future maps from ambush, all of which impose only one topic: the division of BiH between the spheres of Belgrade and Zagreb.
We have not even looked around, and the era of unipolar rule of the Western neoliberal order has passed, whose globalist and multilateral nature enabled such a development of the principles and practices of international humanitarian and criminal law, but at the same time led to an increasing number (and recurring) of armed conflicts on the planet. The world has become fairer by acknowledging that there are crimes in war, but that planning and waging war and aggression (whether it is the US 'war on terror', or Russia's destruction of Grozny and Ukraine, or Israel's permanent war against neighbours and 'internal terrorists', etc.) are still not a crime, but Clausewitz's 'continuation of politics by violent means'. With the introduction of global objective-idealist neoliberalism into Clausewitz's definition of war and the issue of morality, more precisely the worldview – it could be concluded that war is a continuation of worldview and moral battles, but with weapons. And for the moment, along with other important factors of postmodernity (historical revisionism, destabilization of language, symbols and meaning, fragmentation of narratives, etc.), we are in the era of quasi-medieval crusades, defense of 'civilization from barbarians', defense of 'our democracy' from evil regimes, and so on and so forth. Of course, with a new techno-feudal caste at the helm.
We have not even honestly looked into the mirror of our recent past, and the world has undergone an economic-technological and ideological transformation that in a few years erased the effect of the institutions of international humanitarian and criminal law and the related archived memory. And now the so-called 'developed democracies' are splitting paragraph by paragraph, sheet by sheet of UN resolutions. The archives and jurisprudence of the Hague Tribunal, as well as all the archives of memories of the war in Bosnia, today cannot influence individual states and governments, even among the so-called 'developed democracies', to stop killing, ghettoizing, expelling, imprisoning and torturing, and systematically discriminate and segregate the population over which it has legal or factual military-administrative power.
And he proceeded seemingly innocently and idealistically: 'we will defend human rights, democracy and political freedoms, by bombing dictatorial and evil regimes (and inevitably the people who, without exception, elected and supported these dictatorships for the most part) and thus actually violate and deny the same human rights, which we so sharply defend'. And it has turned into today's often undisguised cultural-racist dehumanization and criminalization of entire nations, religions, ethnicities and societies, into the creation (or exploitation of existing) mutually conflicting extremist movements and the heating up of wars between nations, as a cover for even more open control, seizure and exploitation of other people's geopolitical and historical habitats and natural resources. Even 20 years ago, it was unpleasant to think that a court such as the Hague Tribunal would judge, for example, American generals by command responsibility or on the basis of their artillery logs (the case of Croatia) or the minutes of the supreme defense council (the case of Serbia), so even the largest US military force gradually exited the Rome Statute, which they originally signed, but never ratified. Today, the so-called 'developed democracies' do not perceive the ICC and the Rome Statute as something important at all, but openly threaten, impose sanctions and prosecute ICC judges. Or they use it as a means of foreign policy and pressure in international relations, where they will support the ICC indictments against 'hostile' dictators for the same or similar crimes, and prevent them against 'friendly' dictators, with religious zeal.
In this big picture, is it even desirable to convey memories and knowledge about different, especially about criminal law aspects of the war in Bosnia and the region today? Does it have a future? Can social memory of war and crimes develop without a foothold into an international norm and institution? With the threat and risk that knowledge and memories of war and crimes in Bosnia will inevitably trigger that dialectical power of archived memory – questioning, thesis-antithesis-synthesis and begin to overflow with questions and analogies of current and some future wars, crimes and regimes that lead (and conduct) them? In the last 30 years, we have witnessed a world in which it has become self-evident, justifiable, even in so-called 'developed democracies', that the mass killing and extermination of one ethnic or religious or linguistic group is not a crime and is not punishable, while the same or similar crime against members of another group is a crime of the highest possible magnitude. The justification and justice of warfare and killing in war are strengthened through power, not through a moral norm. The one who wins will be right?! Although the Kampala Conference in 2010 incorporated aggression into the Rome Statute as a crime, the given definition is too stretchy, to the extent that it does not represent a legal norm with a clear disposition and sanction, but a gathering place of 'what would be if it were and how it should be'. Aggression remains a political rather than a moral issue. Thus, the memory of the aggression of the stronger, of the conquest and oppression of the militarily more powerful, remains only a political issue, and its moral implications and justification (justice) will be judged in the decades after the weapons fall silent.
In such a world, it is very desirable, necessary and in some way inevitable to invoke archived knowledge and memory of the war, especially in Bosnia. This archived memory will, even without domestic BiH or regional actors, produce over time that inevitable polarization and tension that will, the longer it is denied, hidden, suppressed, cancelled, in fact produce the opposite effect – it will increasingly clearly mark the criminal, his strategies and the overall context (especially historically). That creativity created about the war in the post-Yugoslav space that was previously discussed is actually not only a transmitter, an agent, but also a catalyst for this dialectic between memory and history that comes to our attention. If memory calls for catharsis, catharsis calls for action and political struggle, and it must have opponents and must have its own forms and methods. Fighting means victims. The question of the ethics of memory arises: do I remember in order to fight, rebel, avenge, or reconcile with my own and collective fate? Do I remember in order to reconcile with my collective execution? Which again opens up new questions about the right to revolt, or rather the justice of revolt in a given geographical, historical and political context. And this is, above all, a class question of the relationship between the more powerful and the weaker."
The opinions and insights expressed in this text reflect solely the views of the author. We publish these contributions to encourage reflection and open space for diverse perspectives on the topic of transgenerational memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider region.
