Serbia: Bad or better Guy?

The wars in former Yugoslavia have severely damaged the image of Serbia for years. Will the recent arrests of Mladić, Karadžić and Hadžić improve Serbia’s negative image? Political Sociologist Dr. Eric Gordy answers.

Julia Koster


Can you describe the image of Serbia?
Before considering the image of Serbia it might be worth considering how little people outside of Serbia know about it. There are a few legacies at stake. Starting with the positive ones, most people who have studied history will know Serbia as the courageous little country that stood up to an empire in the first world war. And they will mostly have positive associations with Yugoslavia.
But of course the most recent set of wars between 1991 and 1999 has had a very strong influence on the reputation of Serbia both inside and outside the country. Most of that influence has been very negative, since crimes were committed that genuinely shocked the world.
The ways in which those crimes were justified by spokespeople for the regime did not help at all - have a look at Ivan Čolović essays where he gives examples of statements from a variety of political and parapolitical figures who try to argue that differences between groups are natural and cannot be changed. Or follow the public antics of characters like the Serbian ultra-nationalist leader Vojislav Šešelj or any other full-time promoters of the regime of that period. These are people who not only discredit themselves but they make the whole country look lunatic.

But this is not the whole story, isn’t it?
No. During that same period Serbian society generated some major international credibility. The student and political protests of 1996-1997 were the most sustained democratic protests that anybody knew about. The cultural and intellectual resistance to the insanity of the period was distinguished - it meant that ideas about protecting human rights were not being imposed from outside because there was a domestic culture that had grown up around that.
A lot of people learned about the kind of creativity in culture and media that I wrote about in my book The Culture of Power (1999). This book came out of an effort to trace political and cultural conflicts in Serbia in the 1990s - it was the product of a lot of hanging out, talking with people and following all kinds of media. The general thesis was that although both the regime and the war were unpopular, these things managed to continue because the regime had a fairly successful strategy of making alternatives unavailable by distraction, by silencing them, or by pushing people to the margins. Probably the most influential part of the study dealt with the way that the regime intervened in musical culture, pushing aside the domestic rock n roll culture that was a base for resistance and promoting the dominance of turbo-folk. The details of the picture have changed since the 1990s, of course, but the society remains very sharply divided in terms of political and cultural orientations.

What about people who are not into to politics, what picture do they have of Serbia?
If these people know anything at all about Serbia they know enjoyable things: the popular films, the music festivals, the tremendous successes of Serbia in sports, the reputation of Belgrade as a magnet for nightlife and entertainment. All this contributes to something closer to the picture that people there would like to maintain of themselves, as an interesting and beautiful place with an active culture, with people worth meeting and talking to, with many things to experience and enjoy in Serbia.

Many people from the Dutch Diaspora have taken offence against the anti-Serbian public opinion that they are experiencing in particular through the media, already since the nineties. They often feel discriminated for the simple fact that they are Serbian.
On the one hand, there is no doubt that the wars of the nineties left Serbia with a very bad international reputation. It might be possible to speak of some damage in the sense that individuals encounter some prejudice, or that some phenomena that are neither mainstream nor unique such as far-right manifestations, football violence, foolish politicians, get disproportionate publicity. But it would be difficult to say that Serbs are the victim of discrimination.

Should the Serbian people collectively feel guilty and plead guilty for the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the nineties and the conflict in Kosovo?
Nobody should plead guilty for things that somebody else did. That is for the criminals to do. The problem with collective guilt is not only that it makes no sense legally. It also has to do with the reason that guilt is established in the first place. The main role of a court, in the legal jargon, is that it is a ‘finder of fact’ - so more than just distributing punishments, it is an institution that makes a determination about what happened and makes it public. Ideally this provides a ground for people in the public to discuss facts. Collective guilt means that the story of what happened and who thought it up and organised it will never be told.
But there are other perceptions and ideas that can be collective - including regret and responsibility. When we talk about responsibility, one way of thinking of it as assuming an obligation to understand the past in order to address it in the future and move beyond it.
There probably are some institutions that need to take responsibility if they are going to be credible. Especially important here are institutions that people trust, and that people look to for information and ideas such as religious institutions, media, and educational institutions. Here it is important to make a distinction about the ways people were lied to. There were liars who lied because they did know any better, and then there were liars who knew very well that they were lying and trusted the people listening to them not to know any better. The people in the second group have a lot to answer for, and that group includes some of the leading religious figures, writers, journalists and public intellectuals.

Has the negative image of Serbia changed since the arrests of Karadžić, Mladić and Hadžić?
The arrests will definitely not hurt. They bring an end to a horrible story, and as long as those people remained fugitives it was hard not to think of the government and a lot of people outside of the government as stuck in that story. So there is an opportunity. But I am not sure that the opportunity has been taken.
In a way the ICTY has made the 'confrontation with the past' trivial. It has reduced the process to something called 'cooperation', which has concretely meant sending a few individuals and documents to the Netherlands. So instead of a social dialogue and an effort to reach an understanding about what happened during that time, the state has been asked to act as a travel agency and postal service. And since that seems to generally satisfy the EU and the US, there is not much pressure to do more, either from outside or from inside.
Take a look at what happened at the time of these arrests and at the topics people were talking about. For Karadžić it was about his odd appearance and strange medical practice. For Mladić it was about the village he was living in and whether he liked strawberries. For Hadzic it was about corruption and his unique family situation. All gossip! The closest the discussion came to substance was on the question of whether the arrests would help Serbia with the EU, and with Mladić on the question of whether he would bring in evidence that would show the involvement of the Serbian military in his crimes. What was missing from all of these events was a discussion of the victims, of what the people did and who helped them do it, and of what it means for people living in the region today.

Does Serbia’s bad image influence the court cases of the ICTY?
I would really recommend that everyone who is interested in the processes take advantage of the fact that the ICTY makes its transcripts available. For any of the cases you can read everything that was said in open session and get the full text of all of the court decisions right here: http://www.icty.org/action/cases/4. Take a look at any of the cases that have been completed. I think what you will find is a very professional effort to determine facts and their meanings. There are also some odd interpretations, strange moments and mistakes, of course, but the whole thing looks very little like the kind of ideological game that was portrayed in the media. The only previous efforts to do anything like this, the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals, were military tribunals and had nothing like the kind of equal treatment of prosecution and defence or the standards of evidence that ICTY has.
It may be that the reason most people do not know this is that the trials are not really followed by the whole world. People take notice of the verdicts and the occasional dramatic moment in the courtroom, maybe also of some of the staged tension in cases where the defendants have not been represented by capable lawyers, like the Milosevic and Šešelj cases. But this is one of the big failures of ICTY: members of the public do not really know what the tribunal does, why it was established and what is at stake. This is partly the fault of the media in the countries over which the tribunal has oversight, which have presented a systematically distorted picture over a long period of time. It is also the fault of the tribunal itself, which never really understood who its ‘clients’ were and never made a serious effort to communicate with the public in the region.





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Het volledige artikel is te lezen in Donau 2011/02.