Received: 10/11/2015
Reviewed: 15/11/2015
Accepted: 29/11/2015
172:341.322.5
316.75:341.485
341.322.5(497.6)”1995”
Obrad Savić
Moral Geography
Why is Srebrenica
European Shame?
Abstract: The whole structure of this highly polemical text on the prepolitical, ethnic concept of the victim is based on two separated, but
convergent, lines of argumentation. The first line is predominantly
organized toward an extensive critique of the Eurocentric concept of
Memory. The seemingly cosmopolitan mourning of the Holocaust must
be deliberated and read quite in the opposite way, even against, the
regulative idea of the European moral universalism. This means that
our moral sensibility to the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jews, comes from European Cultural Particularism, from the fact
that the unprecedented Nazi crime, mass murder, had happened in our
home, at the ‘Heart of Europe’. In the second line of argumentation
I try to follow the hidden process of the unavoidable assimilation of
the ‘Srebrenica discourses’ to the Holocaust paradigm and its pseudocosmopolitan framework. The common rhythms of national and ethnic
memories are recycled by Globalized Eurocentric memory in a form
of world memory. By the 1990s the Holocaust paradigm has been reconfigured as a ‘Decontextualized Event’ in such a way that any local
tragedy can share memories of the de-territorialized Holocaust as its
own mnemonic destiny. In the other sections, I express a deep disagreement and extensive polemics with the state expropriation of the ethnic
victims in Srebrenica.
The whole article can be read as an open polemic with the Eurocentric
Geography of nationalized memory, or nation-state centered memory,
as calling into question the entire political ontology of victim discourse.
Obrad Savić
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Keywords: Genocide, Holocaust, Auschwitz, Mass Atrocity, Ethnic
Cleansing, Victims, Witness, Crime against Humanity, Collective
Memory, The Culture of Apology, The Tyranny of Guilt, Sorry States,
The Politics of Regret, Islamic Rage.
I. Introduction – Contextual Remarks
“Dear Sir, I have always had a desire to see things as
they appeared before they showed themselves to me.”
(Franz Kafka, Gesprach mit dem Beter, 1934)
This brief Introduction offers an abbreviated version of the genealogy of the
text based on a counter-history of the pre-political, the ethnic concept of the
Victims. The main function of these introductory, contextual remarks is to
openly reflect what is not found in the public discourse on the Srebrenica
victims, to critically rearticulate hidden, absent traces, from the memory discourse although we must keep in mind, as Derrida properly warns us, that
there is above all no originary trace: “The trace is not only the disappearance
of origin [...] it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never
constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.” (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1976).
The first version of this text was not originally intended for publication. In
fact, it was only a transcript of my public speech at the International Conference, “Heritage, Violence and Healing”, held at Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine/Israel, October 21-24, 2007. Invited by the Archeology Center
of Stanford University, USA, I prepared very brief remarks on a seemingly
apt topic, “Moral Geography: European Heritage and the Duty of the Holocaust Memory”. Before I started to speak, the majority of Palestinian students
left the public hall at Ramallah University: they protested against the very
topic of my presentation. Despite my ‘Geographical Imagination’, I have
been apparently blind to the fact that I speak precisely at the place (Bir Zeit
University) where Holocaust memory is a polemical issue. What’s more, I
was unaware that I was speaking on the topic of European Memory and the
Holocaust precisely at the time when the Iranian Foreign Ministry organized
a revisionist conference on the Holocaust, a notorious Tehran Meeting (December, 2006), which has achieved the status of a political landmark within
the Muslim world community.
30 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
The Ramallah version of the text itself is mainly based on the Eurocentric
Geography of nationalized memory, the nation-state centered memory. The
central idea of my public talk can be summarized in the following way:
the very first and most urgent duty of the European mind is to express unconditional responsibility for its own ‘shameful legacy – the Holocaust’.
It is more than clear that we did not choose this responsibility arbitrarily;
it imposes itself upon us, Europeans, in an unavoidable way. This kind of
responsibility, let us say it again, must be unconditional responsibility, endless responsibility, universal responsibility ‘before the ghosts of those who
are not yet born or who are already dead’. Moreover, I insisted that transnational mourning of the Holocaust (Memorial Day, 27 January) must be read
against the regulative idea of European moral universalism. The unpredictable expansion of the ‘surfeit of memory’ (in Charles Maier’s words) with
regard to the Holocaust comes from European Cultural Particularism; from
the fact that unprecedented Nazi crimes had happened in our backyard, at
the ‘Heart of Europe’. Therefore, any mapping of European shame for the
Holocaust necessarily marks a distinctive ‘discriminatory empathy’ toward
the Jews as victims of the Holocaust: our moral compassion towards the
eliminated Jews belongs to the national-territorial forms of memory of the
European victims.
A few years later, I was invited by Wolfgang Klotz, director of the Heinrich
Boell Foundation (Heinrich Böll Stiftung) in Belgrade, to speak on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. I accepted the invitation and prepared another polemical article entitled Moral Geography: Why
Is Srebrenica Europe’s Shame? based on my Ramallah speech, and presented
it at the round table in CZKD, Belgrade, on 20 July, 2010. One part of that
presentation followed the process of unavoidable assimilation of the tragic
‘Srebrenica discourses’ within the Holocaust paradigm and its, as it were,
cosmopolitan frame. The common rhythms of national and ethnic memories are recycled by the Globalized Eurocentric memory and transformed
into cosmopolitan, world memory. By the 1990s the Holocaust paradigm
had been reconfigured as a ‘Decontextualized Event’ in such a way that any
local tragedy can share memories of the de-territorialized Holocaust as its
own mnemonic destiny. In other words, any local tragedy can become, as
it has happened with the Srebrenica case, a global drama! The other, parallel parts of my presentation expressed deep disagreements and extensive
polemical engagements with ethnic expropriation (Islamization of the burden!) of the Srebrenica victims. The Srebrenica victims have been reshaped
and misused as material for building and consolidating the ethnic substance
of the nation-state. In other words, the pre-political, ethnic concept of the
Obrad Savić
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victims is the compulsory ideology of administrative self-victimization. The
side effects of the dehumanizing politics of victimhood have rightfully been
termed ‘patriotic remembering without memory’, where remembering refers
to the ideology of official victimization, and memory to private reminiscence
of excluded and silenced victims.
A slightly modified article – Moral Geography: Why Is Srebrenica Europe’s
Shame? – was again presented at an international conference, ‘Days of Practical Philosophy’, held at the Philosophical Faculty, Osijek, 16-17 January,
2014, and finally published in the book, Records of Totalitarianism (Marijan Krivak and Željko Senković, eds., Zapisi o totalitarizmu, Osijek: Filozofski Fakultet, 2014). Precisely at the moment when my polemical article
appeared in the public domain (January 2015) harsh criticism and negative
comments appeared from differing and unpredictable camps. For the majority of patriotic Serbs, my text represents a clear ‘anti-Serbian provocation that
affirmed the indictment for the genocide in Srebrenica’. For radical Bosnians
my article is simply an anti-Muslim denunciation of the ethnic expropriation
(Islamization) of the Srebrenica victims. Almost all conflicted and indeed
passionate reactions are based, unfortunately, on pure ethnic animosity, even
national hatred, rather than on a culture of cultivated memory, a kind of just
memory dedicated to the victims of Srebrenica.
For the majority of my academic friends, everything in this text can be the
subject of heated debates, except for the seemingly untouchable discourse
of the victims. Paradoxically, my main intention is the unconditional deconstruction of the very concept of appropriated victims. On the other hand,
my wide-ranging readings of many authors with diverse disciplinary backgrounds contributed to my decisive, radical critique of ethnic self-victimization. Professional and personal contacts with many prominent theorists
allowed me to rearticulate some of my arguments in a hopefully very productive and effective way. My long-standing friendship with Mary Kaldor
helped me understand the very complex nature of the war in Bosnia (Mary
Kaldor, New and the Old Wars: Violence in the Global Age, 2001); occasional contact with Michael Ignatieff enabled me to progress towards the idea of
the limits of moral universalism (Michael Ignatieff, The Danger of a World
without Enemies, 2001); my long and intensive friendships with Helmut Dubiel (Nobody Is Free from History, 1999) and Stanley Cohen (States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, 2001) were extremely important
for nondiscriminatory reconstruction of the official denial of state crimes.
Extensive readings of Elazar Barkan (The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and
Negotiating Historical Injustices, 2000; Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn,
32 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation, 2006), Idith
Zertal (Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 2010) and Esther
Benbassa (Suffering as Identity, 2009) were crucial for an advanced analysis
of the reconstruction of ethnic and national identity through the memory of
collective suffering. Conclusions in my critical research on the European
Culture of Apology as an ethical imperative are mostly inspired by the explosive, inflammatory work of Pascal Bruckner (The Tyranny of Guilt: an
Essay on Western Masochism, 2010). Finally, without the perceptive insights
offered by the works of Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers,
2002) and Jean-Michel Chaumont (Competition of the Victims, 2010) we
cannot explain competitive biddings among victims, and also, the reversible
relationship between victims and perpetrators.
The English version of the text Moral Geography will be distributed among
those on a list of selected authors from the former Yugoslavia (Appendix
1). This inclusive list of my acquaintances, colleagues, and friends has been
prepared according to their readiness to accept a reflexive distance from
themselves and start to speak on others’ victims and killers, and not only
ours. Likewise I am counting on their finely tuned moral sensibility toward
victims and the discourse of mourning. I also believe that all listed members
share a duty and responsibility toward a new, emancipated Memory and a
cultivated Victim Language. I am waiting for an extremely thoroughgoing
critique and fierce comments based on the unconditional coldness and cruelty of real friendship. I hope that the coming reactions on the common painful
past will be seriously reflected as a kind of critical gifts in the book I plan to
write together with Gil Anidjar, The Holocaust after Derrida.
At the end of these introductory remarks, I should not begin without an open
and clear expression of my deepest gratitude, my fervent thanks, yet one
more time, to all the friends who carefully supported my radical critique of
appropriated victim discourse. Never one to shrink from a challenge, I have
a kind of courage to call into question this entire political ontology of victim
discourse. I should also confess, here again, that I have never expected from
anyone to accept and share my highly polemical position, full of problematic
claims and ‘provocative assertions’? But, what holds me here in life, textual
and discursive life, holds first of all in our mutual friendship: ‘By the grace
of a friendship of thought, of a friendship itself to be thought, in fidelity. And
this fidelity, always trembling, risky, would be faithful not only to what is
called the past but, perhaps, if such a thing is possible, to what remains to
come and has as yet neither date nor form’ (Derrida).
Obrad Savić
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Finally, I do not hesitate to ask myself, whether I could ever wait for critical
solidarity with regard to this polemical text on self-victimization. Should I
count on someone who would approach this profoundly painful problem and
say: I shall join the author in what remains nonetheless a terrible difficulty
to endure, an unsolvable difficulty, one that I will not dissimulate, or at least
will dissimulate no more than the author of this text?
Appendix 1: List of the addressees
(Ana Miljanić, Bojan Munjin, Borka Pavičević, Branka Arsić, Daša
Duhaček, Dragica Vujadinović, Dubravka Ugrešić, Dušan Bjelić,
Edina Bečirević, Enver Djuliman, Filip David, Hrvoje Klasić,
Ivan Lovrenović, Jelena Milić, Jovan Čekić, Izabela Kisić, Ksenija
Lazović, Laslo Vegel, Latinka Perović, Lazar Stojanović, Lino Veljak,
Milorad Belančić, Mirjana Miočinović, Nataša Kandić, Nena Tromp,
Nenad Dimitrijević, Pupovac Milorad, Rastko Močnik, Rusmir
Mahmutčekajić, Sanja Pesek, Selma Muhić Dizdarević, Shkelzen
Maliqi, Slavoj Žižek, Sonja Biserko, Staša Zajović, Svetlana Slapšak,
Tomaž Mastnak, Tomislav Longinović, Žarko Korać, Žarko Paić, Žarko
Puhovski, Vesna Bogojević, Vesna Rakić-Vodinelić, Vesna Teršelić,
Ugo Vlaisavljević, Vlasta Jalušić, Zoran Pusić, Zdravko Grebo.)
II. Srebrenica – European shame!
“The assumption of political or moral responsibility without the
assumption of the corresponding legal sonsequences, on the other
hand, has always characterized the arrogance of the power”.
(Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 2002)
If it was mass murder in the death camps that marked the 20th century, recognized as The Age of Extremes, then a genealogy of crimes against humanity would have to be articulated within the most radical paradigm of
political evil – genocide. Genocide itself presents the accumulated eruption
of all the state crimes, violence, aggression, and ethnic cleansing, based on
an ideological activation of ethnic nationalism, religious fanaticism, and racism. Additionally, genocidal practices constitute no simple incident in the
economy of antagonistic relations, but rather an explosive violence of all
relations, simultaneously exponential and promiscuous. As genocides are
political crimes conducted by states (an extreme form of population policy),
then it is quite understandable that ‘rogue states’ would have to become the
center of a normative reckoning with radical, ‘political evil’.
34 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
Despite the popular doctrine on the ‘zones of genocide’, Political Geography insisted that colonial extermination, and especially biopower (in the last
section of his History of Sexuality, vol. I, Foucault identifies genocide as
an element of biopower) clearly demonstrated that genocide praxis belongs,
almost to the whole world. The prevalent theory on Genocide in the Age of
the Nation-State offers quite a conventional argument according to which
Genocide as extermination politics belongs to the inter-national wars, or that
mainly happened during the waging of the nation-centered wars.
If we turn to the post-Genocide time, if such a time has ever truly existed, we
can say that it was precisely normative disorientation that often contributed
to a misguided approach to overcoming a criminal history: for example, it
was the overwhelming military defeat and not the moral catastrophe of the
Holocaust that served as the main redirecting point in Germany’s (un)successful confrontation with its Nazi past. Moreover, obsessive criticism of
Communist totalitarianism drowned out any self-critical overcoming of Nazi
totalitarianism. A stabilized democratic culture in Germany can to this very
day be nourished by the memory of the Holocaust only because it has productively adopted a self-critical stance towards the Nazi past. For the German people, as Helmut Dubiel suggests, “who have the national state as their
political framework, the state which had become the collective subject of a
crime unique in history, the memory of these crimes presents the only chance
to reclaim their moral sovereignty without which their political sovereignty
cannot receive its true historical substance” (Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei
von der Geschichte, 1999).
Therefore, what needs to be investigated is what transpires when an emancipated culture of collective memory is brought into direct contact with mass
crimes born out of a fatal relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.
What transpires when we have resorted to the figure of a sovereign national
memory, whose potent historical heritage seems less legitimate today? Finally, what transpires as a result of the ethnic usurpation, expropriation of
an allegedly sovereign national remembrance of the victims, precisely at the
moment in which the old specter of the sovereign perpetrator (‘History is
written by the victors’) has lost its political, legal, and moral credibility?!
It is a relentless necessity after the Holocaust to question the hypothesis of
the paradoxical remembrance of the victims that cannot be separated from a
remembrance of the perpetrators.
Crime and criminals must be part of remembrance; one cannot remember only
the victim as such. This is what differentiates us from other nations. Because we
Obrad Savić
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are politically responsible and because of this we must also mention the crimes
and the criminals, and not solely victims. It should be seen what position the
very nation of the criminals assumes towards their victims.11
I should like to point out that my argument constitutes a postponed reaction, a commentary on the exemplary lecture by Professor Juan Ramón
Aranszadi Martínez which I understood as a purposeful invitation to a responsible questioning of the ethics of public speech, especially that speech
which patronizingly invokes the Srebrenica victims. His poignant exposition
‘The Srebrenica massacre through the eyes of a Basque – Spanish apatride’
(spoken at the panel ‘Fifteen years after Srebrenica’, which was organized
by the Heinrich Böll foundation at the CZKD, mentioned earlier) carries an
unobtrusive rebellious note which decisively opposes an ethnically impassioned remembrance of the victims, that malevolent memory which is still
incapable of achieving mastery over the self-destructive forces of hatred that
it has released. I am especially grateful to Professor Aranszadi Martínez for
having courageously pleaded for salvaging the discourse of the victim from
the blatant ethnic usurpation which is no more than a relic of a nationalist
past we have yet to overcome. Professor Aranszadi Martínez opened a space
whereby the public debate on the Srebrenica tragedy can move towards respectful solidarity with the victims now hopelessly buried in an ethnic image
of the past. Aranszadi Martínez also warned of a distressing competition in
victim body counts, a monstrous rivalry which opened an abyss in the moral
economy of evil. I will therefore comment especially on the inappropriate
practice of classifying genocides on a hierarchy of greater or lesser evil: it is
precisely the competition in ethno-national, and, increasingly, religious solidarity with our victims, but not theirs, that prevents us from seeing the mass
crime in Srebrenica in its ‘intimate cruelty’, the brutality drenched in the
blood of brothers. Aryeh Neier rightfully pointed out that the most unusual
mark of the sadistic conflicts in Bosnia was the ‘grotesque intimacy between
the victims and the perpetrators’.
Here I could add a necessary comment which might help counteract potential
misunderstandings concerning the issue of the nature of the war in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, a war which has once more taken place in the shadow of
genocide. If we accept for a moment the widespread thesis that the genocide
in Bosnia and Herzegovina took place in its pure form of ethnocide, then we
would need to answer the question of why the warring ethnicities blurred the
clear boundaries demarcating wars between states from wars within states.
As an extreme form of organized violence, war operations in the spaces of
torn Yugoslavia largely evaded centralized state control. It was precisely the
36 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
‘hybrid war’ operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina that once more called attention to a novel degradation, a refeudalization of ‘Modern warfare’ which,
in its purer form, used to be conducted on the frontline, between at least two
sovereign states. What transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina were in fact
Globalized, ‘New wars’ (Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars, 2001), which obliterated the lines between military and civilian spaces, wartime and peacetime.
In a strictly formal, that is to say, legal sense, until the act of international
recognition, what transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a civil war (degenerated in a series of private wars) – devastating religious and ethnic conflicts taking place within the torn federation.
The field reality of military conflicts and war operations indicates that what
occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a specific case of the refeudalization of modern warfare which deteriorated into a criminalized series of private wars, uncontrollably intersecting all of society:
The UN Commission of Experts identified eighty-three paramilitary groups on
the territory of former Yugoslavia – of which fifty-six were Serbian, thirteen
were Croatian and fourteen were Bosnian. The estimated size of these forces
was 20-40000, 12-20000 and 4-6000, respectively. The vast majority of these
acted locally, but certain groups operated much more widely in conjuction with
regular forces and gained considerable notoriety.22
Before I leave behind this excursus on the complex nature of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I would have to express a profound doubt, or rather
a disagreement with numerous interpretations which advocated the position
that the ‘war in Bosnia was a civil war in the sense that it was led against
the civilian population and against civil society’ (Tadeusz Mazowiecki), or
that ‘the war in Bosnia can be viewed as a war of radical nationalists against
secular, multicultural, pluralistic society’ (Mary Kaldor). Is it not clear after
Foucault’s insight that the pacified civil order is in fact a masked war order,
and politics were war continued by other means? The permanent erosion of
the distinction between public and private, military and civilian, internal and
external, also calls into question the distinction between war and peace itself.
Modern war has become the archetypal example of a fusion of war, state, and
society, a fusion at the local, regional, and global levels. It is quite clear that
the distinction between internal and external war, between ethnic, racial and
civil wars have all but disappeared. Already during the Second World War, it
became apparent that individual nation-states could not fight wars unilaterally. Foucault’s archaeology of the states nature of modern warfare could help
in the description of the regressive form of war conflicts in former Yugoslavia:
Obrad Savić
| 37
The immediate effect of this State monopoly was that what might be called
Day-to-day warfare, and what was actually called Private Warfare, was eradicated from the social body, and from relations among men and relations among
groups. Increasingly, wars, the practices of war, and the institutions of war
tended to exist, so to speak, only on the frontiers, on the outer limits of the
great State units, and only as a violent relationship — that actually existed or
threatened to exist — between States. But gradually, the entire social body was
cleansed of the bellicose relations that had permeated it through and through
during the Middle Ages.33
The appropriation of the modern warfare by the state, however, has not prevented an uncontrollable incursion of re-feudalized forms of local conflicts
and combat actions. Modern societies clearly proved themselves unable to
irrevocably liberate themselves from their everyday practices of militarized
violence. In Foucauldian terms, the laws, the rule of law and human rights
do not represent a guarantee of a permanent pacification of social relations:
even under the rule of the law war continues to rage within all the mechanisms of power, including the most legal ones!
It is important that I describe precisely here the contentious issue of the nature of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am of course bound by responsibility towards the canonized decisions forming the international legal discourse of the Hague Tribunal – the International Criminal Tribunal
for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, which decisively testified to an immeasurable
criminal guilt of the armed forces of Republika Srpska: the verdicts thus far
have demonstrated, if I may venture into a ‘Juristocratic’ interpretation of
the ISTY verdicts, that ethnic cleansing was the strategic goal of the civil
war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that this strategic goal was attempted
by all three warring sides. Therefore, the dominant perception of the war in
Bosnia is mainly expressed in terms such as ‘Balkanism’ or ‘Tribalism’ or
Private Civil War, or Invasion, Aggression, and Occupation: only the collapse of the state monopoly of organized violence – war – can explain such
a brutal destructions on all antagonized sides. For example, the existence
of detention centers was discovered on all sides, at the very beginning of
the local wars: ‘The UN Commission of Experts identified some 715, of
which 237 were operated by Bosnian Serbs, 89 by the ABIH and the government and 77 by Bosnian Croats. According to the Commission, they were the
scene of the worst inhuman acts, including mass executions, torture, rape and
other forms of sexual assault.’ (Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars: Organized
Violence in a Global Era, 2001)
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By offering this contracted description of juristic versions of the war, naturally, I do not wish to defend the contentious thesis of an alleged symmetry
of the criminal atrocities that the warring sides used in an attempt to exterminate one another. Quite the opposite, I attempt to affirm an empirical assertion according to which the mass murder of civilians in Srebrenica occurred
in the middle of a civil war which, after Bosnia and Herzegovina was internationally recognized as a sovereign state, transformed into an international
conflict, an aggression, with elements of genocidal politics.
In the following sections, I will attempt to discredit the mass ethnic expropriation of the Srebrenica victims in an Arendtian manner: namely, the massacre
in Srebrenica was not a crime against ethnic Muslims, but instead a crime
against humanity committed against Bosnian civilians. I am here referring,
obviously, to Hannah Arendt’s far-reaching warning that the “Holocaust was
not a crime against Jews, but a crime against humanity committed against
Jews”.
As you may surmise, I have initiated here the issue of a specific counterhistory of the victim, which needs to be freed from an excess of ritualized
remembrance that decreasingly liberates and increasingly yokes our relationship with the past, and, connected with it, the future as well. I would like to
focus specifically on the issue of a vengeful misuse of the victims which has
as its goal ascribing to the perpetrators a ‘unique demonic status’, to corral them into collective guilt which is to become a permanent mark of their
criminalized national identity. I will therefore strive to deconstruct the commemorative discourse of the memory of the Srebrenica victims on the basis
of the European culture of apology which has been since the Holocaust the
center of ‘self-imposed confessions of Western shame’.
This segment can function as a kind of initial polemic against nationalistic
abuse of the collective memory, memory based on the ethnically expropriated victims, and simultaneously, as a general appeal for a new politics of
regret. In the name of the dignity of the victims, mnemonic struggles for the
Srebrenica massacre must be separated from the post-traumatic battle for
nationalizing identity through religion, culture, and even human remains.
Obrad Savić
| 39
III. Mapping European Regret
“We must fight for what the word Europe means today.
This includes our Enlightenment heritage, and also an
awareness and regretful acceptance of the totalitarian,
genocidal and colonialist crimes of the past.”
(Jacques Derrida, L’Europe de l’espoir, 2004.)
In this section, I will strive to demonstrate the conditions under which the
Srebrenica tragedy became the moral conscience of European peoples. As
is well known, the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica (11
July 2010) occasioned appropriate worldwide responses from numerous representative ‘institutions’ whose commemorative discourse was marked by
‘mediatized’ statements on European shame. Let me remind you that the
president of the USA Barack Obama described the massacre in Srebrenica as
‘An unimaginable world tragedy’ (CNN.news, Sunday, 11 July 2010, 6:30
am). The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, issued the
following statement at the Security Council: ‘Today we honor the victims of
the largest atrocity on European soil since the founding of the United Nations’ (UN-News, UNHQ, Monday, 12 July 2010, 10:30 am). But the most
precise formulation on Srebrenica as Europe’s shame was offered by British Prime Minister David Cameron: ‘We must never forget the act of genocide that happened at Srebrenica. It was a crime that shamed Europe.’ (BBC
News, Sunday 11 July 2010, 14:11 pm). Naturally, we can understand these
dramatic statements on Srebrenica as a diplomatic echo of a much broader,
penitent spirit of Europe:
Europe has demonstrated a shameful impotence in the time of the Balkan crisis
of the 1990s. Besides, these conflicts did not take place in some remote area of
the globe, but in Europe’s own entrance hall.44
The European culture of penitence has found its most radical philosophical
expression, to my mind, in Sloterdijk’s reflections on the Bosnian tragedy:
Through the experiences of the Yugoslav crisis, the European Community was
educated on the boundaries of its own nobility. It could be said without prevarication: during the siege of Sarajevo, the age of Europe’s political dream ended.55
According to Sloterdijk’s insights, ‘Bosnia as Europe’s shame’ (‘Europas
bosnische Schande’) represents the final and, certainly, the decisive event in
the long and outrageous history of European self-deterioration.
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The penitent discourse of Europe built up the ritual politics of regret, which
has moved from the very beginning towards ever more decisive demands to
ascribe to the ‘Bosnian tragedy’ the status of the highest evil. Another source
of disquiet has to do with the controversial remark made by Martin Malia that
any comparison with the Holocaust, which has acquired in the Western moral
economy the unique status of absolute evil, is normatively problematic and
morally contentious. On this occasion I will leave aside the question of why
any competition in grading the magnitude of evil seems like an inappropriate
endeavor. I will not enter into a potential argument over why any rivalry surrounding the Srebrenica tragedy – which allegedly threatens to contest from
within the ruling paradigm of the Holocaust – sounds utterly unconvincing. I
will instead focus primarily on an analysis of the circumstances under which
the crime in Srebrenica, under the aegis of the Holocaust, took a prominent
position in the European discourse of self-expiation.
I recall that long before the Srebrenica massacre, the privileged position of
the Holocaust in the European discourse of evil became the subject of increasingly common disputes from different corners of the world. The monstrous denial of the Holocaust (‘Auschwitz never took place!’), was immediately countered by a wide front of agreement on the alleged ‘radical incommensurability of the Holocaust’. It appears that the central issue is not the
more-or-less convincing process of undermining and permanently eroding
the Eurocentric paradigm of evil – the Holocaust. The central issue refers
rather to the very history of the emergence and continuous effects of the
‘Holocaust discourse’: in other words, it is vital to our understanding of the
‘Srebrenica Effect’ to explain why the opinion that the Holocaust represents
a unique and immeasurable historical event has taken root within the Western moral economy (the model of Nazism as radical evil is mostly spread
within the European and the Anglo-American moral space). Does this mean
that the issue of Srebrenica as Europe’s shame cannot be appropriately articulated outside of the central significance of the Holocaust for the Western
moral discourse and its mapping of absolute evil? In Levy’s brilliant book
on cosmopolitan (de-nationalized) Holocaust memory we can find a very inspired argument on the main historical course of the Holocaust memory that
has been nationalized, particularized, and finally, universalized:
Holocaust memories have taken on a cosmopolitan scope because they enable
diverse oppressed groups to recognize themselves in the role of the Jewish
victims. The identification of other victim groups with the Jewish victims of
the Holocaust has altered the significance of contemporary cosmopolitanism.66
Obrad Savić
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According to the conventional interpretation, convincingly formulated by
Steven Ascheim, there is something in the very practice of this administrative crime – genocide, which awards it the status of unique bestiality and
intolerable cruelty.
Something in the event itself, its state-sanctioned criminality, its taboo-breaking aims, industrial methods and mammoth, transgressive scale clearly rendered such an absolutizing discourse both possible and plausible.77
What shocked the moral conscience of the European man the most was not
the frightening number of those eliminated in the Holocaust (every victim/
witness feels a natural rage against statistical inventories!), but the cold, calculated brutality with which the victims were identified, selected, transported
into camps and, finally, executed. In the case of the Srebrenica massacre
– I dare notice – Europe’s conscience was specifically shaken not only by
the unbearable similarity with the traumatic images of Auschwitz, but also
the sadistic brutality which marked violence against neighbors and relatives,
violence, that is, which was personal and intimate. Additionally, the spiral of
cruel ‘cell violence’ cannot be understood without a cross-combination and
local mobilization of those ‘predator identities’ which killed each other in the
morning and traded together in the afternoon!
I define as predatory those identities whose social construction and mobilization require the extension of other, proximate social categories, defined as
threats to very existence of some group, defined as a ‘we’. [...] Thus, predatory
identities arise in those circumstances in which majorities and minorities can
plausibly be seen as being in danger of trading places.88
In a world civilization of conflicts, rather than a conflict of civilizations, we
would have to establish a precise difference between objective, structural
violence and the personal brutality of local, intimate, incidental violence.
The brutal images of mass infliction of death cannot fully explain the central significance of the Holocaust in the Western map of evil. Perhaps the
Holocaust achieved its iconic status because it testified, at the end of all the
atrocities of the twentieth century, in a concise and convincing manner, to the
omnipresent human baseness in the center of Europe itself. In other words, a
special moral sensitivity of the Western man towards those crimes that happened ‘in our back yard’ enabled the Holocaust to perform the function of
a unique and unrepeatable evil. A particularly durable fascination with Nazi
crimes was born out of the fact that this, allegedly greatest historical catas-
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trophe (far greater than any of the mass murders and genocides which occurred throughout the world!) took place in the middle of Europe, in the very
center of Western enlightenment, rationality and modernity. The cautionary
observation by Hannah Arendt that Nazism was colonialism’s coming to
home draws attention to the geography of imperialist horrors which have
transformed the world into a natural horizon of Europe’s ambitions to conquer. The Holocaust was not deemed the most outrageous historical transgression owing to its extremity (there are, after all, many other examples of
extreme human cruelty), but because it entailed, in the middle of Europe,
a ‘dissolution of the constraints of civilization’ (Peter Sloterdijk). A vital
impetus to the obsessive treatment of the ‘Holocaust discourse’ as taboo can
be found in our perpetual astonishment at the fact that enlightened societies
of Europe can behave in such an uncivilized, brutal, and bestial manner. As
opposed to the barbarities committed by imperial powers in far-off, ‘peripheral’ parts of the world, the Nazi horrors took place in the heart of European
civilization. Our indifference towards the catastrophic crimes of colonialism,
which were perpetrated across the ‘primitive parts of the world’, stands in reverse proportion to the powerful shame we feel before our neighbors – Jews,
and, with increasing frequency lately, Muslims. In the book Language and
Silence (1967) George Steiner gives a specific and somewhat idiosyncratic
description of the essence of the shocking image we have of Nazism, more
than any other example of mass cruelty:
The cry of the murdered sounded in the earshot of the universities; the sadism
went on a street away from the theaters and museums […] the high places of
literacy, of philosophy, of artistic expression, became the setting for Belsen […]
We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can
play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.
(See‘Preface’ to George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language,
Literature and the Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. viii, ix.)
It is well known that Western man was less astonished even by those historical crimes which were committed in the vicinity of Europe: we are utterly
indifferent to the worst atrocities and brutalities of the Stalinist regime only
because the gigantic transgression of the Gulag took place outside the imaginary core of Western civilization. It is highly unlikely that we will be terribly
upset by any crimes of genocide committed far from the Western metropolises. The fact is that large-scale colonial crimes have remained completely
unknown: who is familiar with the fact that the reign of Belgian king Leopold II over Congo, which was based upon slave labor, cost over a million victims? Moreover, we can with great likelihood expect not to find new crimes,
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if they take place in the backwoods of the world, such as the Gobi desert
or the Amazon rainforest, on the high-priority list of the European map of
political evil. We can probably agree that the paradigm of the Holocaust is
a unique piece of evidence that the boundaries of Western moral empathy
are fully Euro-centric. Our fascination and frustration with Nazism stems
from the ‘knowledge that barbarity can erupt precisely in the places where
culture seems the most securely rooted’, or the fact that fundamental historical transgressions occurred within the civilizational space we still consider
to be the most progressive. Finally, our deepest challenge with the Holocaust
is born out of a Euro-centric need for a unified, ‘monotheistic ideology of catastrophe’ which can be embedded into ‘nearly any imaginable ideological,
philosophical or moral construction’.
IV. The Ethics of Victim Discourse
“For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to
bear the other in mourning; one must love the future”.
(Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 1994)
The magnitude of the catastrophe in ex-Yugoslav spaces is primarily measured against the horrors that struck Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Srebrenica,
this singular locus of eruptive bestiality. It is precisely the history of a traumatized memory of the Srebrenica victims that can help us understand the
circumstances under which Srebrenica’s tragedy became Europe’s shame. It
is essential to reconstruct those commemorative discourses and rituals that
allowed the Srebrenica victims to be transformed into the unique martyrs of
contemporary Europe.
Allow me to broach the sensitive issue of a miraculous growth of the ‘culture of the victim’ which established, in the name of a noble solidarity with
those persecuted, a hopeless image of a criminal past. Should we wish to
liberate a new and more just memory of Srebrenica, we must liberate the
colonized discourse of the victim from the so-called ‘friends of the victims’,
those ‘wrathful angels’ who, with moral swords crossed, stand between the
ruthless criminals and the innocent victims in order to prevent any future
reconciliation. As is well known, the Euro-centric culture of mourning, ‘national mourning’, has no special, normative status: non-discriminatory remembrance of all the victims of mass crimes against humanity is the universal norm of the new culture of memory. Is it even necessary to add that the
cumulative work of noble remembrance and the attendant mourning should,
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without exception, encompass all the victims in ex-Yugoslav spaces? The
decisive impetus for labeling Srebrenica the new measure of the culture of
regret and apology can only be that model memory of the victims which is
liberated from ethnic usurpation, moral expropriation, and mediated staging.
These, most drastic forms of ‘the contaminated victim narrative’ uncomfortably intermingle to the extent that they undermine the moral reputation of
the memory of the Srebrenica tragedy. Indeed, the thoughtless practice of
self-victimization squanders away with wild abandon the universal morality of the victim discourse, which shapes and filters our future images of
mass horrors. I hope that the vindictive discourse of bitterness and rage, even
when spoken only in the interest of ‘our’ victims, will not destroy that moral
sensibility to the universal idea of justice which should become the ‘general
law of all the peoples’.
Here I would like to point out a fundamental, structural tension inevitably
faced by any demand for objective and impartial reflection on the victims
and the perpetrators of the crimes committed against them. I fully agree
with the seemingly cynical suggestion made by Slavoj Žižek that any impartial reflection on the victims must ignore the traumatic effects of victimhood. On the one hand, according to Žižek, direct and unmediated, and
therefore non-sublimated confrontation with the crimes and their helpless
victims ‘contains something which deforms the view of the entire situation’: moreover, noble solidarity and empathy towards the victims prevents
us from understanding the crime in an unavoidably integral, contextual,
historical manner. On the other hand, an unbiased and objective analysis of
mass crimes of necessity reproduces its horrors and participates in the devastating dehumanization of the victim. The way out of this troublesome and
degrading paradox of the victim discourse can be found in the very structure
of the stated dilemma:
The same holds, of course, for the so-called unreliability of the verbal reports
of Holocaust survivors: the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his camp
experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that clarity. The only appropriate approach to my subject thus seems to be one which permits variations on
violence kept at a distance out of respect towards its victims.99
It would appear to me that even this well-weighed invitation to a measured,
distanced reflection on the perpetrators and their victims seems convincing.
From the perspective of thoughtless self-victimization, which threatens to
undermine from within those trustworthy voices of the victims, the ideal victim-subject emerges as a helpless wretch, deprived of any political identity
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and reduced to bare martyrdom. It is precisely via this pre-political notion
of the victim that compassion and regret are appealed to, instead of dignity
and respect. Moreover, the scope and the energy of the privileged victim
discourse have of late been redoubled:
Constantly claiming to be the victim of a crime against humanity is a way of
telling everyone else: don’t judge me! [...] Victimization would be a kind of
savage positive discrimination, a way of giving oneself a free pass when all
legal and political recourse have been exhausted. To call oneself a victim is to
make oneself a candidate for exception; [...] To set oneself up as a victim is
to give oneself a twofold power to accuse and demand, to cast opprobrium on
others and to beg.1010
It is perfectly clear that the pre-political concept of the victim does not wield
the moral strength that would allow passing unconditional judgment on unforgivable mortal sin, the irredeemable guilt of the crime. I am willing to join
those authors who draw attention to the greedy usurpation of the memory of
the Srebrenica victims. It is true that, as Michael Ignatieff recently pointed
out, the ethics of victim discourse is as a rule being associated with ethnicity,
that ‘empathy and moral principles are being rooted within tribal boundaries,
and that they receive their most straightforward and natural manifestation
within those boundaries’. There are numerous examples of pitiful ethnic and
religious confiscations of the memory of the Srebrenica victims: especially
disturbing and in every respect devastating is the assertion that the Srebrenica
tragedy can only be authentically and reliably interpreted only by Bosnians. I
am not prepared to enter an ‘ethnic dispute’ about the moral damage caused
by this to the victims of the Srebrenica tragedy. I would simply add that the
model ethics of the victim discourse must be based on Lemkin’s thesis on a
‘universal moral imagination’, the conviction that there are no racial, ethnic,
or religious boundaries which cannot be surpassed by our moral interest in
others.
The concept of genocide was invented, in other words, not only to describe
the fate of his own people, but also to capture what was happening to the
people to whom he would have belonged, had he been permitted. He was
one of those Polish patriots never allowed membership in the nation that he
claimed as his own. Lemkin’s theoretical innovation taught a universalize
lesson not least by example.1111
We could adopt Michael Ignatieff’s claim that genocide is a crime against
humanity precisely because it is a crime committed against Jews or Muslims,
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or any other group, and simultaneously a crime against all those that do not
belong to those ethnic, religious, or political groups. Though there is something devastating about the fact that moral universalism has as a rule let us
down, we can still hope that its norms can overcome the ‘pathetic obtrusiveness’ of any ethnic particularism. It is true, as Michael Ignatieff has recently
pointed out that ethic argumentations typically follow ethnic borders, but, we
can hope, less intensively in the coming time.
It is important to point out another, much more delicate political dimension
of self-victimization, which has within national frameworks manifested itself
in devastating forms. The ethics of the victim discourse has simply been
dragged onto another scene, which is to force the perpetrators to redeem
themselves politically for past crimes. This is not a simple matter of the legal convention of restitution (remuneration, return of assets) or reparation
(material compensation) which can really alleviate the injustices perpetrated
in the past. It concerns a much broader and more ambitious endeavor to
politically mark the crimes perpetrated by ‘A Nation on Trial’ (Norman Finkelstein, Ruth Bettina Birn, 1998). The state-sponsored victim discourse is
increasingly growing into a real political power which threatens to largely
shape international relations and the world community. Under pressure from
these new circumstances, the victim discourse, once moral and legal, has
been transformed into a political lesson and historical norm! Trials are no
longer held for individual perpetrators, but entire nations, which must prove
ready to embrace their own guilt in order to make it part of their criminalized
identity. The alarming thing, as Ian Buruma noticed, is the readiness with
which an increasing number of ethnic and religious minorities fashion their
identity as unique historical victims:
Last year Ian Baruma highlighted some controversial aspects of the focus on
identity through victimization in contemporary society. ‘What is alarming,
writes Buruma, is the extent to which so many minorities have come to define
themselves above all as historical victims. Not only does it reveal [...] lack of
historical perspective, but it also, seems a very peculiar source of pride. Buruma does not negate the memory of suffering by numerous communities, but
he questions when a culture, ethnic, religious, or national community bases
its communal identity almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood. For that way lie historical myopia and, in extreme circumstances, even vendetta. The problem, as Buruma sees it, is that this sense of
victimization impedes understanding among people; it cannot result in mutual
understanding.12
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It is perfectly clear that political instrumentalization of suffering, that onesided ethnic and national self-victimization, disrupts understanding among
people and reconciliation among peoples: it invites us to a partial solidarity
with our victims, and, in turn, indifference towards others’ victims. It is well
known that criminal responsibility of one party must never conceal political
and moral irresponsibility on the part of the other. In a smug victimization
of ethnic groups and nations, particularly disturbing is the readiness to deindividualize the hapless victims, and, as an anonymous community of the
dead, drag them into a general process of interethnic panic over corpses.
“Moreover, the religious ritual of burial which takes the bodily remains of
the victim of genocide from modern science after identification, commits
another act of erasure: namely, all the victims of the Srebrenica genocide are
by way of this religious ritual Islamized” (Manifest: How to think genocides,
Matemi Reasocijacije, Belgrade, no.1/2010). The religious processing of the
trauma of genocide calculatedly constructs the depoliticized concept of the
Srebrenica victim reduced to a religious martyr. This gesture, I should add,
directs the accumulated energy of Bosnian rage towards the general Islamic
wrath “which still has not exhausted its ‘timotic’ potential” (Peter Sloterdijk,
Rage and Time, 2007).
In fact, the devastating conflict between the ‘victims’ (described in detail in
the polemical book by Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence de victimes,
2010) was actualized in the period of the monumental victory of the victim
figure. The emergence of a post-heroic culture of the victim and, associated
with it, the demise of the heroic narrative, marks the period of a clear rise
of the democratic ideal of the struggle for public, political recognition. The
victim discourse has from the start imposed itself as the unconditional moral
corrective based on the demand for absolute recognition of one’s own selfvictimization. Additionally, constant misuse of the potentially universal concept of justice as equity has led to a breakdown in the legal regulation of the
victim as subject, whose fragile identity has been reduced to religious and
ethnic belonging. The historical rise of the victim once ‘enclosed in shame’
is associated not so much with the magnitude of the injustice wrought as with
the readiness of a nation to mark the identity of its victims in ethnic and religious terms. Surely, at all times, there is a danger of ethnic ‘victim contests’
igniting dormant nationalistic passions which multiply the workings of evil
in such a way as to render impossible any distancing of ourselves from the
injustices we have wrought against others.
Numerous authors believe that restitutional mediation between the perpetrator and the victim can settle old bills, and enable ‘memory and historical
48 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
identities to be processed in such a way that they become mutual for both
sides’. I am not convinced that a mutual settling of historical injustices is
possible, even when it is achieved with a mutual consent from both the victim and the perpetrator: in completely novel civilizational circumstances ‘the
victorious history of the perpetrator’ has been suspended and replaced with
‘the privileged history of the victims’.
V. The Tyranny of Guilt
“Everyone is guilty with respect to everyone else,
for everything, and I more than anyone.”
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 1881)
I am assuming a risk, and a responsibility, in associating the instrumentalized figure of the Srebrenica victims with an odd dissemination of the culture of regret and apology. A self-imposed confession of Europe’s shame
has been transformed nowadays into a Western allegory of regret: a wave of
public apologies by state officials is spreading uncontrollably around. The
culture of apology is fully institutionalized and has achieved the status of
an international diplomatic form. As has been noted by Jennifer Lind (Sorry
States: Apologies in International Politics, 2008), ‘[r]econciliation requires
that countries stop perceiving one another as a threat’.
There should be an investigation into how a political spin on victim discourse became embedded into an omnipresent scene of state-sponsored apology which has grown to world proportions. How else is one to understand
the fact that diplomatic disputes surrounding the Srebrenica tragedy take
place in the United Nations, the US Senate, the Australian Parliament and
the Council of Europe? I would like to issue a reminder here that the European Parliament – the sole institution representing the citizens of the EU – on
15 January 2009 passed a Resolution on Srebrenica which invites all EU
member states, as well as all states in the Western Balkans, to mark July 11th
as the Day of Commemoration of the genocide victims in Srebrenica. In the
exposition of the resolution proposal, Jelko Kacin, the European Parliament
Report on Serbia, made the following remark: “Srebrenica must be engraved
into our historical memory and built into the foundations of EU enlargement
to the West Balkan areas”. If I understand this remark correctly, the Europeanization of the memory of the Srebrenica victims is now an essential part
of the official reintegration of the Western Balkans into the European Union.
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We are witnessing today an ostentatious staging of the ‘world culture of
regret and apology’ which harbors the suppressed spirit of European guilt.
The European Union has found itself in the center of the current culture of
regret: its passive stance towards Bosnia and Herzegovina – ‘Europe acted
too late and with too little force’ (James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will,
Columbia University Press, New York 1997), the hideous politics of waiting in Rwanda, the silence on Chechnya, the insensitivity shown towards
Darfur, etc. However, the European Union is not responsible only for current crimes; it is retroactively responsible for all the atrocities committed by
its distant ancestors! This means that the globalized economy of regret has
been overtaken by the principle of extended retroactive stigmatization: the
perpetrators must be branded for both current and past historical horrors. As
the immeasurable injustices towards the victims are the result of an inherited,
‘accumulated working of evil’, the demand to right current wrongs becomes
a self-explanatory demand for righting all past wrongs as well. The relentless
victim discourse has been instated in the position of boundless demands, the
supercilious practice of omnipresent historical litigations which makes us
with increasing frequency insensitive to new, and unpredictable, injustices.
Naturally, the strategy of exalted retroactive stigmatization has used the language of the Srebrenica victims homeopathically as well. If I may remark,
the Bosnian victims were counted not only for the sake of factual truth, a
restitutional justice that is to liberate us from the abyss of the past. Rather,
the figure of the victim was misused in order to corral the perpetrators into
a reversible historical shame: the guilt for the Srebrenica tragedy cannot be
settled before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, precisely because the guilt of the Serbs summarizes all the European atrocities the West
was once ready to commit.
Genocide against Muslims was committed during the so-called Great or Vienna War of 1683–1699, then again in 1711 when the so-called Inquisition of
the Turkicized took place on the territory of Old Montenegro. Expulsions of
Bosnians were once more intensified during the two uprisings against the Ottoman Empire. […] Anti-Islamic ideology seems to have formed a mutual
basis for the Serbian-Western alliance.13
Religious theatralization of the Srebrenica tragedy aims to prove that the
perpetrators are not merely ‘Orthodox criminals’ but, spoken in theological
discourse, the ‘Christian damned’. Any placement of the Srebrenica tragedy into an antagonized religious discourse (‘the Srebrenica genocide proves
beyond a doubt the existence of a holy war waged by Christians against
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Muslims’), as a rule, leads to a hopeless revival of old religious and ethnic
conflicts. Extorted religious repentance stems from that ostentatious culture
of sin which reminds us that Christian Europe is tainted by the shame of
Srebrenica! This nationalist-religious fervor – which further debases the Srebrenica victim discourse – is calculatedly addressed to the interiorized guilt
of Christian Europe and the entire Western world. The moral confusion surrounding the instrumentalization of the victim discourse is further complicated by the “calculated rewarding of the strategy of self-victimization which
is no less dangerous to the global stability than rewarding aggression” (Xavier Bouigarel, Bosnie: Anatomie d’un conflict, 1996). Under the auspices of
the privileged status of the victim figure, the European culture of regret and
apology has deteriorated into an ostentatious self-repentance, a ‘spectacular
tyranny of regret’ which Europe practices on itself, and against itself!
It seems to me that the time has come for the memory of the Srebrenica
victims to be liberated from the forced tyranny of regret that romanticized
suffering which no justice for the victims can ever satisfy. Should we not
finally cease this offensive, vindictive remembrance of the Srebrenica tragedy that armed memory which, as a rule, inflames old ethnic horrors, while
beckoning new ones? Should we not definitively forsake all victimizing selfdramatization, that ethnic affectation which, as a rule, counts on ritualized
tricks of national remembrance and oblivion?
Assuming that being concerned with the significance of the dead in the world
of the living is an unavoidable element in the unconscious of every nation, the
impetus of resistance to nationalist logic must be the enrichment of the world
of the living through the inscribed memory of the no longer living, not the
other way around. At least for me, and in my current interest in writing against
narratives of sacralization, which I take to be narratives dangerous to history
– or to a historical relation to the world, to be more precise – this is a fundamental priority. Memorialization must be executed without the least intention,
the least desire, for rendering the dead sacred, if we are to do justice to their
history, that is, to the fact that they were once living in the world, a world alas!
no longer in existence, but whose significance as a world, as historical secular
world, is and must be the worldly work of the living.14
I fully concur with Helmut Dubiel that nations are in fact claustrophobic,
predatory identities, which have materialized on the basis of the barbaric
cruelty which sacrificed one’s own children and murdered the children of
others.
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Contrary to what traditional sociology claims, nations do not emerge from some
sort of common value system. [...] It would be more accurate to say that skeletons in national closets produce the feeling of community which is predicated
upon suppressed guilt. [...] The secret of a nation’s unity is based not upon the
freedom of its citizens, but upon the tacit complicity in collective crime.15
As a matter of fact, we are speaking of a deconstruction of the history of the
living in favor of a revival of the national history of the dead: in a paradoxical way, we are referring here to a national text of remembrance which is
entangled into a long and organized history of calculated oblivion. Owing to
the distinctive insights of Stanley Cohen (States of Denial: Knowing about
Atrocities and Suffering, 2001) we can assert that the ‘state of denial’ of historical crimes is the result of a conflicting intrigue between instrumentalized
memory of the victims and arrogant oblivion (and denial) of the perpetrators.
Professor Cohen described in precise detail the dominant forms of denial of
the crimes only to conclude that it is ‘exalted lie, and not tabooed silence
(extorted silence) that represents the central locus of the rhetoric of denial’.
It is quite pertinent that I cite here some of the more ‘exotic statements’ on
the allegedly imaginary, fictitious crimes in Srebrenica:
The official version on Srebrenica is a colossal bluff, the triumph of late 20th
century propaganda. [...] Srebrenica is genocide without corpses, only about
100 Muslims died there! [...] We are dealing with virtual evidence which do
not serve to ascertain factual reality but to support its illusions. […] The first to
die in Srebrenica were Serbian victims.16
This bizarre travesty of the victim stems from a temporal inversion of the
crime: the martyr is akin to the perpetrator of today who was once himself
a victim! (Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 2002). The
corrupt discourse of the victims invokes the perpetrator to accept moral responsibility penitently in order to paradoxically evade legal responsibility.
To assume guilt and responsibility – which can, at times, be necessary – is to
leave the territory of ethics and enter that of law. Whoever has made this difficult step cannot presume to return through the door he just closed behind him.17
Ethnic stylization of the Srebrenica victims necessarily obstructs the political
and legal confrontation with the perpetrators: hence, when it comes to the
European politics of regret and apology it would perhaps be better to direct
our efforts at working out a new politics of memory, political memory, liber-
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ated from the ethnocentric passions which had formed the basis of the crimes
committed in the age when ethnic states emerged. What should be especially
worrying for us is the fact that after the Second World War all the genocides
have been associated with military actions in which mostly civilians lost
their lives: “UNICEF data from 1989 suggested that 90 per cent of all war
victims since the Second World War had been women and children”.18
It is clear that the mnemonic conflicts surrounding Srebrenica result from
much broader polarization of the discourse of remembrance and oblivion
which shape an antagonistic image of the past. We are faced with the process
of ‘destabilizing the past’ which is separated from its representation in such a
radical manner that it has become, as it were, more uncertain than the future
itself! The spreading of narrative conflicts surrounding the past (mnemonic
battles) obliges us to cling with discipline to a regulative idea of an always
already ‘mediatized’, and therefore mediated, structure of memory and, naturally, oblivion as well.
It is necessary that we focus once more on the central issue of remembrance
(and oblivion) of the victims: it is important that we do all we can in order
to appropriate the traumatic past, although we know that the past, in its essence, remains inappropriable. The point of productive memory or, if you
will, just memory lies in liberating the future from the burden of the traumatic past while simultaneously refusing to forget this past. This means that just
memory cannot be reduced to a ceremonial appropriation of the heritage of
a dead past: this heritage should be categorically liberated in another, more
productive way, and then maintained continuously. It is therefore important,
as Jacques Derrida suggested admirably, to start from the apparent opposition between a passive appropriation of the past and an active decision to say
‘yes’, to acknowledge and accept the entire heritage we must interpret and,
naturally, transform.
The past should not be left untouched or whole; this thing, thing of the past,
which we say is the most uncomfortable of all things, should not be left to rest
in peace and quiet. Perhaps we should try to revive it, save it once more, if only
for a short while, but this time without an illusion of a final redemption.19
It is precisely our moral debt to the victims that commands that collective
memory of the victims must not be placed on the public stage in order to
merely ‘integrate’ the crimes into a national memory, in order to commence
and complete the staged rituals of ‘regret’, to hold merciful ‘vigils’ over the
victims, or in order to nurture sentimental memories of their tragic lives. The
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discourse of the victims should simply be liberated from a specific moralistic
banality which latently usurps the practice of self-responsible testimony and
just memory of the nightmarish past. It should not even be necessary for me
to once more refer to the poignant statement by Primo Levi: “I must repeat –
we, the survivors, we are not true witnesses. [...] We speak for them, as their
representatives”. This dramatic personal confession, Primo Levi’s testimony,
creates a topical fascination/frustration with Auschwitz, whose discourse, the
Discourse of the Holocaust, is immersed in unnecessary sentimentalism and
perverted moralism. As Agamben asserts, in Auschwitz Levi discovers “an
area independent of any establishing of responsibility, not because it is an area
of impunity but, quite the contrary, because it is the responsibility infinitely
greater than any responsibility we could ever assume”. What we term the just
memory of the victim must remain free from a general name and term, as simple as any other unrepeatable, personal tragedy. Just memory has as its starting
point this singularity without norms and terms in order to approximate a new
justice, a justice towards the victims which is ‘yet to come’, (à-venir, Zu-kunft).
And this fidelity to the victims, always disturbing, and extremely dangerous,
would entails loyalty not only to what is called the past but, perhaps, if such
a thing is possible, to what remains to come and has as yet neither date nor
figure.
* The English version of my text is dedicated to much appreciated and closest of
friends, Helmut Dubiel (30 June 1946 † 3 November 2015) and Stanley Cohen (23
February 1942 † 7 January 2013). They bring new light to the problem of Sorry
States, institutional re-framing of the victim discourse and its consequences for the
new (transitional) justice, the justice to come, although we are not yet prepared for it.
They also helped me articulate progressively the idea according to which the national past can no longer provide accurate arguments for a new reaffirmation of a
common European future. ‘Public memory of the national past is now assigned the
task of breaking the mythic repetition-compulsion of history burdened with guilt
and injustice’. Undoubtedly, Europe cannot exist only as a community of conflicted
national memories: the exclusivity of national memory (‘ethnic expropriation of collective remembering’) is not universalizable and therefore is less relevant for the
creation of post-national, cosmopolitan, public spheres in Europe.
In the end, I wish to express my deep admiration to Danica Igrutinović for a careful translation of my text. I also want to express heartfelt gratitude to my dearest
friends, Gil Anidjar, Stathis Gourgouris, Dusan Djordjević Mileusnić, and Djordje
Čolić, whose language interventions improved and cultivated the English version of
my text.
54 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
Notes:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002).
Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 47-52.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 48.
Walter Lagueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
Peter Sloterdijk, Falls Europa erwacht (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1994).
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der
Holocaust (2001), 46-47.
Steven E. Aschheim, “Imagining the Absolute: Mapping Western Conception
of Evil”, in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed.
Helmut Dubiel & Gabriel, (London: Routledge, 2004), 74.
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), 51-52.
Slavoj Žižek, On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books
LTD, 2008), 9-10.
Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 142,148.
Michael Ignatieff, “The Danger of a World without Enemies”, The New Republic, 2001. Reprinted in: Belgrade Circle Journal 1-4/2006: 179.
Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations (London and New York: W.W. Norton,
2000), viii.
Edina Bećerević, Na Drini genocid, (Sarajevo: Buy-book, 2009).
Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), 14.
Helmut Dubiel, Niko nije oslobođen istorije (Belgrade: Samizdat B92, 2002).
Stefan Karaganović and Ljubiša Simić, Srebrenica: Dekonstrukacija jednog
virtuelnog genocida, (Belgrade: Fond IPS, 2010), 42.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
(New York: Zone Books, 2002), 24.
Mark Levene, The Meaning of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 53.
Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow... A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Obrad Savić
| 55
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56 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
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Obrad Savić
| 57
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58 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8
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Obrad Savić is Director of the Center of Media and Communications,
Faculty of Media and Communications, University Singidunum, Belgrade.
He has worked as research fellow and lecturer at the School of Fine Art
and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, UK, Visiting Lecturer at American University in Kosovo (AUK), department of the Rochester Institute of
Technology, NY, USA. He has also been Editor-in-chief of a many journals:
Theory, Philosophical Studies, Text, Belgrade Circle, Belgrade Journal of
Media and Communications, and guest editor of Parallax, London, UK. He
has published and edited many books, monographs, collections, and more
than hundred texts on various topics: Community of Memory, 2006 (with
Ana Miljanić); Balkans as a Metaphor, 2005 (with Dušan Bjelić); Politics of
Human Rights, 2002; Charles Taylor: Invoking Civil Society, 2000. He also
work (under preparation) at the following books: Auschwitz after Derrida
(with Gil Anidjar); The Book of the Questions (Interviews and debates with
fifteen prominent philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Etienne Balibar, etc.); Rage as Political Concept.
60 | Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications #8