Collective Guilt Collective Responsibility and The Serbs

East European Politics & Societies
http://eep.sagepub.com Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs

Janine Natalya Clark East European Politics and Societies 2008; 22; 668 originally published online May 16, 2008; DOI: 10.1177/0888325408318533 The online version of this article can be found at: http://eep.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/3/668
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
American Council of Learned Societies
Additional services and information for East European Politics & Societies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://eep.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://eep.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations http://eep.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/22/3/668
Downloaded from http://eep.sagepub.com at Vytautas Magnus University on June 21, 2009
Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs

Janine Natalya Clark
Can an entire nation be collectively guilty for crimes committed in its name? Focusing on the case of Serbia, this article argues that collective guilt is a morally flawed and untenable concept that should be rejected. It presents various moral and practical objections to both the generic notion of collective guilt and the more specific idea of Serbian collective guilt and contends that the latter is a fundamental impediment to peace-building and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia. On what basis might it be argued that the Serbs are collectively guilty? To claim that they are collectively guilty for having supported Milos evic both exaggerates levels of support for the former Serbian leader and does a major injustice to those individuals who bravely fought against the Milos evic regime. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, the article concludes by suggesting that perhaps we can speak of Serbian collective responsibility. Keywords: Serbs; Milos evic ; collective guilt; collective responsibility; collective denial; Second Serbia
Can an entire nation be collectively guilty for the crimes committed in its name? This is the key question with which this paper is concerned. Discussions surrounding the notion of collective guilt have most often centred upon the case of the German people, the archetypal guilty nation. Wilkins, for example, maintains that there are numerous examples of collective guilt, but to my mind the clearest and most indisputable example in recent history is to be found in the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.1 The case of My Lai, when as many as 500 unarmed women, children and elderly Vietnamese were massacred on 16 March 1968, has also been frequently discussed in the context of debates about whether and to what extent we can correctly speak of collective guilt.2 More recently, as a result of the devastating wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, some commentators began to speak
668
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 22, No. 3, pages 668692. ISSN 0888-3254 2008 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1177/0888325408318533
about the collective guilt of one particular nation involved in those warsSerbia. For example, in an article published in The New Republic during the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, Sullivan argued, Whatever else we do in Kosovo, we must face the fact that, to all intents and purposes, many ordinary Serbs areto paraphrase Daniel Jonah GoldhagenMilos evic s willing executioners.3 Despite his claim that the notion of collective guilt, conceptually and morally indefensible, must be rejected,4 Goldhagen himself was insisting that Serbia needed to be occupied on the grounds that any people that commits such deeds in open defiance of international law and the vehement condemnation of virtually the entire international community clearly consists of individuals with damaged faculties of moral judgement and has sunk into a moral abyss from which it is unlikely, any time soon, to emerge unaided.5 For Goldhagen, just as the German peopleHitlers willing executioners6bore collective guilt for the Holocaust, so too the Serbian people were collectively guilty for the crimes of the Milos evic regime and therefore in need of collective punishment. Using Serbia as a case-study,7 this paper will seek to show that the concept of collective guilt is problematic and morally flawed. It will begin by outlining some objections to the idea of Serbian collective guilt and will argue that those NGOs in Serbia that embrace this notion impede the very truth and reconciliation process that they are trying to encourage and develop. The second section will ask what it actually means to say that the Serbs are collectively guilty. If the contention is that they are culpable for having supported Milos evic , this is to do a fundamental injustice to those individuals who courageously and tirelessly fought against the regime throughout the nineties. These opponents of the regime, who form the focus of this part of the paper, represent a second face of Serbia which the West has tended, deliberately, to ignore. The final section of the paper will suggest that while we cannot speak of the Serbs collective guilt, perhaps we can speak of their collective responsibility. Drawing upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, it will argue that there is a case to be made for Serb political and metaphysical responsibility.
East European Politics and Societies

669
The Case against Collective Guilt When Yugoslavia disintegrated and descended into bloodshed, it was the Serbs who were widely seen as the aggressors. To cite Handke, so many international magazines, from Time to the Nouvel Observateur, in order to bring the war to their customers, set up the Serbs, far and near, large and small, as the evildoers and the Muslims in general as the good ones.8 If the Serbs had the status of an aggressor nation during the nineties, in the eyes of some their status has now become that of a guilty nation. This ascription of collective guilt can be seen, inter alia, in calls for the Serbian nation to apologize for its crimes. In February 2000, for example, Joschka Fischer, the then German Minister of Foreign Affairs, argued that one of the conditions for dialogue was an apology of the Serbian side for what has happened to the Albanians.9 According to Drinka Gojkovic , the head of the War Documentation Centre in Belgrade, The demand for an apology is always addressed to the whole nation, all Serbs. The message it contains is basically less of a condemnation and more of an offer of relief. Apologize, shake your guilt off, show that you are moral.10 Such demands are based upon the assumption that all Serbs are, and should feel, guilty.11 However, as Arendt argues, Morally speaking, it is as wrong to feel guilty without having done anything specific as it is to feel free of all guilt if one actually is guilty of something.12 In her judgement, There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals,13 and using the example of Serbia this paper seeks to defend Arendts viewpoint. Whilst calls for Serbia to apologize have chiefly come from outside the country, it is important to stress that the idea of collective guilt is not anathema to everyone in Serbia. Within the NGO sector in particular, there are various individuals who embrace the notion of Serbian collective guilt. Sonja Biserko, for example, the president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, asks, If we collectively take pride in the success of our basketball players, for which we have no individual credit, are we entitled to reject the feeling of guilt for our ethnic crimes 670 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
in which we have not individually participated?14 For Biserko, the answer to this question is a resounding no. The very question she poses, however, is based upon a flawed analogy. That is to say that it is neither useful nor constructive to compare pride with guilt, since only the former can be vicarious. To cite Feinberg, even when it is reasonable to separate liability from fault,15 it is only the liability that can be passed from one party to another. In particular, there can be no such thing as vicarious guilt.16 Thus, for example, . . . if all Americans are guilty of the massacre at My Lai, it must be shown that they all in some way contributed materially to the monstrous acts performed on that day in March 1968.17 One of the reasons why Biserko and other leading human rights activists, such as Natas a Kandic and Biljana Kovac evic -Vuc o, are so unpopular in Serbia is their insistence that as part of the truth and reconciliation process, the Serbs must face up to and acknowledge their nations collective guilt for the crimes of the Milos evic era. Yet constant references to Serbian collective guilt, far from advancing the truth and reconciliation process, actually frustrate and hinder it. In short, by speaking of collective guilt, people like Biserko and Kandic are actually perpetuating the very problem of denial that they are professedly fighting to eliminate. There are people in Serbia who deny that certain crimes, like Srebrenica, ever took place.18 Latinka Perovic , for example, describes how, pacing about in a forsaken Serbia, whose soul has been taken away by those who killed thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica, I confront disbelief that such ferocious atrocities should have happened and that Serbs committed them. I encounter unwillingness, even desperate refusal, to accept the truth that is brutally documented. . . .19 Evidence of this unwillingness or refusal to accept that certain crimes were committed by the Serbian side during the nineties can also be seen in the results of public opinion poll data. As one illustration, according to research by the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute in Belgrade in April 2005, 74 percent of the 1,205 respondents said that the Serbs had carried out fewer crimes than the Croats, Albanians and Muslims during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, of whom 24 percent also thought that East European Politics and Societies
671
Serbs had perpetrated fewer crimes than the Slovenes.20 In the same research, while 27 percent of respondents had heard that paramilitary groups from Serbia killed civilians in Bijeljina during the war in Bosnia, only 14 percent believed this had actually happened; and 47 percent of respondents had heard that paramilitaries and members of the Yugoslav Army killed civilians in Vukovar in Croatia, but just 23 percent believed this to be true.21 For Serbian NGOs like the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and the Humanitarian Law Centre, such data attest to the Serbs collective denial. Biserko, for example, claims that Milos evic s extradition to The Hague on 28 June 2001, pokrenuo odbrambeni mehanizam gotovo cele zajednicekolektivno poricanje (triggered a defence mechanism of almost the entire communitycollective denial).22 Such sweeping statements, it is argued, are as unhelpful as they are erroneous. Whilst there are those in Serbia who deny the existence of crimes, the key question is not how to cure such individuals but rather why there are people in Serbia who continue to seek refuge in denial.23 This is obviously a complex question to which there are no simple answers. However, one possible answer is that denial serves as an important mechanism for asserting and affirming ones own innocence. This mechanism, in turn, is fuelled by fear that to acknowledge the perpetration of crimes is to thereby both incriminate oneself and, more broadly the Serb nation, as being somehow guilty. Thus the real problem, it is suggested, is not Serbian collective denial but rather the notion of collective guilt itself. To take one illustration, in July 1995 some 7,000 Muslim men from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica were massacred. Those involved in or responsible for the crime were subsequently indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In a landmark decision in April 2004, the Tribunal found the Bosnian Serb general, Radislav Krstic , guilty of aiding and abetting the crime of genocide in Srebrenica. It was the first time since the Nuremberg trials that an international court had established a case of genocide on European soil. At the same time, the Tribunal has explicitly and repeatedly rejected any notion of collective guilt. At the start of Milos evic s trial on 12 February 2002, for example, the chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte emphasized that the accused in this case, as 672 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
in all cases before the Tribunal, is charged as an individual. He is prosecuted on the basis of his individual criminal responsibility. No state or organization is on trial here today. The indictments do not accuse an entire people of being collectively guilty of the crimes, even the crime of genocide. . . . Collective guilt forms no part of the prosecution case.24 Hayden, however, maintains that . . . genocide must be a collective act, a policy and practice formed in the name of one collectivity and implemented against another. Thus even prosecutions of individuals presuppose the collective guilt of those whom the defendants claim to represent. Furthermore, according to Hayden, this charge of collective guilt is irrefutable. While an individual defendant may be acquitted, the charge itself indicates that the larger guilt is assumed.25 Hence, while the case of Srebrenica may be used as an exemplar of how some Serbs engage in denial,26 following Hayden it can be argued that this denial is not a denial of the crime per se but rather of the collective guilt implicit in that crime.27 By making some people more likely to deny the existence of crimes than to openly discuss them, the concept of collective guilt is an impediment to peace-building in the former Yugoslavia. Thus, in this sense the recent Judgement of the International Court of Justice on 26 February 2007, in the case of Bosnia and Hercegovina versus Serbia and Montenegro,28 is to be welcomed. If the Court had found that the Serbian state committed or was responsible for genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, this would arguably have cemented the idea of Serbian collective guilt, thereby creating further obstacles to reconciliation. The notion of collective guilt also hinders and obstructs a more general process of human understanding. If we believe that an entire nation is collectively guilty of heinous crimes, it follows that we will regard that nation as being fundamentally different from ourselves. If we proceed on this us/them basis, we thereby close our minds to any possibility of comprehending why the crimes were committed in the first place. This is extremely dangerous because, to cite Todorov, It is understanding, not the refusal to understand, that makes it possible to prevent a repetition of the horror.29 We cannot empathize with a criminal East European Politics and Societies
673
nation, and we do not want to. It is much easier, and more palatable, to emphasize that nations otherness than to see in it elements of ourselves. Yet if we focus only on it being not like us, we thereby avoid asking ourselves a fundamental questionhow would we have behaved in similar circumstances? For example, we can argue that the German people were collectively guilty for embracing National Socialism, but how do we know that we ourselves would not have done so in the same circumstances? In other words, What business do we have condemning these people if . . . we too would have naturally absorbed those beliefs had we been brought up in their society?30 Similarly, we can hold the Serbian people collectively guilty for supporting Milos evic , for example, but can we be sure that we ourselves, in a similar situation, would not have supported him? It is also easy for us, as outsiders, to claim that more people in Serbia should have stood up against the Milos evic regime, or that more people in Germany should have opposed Hitler and the Nazis. According to Lewis, however, it is important to bear in mind that . . . there are severe limitations on the power of the individual to modify social conditions, for normally he can only do so by concerted action, and concerted action, moreover, which requires a consensus of opinion on highly complicated social and economic questions.31 Thus, in the case of Germany, for example, the question we need to ask is, What could have been expected of the average German citizen in the swirling tide of the events which engulfed him and others eventually in the deep vortex of war?32 The same sort of question, it is argued here, should also be asked in relation to Serbs living under Milos evic . Collective guilt can be particularly objected to on moral grounds. In short, crimes against a nation perceived as collectively guilty are unlikely to provoke moral outrage. Like an eye for an eye, the concept of collective guilt provides a basis upon which crimes against such a nation can be treated as justified. How else can we explain the lack of international reaction to Operation Storm in August 1995the ethnic cleansing by U.S.supported Croatian forces of some 200,000 Croatian Serbs from the Krajina?33 The belief that these Serbs were simply getting 674 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
what they deserved was implicit in a comment made at the time by Peter Galbraith, the then American ambassador to Croatia. According to him, the expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina did not amount to ethnic cleansing because ethnic cleansing is a practice supported by Belgrade and carried out by Bosnian and Croatian Serbs.34 It is undeniable that Serbian forces, both the regular army and various paramilitary organizations, committed heinous crimes during the Yugoslav wars. Yet terrible crimes were also committed against the Serbsin Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In addition, the Serbian people suffered at the hands of NATO, whose pilots bombed Serbia for three months in 1999, and at the hands of their own leader, Slobodan Milos evic . However, the notion that Serbs are collectively guilty has meant that crimes against them have tended to receive little attention, hence the problem of the lack of international recognition of the crimes committed against the Serbs.35 Unless and until such recognition occurs, many Serbs are unlikely to want to discuss the suffering of others, instead seeing themselves as the principal victims of the nineties. Evidently, this will not help the truth and reconciliation process because the sense of victimization, to cite Buruma, impedes understanding among people and cannot result in mutual understanding.36 So far, this paper has argued and sought to demonstrate that the concept of collective guilt is flawed, problematic and unhelpful. If, however, the reader remains unconvinced and believes that we can rightly speak of the Serbs collective guilt, this raises a fundamental question: what does it actually mean to say that the Serbs are collectively guilty? Are we saying that they are guilty for supporting Milos evic ? Cohen, for example, maintains that as a people, the Serbs cannot escape responsibility: they massively backed Milos evic s nationalist upheaval and they voted him into office in the first free elections of December 1990.37 To say that the Serbs are guilty because they voted for Milos evic , however, simply raises further questions. In particular, how much support did he actually have, and why did people champion him? Taking the first of these questions, there is no doubt that Milos evic was immensely popular when he first came to power in East European Politics and Societies
675
1989. According to Ramet, for example, Milos evic was genuinely loved by many (though not all) Serbs as no other leader had been since Chetnik leader Draz a Mihailovic .38 Nevertheless, it is important not to exaggerate levels of support for Milos evic . It is also necessary to emphasize that support for him and his political party, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), steadily decreased throughout the nineties. This is evidenced not only by anti-regime protests, like those of 1996-1997, but also by election results. In the 1990 presidential elections, for example, Milos evic won 65.34 percent of the votes cast. Although he was the clear victor (his closest rival, Vuk Dras kovic , won just 16.4 percent of the vote), the percentage of votes for Milos evic represented only 46.72 percent of the total electorate.39 In other words, he did not have an absolute majority of support within the country. By the time of the next presidential elections in 1992, Milos evic s popularity had already declined. In these elections, he won 53.24 percent of votes cast, which represented just 37.12 percent of the total electorate.40 The results of parliamentary elections show a similar decrease in support for Milos evic s party. In the first multi-party elections in Serbia in December 1990, the SPS won 46.1 percent of votes cast (32.9 percent of the whole electorate).41 In the second parliamentary elections held in December 1992, the party won 28.8 percent of the vote (20.1 percent of the total electorate), thereby losing its parliamentary majority.42 This meant that the SPS was therefore unable to rule on its own after the second elections, but with its informal partner, the SRP [Serbian Radical Party], it had an absolute majority in parliament.43 In the third multiparty elections in December 1993, the SPS received 36.7 percent of the votes cast (22.5 percent of the total electorate).44 Although it won these elections and obtained 22 more seats than in the previous elections, it remained three seats short of an absolute majority. Moreover, objectively speaking, its hold on power was threatened for the first time, naturally on condition that the other parties (which had a total of 127 seats against the SPSs 123) could agree amongst themselves.45 Fortunately for Milos evic and the SPS, however, the other parties were not able to do so. 676 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
Further evidence of the SPSs declining popularity is the fact that it needed to enter into coalitions with other parties. In the 1997 elections, it entered into a Left Coalition with the Yugoslav United Left46 and New Democracy, and in March 1998 it formed a coalition government with the Yugoslav United Left and the Serbian Radical Party. In short, the election results reveal that Milos evic s regime enjoyed the support of a significant element of the Serbian population (about 40 per cent) only until 1992. From 1992 onward, this support rapidly deteriorated, amounting to only 20 per cent of the electorate in 1997. On the other hand, the systematic opposition to Milos evic kept growing, and in 1997 it exceeded 40 per cent of the electorate.47 Turning now to the second question, what were those Serbs who supported Milos evic actually giving their support to? Were they, as Goldhagen claims, endorsing an eliminationist project?48 Unfortunately, there are no detailed studies of why people in Serbia supported Milos evic . However, analysis of his speeches, a valuable yet often neglected primary source, can provide important insight. A recurrent and prominent theme of Milos evic s speeches was the economy and the need for economic development. In his speech in Panc evo on 10 May 1990, for example, he declared that Serbia was resolved upon a programme of economic and social reforms,49 and in his speech at the Sava Centre in Belgrade on 20 October 1994, he stressed that Serbia must draw upon all her resources to bring about economic stabilization and development and to raise both community and individual standards.50 In view of this strong emphasis on economic issues, it can be argued that at least part of Milos evic s appeal was very practical and that what he instilled in people was the hope of a better life and a bright and prosperous future, which is borne out by the fact that his greatest supporters came from low-income social groups such as pensioners, peasants, and housewives.51 This is significant because it challenges claims that Milos evic appealed to, and relied upon, ethnic hatred and chauvinism.52 Furthermore, if we accept that there was a very practical element to Milos evic s popularity, it thus becomes far more difficult to argue that the Serbs are guilty for having supported him, not least because East European Politics and Societies
677
there were always some national minorities who themselves voted for Milos evic on economic grounds.53 To contend that the Serbs are collectively guilty for backing Milos evic , moreover, is to do a great injustice to those courageous individualswhom existing Western literature on Serbia has tended to overlookwho actively opposed the regime. The existence of this Second Serbia further undermines the popular idea that Milos evic enjoyed near-universal support.
The Voices of Second Serbia
According to Gordy, As a political idea, while the notion of collective guilt is often used as a part of rhetoric, it has several obvious theoretical shortcomings. Probably not the least of these is the inclination to define a false collectivity which ignores social and political differences.54 To speak of Serbias collective guilt is essentially and erroneously to conceptualize Serbia as a homogeneous entity comprised of people sharing fundamentally the same views and outlook. In fact, the reality is that Serbia is a highly complex and divided society. At the simplest level, we can distinguish between traditional Serbia, comprising those who supported Milos evic , and so-called Second Serbia or Other Serbia,55 consisting of those individuals who tirelessly opposed and fought against the Milos evic regime. The experiences of the latter, however, have tended to receive little attention, which has simply reinforced the misconception that the Serbian population wholeheartedly supported Milos evic . Using data from semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2006, this part of the paper is precisely about giving expression to a different set of voices. The 14 interviewees,56 all members of the Serbian political and cultural elite, were purposely selected for interview on the basis of their very active opposition to the Milos evic regime. That Milos evic was very popular when he came to power in 1989 is heavily emphasized in Western literature on the regime. LeBor, for example, has referred to Milos evic as a living Serbian saint,57 and according to Hartman, when Milos evic delivered his 678 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
now infamous speech at Gazimenstan in Kosovo on 28 June 1989, he was le nouveau Messie (the new Messiah).58 Yet what is often overlooked is the fact that from the very outset, there were people in Serbia who were strongly against Milos evic people like Branka Prpa, the director of the Historical Archives in Belgrade. She explained, I recognized immediately that Serbia had crossed into Hell with Milos evic .59 The Belgrade journalist Dus ka Anastasijevic similarly maintained that she was against Milos evic from the beginning. In her words, I was opposed to Milos evic from the start, from the moment he ousted Ivan Stambolic during the Eighth Session.60 I was twenty at the time, and when I saw just how autistic and power-hungry Milos evic was, it scared me. The day after the Eighth Session, I had an urge to tell people that Serbia was facing a catastrophe and that Milos evic was very dangerous.61 Each of the interviewees opposed the Milos evic regime in his/her own way, and they all faced serious risks in doing do. The personal experiences of three particular interviewees can be used to illustrate this. In the case of Filip David, a writer and professor of Dramaturgy, the struggle against the regime was not political but rather ethical and moral. This took the form of setting up various organizations in which like-minded people who were against Milos evic could gather and express their views. David explained,
Together with three friends, all of them writers, I founded a new Writers Association in Sarajevo, composed of writers from all over Yugoslavia. We tried to maintain the friendship that existed. In 1991 in Belgrade, I helped to found the Belgrade Circle. The members met once a week to discuss and to criticize Milos evic s politics. The Belgrade Circle was the only place where people opposed to Milos evic could come to talk and to protest. I was also a member of Group 99, which was founded in Frankfurt. It was made up of writers and publishers from Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Kosovo and Montenegro. The idea was to oppose bad things. We went to Montenegro on one occasion to support Djukanovic [the then Prime Minister of Montenegro], and we went to Sarajevo to support multiethnicity. . . . I also founded the Writers Forum, which was against hatred and nationalism. When you live in that kind of State where you have killings and so on, you must say something.62

679
However, opposing the Milos evic regime could be very dangerous, as highlighted by the assassination of the journalist uruvija, the partner of Branka Prpa. A few days after Slavko C Curuvijas murder on 11 April 1999, an article appeared in the State-controlled newspaper Politika claiming that Filip David and two other vocal critics of the Milos evic regime were traitors uruvija himself had who had called for Belgrade to be bombed. C written an article advocating an aerial bombardment of the city, and it was shortly after this that he was gunned down on his doorstep. Despite receiving menacing phone-calls and being threatened in the street, David nevertheless decided to remain in Belgrade. In his words, Despite everything, I didnt want to leave. I felt I had to stay and to say what I thought. I needed to fight, to oppose, and to try to explain. Some of Davids friends, however, like Mirko Kovac and Bogdan Bogdanovic , left Serbia and never came back. For the cartoonist Predrag (Corax) Koraksic , his cartoons also known as Coraxwere the vehicle through which to make a stand against the Milos evic regime. These cartoons, according to the Serbian psychologist Zarko Trebjes anin, were an uncompromising and subversive critique of a dictatorship. . . .63 Not surprisingly, therefore, there was a price for Koraksic to pay. When Milos evic came to power, Koraksic was working for the independent newspaper Vec ernje Novosti (Evening News). However, Milos evic decided to take control of the newspapers editorial board, and that is when Koraksic s problems really began. After he refused to support the new editorial policy, the newspaper no longer wanted to publish his cartoons, and a three-year court case ended with Koraksic being sacked from Vec ernje Novosti in 1993. Thereafter, he started working for the independent newspaper Nas a Borba (Our Struggle). When that became too popular and was consequently closed down by the regime, he joined the independent newspaper Danas (Today). However, there were always risks, and Koraksic regularly received threatening phone-calls and letters. After Milos evic s fall from power in 2000, his wife Mira Markovic gave an interview to the Slovene newspaper Mladina (Youth). When she was asked what she thought of Koraksic , she 680 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
replied, On je najgori crtanist na svetu! (He is the worst cartoonist in the world!). Koraksic recalled, After that, I was really scared!64 With good reason too, since it did not bode well to be criticized by Mira. Her weekly column in a popular Belgrade magazine, nicknamed The Horoscope, was a reliable forecast of the political fortunes of Serbias elite.65 Koraksic also faced numerous obstacles. For example, an exhibition of his work had been scheduled for 15 March 1995 at the gallery Art Sebastian in Belgrade. However, the director of the gallery decided that Koraksic s cartoons could not be displayed, owing to their negative portrayal of Milos evic , his wife, and SPS 66 officials. Thus, when visitors arrived at the gallery to view Koraksic s drawings, they were faced with virtually bare walls. All the caricatures of Milos evic , his wife and members of his party had been removed. Only drawings of opposition leaders remained. It was no coincidence that the owner of the art gallery, the firm Inex Interexport, had firmly-established business links with the ruling authorities.67 From 1994 until 2000, Ljubica Markovic was the editor-in-chief of the news-agency BETA. After the 1996-97 anti-regime protests in Serbia, the number of BETAs clients rose dramatically. Thus, Markovic s work was a way for her to express her opposition to the Milos evic regime. Like other independent media, however, BETA faced many problems. Markovic explained, Sometimes it was very risky. There were times when you didnt know if you would be able to come to work the next day and do your job.68 It was particularly dangerous during the late nineties as Milos evic , feeling his power slipping away from him, became increasingly authoritarian. In 1999, for example, he introduced an Information Law that inflicted extortionate fines on anyone who dared to criticize his regime. BETA was fined in May 2000. Markovic is the half-sister of Milos evic s wife (although they have not had any contact for 25 years), and according to her the Serbian police tried to use that against her. For example,
On one occasion, a policeman came with a long list of names. He said that he was representing the Greek-Serbian Association of Friendship, and he wanted to know if I approved of the people on the list being given medals. I told him that it was nothing to do with

681
me. There were various names on the list, like King Juan Carlos and Ratko Mladic . Number 46 on the list was Mirjana Markovic . Before he left, the policeman said to me, Remember number 46. Ill be back. He never did come back, but it was very unsettling. On another occasion, a policeman came to BETA. We didnt know how he got into the building. He kept saying to one of my colleagues, Do you know that she [Ljubica Markovic ] does not have a good relationship with her half-sister? Again, he said that he would come back, but he didnt. It was very subtle pressure from the secret police, and it was very unnerving.
Threats and intimidation were just two of the prices to be paid for being actively against the Milos evic regime. Another was losing ones job. In 1998, under Milos evic s new University Law, Radmilo Marojevic , a radical old-style communist turned Serbian nationalist, was appointed Dean of the Philological Faculty in Belgrade. He immediately turned his attention to Professor Ranko Bugarski, who described himself as an outspoken critic of the Milos evic regime.69 Marojevic regarded Bugarski as a bad Serb and wanted to remove him. Over-ruling the two-year extension that the previous Dean had granted to the sixty-fiveyear-old professor, Marojevic thus forced Bugarski to leave the Faculty (he has since returned). By expressing and demonstrating their opposition to the Milos evic regime, such individuals took considerable risks. Despite this, they have seldom received the recognition and credit they deserve, not least because it has been far more convenient to ignore than to acknowledge the existence of this Second Serbia. Overlooking the reality of resistance to the Milos evic regime, an example of what Hayden calls an uncomfortable fact,70 aids the propagation of the myth that Milos evic enjoyed extensive support. This, in turn, has provided a basis for the argument that the Serbs are collectively guilty. By placing the burden of collective guilt on the Serbs, we in the West thereby absolve ourselves of any blame or responsibility for the events that befell the former Yugoslavia. The interviewees, however, stressed that Western governments were far from blameless. Some particularly emphasized how the Serbian Opposition was let down by the West. To cite Miljenko Dereta, the executive director of the Civic Initiative, an NGO in Belgrade, 682 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
The West could have done more to help the Opposition, first of all by recognizing us. They didnt talk to us. They only talked to Milos evic . By ignoring us, the West was not accepting reality, because we existed. A wrong picture of reality was consequently createdthat everyone in Serbia was for Milos evic and that civil society did not exist. It took the Opposition a long time to get access to international organizations and to start a dialogue with them. The process only really started in 1999-2000.71 According to Koraksic , therefore, the problem is that the West does not know the right face of Serbia.72 However, perhaps the real problem is that it does not want to. It is easier to blame Serbia for everything that happened in the former Yugoslavia if one subscribes to certain stereotypes and ides reues, or received ideas, that have developed about the country and its people. Serbian Collective Responsibility While there is no basis for arguing that the Serbs are collectively guilty, perhaps there is a case to be made for Serbian collective responsibility. While the two concepts may appear very similar, they should not be conflated, as Arendt has emphasized. According to her, collective responsibility is always political. That is to say that every government assumes responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessors and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.73 In her view, moreover, the only way in which to escape from this political and strictly collective responsibility is to leave the community. Thus, refugees and stateless people are the only totally non-responsible people.74 For Arendt, however, the key point is that we can be responsible without being guilty. Thus, she insists on a sharper dividing line between political (collective) responsibility, on one side, and moral and/or legal (personal) guilt, on the other. . . .75 Summarizing her position on collective responsibility, Arendt concludes, . . . no moral, individual and personal standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility. This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live East European Politics and Societies
683
our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community.76 This rationale for collective responsibility brings to mind what Karl Jaspers calls metaphysical guilt. According to Jaspers, metaphysical guilt is the feeling produced by the knowledge of crime and can be understood as a universal sentiment which interferes with a persons conception of the self as fully human. Just as, according to Arendt, human solidarity justifies collective responsibility, so too does it lie at the heart of Jaspers metaphysical guilt. As the latter explains, There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.77 Although Jaspers speaks of metaphysical guilt, guilt is a legal concept that refers to a specific status defined by an act of a judicial institution.78 What Jaspers is discussing are states of feeling and self-assessment. According to Gordy, therefore, it is more appropriate to speak of metaphysical responsibility, and for him this concept is highly persuasive. In his words, Following Jaspers, at least one form of collective responsibility, his metaphysical guilt, is common to every person. We do not have to share his mysticism to understand feelings of responsibility as functioning only partly on the level of the individual, and partly in the context of identities and relationships. In this sense responsibility has to do with our sense of who we are, our sense of one another, and peoples sense of us. Collective perceptions and feelings are involved at all these levels.79 It is in this metaphysical sense, it is argued, that we can speak of the collective responsibility of the Serbian people. The point is that although no one is responsible for others in the sense that he is answerable for the conduct of others, we are all extensively responsible for our fellows in the sense that we have duties towards them. . . .80 In short, all of us, to cite Lewis, have duties to further the wellbeing of others, independently of any advantage to ourselves.81 684 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
Furthermore, we can speak of the Serbs collective responsibility not only in a metaphysical sense. According to Jaspers, It clearly makes sense to hold all citizens of a country liable for the results of actions taken by their state,82 regardless of whether or not they supported those actions. Hence, it can be argued that the Serbs are collectively responsiblerather than guiltyin this political sense. This responsibility is based on citizenship, and as such it attaches not only to Serbs but also to national minorities in Serbia. The important point, however, is that there can be collective responsibility without collective guilt. Indeed, as Jaspers rightly emphasizes, A people as a whole can be neither guilty nor innocent, neither in the criminal nor in the political (in which only the citizenry of a state is liable) nor in the moral sense.83 Certainly from a practical point of view, it is far more useful to speak of collective responsibility than collective guilt. As Arendt famously argued, Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.84 Indeed, every war crimes tribunal to date has expressly rejected the idea of collective guilt.85 Gordy, for his part, maintains that conceptions of collective guilt, while often politically popular, do not assist the process of dealing with responsibility,86 and establishing responsibility is an essential part of any peace-building process. To cite Kovac evic , The process of discovering the truth and establishing who is responsible for committed crimes helps in the recovery of individuals and the community from suffered traumas and systematical pressures they were subjected to.87 In this respect, the potential importance of metaphysical responsibility is that it appeals to elemental human solidarity, and the moment people empathize with the victimized, they turn against the killers.88 Of course it might be argued that the notion of metaphysical responsibility, in particular, is excessively broad and even unhelpful. However, it can be counter-argued that the concept reflects the realities of the inter-dependent world in which we now live, as well as the duties that arise from that inter-dependency. Rather than diluting responsibility, the idea of metaphysical responsibility actually strengthens it, by reminding us of our obligations to each other as human beings. Furthermore, it is a very specific concept in the sense that it requires people, not as nations but East European Politics and Societies
685
as individuals, to look within themselves and to examine their own consciences. Finally, it should be noted that while the essence of metaphysical responsibility is such that it would not only encompass the Serbs, this is not to mitigate their responsibility. Rather, it is to recognize that many others, including the international community, also bear part of the responsibility for the tragic events that befell the former Yugoslavia.89 It is precisely such recognition that could significantly help Serbia to deal with its painful past.
Conclusion
Using the example of Serbia as a case-study, this paper has argued and sought to demonstrate that the concept of collective guilt is fundamentally flawed. It began by highlighting the very serious practical and moral implications of branding an entire people collectively guilty. By giving expression to the voices of Second Serbia, it then specifically sought to challenge the idea that the Serbs are collectively guilty for having supported Milos evic . Finally, while rejecting the notion of collective guilt, it suggested that we can legitimately talk about a nations collective responsibility, in particular its metaphysical responsibility based on human solidarity. Intellectuals, philosophers and academics have long discussed and debated whether we can speak of a nations collective guilt. Many of these debates and discussions took place in the aftermath of the Second World War. If the crimes of Nazi Germany, above all the Holocaust, were the chief catalyst for these debates and discussions, it is suggested that a particular postCold War development justifies renewed analysis of, and reflection about, the concept of collective guilt. This aforementioned development is the rise of the so-called criminal leader. Woodward highlights a general pattern in the postCold War period of U.S. officials identifying rogue or renegade states, headed by new Hitlers, such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milos evic , who defied all forms of civilized behaviour and had to be punished to protect those norms and to protect innocent people.90 The main way in which such leaders defy civilized behaviour is by 686 Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility
unleashing illegitimate wars, and it is such warmongering behaviour that essentially defines the criminal leader. Speaking in March 1999 at the start of the Kosovo War, for example, President Clinton described Milos evic as . . . a dictator who has done nothing since the Cold War ended but start new wars and poor gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division.91 Historically, war has been seen as something normal and legitimate. As Howard argues, War has been throughout history a normal way of conducting disputes between political groups.92 However, this is no longer the case. In the words of Mueller, Over the last century or two, war in the developed world has come widely to be regarded as repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized.93 One explanation for this change in attitudes towards war is the postCold War decline of the Realist paradigm and the subsequent rise of Liberalism as an ideology. For realists, war is a rational response by states to the security dilemma created by the anarchical nature of the international system. In contrast, Liberalism was and is, in large part, an expression of revulsion against illegitimate violence: that of tyrants at home and of aggressors abroad.94 Consequently, . . . liberalism has made an important contribution to challenging the position of war as a standard feature of international political life.95 If attitudes towards war are changing, this necessarily affects how we perceive those who start, or are seen to have initiated, armed conflict. To cite Duffield, The condemnation of all violent conflict by liberal peace means that the leaders of violent conflicts are automatically problematised. By their own actions, they risk placing themselves beyond the limits of cooperation and partnership. This is regardless of whether they are guilty of war crimes, as many are, or defending themselves from dispossession or exploitation, which some may be.96 Such developments have important implications for the notion of collective guilt, since an obvious corollary of the criminal leader is the criminal nation. In short, as more leaders are deemed to be criminal, it is possible that more nations will be held to be collectively guilty. This potential for an increased usage of the term collective guilt, and the enormous injustices it would entail, necessitates new discussion and debate. The East European Politics and Societies
687
contribution of this paper has been to argue, and hopefully demonstrate, that collective guilt is a dangerous and unhelpful concept that should be wholly rejected. Notes
1. Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Terrorism and Collective Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1992), 20. 2. See, for example, Kurt Baier, Guilt and Responsibility, in Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, ed. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 197-218. 3. Stacy Sullivan, Milos evic s Willing Executioners, The New Republic 220:19(1999): 28. 4. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A New Serbia, The New Republic 220:20(1999): 17. 5. Goldhagen, A New Serbia, 17. 6. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1997). 7. Serbia was selected as a case-study on the basis of the authors particular interest, and extensive research, in that country. 8. Peter Handke, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (New York: Viking, 1997), 76. 9. Cited in Drinka Gojkovic , The Future in a Triangle: On Guilt, Truth and Change, in Facing the FutureA Reader, an unpublished collection of documents, ed. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (2006), 52. Personal correspondence with Dr. Zorica Mrs evic from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Belgrade. 10. Gojkovic , The Future, 53. 11. On 13 November 2003 Svetozar Marovic , the then President of Serbia and Montenegro, apologized to the citizens of Bosnia-Hercegovina. However, he rejected any notion of collective guilt. Rather, he insisted that . . . peoples have no right to and must not suffer guilt and anguish caused by individuals and that peoples must not be made to suffer guilt for evils perpetrated by individuals; rather, the individuals themselves ought to be held accountable for that. Cited in the Humanitarian Law Centre, Transitional Justice Report: Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, 1999-2005 (Belgrade, Serbia: Humanitarian Law Centre, 2006), 40. 12. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 28. 13. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 29. 14. Cited in Srboljub Bogdanovic , Polemics: Collectively Innocent, http://www.helsinki.org. yu/confront_detail.php?lang=en&idgnrc=693 (accessed 31 August 2006). 15. For example, as in cases of so-called strict liability. 16. Joel Feinberg, Collective Responsibility, The Journal of Philosophy 65:21(1968): 676. 17. Peter A. French, The Responsibility of Monsters and Their Makers, in Individual and Collective Responsibility, ed. Peter A. French (Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1998), 5. 18. It is important to emphasize that this problem of denial exists not only in Serbia but also elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. See, for example, Louis Aucoin and Eileen Babbitt, Transitional Justice: Assessment Survey of Conditions in the Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade, Serbia: United Nations Development Programme, 2006). However, since this paper is focused on Serbia, it will deal only with the problem of Serbian denial. 19. Latinka Perovic , To Tell the Difference between the Murderers and the Victims, in Women for Peace, ed. Stac a Zajovic (Belgrade, Serbia: Women in Black, 2001), 107. 20. Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, Javno Mnenje u Srbiji: Stavovi Prema Domac em Pravosudju za Ratne Zloc ine i Has kom Tribunalu [Public Opinion in Serbia on Domestic Trials for War Crimes and the Hague Tribunal] (April 2005), 15. Personal correspondence with Dus an Pavlovic from the Jefferson Institute in Belgrade. 21. Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, Javno Mnenje, 10-11. 22. Sonja Biserko, Kolektivno Poricanje [Collective Denial], Helsins ka Povelja 93/94 (2006): 3. 23. According to Cohen, it makes little sense to speak of a people as being in denial because denial is not a stable psychological condition. . . . Unless psychotically cut off from reality,
688
Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility

24. 25. 26.
27.
28.
29. 30. 31.
32. 33.
34. 35.
36. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43.
44. 45. 46.
no one is a total denier or non-denier, still less in denial or out of denial permanently. Rather, people give different accounts to themselves and others; elements of partial denial and partial acknowledgement are always present; we oscillate rapidly between states. Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 54. Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutions Opening Statement, http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/ 020212IT.htm (accessed 14 January 2005). Robert M. Hayden, Schindlers Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers, Slavic Review 55:4(1996): 742-43. According to a survey by the International Republican Institute in Belgrade in late September 2005, for example, 35 percent of the 2,237 respondents said that Srebrenica was a war crime, 25 percent said that it was a war necessity, 10 percent said that it was a massacre, and 4 percent claimed that they did not know of it. International Republican Institute, Serbia (September 2005). Personal correspondence with Aaron Presnall from the Jefferson Institute in Belgrade. Srebrenica can thus be seen as an example of what Cohen terms implicatory denial; this occurs when there is no attempt to deny either the facts or their conventional interpretation. What are denied or minimized are the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow. Cohen, States of Denial, 8. Rosalyn Higgins, Statement to the Press by H.E. Judge Rosalyn Higgins, President of the International Court of Justice (2007), http://www.icj-cij.org/presscom/index.php?pr=1898& p1=6&p2=1&search=%22icty%22&PHPSESSID=db49b03ad074d149813d9a7b93f329d7 (accessed 1 March 2007). Cited in Hayden, Schindlers Fate, 730. David Cooper, Collective Responsibility, Moral Luck, and Reconciliation, in War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing; A Reader, ed. Aleksandar Jokic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 209. H. D. Lewis, Collective Responsibility, in Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, ed. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 28. Lewis, Collective Responsibility, 29. Cedric Thornberry has pointed out that following Operation Storm, Croatia became the most ethnically pure state in the whole of the former Yugoslavia. Cited in Robert Thomas, Serbia under Milos evic : Politics in the 1990s (London: Hurst, 2003), 13. Cited in Hayden, Schindlers Fate, 738. Vesna Nikolic -Ristanovic , Social-Historical Context, Victimization, and Truth and Reconciliation Process in Serbia So Far (2003), http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache: Up9i6NAWrLMJ:www.vds. org.yu/file/VesnaNikolic-Ristanovic.doc+vesna+nikolic+ristanovic&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=2 (accessed 25 August 2006). Cited in Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii. Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York: Random House, 1998), 194. Sabrina P . Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milos evic , 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002), 36. Dijana Vukomanovic , Documentary Appendix, in Challenges of Parliamentarism: The Case of Serbia in the Early Nineties, ed. Vladimir Goati (Belgrade, Serbia: Institute of Social Sciences, 1995), 274. Vukomanovic , Documentary Appendix, 275. Vukomanovic , Documentary Appendix, 268. Vukomanovic , Documentary Appendix, 270. Srec ko Mihailovic , The Parliamentary Elections of 1990, 1992, and 1993, in Challenges of Parliamentarism: The Case of Serbia in the Early Nineties, ed. Vladimir Goati (Belgrade, Serbia: Institute of Social Sciences, 1995), 55. Vukomanovic , Documentary Appendix, 272. Mihailovic , The Parliamentary Elections, 58. Yugoslav United Left was the political party of Milos evic s wife, Mira Markovic .

689
47. Slododan Antonic , Zarobljena Zemlja: Srbija za vlade Slobodana Milos evic a [A Closed Nation: Serbia under Milos evic ] (Belgrade, Serbia: Otkrovenje, 2002), 507. 48. Goldhagen, A New Serbia, 16. eveningena [From Gazimestan to 49. Slobodan Milos evic , Od Gazimestana do S Scheveningen] (Belgrade, Serbia: Harprom, 2001), 22. 50. Milos evic , Od Gazimestana, 84. 51. For example, according to research by the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade in November 1990, 68 percent of pensioners, 51 percent of farmers, and 48 percent of housewives supported the Socialist Party of Serbia. In contrast, only 2.5 percent of pensioners, 2 percent of farmers, and 4 percent of housewives voted for the Democratic Party, and just 2.5 percent of pensioners, 12 percent of farmers, and 11 percent of housewives voted for the Serbian Renewal Movement. Srbobran Brankovic , Social Class and Political Affiliation, in Challenges of Parliamentarianism: The Case of Serbia in the Early Nineties, ed. Vladimir Goati (Belgrade, Serbia: Institute of Social Sciences, 1995), 87-88. 52. Ramet, for example, contends that Milos evic built his power on a foundation of hatred and xenophobia. . . . Ramet, Balkan Babel, 308. She further claims that of all the ex-Yugoslav republics, only Milos evic s regime relied on the inculcation and nurturing of hatred in the first place to develop support. Ramet, Balkan Babel, 351. For his part, Zimmermann refers to the ethnic hatred sown by Milos evic and his ilk. . . . Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its DestroyersAmericas Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why (New York: Times Books, 1996), 41. 53. As part of the authors doctoral research, 18 semi-structured interviewees were conducted with various national minorities in Serbia and Kosovo in the summer of 2004. According to a male ethnic Hungarian interviewee in Novi Sad, Minorities supported Milos evic because of the money and privileges they received. There was a part of society that got richer and richer in that period. Author interview, Novi Sad, 7 September 2004. For his part, a male Kosovar Albanian interviewee in Vuc itrn similarly explained that there were always some Albanians who were loyal to Milos evic . He paid them well and they enjoyed many privileges and opportunities. . . . Author interview, Vuc itrn, 24 August 2004. 54. Eric Gordy, Accounting for a Violent Past by Other than Legal Means, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 3:1(2003): 3. 55. Bieber notes that the term Other Serbia has been used to describe a group of NGOs and intellectual circles that sought to formulate a non-nationalist alternative to the regime and courageously oppose the war. Florian Bieber, The Serbian Opposition and Civil Society: Roots of the Delayed Transition in Serbia, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 17:1(2003): 83. 56. Duska Anastasijevic (a journalist for Vreme), Slobodanka Ast (a journalist for Vreme), Professor Ranko Bugarski (a philologist), Professor Filip David (a writer and professor of Dramaturgy), Miljenko Dereta (head of the Civic Initiative, an NGO), Professor Vojin Dimitrijevic (a professor of International Law and the director of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, an NGO), Drinka Gojkovic (head of the War Documentation Centre, an NGO), Predrag Koraksic (a cartoonist), Ljubica Markovic (director of the news-agency BETA), Jelica Minic (an economist), Milan Nikolic (a sociologist and the director of the Centre for Policy Analysis), Branka Prpa (the director of the Historical Archives in tajner (a media analyst at the Media Centre in Belgrade), and Professor Belgrade), Heri S Srbijanka Turaljic (an electrical engineer and former vice-minister of higher education). 57. Adam LeBor, Milos evic : A Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 119. 58. Florence Hartman, Milos evic : La Diagonale du Fou Milos evic : The Diagonal of the Insane] (Paris: Denol, 1999), 50. 59. Author interview with Branka Prpa, New Belgrade, 5 June 2006. 60. Ivan Stambolic had been Milos evic s mentor and was instrumental in helping his protg to climb up the career ladder. Milos evic , however, repaid Stambolic by engineering his removal from power. After the Eighth Session in September 1987, Stambolic was forced to step down from the position of Serbian President, to be succeeded by Milos evic . Stambolic was mysteriously kidnapped while out jogging in August 2000. His body was later discovered in 2003. It is widely believed that Milos evic and his wife were behind Stambolic s murder
690

61. Author interview with Dus ka Anastasijevic , Belgrade, 3 July 2006. 62. Author interview with Filip David, Belgrade, 3 July 2006. arko Trebjes 63. Z anin, Slobo on Coraxs Couch, in On [He], ed. Predrag Koraksic (Belgrade: Plato, 2001), 11. 64. Author interview with Predrag Koraksic , New Belgrade, 14 June 2006. 65. Laura Silber, Milos evic Family Values, The New Republic 221:9(1999), 26. 66. Koraksic s portrayal of Milos evic was anything but flattering. From 1999 onwards, for example, he drew Milos evic without eyes in order to make the point that the latter lived in his own reality and did not want to see what was really happening around him. As well as the eyes that could not see, Milos evic is easily recognized in Koraksic s drawings by his bristling hair, high forehead, and pug nose turned up at the end. Fat cheeks, protruding chin and tight lips make up the finishing touches to his familiar character. His face is frozen, expressionless. He never laughs, except in a cartoon where his pose is typical of a smiling dictator (a kind of smile that makes your blood run cold!) surrounded by children with sad and dumfounded faces. Trebjes anin, Slobo on Coraxs Couch, 8. In one of Koraksic s cartoons, Milos evic is standing in a Marilyn Monroetype pose on a grating, his uplifted skirt revealing legs with cloven hooves and a Devils tail. Predrag Koraksic , ed., On [He] (Belgrade: Plato, 2001), 41. 67. Nepodobni Corax [Unsuitable Corax], Vreme (20 March 1995), 13. 68. Author interview with Ljubica Markovic , Belgrade, 22 June 2006. 69. Author interview with Professor Ranko Bugarski, Belgrade, 20 June 2006. 70. Hayden, Schindlers Fate, 743. 71. Author interview with Miljenko Dereta, Belgrade, 4 July 2006. 72. Koraksic , Interview. 73. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 149. 74. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 150. 75. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 150-51. 76. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 157-58. 77. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 26. 78. Gordy, Accounting for a Violent Past, 6. 79. Gordy, Accounting for a Violent Past, 6. 80. Lewis, Collective Responsibility, 32. 81. Lewis, Collective Responsibility, 32. 82. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 33. 83. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 35. 84. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 278. 85. For example, in his opening address for the UK on 4 December 1945, Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, emphasized that the entire law relating to war crimes . . . is based upon the principle of individual responsibility. Cited in Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-46: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 87. 86. Gordy, Accounting for a Violent Past, 4. ivorad Kovac 87. Z evic , Vukovar, Forgive! in Serbia and the World: Between Arrogance and Humbleness, ed. Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia (Belgrade, Serbia: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2004), 302. 88. Perovic , To Tell the Difference, 108. 89. Gowan rightly points out that the Wests role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia has largely been overlooked in Western literature. Peter Gowan, National Rights and International Powers in Yugoslavias Dismemberment, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe 62 (1999): 18. 90. Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 7. 91. Cited in Philip E. Auerswald and David P . Auerswald, eds., The Kosovo Conflict: A Diplomatic History through Documents (The Hague, the Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 730. 92. Michael Howard, The Causes of War and Other Essays (London: Temple Smith, 1983), 7.

691
93. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 9. 94. Stanley Hoffman, The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism, Foreign Policy 98 (1995): 160. 95. John Macmillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War, and the International Order (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998), 281. 96. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001), 129.
692


Collective Guilt Collective Responsibility and The Serbs

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Collective Guilt Collective Responsibility and The Serbs

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

East European Politics & Societies

http://eep.sagepub.com Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs

Downloaded from http://eep.sagepub.com at Vytautas Magnus University on June 21, 2009

Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility and the Serbs

East European Politics and Societies

East European Politics and Societies

East European Politics and Societies

Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility

24. 25. 26.

29. 30. 31.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

East European Politics and Societies

Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility

East European Politics and Societies

Collective Guilt, Collective Responsibility

Você também pode gostar