Читать книгу Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial - Eric Gordy - Страница 11

Chapter 3

Moment I: The Leader Is Not Invincible

The previous chapter indicated that public opinion surveys offer at best a mixed view of the state of public opinion just after the end of the Milošević regime. Part of the reason for this may be that opinion was in fact mixed, as could be expected in a period when a strongly ideologized form of control of information was coming to an end, and when uncertainty remained regarding what might follow. Another part of the reason may be that opinion was still in formation, just as political institutions and the parties and movements that would influence them were also in formation. Many of the perceptions and understandings that would become important in the years to follow were in negotiation in this period. While it may be uncertain what perspectives were dominant in 2001, contention between residual and emergent perspectives was clearly visible.¹

This chapter explores some of the negotiation that took place around these perspectives by examining two cultural-political moments: (1) the discussion of the arrest of Slobodan Milošević at the end of March 2001, the moment at which it became clear that the former absolute ruler was neither untouchable nor invincible;² and (2) the emergence of the literary genre of “regime memoirs,” in which writers would, using diary, fiction, and polemic, generate an account of the meaning of the period that had just ended.³ It was in cultural sites like these that positions and themes were elaborated that would come to define the discussion over the following decade.

Initial Responses to the Arrest of Milošević

As criminal investigations commenced following the inauguration of Serbia’s government in January 2001, major political actors frequently insisted, sometimes instrumentally, on the independence of prosecutorial and investigatory agencies. This was clear when Vojislav Koštunica refused (before, several days later, relenting) to meet with Carla Del Ponte, chief ICTY prosecutor, claiming that cooperation with the Tribunal was not a responsibility of the federal president. The ministers who met with Del Ponte echoed the arguments about separation of powers. When the U.S. government imposed a deadline of 31 March 2001, by which time Milošević had to be arrested or economic aid would be blocked, several Serbian government representatives argued that they could not order police to make an arrest or complete an investigation without compromising the independence of law enforcement.

Milošević was arrested nevertheless, just in time to meet the deadline—an event that marks a symbolic break, consolidating the power of the incoming regime. It is one thing to defeat an opponent politically, and quite another to hold this opponent politically responsible, to puncture the perception, built up over years, that he is above the law. Nobody who saw Milošević driven off to the Belgrade central prison believed afterward in the myth of his invincibility.

The government that carried out the arrest spoke about it very little while it was taking place and immediately afterward. Many government figures either would not give information or, in Koštunica’s case, did not seem to know themselves what was happening.⁴ One vice-president,Žarko Korać, was shown around the world claiming, inaccurately, that Milošević had already been arrested half a day before he was. Federal premier Zoran Žižić declared that the arrest “is not under the jurisdiction of the federal government.”⁵ Prime minister Zoran Djindjić told reporters that he had not been following events on the night of 31 March, but had been watching the popular film Gladiator with his son.⁶

The strange silence of the people in charge probably derived from complicating factors. First, there was the danger, which turned out to be exaggerated, that the arrest might lead to confrontations or violence between supporters and opponents of Milošević.⁷ Second, any declaration that Milošević was being arrested would inevitably lead to the question of what he was being arrested for, a question people in power preferred to avoid as it raised subsidiary questions of whether international oversight should be accepted and whether people in Serbia or elsewhere had the most legitimate claim to being Milošević’s victims. Third, the U.S.-imposed deadline for financial assistance was controversial. Every official statement declared that arresting Milošević right on the deadline day was a coincidence, but these declarations were not generally regarded as persuasive. So government representatives had good reason to avoid the question of whether they were more interested in establishing the rule of law or acting out of a more practical financial logic that looked like blackmail.

People outside the government showed none of the reticence of their political representatives. I followed just one popular channel for public comment: the postings in the “comments on the news” section of the web site of Belgrade’s B92 radio. This section invites people to send responses to news items, which are then published on a separate page. What follows is a categorization of several of those comments (in my translation) as a broad picture of the responses people shared about the arrest.⁸

The Process of Arrest as a Reflection of the Nature of the New Regime

The arrest itself was a process full of confrontations and confusions lasting from 7:00 P.M. on Friday, 30 March, until Milošević was finally taken into custody around 4:35 A.M. on Sunday, 1 April. During those thirty-four hours, there were small clashes between the police and Milošević’s personal military guard and private security, there were contradictory statements from media and government spokespeople, and there were some brief gestures of heroism on the part of Milošević’s supporters and relatives.⁹ Although the arrest was eventually carried off without major violence, it looked like an organizational and tactical fiasco.

The first comments responded to the inability of the police to make the arrest swiftly, and interpreted this as a sign that the new government was either incompetent or continued to fear Milošević:

(Aleksandar, 31 March): Milošević is not God above all people and law that he can resist arrest. (Beogradjanin u Washington DC-u, 31 March): [he came to power in] 1986, and now 15 years later he is still laughing in all our faces.¹⁰

(Mirjana Grkavac Maksimović, 31 March): Is our police really so incompetent that it needs so much time to arrest one person? How can Milošević reject an arrest warrant? Who is in charge here?

Other writers focused on what appeared to be the insubordination of Milošević’s military guard. Prime Minister Djindjić had stated in January that the military unit at Milošević’s residence was “guarding the house, not the person,”¹¹ but the guards refused entry to the police on the grounds that they were not invited visitors. The police had to remove the military guard from the gate by force. Some writers interpreted this as a sign of that the army remained loyal to Milošević, especially since it continued to be commanded by his last appointee:

(Mile, 31 March): So it’s all clear. President Koštunica, who is so proud of his “legalism,” uses General Pavković—once Milošević’s favorite—to interfere with the police doing their legal duty. And all that from populist motives, so the federation will fall apart and in the next election he can win votes for his own, until recently minority DSS party, which has been known only for giving statements to the press.

A (tragi?)comical element emerged at the moment of the actual arrest, when Milošević’s daughter Marija fired a gun (a gift from General Pavković, engraved with his signature and portrait) in the direction of the car that was taking Milošević away. One couple (Mira and Predrag, 1 April) composed a comical poem about the shooting. Another writer (Milan Palinić, 1 April) quoted a canonical movie joke: “Did you hit the air, Marija?”¹² Perhaps the sadistic pleasure these writers took in Marija Milosević’s desperate gesture could be understood as a sign of relief at the arrest?

The Question of What Milošević Was to Be Charged With

One of the questions raised by the arrest was whether Milošević ought to be arrested at all, and if so what for. Some people continued to support him, declaring that he defended national goals and could not be considered a criminal:¹³

(Nenad, 31 March): I don’t regard him as guilty, he defended the homeland from a satanizing that was prepared in advance. He is a hero, not a traitor.

However, most people seemed to agree that he ought to be arrested and charged with something. The government’s indictment charged him with embezzlement, theft, and abuse of power—attempting to assure that he be arrested and tried in Serbia for violations of domestic law.¹⁴ Several commenters expressed outrage at the absence of war crimes from the indictment:

(Maja, 31 March): For abuse of power? Shouldn’t he be tried for genocide against the Bosnian, Albanian and Croatian people, or maybe for the destruction of SFRJ, or for the decline of the Serbian people? I think that Milošević did many things that were worse than ABUSE OF POWER!!!

(Branislav Zekić Zeka, 31 March): The fact that He has been arrested is very good news. But that he will be charged for embezzlement, building without a permit, and unpaid electric, sewer and heating bills…. Garbage! That is throwing crumbs to us, because every honest citizen of Serbia has at least a few, more or less bloody, reasons to bring charges against our former president. I hope that he will be tried in Belgrade for all of the crimes he committed against his own people, for all the killings he ordered, for treason and theft and especially for all the things he is charged with by the Hague Tribunal.

It is difficult to distinguish to what degree such comments represented legal interpretations and to what degree they could be considered as expressions of hatred or revenge toward Milošević personally. One of the principal arguments that Koštunica offered in favor of moving slowly against the previous holders of power was the need to avoid what he called “revolutionary justice.”¹⁵

Belgrade or The Hague?

Closely tied to the question of what Milošević was to be charged with was the question of where he should be tried, or more specifically whether he should be extradited to ICTY. People who rejected this possibility raised issues ranging from the fear that an international trial of a former president would amount to an imposition of collective guilt to doubts about the fairness and objectivity of the Tribunal:

(Vuk Vujović, 31 March): Now, anybody who thinks about it even a little bit knows that he will be tried in The Hague as a former president, which automatically and immediately means that if he is found guilty, everything that the Serbian people did during the period when Milošević was president will be declared a crime. That means every commander or soldier who was on the battlefield will be a war criminal, every dead soldier will be a war criminal, and every mother who cried for her child will be a war criminal.

(siniša, 31 March): Our country is in the condition it is in and one more betrayal or surrender of our citizen to The Hague, even if it is the former president, brings a bad image to all members of the Serbian nation. Our citizens should only be tried in our country for their actions. Any other decision is shameful and stamps us with recognition as a genocidal horde which only understands force and blackmail. I wonder who would defend our exhausted country if it ever really needed it. Many patriots have already been arrested and sent to The Hague for no reason, hiding out and believing that if they need to show their innocence, they would be able to do it in their own country. But they have been deceived by the current regime who sends them as scapegoats to the executioners in The Hague, who instead of honest and fair trials have sentences prepared in advance by their American mentors.

(Boris, 31 March): Do the people who are doing the arresting know what is waiting for them tomorrow if they are not cooperative?

Other writers argued that since Milošević had committed both domestic and international crimes, he should be tried for both. Sometimes this was expressed jokingly—for example by the Vojvodina politician Nenad Čanak, who suggested that Milošević should be tried in The Hague and then serve his sentence in a Serbian prison (where conditions are worse than in the resortlike Scheveningen prison used by ICTY):¹⁶

(aca, 31 March): It would be best for us to offer some compromises to the West … first, that we (the Serbian people) try and convict him, then after his fiftieth year of prison we send him to The Hague. Or better, we should clone him … we’re satisfied, they’re satisfied….

Some writers who advocated extradition expressed this as a desire for revenge, although several writers advanced the thesis that by trying and convicting the person responsible for organizing and financing war crimes, guilt could be transferred from the social collective to an individual:

(Vlada, 31 March): I don’t know how people can still support and feel sorry for him after all the evil he has brought us. Did he regret any of the lives that he gambled away? Let him go to The Hague if he has to!! He doesn’t deserve any better. (marko, 31 March): Arrest that murderer, traitor and WAR criminal Milošević. Send him immediately to The Hague so we can remove the guilt from the whole Serbian people … just do that and show that you are for change, for a better future, for equality between people without regard to religion, nationality or political belief, don’t forget we are in the 21st century.

Clearly more was at stake in the question of extradition than an assessment of the charges or of the legitimacy of ICTY.¹⁷ People who wrote in to give an opinion also expressed general orientations about sovereignty, the nature of individual and collective responsibility, and the use of ICTY as an instrument in domestic and international politics.

Is Milošević Serbia?

Also at stake in the controversy over the arrest was the extent to which people recognized a personal stake in the fate of Milošević. Through this dispute the question was raised of whether people continued to identify Milošević as a symbolic (if no longer official) representative of the Serbian people. Here the clearest signs of willingness to break with the recent past could be observed, as many writers not only rejected any identification with Milošević, but criticized the people who did:

(Petar, 31 March): I really enjoy the comments from people who see the arrest of Milošević as their own shame, and the people who think it is a shame “for the whole Serbian people.” I am ashamed too, but only because this bloodsucker was arrested only after almost fifteen years of robbing and pillaging a country that was once beautiful and that once had a future. I can only hope this is the beginning of sobering up and real denazification, although I think the job will never be finished, because I have the impression that what people hold most against Milošević is that he didn’t succeed in creating Greater Serbia.

People who made a connection with Milošević on the level of identity were accused by these writers of a sort of false consciousness—here the question of authenticity of experience was raised, with Milošević supporters being identified with a nationalist diaspora that is pictured as both more extreme than the domestic population and also as uncaring and alien, not sharing the fate of people living in the country:

(Dejan, 31 March): I like all the messages coming from “patriots” and “great sons and daughters of Serbia” from the diaspora. I personally know a ton of heroes who, as soon as our “humanitarian aid packages” started arriving from the Western countries on 24 March 1999 [the date bombing began], ran off with their tails between their legs to THOSE SAME COUNTRIES. Pretty patriotic, isn’t it? The new millennium, it seems, brings us a lot of surprises. One of them is the “remote-control patriot.”

(Olja Bročić, 31 March): If by Saturday morning that man is not on a helicopter to Scheveningen or in a Yugoslavian jail, I will ask for political exile in any foreign country, tear up my Yugoslav passport, and forget I ever lived here. I authorize RTV B92 to publish this statement as they choose and forward it to the president of Yugoslavia and to the Ministries of Internal and Foreign Affairs. (ZoranP, 31 March): All the people who have gone to stand by Slobodan should do just that, they should be with him. I hope there is space for all those people.

Here the proposition was offered that in order for Serbia to move into the future, it needed to separate the character of the recent past, personified by Milošević, from the self-perception of identity on the part of people in Serbia:

(Raina von Kraemer, 31 March): he has to disappear, first of all from the HEADS of his “admirers.” There is no need to talk about him anymore. Let’s start a new life—. WITHOUT HIM

This perspective might simply illustrate the level of resentment directed toward the former dictator. But it could mark a perceptual step toward generating an account of the recent past: to objectify it in some way, initially probably in a negative way. Here the argument seemed to be that if people were able to imagine Serbia as Serbia-without-Milošević, then new possibilities could be opened.

The brief overview of readers’ comments here suggests that the arrest of Milošević sparked a debate over questions of responsibility and a search for a usable understanding of the preceding ten years. Concerns over factors like threats to sovereignty, imposition of collective guilt, and resistance to moral posturing on the part of powerful countries did begin to emerge as justifications, and have constituted obstacles to the further development of this debate.

Both subsequent events and an intervention by Milošević himself would play a role in the development of the discussion that began in late March 2001. The day after his arrest, Milošević filed an appeal in which he declared that he had not stolen money but rather had diverted it from the state budget to finance paramilitaries in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, thus introducing a point domestic prosecutors had wanted to avoid and international prosecutors had been trying to prove. Not long after Milošević’s arrest the news story broke in Serbia about the “freezer truck case” discussed in Chapter 1. The importance of these events might be understood as showing first that people accused of crimes no longer themselves denied things that other people denied for them, and second that violations could be traced through a chain of command to the highest sources and so could not be dismissed as incidental.¹⁸ The claim that the state was defending itself against the freezer truck victims could only seem plausible in an environment where open discussion is made inaccessible, and that at least seemed to be no longer the case in Serbia.

War and Identity in War Diaries

Questions of national identity were already complex before the collapse of SFRJ. At various moments, a series of Yugoslav states promoted or backed away from the promotion of a synthetic “Yugoslav” identity, encouraged or discouraged the public expression of ethnic, national, and local identities, and made efforts of varying intensity to subsume particular identities to a concept of “brotherhood and unity.” In the post-1945 period identity issues invoked the fear that expressions of ethnic or national pride could grow into nationalist displays, which risked raising the unresolved question of guilt for the behavior of nationalist movements during World War II.¹⁹ The complete rejection of “brotherhood and unity” by nationalist regimes after 1990 also involved an effort to dismiss the association of nationalities with the crimes of the World War II period Serbian and Croatian quisling states—a concern that is especially apparent in the polemical historical works of Franjo Tudjman.²⁰

The wars of succession that followed the dissolution of SFRJ did not have the effect of freeing national identity from constraints imposed by a guilty past. Instead they burdened these identities further with a consciousness of a guilty present. This is clearly visible in an examination of diaries and autobiographical works produced in Serbia during the war period. A number of writers produced “war diaries” examining events they had experienced or witnessed, and exploring their own responses to them. There is no way of knowing how many people shared the impressions offered in these works, most of which were consciously presented as an alternative to official “patriotic” propaganda, but enough of them were produced that they might be considered a meaningful subgenre of contemporary Balkan literature.²¹

First, writers displayed a keen consciousness of the way that Serbs were perceived in the world as the primary perpetrators of atrocities. Mileta Prodanović tells of meeting an old and prominent East European writer at a conference. “I shook hands with the old man (who was the only Nobel laureate I had ever met personally), told him where I was from, and at once noticed a change in his blue Slavic eyes.”²² Discomfited by the writer’s gaze:

I understood. The old man was disappointed. The questions which he really, undoubtedly, wanted to ask me could be, for example: “And how many unfortunate Bosnian children did you slaughter with your own hands? Did you participate in mass rapes? Are you a relative of one of the leaders of the paramilitary formations, or maybe just one of the ‘weekend warriors’?” I ran to my hotel room, ripped off the top of the plastic container of red ink for my “Rotring” pen with my teeth, spread the ink over my shirt, and rubbed it on my hands. When I returned to the lecture room, I could see the relief on the face of the old poet. It seemed to me that he even nodded his head a little bit.²³

Other writers tried responding directly to the negative global reputation of Serbs, rather than taking refuge in bitter humor. Vladimir Arsenijević quotes an e-mail message he wrote to an Albanian friend:

My compassion really and naturally belongs only to people, regardless of their nationality and/or religion. I know that everything we have been going through in this country for the past decade or so is simply a long chain of consequences of our President’s irresponsible and highly destructive behavior. You say that people are suffering here just for the fact that “they are Albanians” and I totally agree with you—they do—but you should also know that what you are concerned with is just one part of the big problem. Because many more people than just those of Albanian nationality have been going through enormous problems here, for a very long time now. It is a kind of inverted nationalism to think that only those citizens who are of non-Serbian nationality suffer here. There is no favouritism in this society, you can be sure of that. Everybody is Albanian here, and this is not just an apt, if shabby, analogy….

And as for us, Bashkim, people like you and me, Serbs as well as Albanians, those who suffered a lot although they never caused any of this to happen, well—we are just flesh, valueless bodies for both parties to play with. That seems to be our most common ground. I’m sorry to say that. Because this is what Our region has given us, such a hideous legacy. We are Nothings. We can easily be killed, and hardly anyone would blink, but many would cheer, because—we are Those Who Are Easily Killed. And, even if we manage to escape the borders of our misguided, stupid, sad countries, we are still not in a position to shake off that negative identity. Our countries, small and miserable as they are, nevertheless remain stronger than us.²⁴

Regardless how they approached the problem, all these writers needed some reply to what they recognized as the international perception of collective guilt about Serbs. Sometimes this took the form of satirizing the imposition of an unwelcome identity, sometimes it took the form of attempting to find a specific social location for blame, and sometimes it took the form of skepticism toward Serbian identity itself.

However, other people’s stereotypes about Serbs were not the only burden that faced Serbian writers. They also had to develop an approach toward inflated patriotic models of identity that were offered up constantly in state-sponsored media. At the same time that media in other parts of the world generated the image of Serbs-as-war-criminals, another mythology was developing in state-sponsored nationalist media of Serbs-as-Ubermenschen, the oldest,²⁵ most virtuous, and altogether finest people. Goran Marković offers an account of one Dr. Jovan I. Deretić,²⁶ a self-declared “historian” promoted on television:

He was speaking about some Serbon Makeridov, a conqueror who lived long before Alexander the Great and conquered much more territory than him…. That Serbon, the father of all nations, was a Serb. That is to say, all his descendants, or rather all known peoples, have a Serbian origin. Contemporary Serbs, in fact, are just some of the many Serbs who, over time, became Greeks and Celts and so on. Serbs, according to this lively old fellow, are not a nation but a race. In fact, why hide it, all Indo-European peoples have Serbian origins.

Even that lesser conqueror than Serbon, Alexander, was named Aleksandar Karanović and he was of Serbian origin too. He conquered the world with an army that was recruited from areas settled by Serbs, our ancestors were so brave. And the most beautiful girls, who can be seen on ancient Greek vases, were also Serbs, there is indisputable evidence for that….

About this doctor. Of course, Deretić has the right to assert whatever he likes, just like the audience has the right to believe it or, like me, simply to ignore it. But something else is in question: the context of the story. It was disgusting, and at the same time typical. The host of the program, a Serb primitive who is delighted by every Serbian heraldic symbol, even completely nebulous ones, in archaeological digs, and who triumphally grins over every bit of “evidence,” even the most suspicious, of the Serbian origin of everyone and everything, and his interlocutor … were perfect partners in this pig’s race of nationalism. It was a real orgy of stupidity in the service of deceiving exhausted people, a last effort to inject hungry and scared people with the feeling that they still have a reason to live. I am not against nationalism a priori. I do not think that love for one’s people is negative by definition. What makes me angry is not even the falsehood or artificiality of what those two people were claiming. I am ashamed because my feeling of belonging to a nation has been made into something crude, used for dirty purposes, because my personal feelings are being sold publicly by TV Palma, like prostitutes in Gavrilo Princip street.²⁷

Similar themes are apparent in other diaries of the period, in which a falsified collective pride, widely publicized, is perceived by the writers as an attack on individual pride, and massively promoted nationalist feeling makes national identity impossible.

A similar response is offered to the discourse of victimization. Arsenijević responds to the efforts of state television to promote a feeling of victimization with what seems to be insensitive rationality. Describing a television clip from a bomb shelter, he tries to place the rhetoric and its motivation in perspective:

“He is completely hysterical!” a young mother said in a shaky voice into the microphones of the state television news, squinting from the bright lights which were pointed right into her eyes as if she were at a police interrogation. In her arms she was holding a baby who did not seem the least bit hysterical.

“How does he behave?” asked the invisible interviewer, with pathos.

“Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he cries,” the young mother answered.

But isn’t that what babies generally do? Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they cry. All the time, even in the shelters when you are bombing them.

But I don’t think the problem is with the baby.

What is worse, it’s not with the mother either.²⁸

Here the writers face an unusual rhetorical challenge. Faced with genuine danger associated with the bombing campaign, they simultaneously feel compelled to resist official media messages telling them that they are victims, and should feel angry and helpless. This requires dismissing some real troubles, or explaining away some real situations.

On the other hand, there is a distinct consciousness that, while inflated claims were promoted regarding “maintaining threatened identity” or “resisting the New World Order,” the countries making these were in fact small, remote, and politically marginal. Prodanović offers an ironic self-location which begins with an interrupted story:

organizations for the protection of animals began a campaign for the permanent protection of the striped-neck swan. These recently little-known birds have their habitat in…. Well, after all, it is not important where their habitat is—the average resident of the civilized world cannot pronounce the name of that country. The most important things are principles and the determination to sacrifice oneself completely for the sake of an idea.

These are just a few additional reasons why we, East Europeans, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of perfect democracy to our small and lost-in-East-European-space homelands, even when it is now possible to buy at our kiosks condoms in thousands of shapes, colors, flavors, and fragrances, and not just the Czechoslovakian “Tigar” brand like in the time of the single-party dictatorship, still try to emigrate to one of those states where so much attention is paid not just to the rights of people but also various types of animals, to one of those countries where order, peace, and mutual respect reign, where even in times of senseless racial violence one can sense an unusually high degree of political correctness.

The governments of the great democracies of the West, of course, would be faced with insurmountable problems if they tried to cram masses of morally, materially, and mentally neglected people from Eastern Europe into their clean cities, into cities with well-maintained facades and rows of well watered flowers, if they let these lazybugs into the hives where every worker bee knows its place. To prevent this undesirable migration, invisible barriers have been placed in the form of visas. People of the East, it is known, fear two things—drafts and bureaucratic procedures. About the East European fear of drafts, those murderous currents of air in rooms, about the awful diseases one can get by exposure to drafts, entire tracts have been written—the fear of bureaucratic procedure is less well researched, but no smaller. This fear is well known to great and small strategists in the West, and so in order to receive a visa, aside from the rigid conditions, barriers have been established in the form of numerous questionnaires, which people who wish to feel the enchantment of orderly countries, or even to settle in these countries, must fill out in the unpleasant waiting rooms of embassies and consulates, after long waits in line²⁹

The passage suggests that the antipatriotism of these writers did not function as substitution. The transparent lies and overwrought nationalist rhetoric of the regime did not force many people to believe that the regime’s external opponents (whether these were regional competitors, the NATO alliance, or an abstractly conceived “West”),³⁰ or even internal opponents (epitomized by the opposition political party leaders) were necessarily any better.

Instead, there seems to develop an ambivalent attitude among these Serbian writers toward their own identity as Serbs. This is bolstered not by some other nationally structured alternative, but by taking refuge in various aspects of individuality. Arsenijević explains his friendly relationship with the ethnic Albanian writer Xhevdet Bajraj partly by the fact that neither was nationalistically inclined, and both liked the same kind of music. Marković talks about his inspiration by (and eventual disillusion with) organizers of protests around Serbia after the end of the bombing campaign, but by the end the most probable vision of the future he can generate is:

When the moment of liberation comes, the most important assistance we can get will be—psychiatric. We will need a whole lot of good doctors who will have the will and the knowledge to wrestle with the effects that the last decade or more has left us.

And in that awakening of mental health it will be most necessary to establish a basic criterion: what is normal and what is not. I know that is not easy and that these things change, depending on the society and culture in question, but this will really be a special case, worthy of the deepest observation. This country will be an Eldorado for future scientists, something like a laboratory with live people instead of white mice.³¹

Under conditions where a small group felt prepared, like the writers discussed here, to offer some kind of more or less moral stories to their readers, but many more were certain that they have gone through a period of madness that may not have ended, it is easy to understand why “public opinion” may not be so apparently solid.

The discourse of responsibility came out of the confines of antiwar groups and people engaged with it as a vocation, and began its public life with events like the ones presented in this chapter. At all points it was a complex and uncertain process, and by no means was there any certainty that “confrontation” or “catharsis”—psychological terms used by politicians—would take place. The examples here indicate an interplay involving several unstable elements. On the one hand people began openly discussing their experience of historical events and of themselves and their social environment. On the other hand the discussion was subject to balances of political forces and unpredictable events that would see the feelings articulated mobilized in varying directions. The evolution of the discussion was not predictable from the way it began.

In hindsight we know several things the observers cited here did not know in 2001: the Milošević trial dragged on for years and ended without resolution; institutions failed, emerged, and changed; and things that once appeared to be clear became confused. In short, the story continued.