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Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. HIJACKED JUSTICE Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. HIJACKED JUSTICE Dealing with the Past in the Balkans Jelena Subotic´ CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2009 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Subotic´, Jelena. Hijacked justice : dealing with the past in the Balkans / Jelena Subotic´. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4802-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. War crimes—Former Yugoslav republics. 2. Transitional justice—Former Yugoslav republics. 3. Truth commissions—Former Yugoslav republics. 4. Postwar reconstruction—Former Yugoslav republics. 5. Yugoslav War, 1991–1995—Atrocities. I. Title. KKZ4545.S83 2009 341.6'909497—dc22 2009013037 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. For Doug and Leo Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xvii Introduction: The Importance of Dealing with the Past 1 1. The Politics of Hijacked Justice 15 2. The Past Is Not Yet Over 38 3. The Truth Is in Croatia’s Favor 83 4. Who Lives in Your Neighborhood? 122 Conclusion: Hijacked Justice beyond the Balkans 166 Index 193 vii Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. Preface and Acknowledgments I don’t remember where I was in July 1995, when I first heard of the genocide in Srebrenica. I have been trying to remember ever since I read Emir Suljagic´’s harrowing account of surviving Srebrenica, in which he asks all of his former friends to remember where they were while his family was being slaughtered and he ran for his life. But I don’t remember, and this fills me with a profound sense of shame. I should be able to remember. I lived in Belgrade, just a few hundred miles from Srebrenica. I considered myself very political, liberal, and as harsh a critic of Slobodan Miloševic´ and his policies as anyone I knew. I worked for an international nongovernmental organization and for a progressive Belgrade radio station. I had access to news reports and to foreign media. Still, I don’t remember. I do remember many other things. I remember watching Miloševic´’s televised takeover of the Socialist Party in 1987 and the sense of dread I felt, even as a teenager, at his aggressive rhetoric, his messianic tone, his language. I remember watching his now famous address in Kosovo in 1989, where he announced to the world and to Serbs everywhere that “no one will beat the Serbs anymore.” I remember my high school teachers sending us to one of Miloševic´’s political rallies in Belgrade because this was where “history was happening.” I remember the first tanks rolling toward Croatia. I remember driving in Belgrade behind lines and lines of tanks and Yugoslav army soldiers waving at me, blowing me kisses. I remember Vukovar. I remember almost every single one of my male friends trying to dodge the draft, hiding from the military police, sleeping in a different house every night. One of my friends successfully faked a serious psychiatric disorder and was discharged. Another never slept consecutive nights in the same ix Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS bed for two years. A third was caught in the middle of the night, taken to the army barracks, and put on a truck to Vukovar. By a pure stroke of luck, the truck broke down, and he never made it to Croatia. I remember watching the demonstrations in Sarajevo in April 1992. Like many others, I thought the war would never spread there—it would be unimaginable. And then it did. I remember the siege of Sarajevo and the stories my mother would occasionally receive in letters from her close friend, a Bosniac trapped in a dilapidated apartment complex on the Serb-controlled side of town. The stories were horrific. She had to change her name to a more Serbian-sounding one in order to survive. She made food out of grass. She gave away all her pos- sessions to Serbian soldiers, hoping they would spare her life. She got cancer. Her friends died trying to get food. The stories only got worse. We heard about cemeteries overflowing with bodies so victims had to be buried in parks, about Sarajevo surrounded by Serbs on mountaintops, about people starving. When I visited Sarajevo as an adult for the first time in 2006 to do research for this book, I couldn’t shake that feeling of vulnerability, of being trapped in a bowl, sur- rounded by snipers who could follow your every move and who killed for fun, for amusement, to show off. And they killed in my name. They killed in the name of a mythologized Ser- bia, a country that Miloševic´ and his supporters wanted to make so large as to include every Serb on the planet. “Wherever there is a Serbian bone, that is where Serbia is,” they would say. They killed to protect us, “the Serbs,” from imagined enemies. But mostly, they killed in order to kill. They killed in order to kill Yugo- slavia, a vast, prosperous, diverse country they could no longer control—and without control there was no point in preserving it. And they killed in order to eliminate as many non-Serbs as possible from the territory they wanted. The war was not about controlling the territory through killing. The war was about the killing. This terrible thing was done in my name. How does a society deal with the legacy of such evil, such violence? These crimes are so massive that they are unfathomable to any decent person. How do we go about punishing the perpetrators, acknowledging the victims, and, most important, making sure the crimes never happen again? And how do we under- stand the kind of society that allows such atrocities to happen? What kind of people are we? What is wrong with us? When I started fieldwork in Serbia for this book, one of the first things I did was join a local gym. I suppose I wanted to preserve the trappings of my now fully Americanized life and keep a sense of order and place, for doing fieldwork in my hometown, surrounded by family and old friends, was wreaking havoc on my brain. The TV set at the gym was tuned to a local station that was broadcasting live the Hague trial of Slobodan Miloševic´. I was thrilled; here, I thought, even Copyrighted Material. Cornell University Press. All Rights Reserved. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi people working out in a Belgrade gym were interested in the trial and wanted to know more about what had happened in the war. The TV was set to mute, though, and I asked the gym attendant to turn it up. Oh no, he said, we don’t listen to that crap—we are waiting for the station to switch over to MTV. That, I thought, was dealing with the past in Serbia. The genocide at Srebrenica and hundreds of other massacres marked the 1990s in the Balkans. With each passing year, memories fade, witnesses are lost, priorities of investigative reporters change, budgets of human rights groups shrink, and the countries of the former Yugoslavia march on, some faster than others, toward the ultimate prize—membership in the European Union (EU). Once they become “European,” they hope this ugly past will all go away. Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia will finally become “normal,” former communist countries now adapting to European markets and liberal democracy, just like Hungary or Slovakia or Bulgaria. And while other East European countries need to fix their economies, change pension systems and citizenship requirements, or carry out police reforms, the countries of the former Yugoslavia are asked to do all that, plus cooperate with international institutions of justice. They are asked to arrest and transfer war crimes suspects to The Hague. The faster they do so, the faster they will join the European Union. “Transitional justice” has now become an inter- national requirement; it is a necessary condition for European accession. It has become like any other EU requirement, something normal that countries need to do in order to move on. But what happened in the former Yugoslavia was not normal, and normal- izing the past to meet bureaucratic requirements for EU accession makes me profoundly uneasy. Out of my fear that something important will be lost if we fail to remember, if we deal with the legacy of war crimes and genocide as if it were on a par with pension reform, came the urge to write this book. At its most basic, this book is about why it is important that we remember and why remembering, accounting, exploring, and acknowledging the past should be a matter of state policy.

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