project of accounting for the past carried high hopes, but that these hopes were only weakly supported by precedent and scantly accompanied by conceptual clarity with regard to what was involved.
The range of initiatives advocating a settling of accounts entered into a political environment where more than the recent past is unsettled. The controversy that developed reflected a background fact that has been observed in many other contexts: Serbian society is deeply divided, both in terms of social and political goals and in terms of understanding the ways in which the society has developed and the direction it is headed in the future. This severe social division has been used to explain a number of factors, from the question of how the Milošević regime was able to survive in power to why the crimes happened in the first place. Wide differences in understanding the present were recapitulated in interpretations of the past, both during the period of violence and after it. Much of the time material interests were at stake, as figures associated with the regime that had left power sought to protect their reputations and influence, and figures associated with the incoming governing groups sought to discredit them. The competition between the incoming and outgoing elites was made more complex by the fact that these two groups had considerable overlap and were often only barely distinguishable from one another.
There are two widely diffused conventional accounts of the record of transitional justice in Serbia, each of which is true but incomplete in its own way. The first concentrates on achievements and breakthroughs: the first trials of high military commanders and heads of state, the first region-wide system of special prosecutors, the first exchanges of declarations and apologies, the first legal judgments on genocide and on sexual violence as a war crime. The second concentrates on disappointments: a long record of obstruction, relativization, and denial; retrenchment of forces complicit in the operation of a criminal regime; repeated instances of impunity. It would be difficult to say that either account is wholly right or wrong; both the achievements and failures of the process are best understood in the social and political context of contemporary Serbia, which is the context that this study tries to take into account.
In the decade after 2000, Serbia provided a unique opportunity to observe a process of transitional justice in real time, with many expectations and institutions already in place. From a methodological view this has both advantages and disadvantages. The principal advantage is of course access to ongoing events, in their intensity and complexity and carrying their emotional weight. Much of the material used here is derived from sources like the daily news, read at the same time as the rest of the reading public, and from events I was able to attend, sometimes directly and sometimes vicariously. The principal disadvantage derives from a lack of distance from the events under discussion—not only temporal and analytic distance but also emotional distance. As a researcher I was not immune to the controversy and complexity of the environment I was examining, nor to the feelings of elation and disappointment that inevitably accompany a process laden with expectations related to categories that, however uncertain, have to be regarded as fundamental, like truth and justice. Added to this is the fact that a situation that is ongoing can change unexpectedly. Some events that took place while the research was ongoing compelled me to revise the entire manuscript and research plan. They changed again between the time the manuscript was submitted and production of the book began, and will have changed again by the time the book reaches the reader’s hands.
While I cannot say that researching a controversy as it was ongoing made my work any easier, I can say that it helped me to generate a feeling for something that formal and conventional approaches to this sort of issue, whether they come from political science or law, might very often miss: a process developing in a real society populated by real people experiencing real conflicts, and governed by an elite that is limited, compromised, and self-seeking. It was not easily amenable to mechanistic formulations or graphic representation. Rather, it was dirty, complicated, contradictory. As much as this may have presented a personal disadvantage, I think it provided an epistemological advantage. After all, we do not live in Hegel’s ideal universe but in a real world not of our choosing. We are not mystified by the confusions and contradictions we encounter day to day; in the best case we try to understand them and function around them. Why would outside observers expect people in another country, or people approaching a political problem that is prominent in the media, to go through their lives differently? I have tried to understand the people whose written and spoken words make up most of the material in this study (whether I like their words or not—that is a matter of opinion and orientation) not as historical subjects or as abstractions, but as human beings.
The story told in this account is what those human beings encountered and what they made of it. We can say that given the record of civic engagement and information that preceded the change of regime in 2000, they encountered a process almost ready to begin. Observers of various kinds had been tracking and compiling information about criminal abuses from the moment the wars began in 1991. They were prepared for a project to engage the public and institutions with the knowledge that they had, and to demand an accounting. This project got off the ground with resistance, which in many instances proved to be strong. The encounter between the efforts to move knowledge and dialogue forward and the impulses to hold it back are described in this book as three “moments”: these were incidents where a dramatic event or the emergence of new information appeared to have the potential to move public understanding dramatically forward. In each of those “moments” the effect was considerably less than could have been anticipated at first. The principal reason effects were limited was the engagement of various actors—media, political, and intellectual actors, but also forces in public opinion—to deny, recontextualize, or trivialize the dramatic events and information.
Resistance limited the potential of “moments,” but did not defuse their force completely. In a sense the forces of resistance proved to be creative: unanticipated issues were raised, boundaries of discourse were shifted, and the discourse of rejection was compelled to undergo refinement rather than remaining crude. Consequently although there does exist a discourse of denial that has persisted since the Milošević period, it is not the same discourse of denial. There are not many people left who will, as they may have done in 2000, deny facts that have been demonstrated. Instead it is possible to observe a migration of discourse from denial of facts to dispute over their meaning, and contention over the authority of people who present them. Whether this constitutes meaningful movement or not is at least partly a matter of standards and interpretation. I propose in the concluding chapter that accounting for the past is a project partly failed and partly achieved, and that the incompleteness of the effort leaves visible traces in Serbian society.
And then there were, in addition to the “moments,” some “nonmoments.” These were incidents where the lines dividing the participants in the discussion became clear but did not move. Although the presentation discusses four “nonmoments,” there were undoubtedly many more of these, some of them small in scope. What the “nonmoments” may show is the limits on how far public memory is capable of moving, at least for a time.
Taken together, the “moments” and “nonmoments” might be thought of as telling a more complex and possibly more troubling moral story than the one with which the period of research began. It is a story that may have implications for similar situations in the future. We are compelled to ask why the discussion got as far as it did, why it did not go farther, and what this means for Serbian society in the present and similar transitional justice initiatives in the future. To the degree that the particular set of social and historical circumstances discussed here is unique, it is unique for the reason that we have been offered the ability to trace the progress of a transitional justice initiative, not only procedurally and formally but also discursively and substantively. We can talk not only about what happened, but also about what people who participated in the moment said it meant to them.
The lesson from this experience may be the same one that I try to teach whenever I am asked about events in the region: if you want to understand the politics, look at the culture. The principle applies particularly well in an instance where a number of political actors imagined that it would be possible to achieve social and cultural goals using instruments of law. While it is not wholly implausible that a legal cause could lead to a social or cultural effect, a deeper understanding of the environment is required. Toward the beginning of the study some public opinion research from 2001 is examined: it