The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide in bosnia-herzegovina, 1992‒1995 211
separatists, such as people of ethnically mixed backgrounds) became particularly
vulnerable.
FEAR AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
There was yet another aspect of the Tito regime’s ambivalent attitude toward ethnic
relations and ethnic communities. It was its reluctance to deal with past injustices,
such as atrocities toward civilians of a specific ethnic identification, for fear
of stirring things up. The civil wars that ran parallel to and intertwined with World
War II in Yugoslavia were never properly dealt with in the official history after 1945.
It operated with two mutually exclusive categories: the fascists (the evil perpetrators)
and the partisans (the heroic victors and the victims of the fascists). 32 The suffering
and injustices experienced by anyone falling outside these categories were
never publicly acknowledged. Civilians who had been caught in between, or those
who had suffered at the hands of the partisans, did not have a place in the official
account. No memorial was ever erected over the graves of those victims. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, “the nameless dead” were in many cases exhumed and given
a religious burial, a burial that imbued these victims with an ethnic identity (see
Verdery 1999). They became Serb victims of the Croat Ustasha or Croat victims
of communists (Serbs). 33 Finally, there was public acknowledgment of the suffering
and loss that had been silenced under Tito, but the public acknowledgment was
only to those living members of the victims’ ethnic/national groups. It was therefore
not a ritual that could be part of a process of reconciliation; on the contrary,
there was another, hidden message: a collapsing of time identifying the victims with
all other members of the same ethnicity and the perpetrators with all other living
members of the group they were seen to represent. As argued by Verdery (ibid.),
the underlying message was, “They may do it to you again.”
Cultivation of the death cults was a central element in the politics of memory
and the manipulation of fear (see Borneman, forthcoming). (It should be noted,
however, that the leaders of the Muslim community did not engage in exhumation
and reburial rituals, as that would have run contrary to both Muslim tradition
and Islamic belief: desecration of consecrated graves is believed to result in divine
punishment. In addition, Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of the Bosnian Muslim Party
[SDA], was reluctant to use inflammatory and divisive rhetoric. After all, at least
in the first half of the war, Izetbegovic saw himself as the leader of a multiethnic
Bosnia—when there was still a multiethnic B-H to consider.)
So there were atrocities and injustices at the hands of co-Yugoslavs that Tito
had not wanted to deal with and therefore had buried under the slogan of Brotherhood
and Unity. But the public process of remembering those events from 1989
onward did not form part of a process of reconciliation, since it was not owned by
the local communities where the events had taken place; instead, it was hijacked
by nationalist leaders as a tool to manipulate fear and create a social climate in
which supporters would rally behind them for “protection.”