Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia 211
Yugoslavia. Thus a period in which the empires collapsed, and the various
ethnic groups received international recognition. But the kingdom was a
compromise, dominated by the Serbs at the expense of the Croats, the
Muslims and the Albanian Kosovars, and as such it inspired new hatreds.
Moreover, since these were created in the twentieth century, their surrounding
memories did not have to be adapted from the misty collective
past: there were still people alive in the 1980s who personally experienced
the events, people who could, for example, tell younger generations of the
prevailing Croat perceptions of the Serbs in the late 1920s: ‘Every post
is reserved for the predominant [Serb] race, despite the fact that the
Croatian people are by common consent a century ahead of the Serbs
in civilisation’. 9 When whispered over decades into the ears of younger
generations, prefaced by the words ‘I remember’, such opinion becomes
implanted as collective memory: a real tableau of a loved one’s past.
The third and in many ways most relevant and painful component of
historical time is that of the Second World War: the initial inadequate neutrality
of the Kingdom and the subsequent capitulation to the Nazis; the
rule of the Croat Ustashe and the rise of the Serb-dominated Partisans;
and the horrific struggle to death between these two. This was the first
dissolution of Yugoslavia into an internal bloody war, and it created the
most pervasive, and divisive, personal and collective memories: of Croat
cruelty to all other ethnicities, but especially the Serbs; of some Muslim
cooperation with the Ustashe; of Serb heroism in conquering the Croats
and saving the region – but also of Serb violence against the defeated
Croats at the end of the war. As already noted, in Tito’s Yugoslavia all
such memories were officially banned, save for those relating to Partisan
heroism. Ostensibly, this was meant to stop any further antagonism between
the different ethnicities, in the name of the overarching principle
of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ upon which the Titoist state was founded.
In fact, the elimination of all but the positive Partisan past was a ‘policy
of memory’, as an historian recently put it, designed to legitimate the
ruling Communist Party by recreating the Second World War solely and
officially as a ‘national liberation war and a socialist revolution’, rather
than ‘a war of each against everybody’. 10 It was the ultimate manipulation:
forging a single memory as a basis for a single identity in a single,
unified state. But ironically, by enshrining a monolithic collective memory,
the variety became no less apparent. For example, each district in
Bosnia-Hercegovina has a war memorial listing the Partisan fighters who
died, yet as Misha Glenny has reflected, ‘in most regions four Serbs died
9 H. Tiltman, Peasant Europe (London: Jarrolds, 1934), 59; quoted in Tanner, Croatia,
127.
10 Hoepken, ‘War, Memory, and Education’, 196, 201–2.