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

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia 213
co-existence. As a Serb of the town recalled: ‘We all lived in Visegrad like
a big family, the Muslims and Serbs ...We didn’t look for differences.’ 13
These individual recollections also fuse with those from the fifth component
of time: the downward spiral into war, between 1987 and 1991.
It was then that these ‘families’ began to fall apart, through rumours of
death lists or amassed weapons held by each ethnicity against the other. 14
These are memories of disorientation and hurt, compounded by those
of deep hardship: the economic situation in Yugoslavia had deteriorated
to the degree of breadlines, defaulting banks and inflation. Indeed, once
the Dayton Agreement ended the war in 1995, it was not uncommon
in the following year for Bosnians to compare favourably the produce
in the shops – with that not only during the war, but also during the
years preceding it, emphasising their bad memories of that period. But,
nonetheless, then came war.
Fuelled and armed with all these radicalised memories and components
of time, the ethnicities strode on to the battlefield, striving to wipe out
all ‘others’: the Muslims in Bosnia, the Krajina Serbs in Croatia, the
Albanians in Kosovo. These were brutal contests, that sought to destroy
centuries-old mosques and churches, to eliminate people as if they were
not established local descendants, to ethnically cleanse villages, towns
and ultimately an entire province; to delete the others, and then recreate
the landscape in the image of the winning sacred memories. And in each
horrific case there was initial success, but then failure – and irony: for
those who survived, on all sides, had new and tangible memories of hate
and fear, distinct images of cruelty, brutality and death – delivered by the
neighbours and friends of yesterday. The battlefield had eliminated the
present, but not the past, people, but not memories: ‘In order to kill a
people, you must kill memory, you must destroy everything that belongs
to that people. But if two people stay alive, they can remember.’ 15
International memories
Much as the attitudes to and involvement of the sides in the Balkan
conflicts were driven by memory, so the international interventions were
largely defined by memorialised images and analogies. And while the
actual policies contrived by the international community were ultimately
a poor composite of differing opinions drawn together by the line of least
resistance, the implications of the images and precedents that compelled
13 Maass, Love thy Neighbour, 11.
14 On such rumours in Foca, for example, see Glenny, Fall of Yugoslavia, 170; Malcolm,
Bosnia, 237.
15 Maass, Love thy Neighbour, 238.