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

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia 221
described them. 33 But these were images incompatible with the beamed
pictures of the modern Balkan wars: pictures of destruction, mutilated
bodies and ethnic cleansing. Yet the images were real.
The warring sides entered the battlefield armed with memories, whereas
the international intervention was merely defined by them. The international
community – the complex yet amorphous combination of states,
politicians and diplomats that ultimately decides on such issues as international
interventions – rather than learn from these images of the past,
chose in Bosnia-Hercegovina first to use them as a reason to dismiss the
conflict, and then, when the awful reality of ‘ethnic cleansing’ became
evident, as a bland moral weapon that ultimately trivialised the events
they recalled. It would take three years for any decisive action to be taken.
Until that time, all leaders and spokesmen of the international community
preferred the path of condemnation based upon horrified memory –
emphasising the moral indictment it invoked, rather acting upon it. 34 But
even after the Bosnian intervention, the international community paid
little heed to the meaning and power of memory in the Balkans. For
while the Kosovo conflict compelled much swifter and stronger action, it
was to little avail: the perpetrators had apparently surprised it again, in
the systematic barbarity of their actions. In other words, the community
remembered the guilt of not intervening, but not the actual dynamics of
the conflict: the ability of the sides, especially the Serbs, to use memory as
both a legitimising tool of destruction and as a defensive barrier of selfjustification.
Moreover, given that this was Kosovo – the most crucial
source of all Serb national memories, dating back at least to the fourteenth
century, but equally, an ancient site of collectively memorialised
national humiliations, including the most recent ones under the Milosevic
regime – it was to be expected that memory would play a large part in
the conflict, that it would be constantly invoked in all forms of media
available to each side, and especially the state-owned Serbian one, and
that it would be preached to soldiers of all units and factions by their
commanders. All of this had already happened just a few years before –
in the earlier Balkan wars of the 1990s, yet these precedents were ignored.
33 Ibid., front cover.
34 There is an argument – rather rooted in the United Kingdom – that suggests that the
US leadership was much influenced by the Jewish reaction to the existence of the concentration
camps. Thus a very senior British diplomat who served at the United Nations
throughout most of the war claimed that the Jewish leadership acted out of continuing
guilt about not intervening in the Second World War (private interview, 9 Jan. 1998).
General Sir Michael Rose, commander of the UN forces in Bosnia in 1994, also noted
that ‘the Jewish influence on current events was to play a significant role in shaping
US policy towards Bosnia’. See Fighting for Peace: Bosnia 1994 (London: Harvill Press,
1998), 5.