Having resigned his ministry in disgrace, Andrija Hebrang is turning to the former sociologist turned horsie spokesmodel Slaven Letica to score a few points with his country's far right. The two want to propose a declaration to be passed by the Croatian Sabor for the tenth anniversary of "operation Storm" declaring in retrospect it and everything that happened in it to have been legal. The reasoning is that the action was an "allied defense against terrorism."
Lesson 1 in autoamnesty: the amnesty should apply to charges. Hebrang and Letica are clearly influenced by their colleague Bozidar Delic, who told Hague prosecutors today that whatever he had done must have been legal because "we had the right to self defense." These kinds of statements work nicely for public opinion where the perception that ICTY defendants are being tried for having participated in war at all is popular. What was illegal in 1995 and 1999 and remains illegal now is the expulsion of civilian population: not the military action itself but its conduct.
2005-07-12
Never again?
For those of you in Europe, be sure to check out Srebrenica: Never Again? by Leslie Woodhead, on tonight (12/7) at 10pm on BBC 4 and at 10:15 on Arte. For a brief blurb, check here.
2005-07-11
A word about genocide
Let's avoid falling into caricature. My little idyll with the fascists was unique. These are people who deprived of the extreme positions they take would have little else to keep them occupied. In any case, as their chants suggest, they do not exactly shy away from taking a few swigs of collective guilt (responsibility being a bit beside the point).
Their moderate wing is represented by the media that have never got out of the habit of safely endorsing them from afar. A case in point would be the tabloid most loyal to the old regime, Večernje novosti. Their approach in the past couple of weeks has been, to borrow the categories first articulated by Vojin Dimitrijević, to move from «denial of the fact» to «denial of the law.» However much they relativise (this was the paper that published the list of Serb victims last week), they are no longer openly contesting the version of events in Srebrenica which has been established by research and in open court.
Their approach now is to contest the qualification of the events as genocide. This ranges from citing politicians warning against the chimera that Serbs may be labelled as «a genocidal nation» — but enough of that, it is a category which, if it exists anywhere, does not exist in law: strictly for popular consumption. But twice in the last week they have run long interviews (both times on the top tabloid page 2) offering technical denials of genocide. First Smilja Avramov was quoted as accepting the facts but denying that it was genocide because «there was no intent.» Then today a young law professor, one Škulić, came foward with an argument that there was no genocide because only men over a certain age were murdered.
Take or leave the arguments: to my mind, they have a sophistic quality and while they might get by in a seminar room, the existing record of jurisprudence makes them untenable in a courtroom. But step back a bit, too — the strategy amounts to denying genocide by recognising crimes against humanity (of course it is not identified this way in Novosti). If all that is left is to test different legal theories against the facts, let the trials begin.
Their moderate wing is represented by the media that have never got out of the habit of safely endorsing them from afar. A case in point would be the tabloid most loyal to the old regime, Večernje novosti. Their approach in the past couple of weeks has been, to borrow the categories first articulated by Vojin Dimitrijević, to move from «denial of the fact» to «denial of the law.» However much they relativise (this was the paper that published the list of Serb victims last week), they are no longer openly contesting the version of events in Srebrenica which has been established by research and in open court.
Their approach now is to contest the qualification of the events as genocide. This ranges from citing politicians warning against the chimera that Serbs may be labelled as «a genocidal nation» — but enough of that, it is a category which, if it exists anywhere, does not exist in law: strictly for popular consumption. But twice in the last week they have run long interviews (both times on the top tabloid page 2) offering technical denials of genocide. First Smilja Avramov was quoted as accepting the facts but denying that it was genocide because «there was no intent.» Then today a young law professor, one Škulić, came foward with an argument that there was no genocide because only men over a certain age were murdered.
Take or leave the arguments: to my mind, they have a sophistic quality and while they might get by in a seminar room, the existing record of jurisprudence makes them untenable in a courtroom. But step back a bit, too — the strategy amounts to denying genocide by recognising crimes against humanity (of course it is not identified this way in Novosti). If all that is left is to test different legal theories against the facts, let the trials begin.
My fascist weekend
So you don't think the slow pace of posting has been an indication of inactivity. On Saturday I spent the afternoon with the Serbian Radical Party. They had a new film to present, called «Istina» («Truth»), meant to be their response to the onslaught of new information about crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Bosnia. The event was held in the large cinema at Sava Centar, heavily advertised and an overflow crowd was assured by the lot full of buses from various provincial places bringing SRS supporters from places where their party is the only one with a local organisation to the city.
The ceremony began with speeches from the SRS leadership—a greeting sent by Vojislav Šešelj from the Hague, dramatically read by Aleksandar Vučić, the presentation of the usual scenographic bit players at right-wing events (the frail Patriarh Pavle, the diabolical Smilja Avramov, the former poets whose names nobody remembers). Then acting Radical-in-chief Tomislav Nikolić gave an outwardly conciliatory address recognising crimes and the need to punish them, but denying any uniqueness for the Serbian side. I thought that this was an interesting step forward for SRS, staking out a new position between denial and recognition which would place them in the spineless center of Serbian politics, but my friends persuaded me that this is the public face which SRS trots out every six months or so to hide the private face. Perhaps so, as they have put a good deal of effort into developing an outward surface which might resemble that of a legitimate political party.
The film itself offers little of interest. For the most part it is a new montage of propaganda clips that anybody who watched Serbian state television during the time when SRS and their allies controlled it already saw repeatedly between 1991 and 1995, and again for a period between 1998 and 2000. What new material there is has no source attribution. The film itself is not signed by an author. My own feeling was that the handpicked SRS audience was not particularly impressed either, as there was a lot of sidetalk, milling about, and complaint about the quality of production. If this is the right wing reply to the existing evidence, it may be an admission that they do not have replies.
On Sunday evening we went to the commemoration of Srebrenica victims which was organised in Belgrade by the feminist human rights group Žene u crnom, on the city's principal square. A circle of activists and supporters, mostly dressed in black, held white roses in a circle around a makeshift memorial of votive candles. Some held banners declaring «never again» in different languages, some held banners identifying them as visiting activists from other countries. There was a large and mostly disengaged police presence, in partial riot gear and doing nothing.
Around the perimeter milled a small group of spectators and a smaller group of local fascists. There were not many fascists, perhaps twenty or thirty, and several of them were faces that I recognised as regular provocateurs from previous public events. Most of them hung back away from the perimeter of the group while a few of them circulated around the perimeter shouting insults. At one point a group of them moved into the center of the circle, but were escorted out by a single police officer. At another point a group of them launched into some football-fan style chants—one of them threatening violence against human rights activist Nataša Kandić (who was there, of course), and another the increasingly familiar ominous rhyme «Nož, žica, Srebrenica» (literally it is not much—«knife, wire, Srebrenica»—but its intent is to threaten a reprise).
Then some of the fascists tossed a tear gas grenade into the center of the circle. The participants in the commemoration dispersed, the semisentient police did nothing that anybody could observe, and there was a brief moment of disruption. My wife and I ducked into the restroom of a coffee shop to wash our hands and rinse our eyes, and then everyone returned to their positions, the participants to the circle, the fascists to shout and toss things from the wings, and the police to discreetly and inactively stand at a few points between the two groups. The ceremony continued in deliberate silence, with some people coming to the center of the circle to light candles, then the participants to place their roses at the makeshift memorial (a paper sign at the top of the steps below the equestrian statue at the square). The police escorted the core activists and international visitors away, we hung back to chat with friends, and a friend bet that the memorial would remain in place five minutes. She was off by four and a half, a group of five young fascists immediately ran up the steps, ripped the memorial sign, and ran away.
My fascist weekend was less tragic than sad, a recurring meeting of incomprehension, incapacity and powerlessness. My wife and I went off to have drinks with our friends, raise a toast to our first (really!) taste of tear gas, and share our wonder. The old guard is finally in retreat, five years after kobajagi losing power. But there is no new guard, and if there were it would have a hard time finding anything to say, and if it had anything to say not many people would be willing to listen.
The ceremony began with speeches from the SRS leadership—a greeting sent by Vojislav Šešelj from the Hague, dramatically read by Aleksandar Vučić, the presentation of the usual scenographic bit players at right-wing events (the frail Patriarh Pavle, the diabolical Smilja Avramov, the former poets whose names nobody remembers). Then acting Radical-in-chief Tomislav Nikolić gave an outwardly conciliatory address recognising crimes and the need to punish them, but denying any uniqueness for the Serbian side. I thought that this was an interesting step forward for SRS, staking out a new position between denial and recognition which would place them in the spineless center of Serbian politics, but my friends persuaded me that this is the public face which SRS trots out every six months or so to hide the private face. Perhaps so, as they have put a good deal of effort into developing an outward surface which might resemble that of a legitimate political party.
The film itself offers little of interest. For the most part it is a new montage of propaganda clips that anybody who watched Serbian state television during the time when SRS and their allies controlled it already saw repeatedly between 1991 and 1995, and again for a period between 1998 and 2000. What new material there is has no source attribution. The film itself is not signed by an author. My own feeling was that the handpicked SRS audience was not particularly impressed either, as there was a lot of sidetalk, milling about, and complaint about the quality of production. If this is the right wing reply to the existing evidence, it may be an admission that they do not have replies.
On Sunday evening we went to the commemoration of Srebrenica victims which was organised in Belgrade by the feminist human rights group Žene u crnom, on the city's principal square. A circle of activists and supporters, mostly dressed in black, held white roses in a circle around a makeshift memorial of votive candles. Some held banners declaring «never again» in different languages, some held banners identifying them as visiting activists from other countries. There was a large and mostly disengaged police presence, in partial riot gear and doing nothing.
Around the perimeter milled a small group of spectators and a smaller group of local fascists. There were not many fascists, perhaps twenty or thirty, and several of them were faces that I recognised as regular provocateurs from previous public events. Most of them hung back away from the perimeter of the group while a few of them circulated around the perimeter shouting insults. At one point a group of them moved into the center of the circle, but were escorted out by a single police officer. At another point a group of them launched into some football-fan style chants—one of them threatening violence against human rights activist Nataša Kandić (who was there, of course), and another the increasingly familiar ominous rhyme «Nož, žica, Srebrenica» (literally it is not much—«knife, wire, Srebrenica»—but its intent is to threaten a reprise).
Then some of the fascists tossed a tear gas grenade into the center of the circle. The participants in the commemoration dispersed, the semisentient police did nothing that anybody could observe, and there was a brief moment of disruption. My wife and I ducked into the restroom of a coffee shop to wash our hands and rinse our eyes, and then everyone returned to their positions, the participants to the circle, the fascists to shout and toss things from the wings, and the police to discreetly and inactively stand at a few points between the two groups. The ceremony continued in deliberate silence, with some people coming to the center of the circle to light candles, then the participants to place their roses at the makeshift memorial (a paper sign at the top of the steps below the equestrian statue at the square). The police escorted the core activists and international visitors away, we hung back to chat with friends, and a friend bet that the memorial would remain in place five minutes. She was off by four and a half, a group of five young fascists immediately ran up the steps, ripped the memorial sign, and ran away.
My fascist weekend was less tragic than sad, a recurring meeting of incomprehension, incapacity and powerlessness. My wife and I went off to have drinks with our friends, raise a toast to our first (really!) taste of tear gas, and share our wonder. The old guard is finally in retreat, five years after kobajagi losing power. But there is no new guard, and if there were it would have a hard time finding anything to say, and if it had anything to say not many people would be willing to listen.
2005-07-09
"Well, nothing. They listen to music."
A dear friend whose father was an intelligence officer told me about the day in the early 1980s when he decided to cut his hair short and get an earring. His father asked about among the intelligence folk, and determined that he "was either an anarchist or a punker." About anarchists everything is more or less known, yes, but what was up with this new category of "punker"? The answer among the intelligence officers was "well, nothing. They listen to music."
These days the fifth annual Exit festival in Novi Sad is under way. It is the biggest cultural event in the city and the only festival in Serbia that consistently attracts a large crowd of visitors from around the world. The concert lineup gets better every year, and the creativity of the organisers is more than obvious. The festival originated as a way of showing a different face of Serbia in the waning agonies of the Milosevic period, and continues to mean something now that the neofascist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) has taken power in the city government of Novi Sad.
Which is where the difficulty comes up. This year the festival coincides with the anniversary of the massacre of the civilian population of Srebrenica. The organisers thought to recognise this with a minute of silence at the performance. The SRS responded by asking whether the organisers thought they might like to have another festival next year, or not. Now the minute of silence for the victims is degenerating into a flowery gesture for peace in the world.
So is it really "well, nothing. They listen to music"? Or is the SRS so persuasive that the youth follow their command? Or is it that if you scratch a young progressive, you find a Radical underneath?
These days the fifth annual Exit festival in Novi Sad is under way. It is the biggest cultural event in the city and the only festival in Serbia that consistently attracts a large crowd of visitors from around the world. The concert lineup gets better every year, and the creativity of the organisers is more than obvious. The festival originated as a way of showing a different face of Serbia in the waning agonies of the Milosevic period, and continues to mean something now that the neofascist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) has taken power in the city government of Novi Sad.
Which is where the difficulty comes up. This year the festival coincides with the anniversary of the massacre of the civilian population of Srebrenica. The organisers thought to recognise this with a minute of silence at the performance. The SRS responded by asking whether the organisers thought they might like to have another festival next year, or not. Now the minute of silence for the victims is degenerating into a flowery gesture for peace in the world.
So is it really "well, nothing. They listen to music"? Or is the SRS so persuasive that the youth follow their command? Or is it that if you scratch a young progressive, you find a Radical underneath?
2005-07-06
Srebrenica and all that
If it weren't sad it'd be funny.
On 10th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre, UN recommits to rehabilitationI'm sure the headline writer at the UN news service missed the bitter irony contained in this news dispatch -- the UN, under whose protection the 8,000 men and boys killed by Serb troops were, "recommitting" to the rehabilitation of the town, which is managed by a largely dysfunctional and corrupt bureaucracy. (I have no proof to back this accusation up, but I suspect we might see some solid evidence published soon.) Well, it wouldn't be the only irony surrounding next week's anniversary. How about this?
"Ten years after those tragic events, they continue to haunt us and serve as a reminder that such atrocities must be met with all necessary means and that there must be the political will to carry the policy through," said Mr. Tharoor [Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications].You mean, like we're doing in Darfur?
2005-07-03
Musical news puzzling, sad and great
As people try to figure out whether the continued popularity of Bijelo Dugme means anything or not and the entire world mourns the passing of the great Luther Vandross, may I just note that Stevie Wonder has set to rest any doubts that he is still fantastic with his engrossing, amusing, inspiring and just darn good new single (with Prince and En Vogue), «So what the fuss.» Listen to it, and see that the fuss is about something.
Update on the Srebrenica debate
An update on the public discussion of Srebrenica in Serbia — it has definitely changed, and I am standing by my earlier assessment that denial has dropped out of the discussion as an option. But there are a couple of new directions.
First, the attacks on the most prominent human rights advocates (Nataša Kandić, Sonja Biserko, Borka Pavićević, Biljana Kovačević-Vučo: interesting that they are all women!) has moved from the tabloids to the floor of the Serbian parliament. Maybe an assessment is possible that when the debate moves from disputes over the facts to attacks on individuals, this is a sign of desperation. Probably there is also a class element to this, akin to the tendency of the American far right to habitually label people to the left of them (i.e., everyone) as «elitists.»
Second, the line of semidenial that says «this has nothing to do with Serbia» is still very much alive, and does not appear to be confined to the far right. The lines of supply and command are clear enough that it is not necessary to respond empirically. But I think that something else is at stake here. The global strategy is to say that if there were criminals, they were not from Serbia, and shift the blame onto the refugees. Something similar has been under way for a long time in Croatia, with every evil put down to «Hercegovci.» It continues a long tradition of regional stereotyping of people according to how far above sea level they live that was originally traced by Vladimir Dvorniković. What it amounts to is shifting responsibility from the people who exercised power to the people who trusted them.
Third, the old construct has reappeared which says that if there were victims from one group this justifies the creation of victims from other groups. Leading the charge is of course, Večernje novosti, which on Thursday published as a special supplement a list of names purporting to document Serb victims of war crimes from the area of Srebrenica. Let's say the document is methodologically and empirically accurate: what does this legitimate?
First, the attacks on the most prominent human rights advocates (Nataša Kandić, Sonja Biserko, Borka Pavićević, Biljana Kovačević-Vučo: interesting that they are all women!) has moved from the tabloids to the floor of the Serbian parliament. Maybe an assessment is possible that when the debate moves from disputes over the facts to attacks on individuals, this is a sign of desperation. Probably there is also a class element to this, akin to the tendency of the American far right to habitually label people to the left of them (i.e., everyone) as «elitists.»
Second, the line of semidenial that says «this has nothing to do with Serbia» is still very much alive, and does not appear to be confined to the far right. The lines of supply and command are clear enough that it is not necessary to respond empirically. But I think that something else is at stake here. The global strategy is to say that if there were criminals, they were not from Serbia, and shift the blame onto the refugees. Something similar has been under way for a long time in Croatia, with every evil put down to «Hercegovci.» It continues a long tradition of regional stereotyping of people according to how far above sea level they live that was originally traced by Vladimir Dvorniković. What it amounts to is shifting responsibility from the people who exercised power to the people who trusted them.
Third, the old construct has reappeared which says that if there were victims from one group this justifies the creation of victims from other groups. Leading the charge is of course, Večernje novosti, which on Thursday published as a special supplement a list of names purporting to document Serb victims of war crimes from the area of Srebrenica. Let's say the document is methodologically and empirically accurate: what does this legitimate?
Also, a licence to bottle Stella would be nice
I'll admit that most of my associations with Nikšić are positive: the 'ladna Trebjesa, some of the most interesting driving habits outside of Dorchester, the best Balkan beer this side of Laško (note to people who will reply to say that Slovenia is «not Balkan»: it is. And so is Italy — also only one good beer, Moretti. New Hampshire too — Smuttynose, if you were wondering). So if it turns out that the report is true that genocidaire Radovan Karadžić has moved his hiding place there, that could only interfere with everybody's enjoyment. So please yank him out of his treehouse and send him off. Then chill a nice Nikšićko pivo. Okay? Thanks.
2005-06-26
Preview: The secondary market in victims
Exclusive to the readers of this weblog, the remarks I will make tomorrow morning on "the concept of victims in transitional law" at a conference on transitional justice:
I recently had the opportunity to make a tour, together with several of my students, of several of the camps established in Europe by the Nazis in the Second World War period. Among these was the one which is certainly best known of the lot, Auschwitz. But that sentence is in itself misleading. Let me tell you why.
What people commonly refer to as "Auschwitz" is in fact three camps. Monowitz was a labor camp, the smallest of the three. Auschwitz itself was a prison camp principally for Polish political prisoners, though there were certainly other types of prisoners and prisoners of other nationalities there. People were killed in Auschwitz, but it was not organized around the purpose of killing. The camp that most people think of when they hear the name Auschwitz, by far the largest one in the complex, the one with the massive expanse of barracks, with the famous railway platform, and with the gas chambers and crematoria, is Birkenau.
Aside from a sculpture complex, there is little in terms of historical commemoration at the death camp, Birkenau. The museum, library, multimedia centres (and, yes, the snack bars) are at Auschwitz, which is visited by far more people than the other sites. More than that: all of the items from Birkenau which have become iconic, and with which the people in the audience here are probably familiar – the room full of human hair, the large piles of shoes and eyeglasses – are on display at Auschwitz, that is to say that the decision was made to move them from Birkenau to Auschwitz for the purpose of display.
It is not my role to second-guess the decisions of the historians and curators, who I am sure made none of these decisions rashly or without consultation. But I can tell you that many of my students were outraged, and saw the placement of exhibits as an effort to eclipse the massive scale of evil at one camp and claim it for the other one where the prisoners had a different origin and where their experience, while not be minimized in any way, was qualitatively different from the experience of the people who "produced," however involuntarily, the exhibits in question. It would not be unfair to say that at least some of them thought that the museum represented an effort by Polish nationalists to lay claim to non-Polish victimhood.
I cannot take a position on the question of whether any currently living person, or any collective, can claim moral ownership over a pair of eyeglasses stolen from another person who was killed years ago. The prospect that I might put myself in a position where I could address that question is more than a little bit horrifying to me. But I can say that I think that I observed in that controversy among my students a pattern that applies here as well, as much as people shy away from comparisons between the two sets of historical events: the existence of a secondary market in victimhood, which operates through political capital and has no capacity to bring any benefit to victims.
What is a victim? To borrow a bit of Marxist terminology, the role of perpetrators is confined to the primitive accumulation of victims. It is only in the secondary markets that the surplus value of victimhood is extracted and transformed into political and symbolic capital. As in Marxist economic theory, this value does nothing for the people who actually produce it, only for the people who trade in it.
One way to illustrate this might be, in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce (who in his Devil's Dictionary defines "justice" as " A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service"), to suggest a set of possible definitions. First, a set indicating some of the ways in which advantages can be extracted from victimhood:
Definition A1: a by product of the illicit trade in corpses by politicians mining the past to gain advantage in the present.
Definition A2: a strategy by which another person's humiliation and suffering are converted into political capital by a second actor, to be spent for dubious goals by a third.
Definition A3: an attribution by which an individual assumes a monumental character, limiting all incoming forms of address to the narrow spectrum which ranges from sympathetic silence to meek apology.
Next, a set of definitions suggesting that the recipients of the advantages of victimhood are rarely the victims themselves:
Definition B1: damaged human goods, fit to be respected from a distance but deemed to be too lacking in objectivity to participate in serious discussion.
Definition B2: the recipient of rights such as witness protection and the privilege of inviting recognition at public events, such as memorials and the (rare) sentencing of perpetrators.
Definition B3: a figure admired at a distance by speculators, emulated by nobody.
If any of these definitions are descriptive, they may tell us something about the value of victimhood. Specifically, while there is no value in being a victim, there is tremendous potential value in being able to make property claims with regard to another person's victim status. Conflicts over such questions as commemoration and memorialisation generally have to do with the symbolic machinery by which documentary evidence is mobilized to support these property claims.
I think it is this secondary symbolic market in victimhood that explains the lack of political consensus around the evidence that everybody has seen by now of the murder of civilians in Bosnia and Hercegovina. There is no longer any serious controversy regarding the facts of the Srebrenica case, even in Serbia where denial has been a cottage industry, and in Serbia even among those political forces which have a material interest in denial. Where there is controversy is with regard to the interpretation of events that offered and the implied context into which the cases fit.
A few years ago, Vojin Dimitrijevic set out two strategies by which responsibility is avoided. The first is "denial of the fact": that is the strategy at work when the connections between paramilitaries such as the "Scorpions" and the organizations that supplied and commanded them are negated. The second is "denial of the law": that is the strategy at work when concrete acts are attributed the war environment, which then takes on a false character as an unearthly environment in which everything is permitted and all distinctions (like the distinction between soldiers and civilians) are lost.
I would suggest a third category, to be labeled "denial of the context": this is what we see mostly at work now, and it operates through the competitive bidding process on victimhood. If the Serbian president goes to pay his respects to Srebrenica, is he also required to go to go to another place where a different lobby makes property claims to the victims? Whatever answer you give, it represents an attempt to intervene in the relative position of values on the market of fetishised victim commodities. The criticism being leveled now (in the Serbian parliament, for example) which seeks to equate the campaign for a condemnation of crimes with an "anti-Serbian campaign" represents a recognition that, for various reasons, the market value of Serbian victims is low.
It may be that there are other victim merchants who have better property claims, but the dilemma remains the same. On the one hand, our education and values make it difficult for us to accept a position according which victims are entitled to anything other than recognition, acknowledgement and respect. At the same time, it is often clear that victims are not the beneficiaries of efforts to provide the kinds of responses that appear to us to be necessary. This is a problem of marginal interest to law, but ought to concern people interested in the politics of societies faced by these problems deeply.
I recently had the opportunity to make a tour, together with several of my students, of several of the camps established in Europe by the Nazis in the Second World War period. Among these was the one which is certainly best known of the lot, Auschwitz. But that sentence is in itself misleading. Let me tell you why.
What people commonly refer to as "Auschwitz" is in fact three camps. Monowitz was a labor camp, the smallest of the three. Auschwitz itself was a prison camp principally for Polish political prisoners, though there were certainly other types of prisoners and prisoners of other nationalities there. People were killed in Auschwitz, but it was not organized around the purpose of killing. The camp that most people think of when they hear the name Auschwitz, by far the largest one in the complex, the one with the massive expanse of barracks, with the famous railway platform, and with the gas chambers and crematoria, is Birkenau.
Aside from a sculpture complex, there is little in terms of historical commemoration at the death camp, Birkenau. The museum, library, multimedia centres (and, yes, the snack bars) are at Auschwitz, which is visited by far more people than the other sites. More than that: all of the items from Birkenau which have become iconic, and with which the people in the audience here are probably familiar – the room full of human hair, the large piles of shoes and eyeglasses – are on display at Auschwitz, that is to say that the decision was made to move them from Birkenau to Auschwitz for the purpose of display.
It is not my role to second-guess the decisions of the historians and curators, who I am sure made none of these decisions rashly or without consultation. But I can tell you that many of my students were outraged, and saw the placement of exhibits as an effort to eclipse the massive scale of evil at one camp and claim it for the other one where the prisoners had a different origin and where their experience, while not be minimized in any way, was qualitatively different from the experience of the people who "produced," however involuntarily, the exhibits in question. It would not be unfair to say that at least some of them thought that the museum represented an effort by Polish nationalists to lay claim to non-Polish victimhood.
I cannot take a position on the question of whether any currently living person, or any collective, can claim moral ownership over a pair of eyeglasses stolen from another person who was killed years ago. The prospect that I might put myself in a position where I could address that question is more than a little bit horrifying to me. But I can say that I think that I observed in that controversy among my students a pattern that applies here as well, as much as people shy away from comparisons between the two sets of historical events: the existence of a secondary market in victimhood, which operates through political capital and has no capacity to bring any benefit to victims.
What is a victim? To borrow a bit of Marxist terminology, the role of perpetrators is confined to the primitive accumulation of victims. It is only in the secondary markets that the surplus value of victimhood is extracted and transformed into political and symbolic capital. As in Marxist economic theory, this value does nothing for the people who actually produce it, only for the people who trade in it.
One way to illustrate this might be, in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce (who in his Devil's Dictionary defines "justice" as " A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service"), to suggest a set of possible definitions. First, a set indicating some of the ways in which advantages can be extracted from victimhood:
Definition A1: a by product of the illicit trade in corpses by politicians mining the past to gain advantage in the present.
Definition A2: a strategy by which another person's humiliation and suffering are converted into political capital by a second actor, to be spent for dubious goals by a third.
Definition A3: an attribution by which an individual assumes a monumental character, limiting all incoming forms of address to the narrow spectrum which ranges from sympathetic silence to meek apology.
Next, a set of definitions suggesting that the recipients of the advantages of victimhood are rarely the victims themselves:
Definition B1: damaged human goods, fit to be respected from a distance but deemed to be too lacking in objectivity to participate in serious discussion.
Definition B2: the recipient of rights such as witness protection and the privilege of inviting recognition at public events, such as memorials and the (rare) sentencing of perpetrators.
Definition B3: a figure admired at a distance by speculators, emulated by nobody.
If any of these definitions are descriptive, they may tell us something about the value of victimhood. Specifically, while there is no value in being a victim, there is tremendous potential value in being able to make property claims with regard to another person's victim status. Conflicts over such questions as commemoration and memorialisation generally have to do with the symbolic machinery by which documentary evidence is mobilized to support these property claims.
I think it is this secondary symbolic market in victimhood that explains the lack of political consensus around the evidence that everybody has seen by now of the murder of civilians in Bosnia and Hercegovina. There is no longer any serious controversy regarding the facts of the Srebrenica case, even in Serbia where denial has been a cottage industry, and in Serbia even among those political forces which have a material interest in denial. Where there is controversy is with regard to the interpretation of events that offered and the implied context into which the cases fit.
A few years ago, Vojin Dimitrijevic set out two strategies by which responsibility is avoided. The first is "denial of the fact": that is the strategy at work when the connections between paramilitaries such as the "Scorpions" and the organizations that supplied and commanded them are negated. The second is "denial of the law": that is the strategy at work when concrete acts are attributed the war environment, which then takes on a false character as an unearthly environment in which everything is permitted and all distinctions (like the distinction between soldiers and civilians) are lost.
I would suggest a third category, to be labeled "denial of the context": this is what we see mostly at work now, and it operates through the competitive bidding process on victimhood. If the Serbian president goes to pay his respects to Srebrenica, is he also required to go to go to another place where a different lobby makes property claims to the victims? Whatever answer you give, it represents an attempt to intervene in the relative position of values on the market of fetishised victim commodities. The criticism being leveled now (in the Serbian parliament, for example) which seeks to equate the campaign for a condemnation of crimes with an "anti-Serbian campaign" represents a recognition that, for various reasons, the market value of Serbian victims is low.
It may be that there are other victim merchants who have better property claims, but the dilemma remains the same. On the one hand, our education and values make it difficult for us to accept a position according which victims are entitled to anything other than recognition, acknowledgement and respect. At the same time, it is often clear that victims are not the beneficiaries of efforts to provide the kinds of responses that appear to us to be necessary. This is a problem of marginal interest to law, but ought to concern people interested in the politics of societies faced by these problems deeply.
Predictions of "light" blogging
Were it not for the quotation marks, I'd enter the heading in the understatement of the week contest because I'm pretty sure I won't blog at all until next weekend. I'll be in Dublin on business and have every intention of leaving my PowerBook at home.
2005-06-24
Playing "where's Ratko?" again
So the domestic media have quieted down a bit on the wait for the arrest of Ratko Mladić. But international media have moved in to fill the gap. First the Sunday Times reported on ongoing negotiations for Mladić's surrender, now the International Herald Tribune has joined in (see, of course, B92 for the full story). It does not help that the government is denying everything, since they would have to deny it whether it is true or not. But as outward signs that something is happening, look at the arrest of 11 Srebrenica suspects in RS and the revival of claims by right-wing parties about an "anti-Serbian campaign" led by NGOs. Signs from outside can be misleading, of course. The last time I saw large numbers of riot police on the streets, I had already begun speculating by the time I overheard three of them complaining to each other about what a waste it was to bring them out for a sports match.
Shock and huh
It's been slow blogging for me this week as I have been preparing texts for other people. One of them is now out, a piece for TOL on what appear to be the effects of the "Scorpions video" (not to be confused the video for the mediocre old heavy metal tune "Rock me like a hurricane," and no, there will be no bitterly pointing out from me that it is possible to distinguish between things that rock and things that blow). The others may be a while out, but it is all a part of the effort to use my short time here as intensively as possible.
2005-06-22
Headline of the day
Dutch troops still traumatized by BosniaPoor things! It must have been really hard on them to abandon the people of Srebrenica and leave them at the mercy of General Mladic and his associates. My heart goes out to them.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands | June 22, 2005 5:11:47 PM IST
Forty percent of Dutch soldiers who served in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war needed psychological help after the massacre, reports Radio Netherlands.
2005-06-20
Welcoming a new Euro blog
There is a new blog in the neighborhood, the European Tribune. It is modelled after the popular US political blog Daily Kos, which heaven knows has inspired any number of new entrants into this interesting medium. For now it seems to focus mostly on the part of Europe closer to St. Tropez than to Petrovac na moru, but maybe if enough of the readers of the Balkan blogs join up this could be shifted an inch or so.
2005-06-19
A European time-out?
Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner, has an op-ed in yesterday's Paris edition of the Times.
The piece begins by describing the doom and gloom that's enveloped the Brussels club after the Franco-Dutch slap of a few weeks ago, and this week's failed summit.
It then dives into the matter by stating,
Check this:
The only other place mentioned is Kosovo because the EU realizes that this is the problem to tackle this year and next, but for purely instrumental reasons -- because the Kosovo Albanians, after years of peaceful resistance, have learned the lesson that being peaceful will get you no points while violence will help advance your agenda.
With Bosnia or Macedonia, let alone Albania, no such instrumental argument can be made, or at least not as convincingly as for Kosovo. That's why I think the European perspective has received a serious blow in these countries -- perhaps a fatal one.
The piece begins by describing the doom and gloom that's enveloped the Brussels club after the Franco-Dutch slap of a few weeks ago, and this week's failed summit.
It then dives into the matter by stating,
Certainly we need to pace ourselves after last year, when 10 new members joined the Union.The rest is very much along those rather surprising lines. The tenor is one of sauve-qui-peut enlargement -- we'll take a big leap (RO, BG, maybe HR) so we can retreat better (TR, the rest of the Balkans). We'll be proactive now so we can slack later.
Check this:
We have to take into account the concerns of those who consider that enlargement is moving too fast. Since the enlargement agenda is already stretched to its limits, we must be very cautious about taking on new commitments. But the EU was founded on the principle of sticking to one's word.
This means that Bulgaria and Romania will join the Union in 2007, if they fulfil the conditions. It also means that accession negotiations will start with Croatia and Turkey once the two countries meet the strict criteria.Translation: we'll let them in because we signed all the papers already but after that the door will close. In fact, the entire piece -- despite referencing the Western Balkans -- only mentions the four countries with which there's some sort of formalized ties already: RO, BG, HR, and TR.
The only other place mentioned is Kosovo because the EU realizes that this is the problem to tackle this year and next, but for purely instrumental reasons -- because the Kosovo Albanians, after years of peaceful resistance, have learned the lesson that being peaceful will get you no points while violence will help advance your agenda.
With Bosnia or Macedonia, let alone Albania, no such instrumental argument can be made, or at least not as convincingly as for Kosovo. That's why I think the European perspective has received a serious blow in these countries -- perhaps a fatal one.
2005-06-18
Triangulating the square around the circle
I am fully aware that my posting has not been so frequent since my arrival in Belgrade. This is only partly because of the unreliable dialup connection I have here in my lovely garsonjera. It is also because from the moment I arrived I seem to have been swept up in the whirlwind of NGO worthy causes and the long hours in kafići that follow them. One thing I have noticed about the worthy causes: they are no longer advertised. I got into last Saturday's invitation-only presentation on Srebrenica on the «imperial advantage» strategy—wear a suit, speak English and smile, and maybe they will think that you are important. Other events, including the documentary film festival in Dom omladine, I found out about through the friend calls a friend network, it was not announced and the audience rarely got above ten people. The nice folks seem to be closing the circle, whether because of intimidation or something else I do not know.
A high point: at the presentation of his new book Vampires like us: Writing down "the serbs", Tomislav Longinović described the image of the vampire: «it is an imaginary creature that has to feed constantly on the blood of others. So the vampire is a metaphor for the idea of the nation.» Toma's new book is in English, and deserving of high praise.
Should I mention that among the worthy events was the largest-ever meeting of worldwide Balkan bloggers?
A high point: at the presentation of his new book Vampires like us: Writing down "the serbs", Tomislav Longinović described the image of the vampire: «it is an imaginary creature that has to feed constantly on the blood of others. So the vampire is a metaphor for the idea of the nation.» Toma's new book is in English, and deserving of high praise.
Should I mention that among the worthy events was the largest-ever meeting of worldwide Balkan bloggers?
2005-06-15
Why's it always us?
BBC News reports,
Stolen Goya found in Montenegro
A stolen painting by the Spanish master Francisco Goya has been found by police in Montenegro.
The oil painting, Count Ugolino, had been lifted from a gallery in Turin, northern Italy, in December 2001.
Goya's work -- which evokes a gory episode from Dante's inferno -- was retrieved during a raid on a flat near the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica.
Evidence, and the need for more evidence
It seems that there is still a good deal of discussion over the videotape “Treskavica July 1995” that surfaced earlier this month showing one instance in which members of a paramilitary formation murdered civilian prisoners. Claims about the influence of the tape go all around, from people saying that it has transformed Serbian public opinion to those claiming (as in today’s Monitor) that some huge number of people believe the footage to be fake. It is probably indicative that many members of the Serbian parliament felt moved to push for a resolution condemning war crimes, but that the initiative now seems to have failed because the parliamentary parties could not reach agreement on the question of whether it is worse to murder people of one nationality than another. So much for consciousness.
For those who have not seen the film or who have only seen the varying bits of it that are shown on television, here is a brief synopsis:
Scene 1: The members of the Scorpions are blessed by a priest who chants to them an invocation including references to the need to defeat “the enemy people” (not the enemy armed forces).
Scene 2: The Scorpions have a little party and enjoy a few drinks.
Scene 3: The Scorpions take their six bound prisoners, teenage boys who appear to have been beaten, in a truck to a rural roadside where they are lain in a row on the ground.
Scene 4: The boys are taken away from the roadside into a wood where the Scorpions kill four of them with guns at close range.
Scene 5: The remaining two boys are instructed to carry away the bodies of the four who have just been murdered.
Scene 6: The other two boys are murdered as well.
Scene 7: The Scorpions enjoy a little barbecued lamb.
There is no doubt that the footage makes some horrifying viewing indeed. At the same time, more needs to be known about the time, place and conditions of filming to be sure about just what the film is evidence of. As it stands, the film could offer a convenient way for people who supported the Milosevic regime and its clients in Bosnia and Croatia to claim that large scale organized murders of civilians were not the result of policy, but simply the work of some armed criminals (Scorpions? White Eagles? Tigers?) going about under the name of one more animal.
For those who have not seen the film or who have only seen the varying bits of it that are shown on television, here is a brief synopsis:
Scene 1: The members of the Scorpions are blessed by a priest who chants to them an invocation including references to the need to defeat “the enemy people” (not the enemy armed forces).
Scene 2: The Scorpions have a little party and enjoy a few drinks.
Scene 3: The Scorpions take their six bound prisoners, teenage boys who appear to have been beaten, in a truck to a rural roadside where they are lain in a row on the ground.
Scene 4: The boys are taken away from the roadside into a wood where the Scorpions kill four of them with guns at close range.
Scene 5: The remaining two boys are instructed to carry away the bodies of the four who have just been murdered.
Scene 6: The other two boys are murdered as well.
Scene 7: The Scorpions enjoy a little barbecued lamb.
There is no doubt that the footage makes some horrifying viewing indeed. At the same time, more needs to be known about the time, place and conditions of filming to be sure about just what the film is evidence of. As it stands, the film could offer a convenient way for people who supported the Milosevic regime and its clients in Bosnia and Croatia to claim that large scale organized murders of civilians were not the result of policy, but simply the work of some armed criminals (Scorpions? White Eagles? Tigers?) going about under the name of one more animal.
2005-06-14
The ethics of book reviewing
Yep, there is such a thing. Like, read the thing before you write the review.
But there is also a time-honored approach that sees reviewing primarily as an opportunity to advance one's own arguments rather than to discuss the arguments of the book in question . The piece I just read, from the March 2001 issue of Choice, squarely falls in that category. The reviewer, a prominent if controversial academic, describes the aim of the author as follows:
But there is also a time-honored approach that sees reviewing primarily as an opportunity to advance one's own arguments rather than to discuss the arguments of the book in question . The piece I just read, from the March 2001 issue of Choice, squarely falls in that category. The reviewer, a prominent if controversial academic, describes the aim of the author as follows:
He wishes to show that Bosnia's tradition has been one of unity in diversity, with adherents of Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity linked in the spiritual pursuit of transcendence. The argument is that this traditional orientation towards transcendence has been lost to a politics glorifying individuality and modernity, achieved by the targeting of Bosnia's Islamic component and the slaughter of its Muslim population by those who deny tradition in order to justify separate nation-states.You may or may not buy this particular argument of the author, but I think it's a fair summary of what he says. But then our reviewer continues, without catching his breath, with the following judgment:
Useful as an example of the arguments of Muslims who want a unified Bosnia in spite of the rejection of that project by most of their Serb and Croat neighbors, the book will be of interest to Balkanists as an exploration of Bosnian Muslim ideology. But it is not suitable for use by undergraduates without much explanation of why some non-Muslims in Bosnia may see its very Islamic argument as evidence justifying their fears of Muslim domination.No comment needed, right?
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