No One in Balkans Wants to Talk About Who’s to Blame : Bosnia: Questions of guilt and responsibility remain unanswered. But denial is easier than soul-searching.

The most savage conflict in Europe since the defeat of Nazi Germany is officially over, but unlike at the close of World War II, there is little soul-searching underway on the quieted Balkan battlefield.

An estimated 250,000 people have been killed and more than 3 million have fled their homes in a war that has touched three republics of the former Yugoslav federation over 52 months. There is barely a family of any ethnicity that has not lost a friend or loved one, or witnessed the cruelty of neighbor turned against neighbor.

But from this snowy headquarters of the rebel Bosnian Serbs in the mountains above Sarajevo to the majestic promenades of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, quiet reflection on the war’s moral lessons is as uncommon as multiethnic living in the largely segregated Yugoslav successor states.

“The Serbs have had a tough history. They are not guilty at all,” said Branka, 37, a Bosnian Serb from suburban Sarajevo who sells household goods at the open-air market in Pale. “The blame belongs to the Muslims and Croats.”

Who should answer for the war’s mass executions, the rapes, the wholesale burning of villages and the expulsions of neighbors whose only offense was being Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Muslim? Should the breakaway Bosnian Serbs shoulder a hefty portion of the blame?

“Nine of my relatives were burned alive by Muslims in their house in 1993, and only one of them survived,” Branka said with angry tears. “Who has the right to say who committed atrocities? America, just because it is so powerful?”

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Pose questions about responsibility and wartime guilt in Croatia, in Muslim-led Bosnia-Herzegovina or in Serbia and the responses are not very different; only the name of the despised culprit--Serb, Croat or Muslim--changes.

In a war ostensibly fought along religious divisions, many people in the crumbled remnants of what was Yugoslavia have not contemplated the intensely personal, moral dimensions of the bloodshed, nor do they wish to.

Some say it is too early for such appraisals; other say the issues are simply irrelevant on a centuries-old battlefield where current enmities follow a pattern of unresolved conflicts seething with unspeakable conduct.

Honest introspection, the sort of soul-searching that experts say is essential to healing and reconciliation, has been quashed by finger-pointing, blinding hatred and painful denial.

Nowhere in the Balkans has the post-World War II cry of moral indignation--”Never again!”--found a modern-day equivalent.

“No one is even asking these questions,” said sociologist Vesna Pesic, leader of the Civic Alliance of Serbia, an opposition party that was against the war from the start. “People do not feel responsibility for any of the bad things that happened. They still feel the need to seek revenge. It is happening on all sides.”

Pesic and others say the nature of the internecine Balkan conflict and its ignominious closure may have thrust a moral reckoning of the past four years beyond grasp, at least for a long time to come.

Unlike wars where the victor and vanquished were easily recognized and the moral high ground clear to defend, this war--and its peace--are rife with ambiguity and contradiction. No one side has been totally defeated, no one people demoralized and unequivocally condemned.

“Unfortunately, it seems history shows us that only some terrible shock brings moral consciousness to some people, such as the atomic bombs in Japan or the destruction of Dresden in Germany,” said Filip David, a Jewish author and anti-war activist in Belgrade, the capital of both the rump Yugoslavia and Serbia. “In this war, people still don’t understand what really has happened. And those who do know are too ashamed, so they remain silent.”

The public confusion, taken in the context of the past few years, is understandable, according to those who have followed public attitudes about the war.

Among them, Michael Williams, a former senior U.N. Protection Force official in Zagreb, said the authoritarian and nationalistic nature of governments in the Yugoslav successor states has made it difficult for everyday citizens to get an objective account of events.

Williams and others said good and evil have been blurred by the needs, politics and war objectives of the day.

As a consequence, virtue, Balkan-style, has been a relative--not absolute--quality. Yesterday’s enemy can be today’s ally, as was the case two years ago when the Muslim-Croat alliance was created, shifting a three-way war in Bosnia into a two-way battle.

State-run media on all sides have tailored information to support the official line, and--in many instances--the truth be damned.

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In Serbia, for example, many residents still have no idea that Bosnian Serbs held Sarajevo in a stranglehold for three years, because state-run television, the country’s main information source, did not report it, said Pesic, the Belgrade sociologist and opposition politician.

For many thoughtful residents, therefore, it has been difficult to know what to believe, said Serbian historian Aleksa Dilas--what one heard in the news or the whispers of one’s own conscience. Over time, the conscience can fall silent, lost in a barrage of disinformation and rhetoric. With independent voices underfunded and isolated, no unbiased arbiter has been able to set the record straight for the general public, he said.

“If you go to the doctor, and he tells you to amputate your arm or you will die, and you go to 20 specialists and they all tell you the same thing, you will amputate your arm,” Dilas said. “In the same way, the normal person turns on the TV and hears the same thing about the war, and they come to accept it. I don’t blame the everyday people for what has happened. They have been manipulated by the elites.”

The fate of the wartime political leadership is a case in point.

The man considered most responsible for stirring the pot of ethnic animosity that ultimately boiled out of control--Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic--has been embraced by the world as a peacemaker.

Once described by Time magazine as the “butcher of the Balkans” and “the high priest of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ” he is now positioned as the region’s guardian angel, shaking hands with President Clinton in Paris for the world to see.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, whose nationalistic rhetoric and policies before the war stoked smoldering fears among Serbs in Croatia about a revival of Croatian fascism, has successfully built a country virtually devoid of minorities.

His ethnically pure Croatia was achieved in large part by a massive wave of violent “ethnic cleansing” last summer in the Serb-held Krajina region. And he accomplished that with the military advice and tacit political consent of the United States.

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Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, whose Muslims are considered the biggest victims, has been left presiding over a country where rebel Serbs have been awarded almost half the territory. As compensation, the Americans--cast as moral arbiters in a moral minefield--have promised to further increase the powers of destruction in the region by beefing up Muslim armed forces.

“All the villains of this war have survived,” said Dilas, son of Yugoslavia’s most famous Communist-era dissident, the late Milovan Dilas. “And the Americans, while they haven’t sold their whole soul to the devil, at least sold part of it.”

All the while, two of the most nefarious players in the war, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, have been marginalized but remain in power.

Mladic basked in the international limelight this week as he handed over two missing French fighter pilots, shaking hands and exchanging kisses with France’s top military official, even though the two Bosnian Serb leaders are wanted by an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Bosnian Serb general, who has been linked to brutal massacres last summer in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, held a cocktail reception for French, Russian and Yugoslav military officials in a motel overlooking the Drina River--where he spoke glowingly of peace and justice as his guests politely listened.

“Can you imagine if, in 1942, the Allies made a peace deal with Hitler when Nazism had still not been defeated?” asked David, the Belgrade author. “We have a lot of little Hitlers with bad ideas still around. You have to defeat such ideas totally, and that did not happen here.”

For the first time since World War II, suspected war criminals, including Karadzic and Mladic, have been indicted by an international tribunal established to punish those responsible for the war’s darkest deeds.

Court officials say the indictments underscore the seriousness with which the world regards the moral aspects of the war, even if the issues are less clear-cut among the people who lived through the barbarism.

Yet, even at the strictly legal level in The Hague, the commitment has been lacking among the warring sides to confront questions of guilt and blame, court officials and legal experts say.

None of them--Croat, Serb or Muslim--has turned the indicted over to The Hague court, and cooperation has been so poor that only one of 52 accused war criminals so far faces trial, only because he was arrested in Germany.

Croatian scholar Zarko Puhovski, a professor of political philosophy and ethics at Zagreb University, said people have dismissed questions of war guilt because they mistakenly assume the issue is a collective, not individual, one.

Since few people are willing to entertain the thought of an entire nation shouldering the guilt of a few, they erroneously excuse those who in fact were responsible.

“Everyone believes Croatia is innocent, from the man in the street to the chief justice of the Supreme Court,” Puhovski said. “But the problem is: Everyone’s looking at collective guilt when they talk about individual guilt. Definitely, the Croatian state is not guilty. It can’t be blamed for the war, but this doesn’t mean Croats have the right to commit crimes.”

In the Pale marketplace, Branka choked back her anger and tears when the discussion turned to the question of individual responsibility.

Yes, she said after consideration, there were Bosnian Serbs who committed awful acts, and yes, they should be condemned and punished.

“It is not all right for anyone to commit atrocities,” she said. “But then, the Bosnian Serb people should not be blamed for what these individuals did.”

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Milorad Ekmecic, a prominent Bosnian Serb historian, said “it is high time” for issues of guilt--both individual and collective--to be confronted in the Balkans.

But Ekmecic, who has been accused by anti-war activists of promoting ethnic intolerance by asserting history made the fighting in Bosnia necessary, said even the best intentions will not overcome the powerful forces of the past.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, he said, has been sentenced to an indefinite term of religious unrest, making any meaningful moral reconciliation impossible because no religion is willing to cede moral ground to another.

“The story of us all living together beautifully in Sarajevo is a fairy tale for children,” said Ekmecic, whose writings have documented 14 civil wars in Bosnia between 1805 and 1945. “There has been religious intolerance on the part of all participants in this war. There has been no redemption, no kind of fulfillment of earlier dreams. . . . If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that this new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina has to collapse.”