Serbs Face Their Past, Dose of Truth at a Time

For years, Milos Vlaskovic thought he knew what happened in the predominantly Muslim Bosnian town of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.

“I’ve heard there was a fight between the units of two armies in which Serbian forces were far stronger, and that’s why far more Muslim soldiers died,” said Vlaskovic, 22, a third-year history student at Belgrade University.

When told that the generally accepted understanding of what happened in Srebrenica is that Bosnian Serb forces overran the town, seized thousands of men of fighting age and killed them, the relatively freethinking Vlaskovic replied: “This is the first time I have heard about this explanation. . . . If this really happened, I think it’s a war crime.”

With former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic imprisoned on corruption charges, the public here in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, is beginning to be exposed to a more self-critical--and less self-pitying--version of the bloody events of the past decade than what had been pumped out through his state-controlled media.

Those who struggled against Milosevic and the bloodletting as the Yugoslav federation disintegrated are finding new acceptance for their point of view and new opportunities to spread their understanding of events.

Despite growing intellectual ferment, however, there are still no signs of acceptance of personal responsibility among those who backed Milosevic or enthusiastically joined in his wars--and it is unclear whether that will ever come.

Even among those Serbs willing to address the issue of war crimes, many believe that their foes--Croats, Bosnian Muslims and the ethnic Albanians of Serbia’s Kosovo province--were equally guilty. Many also insist that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization committed war crimes by killing civilians during its 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, an air war that the alliance said was necessary to end Milosevic’s brutality against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

In an effort to open minds, the Center for Cultural Decontamination, long an incubator of liberal thought, last week presented the Belgrade premiere of “Snakeskin,” a play about the rape of a Bosnian Muslim woman by five soldiers. One of the rapists is named “Milos,” which identifies him as almost certainly a Serb.

“I have the name and I have the tribe,” a sympathetic Serbian character named Marta declares to the traumatized victim, who has been unable to speak. And, in a comment that can also be seen as directed at the audience, she goes on, “Why are you silent?”

To address the issues of guilt and responsibility, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has named members to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, still in its formative stages.

The body won’t have the sweeping powers of its South African namesake, which examined the crimes of apartheid and gave amnesty to those who testified truthfully before it. Critics question whether the Yugoslav panel will accomplish anything.

Independent Radio, TV Launch Documentaries

But some liberals and nationalists share the hope that the commission will contribute to a better understanding of the bloody ethnic conflicts in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo that erupted as Yugoslavia fell apart during Milosevic’s 13-year rule.

“A lot of Serbs don’t know what really happened, or those who know don’t want to accept it,” said Bratislav Grubacic, a prominent political commentator. “The main problem is that we still don’t have a proper atmosphere in the country for opening this very sensitive moral, emotional and political issue of war crimes.

“So a big job for the new authorities will be . . . individualizing the responsibility for those who really committed war crimes. Maybe the process against Milosevic would be a step toward this. But it will be a long process.”

In one of the widest-reaching projects started in the wake of Milosevic’s Oct. 5 fall from power and April 1 arrest on corruption charges, independent B-92 Television last week launched a prime-time weekly series examining the history of the wars waged under his rule. The first show was a powerful two-hour BBC documentary about the Srebrenica massacre.

On B-92 Radio, a weekly documentary called “Catharsis” carries views of victims and fighters from all sides in the wars of the past decade.

A key goal of the B-92 Radio and TV broadcasts is to provoke a wider debate “so that people feel this needs to be cleared up,” said Veran Matic, the network’s editor in chief. “We will try to tell people there is a lot of evil that should be disclosed, that things shouldn’t be reduced just to questions of financial corruption. We have to prove that the foundations themselves, the reasons to start these wars, were not right.”

Some people “think that Milosevic is guilty for losing these wars, not for waging them,” Matic added. “It will be very difficult to destroy this belief, but that is what we have to do.”

Matic’s point was reflected in a recent survey by Ipress, an independent polling agency, in which 18% of respondents said Milosevic’s worst crime was the loss of Serbian lands in Kosovo and Croatia. Kosovo technically remains a part of Serbia but has been under U.N. administration since mid-1999.

Just 11% of respondents thought that Milosevic should be sent to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face charges there. While 20% said he doesn’t belong in prison at all, 59% said he should be put on trial in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. About 40% said his worst crime was abuse of office, the charge for which he was arrested, which includes allegations of corruption.

Efforts to encourage Serbs to confront the wrongs committed in Kosovo under Milosevic have been further complicated by a recent outburst of violence by ethnic Albanian guerrillas in southern Serbia and neighboring Macedonia, Matic added.

“It’s an enormous problem,” he said. “People in Serbia these days say, ‘See, these Albanians are evil in general, and Milosevic was right.’ ”

Zoran Djuraskovic, 19, a first-year history student at Belgrade University, said he doubts that rebroadcasts of foreign documentaries will have much impact here.

“I personally think that if this was done by Western authors and by Muslims, this will not be much different from propaganda,” he said. “I think there will be some elements of truth to it, but I don’t think that these accounts they will broadcast will be completely truthful.”

Fellow student Vlaskovic said that for many of his more nationalistic peers, confronting new facts about crimes committed by Serbs will have no effect.

“I don’t think they will believe the facts,” Vlaskovic said. “Maybe some of them would even be delighted to hear that these things are true.”

A key problem is that schools have been pumping children’s heads full of “nationalism, hatred and xenophobia,” Matic said.

The Serbian Education Ministry is rushing to prepare revised history textbooks for the coming school year that will at least be less encouraging of extreme nationalism and ethnic hatred, and it aims to have completely rewritten textbooks ready for the following school year.

History textbooks not only distort events but also send children a “value message” about “the bad fate of the Serbian nation,” said Serbian Deputy Education Minister Tunde Kovac-Cerovic. “It’s a sad story about losses, about being doomed to being surrounded by enemies, a constant and unsuccessful fight for freedom.”

The drama students who performed “Snakeskin” are among those young people who figured out that much of what they were taught didn’t make sense.

“Over the past 10 years, we experienced lobotomy by our media,” said Sena Djorovic, 24, a senior at the Academy for Performing Arts in Novi Sad, who played the part of the rape victim. “It is difficult for us to face all the truth because we don’t know all the truth.”

Performance here of such a play “has a lot of significance,” said Jelena Helc, 23, another student at the academy, who played the role of Marta, the sympathetic Serbian woman. “In Belgrade, we are pronouncing this name ‘Milos’ as the name of a person who raped a Muslim girl. We wanted to show we are brave enough to face something, as I say in my lines, that is a part of our tribe.

“But we also don’t want to be equated with that. We want to mark a conclusion to things, finally after 13 years, and to show that we are not the people that Milosevic made us seem to be. We are normal and healthy and good people, like all other people, and among us are some who are bad, rotten, evil, sick, as much as in any other nation.”

A recent “Catharsis” show on B-92 Radio presented the views of two volunteers who fought on opposite sides in Vukovar in the autumn of 1991, the biggest battle of the Croatian war. They were interviewed separately, but they knew that their comments would be compared and contrasted.

“We were waging a war for an idea,” Zeljko Vasiljevic, a Serb who limps because of a leg injury from the fighting, said on the radio show. “We were not fighting for Slobodan Milosevic. Wrong policies on all three sides led to the war.”

Views on a War From Both Sides

Serbian fighters were also inflamed by media images that bombarded them every day of “a burned Serbian village, burned Serbian children. . . . There is not a man alive who can endure such pressure and behave like a normal person,” Vasiljevic explained.

Pavle Kalinic, a Croatian writer who lost a hand in the fighting and is a member of the Croatian parliament, said he is still not ready to forgive.

“We cannot reconcile with those who shot at us, who fired at Zagreb [the Croatian capital]. We did not bomb Belgrade,” Kalinic said.

“No forgiveness,” echoed Vasiljevic. “We should be those who remind the Serbs what the Muslims and Croats did to the Serbs and ensure that this is never forgotten.”

Although this might not sound like progress, some think it is.

“When you find yourself in this sort of collective mental disease, which I think that the Balkan nations were in at the beginning of the 1990s, I think that the best way to cure it is basically to do it with doses of truth,” said Grubacic, the political commentator. “It will take some time. Truth is the only good medicine for what happened here.”