The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued its final indictments in 2004, and these were confirmed in 2005.¹ The remainder of the Tribunal’s activity consists in completing cases that have already begun and preparing for cases that have yet to begin. Prosecution is still being prepared against Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić, who were apprehended in 2011. In November 2008 the president and prosecutor of the Tribunal anticipated, provisionally, that trials should be completed in 2010 and appeals completed in 2011.² Clearly this did not happen, and the ICTY completion strategy is likely to be revised to...

There are obvious difficulties in describing the state of readiness in Serbian society to engage with questions of the recent past and responsibility for it just after the change of regime on 5 October 2000. Processes were not only ongoing, but might also be perceived as having been just at their beginning, at least as far as large-scale public opinion is concerned. But any kind of explanation of the development of public opinion needs a starting point. This study takes as its starting point the moment at which it was possible to engage in discussion free of overwhelming constraint.

It...

The previous chapter indicated that public opinion surveys offer at best a mixed view of the state of public opinion just after the end of the Milošević regime. Part of the reason for this may be that opinion was in fact mixed, as could be expected in a period when a strongly ideologized form of control of information was coming to an end, and when uncertainty remained regarding what might follow. Another part of the reason may be that opinion was still in formation, just as political institutions and the parties and movements that would influence them were also in...

As long as the Miloševć regime controlled most media in Serbia, denial and claims of victimization were the most generally available perspectives on guilt. In other countries of the former Yugoslavia, rejection of the possibility that crimes were committed constituted, at least for some people, an essential part of national identity and national pride.¹ Two weeks after Slobodan Miloševč was sent to face trial in The Hague, ICTY presented the government of neighboring Croatia with indictments against two army generals, Rahim Ademi and Ante Gotovina. After a bitter political debate, the government accepted the indictments and agreed that the accused...

Never popular among the public and despised by the nationalist right and the remnants of the Milošević regime, Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjić became the object of a sustained smear campaign after he ordered the transfer of Slobodan Milošević to ICTY. It became common to find him described in the press as a traitor, together with accusations that he collaborated with international intelligence services and criminal organizations. For his part Djindjić ignored his detractors, claiming, “I did not take this position in order to be popular. I came here to complete a historical task, to bring order to Serbia, and...

Evidence from the “moments” that have been discussed here indicate that incidents that could have been revelatory turned out, for a whole complex of reasons, to be inconclusive. The arrest and extradition of Milošević permitted a set of issues to be introduced, but mostly sketched out the lines dividing participants. The murder of Zoran Djindjić appeared to confirm long-suspected links between war crimes, political crimes, and crime committed for more customarily criminal reasons. But a set of decisions at crucial moments by politicians and police meant that prosecutors concentrated on operational details of the killing rather than the structure of...

Many examples of denial discussed in the last chapter relate specifically to the large-scale organized killings that followed the conquest of Srebrenica in 1995. The crime has taken on an emblematic character, serving as a shorthand for the ways armed force was directed against civilians, the coordination between military and paramilitary forces, and the parallel processes of development and denial of evidence. This emblematic character has its critics: Srebrenica was not the only crime in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the only place where crimes occurred. In Serbia a broad current of belief regards the emphasis on Srebrenica as tendentious,...

The previous chapters examined three “moments” that had an element in common. They revealed something about the recent past and about continuity with power structures in the present. What they revealed was often, for various interested actors, threatening, and had to be covered over. Sometimes questions were covered over by denial, sometimes by altering the context, sometimes by trivialization. But in each case protecting people engaged with the past required a refinement of the discourse, maintaining its longevity while at the same time demonstrating its fundamental fragility.

Some events revealed little beyond the extent to which the public was divided....

The process of transitional justice is predicated on some assumptions that are inarguably noble, if a bit tormented in practice: that truth leads to justice, justice to catharsis, and catharsis to reconciliation. Put another way, it represents an attempt to use the instruments of law to produce consequences on the level of politics, and to expect developments in politics to catalyze processes on the level of culture. It is not surprising that not all these assumptions work perfectly. These are predictable difficulties arising from an effort to treat social practices and interactions as though they operate in a mechanistic fashion...