Memories and Narratives of the 1999 NATO Bombing in Serbia

This article analyses how NATO’s bombing of Serbia has been officially commemorated in that country. Initially, it provides an overview of the commemorations performed between 2000 and 2013, covering both the commemorative practices and policies of leading Serbian politicians and alternative voices. The focus then turns to the fifteenth anniversary of the bombing in 2014. Just as in previous commemorations, there was no central ceremony, but, rather, a series of commemorative events held all over the country. The controversies that these aroused are then discussed, in particular those surrounding the commemoration of Radio Television Serbia’s employees and the spontaneous commemorative acts that took place in Serbian schools. Marija Mandić is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, and a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018) at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin. ‘– How did the bombing affect you? – Well, after it, and particularly after I experienced a three-ton bomb dropped on Straževica Hill in Belgrade, when I thought I was going to die, I decided to marry my long-term boyfriend.’ (From my conversation with Eve Ann Prentice, war correspondent for The Times) Theoretical Framework: the Politics of Memory, Discourse, and Media The connection between social groups and collective memory has been the starting point for memory research in the modern humanities ever since Maurice Halbwachs argued that every memory is carried by a specific social group, limited in space and time.1 The politics of memory, however, is concerned with 1 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective. Ouvrage posthume publié par Mme Jeanne Alexandre née Halbwachs, Paris 1950 [1925]; Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History. Problems of Method, The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997), 1386-1403, 1392. Südosteuropa 64 (2016), no. 4, pp. 460-481 MEMORIES AND NARRATIVES OF THE 1999 NATO BOMBING 461 Official Commemoration of the NATO Bombing the role politics has in shaping collective memory. It is reflected in the ways historical events are represented by politicians, talked about in governmentcontrolled media, or transmitted through the school system.2 The present article focuses specifically on commemoration as a form of remembrance. According to Assmann, cultural memory is memory which has periodically stabilized with the help of anniversaries and which can thus extend over a very long period. Commemoration is also an opportunity for collective re-staging: communities of memory make use of commemorations to represent themselves in the way they would like to see themselves—in the way they aspire to be.3 Paul Connerton stresses the interrelationship: ‘If there is such a thing as social memory, I shall argue, we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies; but commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative only in so far as they are performative; performativity cannot be thought without a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought without a notion of bodily automatisms.’4 As this article analyses commemorative ceremonies and discourses, I will outline the basic theoretical assumptions I have adopted. My understanding of ‘discourse’ comes from Michael Foucault, who takes the rules of the formation of discourse to explain the ways in which societies and groups constitute forms of subjectivity, knowledge, social practices, institutions, and power relations, and vice versa.5 Since critical social theory maintains that discourse and society constitute one another, it criticizes the abuses of power that are reflected, constructed and legitimized via discourse.6 The concept of ‘discursive strategy’, which is also used in this article, denotes a more or less accurate plan adopted to achieve a certain political, psychological or other kind of objective.7 Theorizing about the social context in which a commemorative discourse has been produced brings us to a thorny question: could Serbia in the post-bombing period be described as a traumatized society? In existing academic writing, it 2 Cf. Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge 2011; Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee, Frankfurt 1993; Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, München 2006. 3 Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 230. 4 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge, New York 1989, 5. 5 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, New York 1972, 38. 6 Cf. Teun van Dijk, Critical Discourse Analysis, in: Deborah Tannen / Deborah Schiffrin / Heidi E. Hamilton, eds, Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Oxford 2001, 352-371; Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, London 1989; Norman Fairclough / Ruth Wodak, Critical Discourse Analysis, in: Teun van Dijk, ed, Discourse Studies. A Multidisciplinary Introduction, vol. 2: Discourse as Social Interaction, London 1997, 258-284. 7 Ruth Wodak et al., The Discursive Construction of National Identity, Edinburgh 2009, 31.