Mijat Lakicevic, a Belgrade-based journalist, writing recently on the independent web portal Pescanik, put forward a provocative proposal.
“We should build a monument to the victims of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences,” he wrote.
Lakicevic is referring to the infamous Memorandum, a 1986 manifesto seen as promoting Serbian nationalism that was signed by a number of prominent Serbian academics. In the eyes of many, it marked the beginning of the drawing of ethnic lines in Yugoslav societies and served as a prologue to the wars of the 1990s.
His idea is in reaction to a serious initiative by Russia’s state-backed Sputnik media outlet to build a monument to the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia.
According to Lakicevic, it was the 1986 Memorandum that turned Serbs against their neighbors and, indeed, against the rest of the world.
“The harm done by that ideology [expressed in the Memorandum] is far greater than the damage caused by the war against NATO,” Lakicevic writes.
The wars that preceded the 1999 intervention led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of educated young people and incalculable economic loss -- “a national catastrophe,” according to Lakicevic. “And that is without even mentioning the evil wrought upon other [neighboring] peoples."
Lakicevic says he does not expect many public figures to back his proposal, which is what one might call an intellectual exercise rather than a serious proposal. He will certainly be unable to compete with the long list of prominent individuals, politicians, and celebrities supporting the Sputnik proposal, which is seen as an attempt by Moscow to further discourage Belgrade -- the Kremlin’s closest ally in the Balkans -- from pursuing closer ties with the West, including membership in NATO.
Apart from Prime Minister and now President-elect Aleksandar Vucic, who said that Serbia will “fulfill its duty toward innocent victims of aggression,” a number of public figures have pledged their support, including some signatories of the 1986 Memorandum. Serbian film director Emir Kusturica is one of the most outspoken supporters of the Sputnik initiative.
Kusturica said the proposed monument should “stand as a reminder that everything that befell the Serbian people in the last century was part of a project aimed at its destruction.”
Kusturica has been a vocal critic of the West and is a known cheerleader for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two years ago, he facetiously claimed that World War III would likely begin with the U.S. bombing of state-backed Russian TV channel RT, since it was “the only outlet challenging the spread of U.S. propaganda.”
It should be noted that there are already several monuments to victims of the NATO intervention in Belgrade and other Serbian cities, including the 30-meter-high Eternal Flame in Belgrade’s Friendship Park. Historian Ljubinka Trgovcevic fails to see the urgency behind erecting another one.
She also points out that no one involved in the Sputnik idea is mentioning the Albanian victims of the war.
“[Ethnic Albanian victims] are considered citizens of Serbia by the constitution, and yet they are excluded from outpourings of public empathy, which only shows this government’s hypocrisy,” Trgovcevic said in an interview with RFE/RL’s Balkan Service in Belgrade. “On the one hand, they continue to lay claim to Kosovo and its territory as part of Serbia, and on the other they do not count [ethnic Albanians], including those who died [as a result of NATO bombing] among the citizens who deserve to be honored. I see absolutely no reason for the monument, and I am decidedly against it.”
According to information gathered by the Humanitarian Law Center NGO, 758 people died during the NATO bombing campaign from March to June 1999. Of those, 453 were civilians, including 220 ethnic Albanians -- almost half of the total -- 202 Serbs, and 28 others. The majority of the victims (448), including military casualties, were killed on the territory of Kosovo.
The figures are based on almost 1,500 documents and more than 500 statements from witnesses and victims’ relatives.
The manipulation of historical memory for political gain is nothing new in the Balkans. What seems to have been forgotten in all public memorialization of the NATO intervention is the context of the confrontation with forces loyal to former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
NATO air strikes began on March 24, 1999, only after months of failed peace talks, broken promises by the Milosevic government, and, finally, a new wave of repression against ethnic Albanians by the Serbian military and police.
“No one can doubt the large-scale human rights violations, expulsions, and war crimes [perpetrated by the Serbian forces in Kosovo] -- all of which are ignored in this [Sputnik] initiative,”Jelena Krstic of the Humanitarian Law Center told RFE/RL.
Her response to Vucic’s statement that “Serbia is obliged to fulfill its duty” to the victims of the NATO bombing is that “we also have to show respect for the victims whose deaths we are responsible for.”
Trgovcevic sees the Sputnik initiative as a distraction from Serbia’s current problems.
“We have many other much more pressing problems, including high unemployment and the exodus of young people from this country, and yet we are dreaming up pharaonic monuments to serve the needs of those in power,” she laments.