WIDENING OF THE BREACH IN THE HISTORY OF THE VICTORS

Why is the National Party of Montenegro insisting on national and civil reconciliation

Summary: The strongest opposition party in Montenegro offered a Declaration on National Reconciliation which is also to be discussed by the Montenegrin parliament, although other parties are not in favour of such an initiative. Is the aim of the National Party to reconcile the living or to rehabilitate the dead - those who in World War II were on the side of the Chetniks. The ruling party reproves the "nationals" for, by reopening the almost forgotten wounds and divisions they play into the hands of the West which "would have us on our knees". How does Bojovic, Vice-President of the National Party explain its intentions. The discussions that are going on today in the public concerning this initiative show that the past is not easily buried, and even less easily altered.

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As it slowly "covered ground", the Assembly of Montenegro at its four-day long session held in late June and early July did not manage to get as far as the eighteenth item of the Agenda concerning the Draft Declaration on National and Civil Reconciliation and Religious Tolerance, behind which is the National Party of Montenegro (NSCG). Still, the leader of the "nationals" Dr. Novak Kilibarda opened the debate on the opening day of work of the Montenegrin Parliament, but not at the session, but on the Montenegrin seacoast, in Majine, near Budva, during a service dedicated to killed Chetniks, at which the Bishop for Montenegro and the Coast - Amfilohije- officiated in person.

"At the time the Declaration on National and Civil Reconciliation is being rejected in Montenegro, when the party in power refuses to recognize that the Chetniks, as the Royal Army in the homeland, were fighters for the holy cross and golden freedom and members of the anti-fascist coalition in the Second World War, it is necessary to remind the mislead that there can never be spiritual peace for the Serbian people as long as the fighters for the King and homeland are considered traitors, while communists are considered patriots and liberators", said Dr. Kilibarda, pointing out that their aim is not "revenge, but reconciliation and forgiving, guided by the holy word of the Gospel, and the teachings of his Holiness the Serbian Patriarch Pavle and the night-and-day concern of his Reverence, the Bishop Amfilohije".

A fierce "non-parliamentary" counter-attack of unconverted communists from the SK-PJ (League of Communists

• Movement for Yugoslavia) for Montenegro ensued. "The political space of the National Party is ever more evidently, through the behaviour of its leader, a communist dissident for that matter, becoming disgraced by endeavours to rehabilitate the foulest servants of the occupying power during the Second World War", said the frontman of the Montenegrin section of SK-PJ Ratko Krsmanovic, adding that it is "beyond any reason and morality to proclaim the torturers vicitms, and vice versa". He also warned that "communists and other honourable citizens of Montenegro would no longer calmly countenance this outrage and obvious desire for revenge because of the defeat and cowardice of the quisling forces".

The string was thus stretched to the ultimate limits of endurance , so that instead of a yielding atmosphere a new sharpening of ideological axes is anticipated. However, the threatening tone from the statements of the communist leader is not prevailing in the critical observations of other political parties, but these too do not lack resoluteness.

Just before the session of the Assembly of Montenegro which was to discuss the Declaration, the Government of Montenegro assessed that there was no need or basis for the adoption of such a document, since its purpose has already been attained, in whole and individually, through the Republican Constitution. The Assembly Committee for the Political System had a similar standpoint, with the intention to underline that the reconciliation has already been carried out through the concept of the civil state, and that there was no need "to stick a thorn into a healthy leg".

The President of Montenegro and of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, Momir Bulatovic, speaking at the election conference of the DPS of Podgorica, took advantage of that opportunity for an accusation that the return to stories of Chetniks, partisans and national reconciliation was, more or less, a conscious attempt at pulling us "into an awful arena of mutual misunderstandings, divisions, nationalism and all that which is still more or less clearly discernible behind these stories of God-pleasing national reconciliation".

A man with the same surname as the president, member of the top leadership of DPS, Predrag Bulatovic, also held it against the National Party that it "was directly playing into the hands of Western factors which want us on our knees and divided", decisively concluding that DPS "does not want to change the past nor to judge it, and especially not to alter or reshape the history recognized by the world."

The "nationals" Declaration on national and civil reconciliation met with critical reserve on the part of both the Montenegrin liberals and socio-democrats - parties which also derive their policy from the traditions of the Montenegrin left and anti-fascism. An article published in the paper of the Liberal Union of Montenegro "Liberal", called the National Party a "classical right and nationalistic party" which is all the more dangerous as it is "active in an unorganized state", while its idea on national and civil reconciliation is qualified as a "Chetnik plot" which was "seen through even by deranged partisan - delegates". However, in their more pretentious reactions neither the liberals nor the socio-democrats negated the emancipatory intention of the idea on reconciliation, but stressed that the National Party was not a "peace maker" which would, here and today, speak about that without any hidden intentions. Therefrom the warning of the Vice-President of the Socio-Democratic Party of Montenegro, Mihajlo Vujosevic, that the intention of the "nationals" was not to reconcile the living, but rather to re-evaluate the past, disregarding in the process what really happened in history.

"Democracy can be achieved only in a civil society, only with dispassionate national aspirations. This war started with the digging up of graves, and we can pay them due respect only if we leave them alone. Life cannot be built on necrophilia" says Vujosevic.

Is really necrophilia in question or does the NSCG truly wish that Montenegro function in the future as as harmonic social community? Why did it occur to the National Party precisely at this moment to urge the Montenegrins to reconciliation and harmony, and is not behind this lofty aim hidden their true intention - to reevaluate the history of World War II in this territory, i.e rehabilitate the quislings? Do the "nationals" wish to sprinkle everything with "snow, rosemary and flowers" as a pledge of future peace and tolerance or do they want to start widening the breach in the minds of the victors and their descendents by blood or idea, and once, at a favourable moment, turn history around by 180 degrees.

"The National Party of Montenegro has come out with the Declaration on National Reconciliation, primarily guided by Christian motives of mutual forgiving. The forming and lasting of a state, of a democratic order and law is built over centuries, and one of the main driving forces in that process is national reconciliation in the times following civil wars and ideological schisms. Where there is no reconciliation, old divisions engender new ones, the Manichean struggle between the kingdom of light and darkness continues, of struggle between the red and the black, the white and the green, the cockade and the five-pointed star. In such an environment where only victors and traitors exist, those who hold politically different views never achieve full legitimacy, which means the blocking of all roads leading to democracy, as an ideal of political aspirations" - says Dr Bozidar Bojovic, Vice-President of the National Party of Montenegro, explaining the essence of the document on reconciliation.

The "nationals" are, despite boasting that among their ranks there are many whose ancestors were partisans, the repositories of a political awareness which bases its anti-communism on the anti-communism of the Chetniks.This road leads to the stance that the Chetniks were anti-fascists who were, due to the wrong tactics of the Allies and their failure to make an invasion in the Balkans, burdened with the mortgage of traitors. The National Party calls to its aid "objective, non-ideologized historiography" which catches the partisans also in the role of collaborationists, but both parties in the role of fighters against fascism.

The fact that the Chetniks and partisans fought among themselves - is a matter of different ideological orientations and of the ideological limitations of the understanding of patriotism. Now, from a distance of fifty years, the "nationals" want that to be accepted as inevitable in a time of trouble and instilled into the collective conscience of the citizens of Montenegro by the Declaration on National Reconciliation. As a party which has, with the assistance of the Bishopric of Montenegro and the Coast, taken on "to renew Serbian awareness in Montenegro", the National Party is additionally anxious to rehabilitate the Chetniks and that is why the Chetnik movement is most frequently linked to Serbdom in Montenegro. They believe that the "renewal of a Serbian awareness" would have much better chances if the stigma of traitors were removed from the Chetniks.

The preliminary debate in the Assembly of Montenegro, held at the end of March at Cetinje, as well as subsequent rections to the MSCG initiative, have shown that is not easy to bury the past and that is even more difficult to refashion history at a moment when its fires warm ones and burn others. It is therefore realistic to fear that insistence on national reconciliation, which implies an equalization in value of movements opposed in the past, could lead to new conflicts rather than to an Arcadian land of love and harmony. Especially in Montenegro because a new polarization between "one hundred percent Montenegrins" on the one side and "the best Serbs" on the other, has grafted itself on the old enmity between the Chetniks and the partisans.

Dusko VUKOVIC

AIM Podgorica