Who is Responsible for War Crimes

Awakening of Intellectuals

AIM Podgorica, 14 July, 1999 (By AIM correspondent from Belgrade)

The obvious silence of Serb intellectuals about the crimes committed against Albanian population in Kosovo broken by just rare lonely voices was interrupted a few days ago by writers, members of the Serbian PEN Centre. In a statement signed by member of the Serbian Academny of Sciences and Arts Predrag Palavestra they demanded public naming and punishment of those responsible for crimes against children and civilian population because on the contrary "guilt and shame for that crime would fall on the entire Serb people".

It is not necessary to be very wise to realise who the call to assume responsibility was addressed to. It is not necessary to be especially ingenious either to suspect that the hands of the highest officials of this country are stained by the misdeeds that happened in Kosovo regardless of the fact that the ultimate perpetrators were hundreds of kilometres away from the place where the ominous idea was conceived about "permanent solution of the Albanian issue in case of NATO intervention". Perhaps just a little civil courage was needed for those who appear to be the wiser and therefrom presumably the more responsible part of this nation to speak out about that which others cannot or dare not even utter. Serb priests from Kosovo have already spoken about atrocities, mass evictions of the Albanian population, looting, systematic arson, destruction of property, demolition of Pec and places of execution where among numerous corpses majority are bodies of women and children.

This does not imply amnesty for the crimes committed by ethnic Albanians against Serb civilian population, but these are the questions of responsibility and conscience which the Albanian people and their intellectuals shuld deal with. Nor does this, of course, free of guilty those because of whom civilians in the cities of Serbia suffered, were wounded or killed during the NATO intervention, but these are the questions of guilt and responsibility which should be put by the public in countries which participated in bombing of Yugoslavia.

The wave of intellectuals' protests that started a few days ago is just an attempt to break the chain which ties the personal destiny of the ruler with the destiny of an entire nation that would instead to individuals, permanently impress the brand of guilt on an entire people. That is why, all over again, like during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, media environment was created in which lives the uninformed citizen, the ideal subject of a state which is always right, and a member of an innocent suffering people who is repeatedly a victim of others.

This citizen who knew nothing about murders in Vukovar, several-year long siege of Sarajevo, mass executions in Srebrenica, should have remained peacefully uninformed about the crimes against the Albanian civilian population in Kosovo. Certain intellectuals are trying to thwart this new attempt of delusion. The first to oppose this heavy, unjust and unrewarding burden of collective guilt which an average citizen with a clear consience is not even aware of were his compatriots who have the privilege of living far from transmitters of Radio-Television Serbia that are weaving the subtle net of delusion.

Among the first to speak out openly about it was the writer Bora Cosic who wrote about a people of million and a half in Kosovo "who were thrown out of their homes, massacred and killed". "Those directly guilty, those who ordered these crimes to be committed and those who committed these crimes should be punished", says this writer who has lived these past years in Berlin and Rovinj.

Architect Bogdan Bogdanovic used to say a long time ago that the Serbs should apologise to the Albanians, and writer Vidosav Stevanovic sends word from Paris that nationalism is the evil that caused banishment of the Albanians from Kosovo. Writers from the Serb Pen Centre continue what those who demand individualisation of guilt, public naming and punishment of those responsible for crime have started.

This is at the same time the voice of intellectual Serbia which is awakening again, which demands resignation of Slobodan Milosevic and withdrawal of key persons in the regime, which is one of the terminal phases in sobering up and a way towards awakening of the people itself from deep darkness of "ignorance of what is going on".

Personalisation of guilt has also finally been demanded by a traditional environment inclined towards ethnic demarcation and drawing of maps without paying any attention to consequences - the Serb Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU). At the annual convention of SANU, fifteen members who took the floor demanded withdrawal of the highest state leadership. Dobrica Cosic, who greatly esteemed Slobodan Milosevic in the early nineties ("he courageously devoted himself to revival of the Serb state and salvation of the Serb people from being enslaved and destroyed all over again"... "Slobodan Milosevic, according to my conviction, has done the most for the Serb people in the past five decades" and one of the "mouthpieces" of the idea about creation of a state "on its ethnic territories" which would "complete the struggle for liberation and union waged for centuries"), eight years after he had said this in Politika, uttered the following from the platform of the SANU gala hall:

"The beginning of political changes in the country should be resignation of the president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic. I appeal on the patriotic awareness, human and civic responsibility of Slobodan Milosevic to enable by his resignation the beginning of necessary changes in Serbia and the federal state". His ideological fellow-fighter from the time, Matija Beckovic ("Let the people decide by themselves where they want to go, even if they choose the worse. We know these limitations better than anybody else, and let Europe tell us only what it knows better than we do"), and who at the time did not know whether crypto-communists were in power, nowadays says: "Serbia which is eight years old has nothing in common with Hilandar or Kosovo. So it has not the right to either glorify Hilandar, nor has it the power to defend Kosovo". If we continue in the direction we have been going these past fifty years, "we have only two or three more steps to take...").

Voices of these members of the Academy are muffled like on previous occasions when similar questions were put at SANU conventions by arguments that the truth cannot be established "by somebody saying spontaneously what occurred to him at one moment" as Mihailo Markovic constantly repeated or by observations of Kosta Mihajlovic that replacement of the president and the regime is "the business of the people, not of SANU". That is how the announced proposal of the language and literature department was rejected to offer a text for adoption of a common stand of the Academy on political situation in Serbia, although majority of those who spoke at the convention had sharply criticised the current regime.

After this gathering, member of the Academy Dejan Despic says "that in the past few months we have been brought into a hopeless situation" and that he is convinced that "there is no salvation if the ruling team does not change". To the question whether Serb intellectuals can in this way help democratic changes in the country, Dejan Despic says: "If for no other reason, a man feels the urge to say somthing like that at least to save his soul".

About thirty odd composers and musicians also decided to "save their souls" by demanding that key personages from current authorities submit their resignations "as the initial and the mildest consequence of their abortive policy and unforgivable irresponsibility... We do not agree to life in isolation and misery, nor to the role of collective culprits for persecution, violence and crimes which seem to have been committed under the pretext of fighting against Albanian separatists and protection (we can very well see how successful it has been!) of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija... The atmosphere of victorious celebration of 'defended integrity and sovereignty' and prospects for a quick reconstruction of the country along with 'unity of the people and the regime' (which is now promoted in a primitive way via state media) is not only insulting for common sense, but reveals the inability of the ruling structures to face results of their own hazardous policy based on obsolete principles".

Although these voices of the intellecttual public are spreading, one cannot say that the process of naming those who are guilty will be easy and painless. One cannot say either that their end will be gay or comfortable. On the contrary. It will be trying and difficult, but it is possible to endure it in view of the relief which inevitably follows after that.

Slobodan Kostic

(AIM)