Jasmina Tešanović: Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide

by Jasmina Tesanovic, photo by Bruce Sterling.

Once again, Serbia is on the front pages of the world press. Serbia is
off the hook. The Hague has ruled that the Serbian nation is not
directly responsible for the genocide in Bosnia. Genocide didn't
happen in Serbia, the genocide existed only in Srebrenica, in those
three days of execution and burial of eight thousand people.

I am split over this bad and good verdict. For twenty-four hours I've
been talking on my B92 interactive blog with people from all over the
world who fear/ hope/ know what this Hague tribunal sentence means…
for us and everyone else.

It's a precedent for the rest of the dirty-wars in the world, which
now exist in such plenty. It is the first time in history that an
international court of war crimes has declared a country both NOT
GUILTY of genocide and yet also guilty of NOT preventing a
genocide… bad and good news together.

(continued after the jump)

The former regime of the late Slobodan Milosevic is not found
guilty of genocide. His loud followers will do nothing to arrest
those outside the regime, those who were clearly guilty: Ratko Mladic,
Radovan Karadzic and many other anonymous police and military. If it
had not been for this rainy windy weather in Belgrade, we would have
eager demonstrations of support for the Bosnian war criminals, who
have successfully hidden themselves from the world for eleven long
years and are treated as national heroes.

The special military group Scorpions from Serbia, who took part in
the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide, whose trial I have been following
for a year, have also not been found not guilty — at lest, not of
genocide. These days we are waiting in Belgrade for their sentence in
a lesser matter, the proven killings of seven minors: Muslim
civilians.

The Mothers of the Srebrenica dead are protesting in Hague
against the verdict, accusing Serbs, Bosnians, USA… any and all
those who used legalities or scientific technicalities against the
obvious … the heartbreaking silence of their dead.

I wonder if tables have turned somehow. Serbia doesn't even
have to pay war reparations to Bosnia. The state is required to do
only official thing: to declaration for, the historical record, that
Serbia regrets that genocide somehow occurred.

The President of Serbia Boris Tadic says that he respects the
seriousness of this demand, and wants to pass a resolution in the
newly elected Parliament… but this country is yet without
government, even more new elections are being mentioned… This
country is still dead set against Kosovo independence; tomorrow in
front of the US embassy a big rally is planned… This confused and
spiteful country has no sense in putting aside the past as the only
way of dealing with its future. If, only a couple of years ago, the
Serbian Parliament had passed such a sensible declaration, none of
this would have happened.

In 1961, Hannah Arendt followed the trial of Nazi officer
Eichmann in Jerusalem, and wrote a book called the Banality of Evil.
At the end of the road her worst literary enemies were the Zionists
who opposed her bitterly for ever considering a war criminal as a
human being, a topic of political and moral interest, a defendant with
human rights.

But Hannah was right, these things and these people must be
faced, and not allowed to haunt us in their self-created banality and
obscurity. I am between relief and guilt: relief for being off the
hook as a Serb living in Serbia, and guilt for knowing that, at the
time, considerations of genocide were of no consequence to us.
Mladic may have not been a direct agent of the Serbian government, but
he was given a pension by our government.

Kostunica stoutly
protected the military, the secret police, the right-wing armed action
groups that disintegrated into a dense haze of assassins, mafiosi,
gangsters and common crooks.

If Mladic and Karadzic had been disowned and arrested in time,
Serbia would not have richly earned its historical role of the Judas
goat of modern genocide. We didn't have to be this badly off.

And yet, it seems we're not that badly off, after all. We're
not guilty.

It's good and bad news.

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Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

– Carnival of Ruritania
– "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
– Faking Bombings
– Dispatch from Amsterdam
– Where are your Americans now?

– Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
– Slaughter in the Monastery

– Mermaid's Trail

– A Burial in Srebenica
– Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
– To Hague, to Hague