ABSTRACT
In September 1990, sitting in his Sarajevo apartment quaffing plum brandy, the future leader of the Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadžić speculated with dark foreboding about the escalating tension in Yugoslavia. Addressing a Western journalist, he depicted a people still haunted by the legacy of the murderous oppression they had experienced at the hands of the collaborationist Croatian Ustaša in the Second World War. ‘Serbs here are ready for war. If someone forces them to live as a national minority, they are ready for war. This nation remembers well the genocide. The memory of those events is still a living memory, a terrible living memory. The terror has survived fifty years.’ 1 There could be no more pellucid illustration of how participants in the conflicts in former Yugoslavia ubiquitously and insistently framed them with reference to historical rivalries, injustices and trauma. Numerous external commentators accepted the claims of nationalist demagogues at face value and consequently represented these wars as historically determined, almost natural phenomena in a region inhabited by exotic primitives in thrall to primordial hatreds and a cyclical history of vicious blood-letting. 2 Such caricatural views did not find much favour in scholarly work, which instead devoted considerable effort not only to unravelling the ‘Balkanist’ Western prejudices that underpinned them but also to elaborating more sophisticated interpretations of the origins and nature of the Yugoslav wars. 3 While rejecting determinism, and often struggling to gauge its precise significance as a variable, these alternative explanations nonetheless generally accepted that ‘memory mattered and exercised power’ in former Yugoslavia. 4 From this point of departure, the following essay offers a necessarily schematic discussion of some of the interconnections between memory, identity and war in the modern Balkans. 5
