Dealing with the contested past in Serbia: decontextualisation of the war veterans memories

This article addresses the protracted process that took place following the wars of the 1990s through which the war veteran populations in Serbia were fragmented, alienated and marginalised. The main assumption in this paper is that gaining control over the veteran populations was a crucial step in silencing any public reckoning with the nation's criminal past. Drawing on the case study of the top-down reframing of the war veterans' memories, I show that the most effective strategy was found to be first to fragment the veteran population and then to encourage them to de-contextualise and reframe their memories replacing concrete historical suffering with abstract remembrance. This resulted in the reinstitution of Serbia's former national narrative of Serbian victimisation. It is suggested that the Serbian case of collective memory reconstruction after the wars of the 1990s is a prime example of how post-conflict states may mediate their contested past in order to bridge the gap between domestic demands and those of the international community.