Osservatorio sui Balcani was created in the year 2000, following the demand for knowledge and debate raised by individuals, associations and institutions which had been working to promote peace and cohabitation in the Balkan region. The answer to the challenge posed by the broader Italian civil society, which had been active in former Yugoslavia all along the wars of the nineties, was provided by the Italian region of Trentino.

This northern Italian area has a long and consolidated tradition of peace and war studies, which has been expressed through the creation of important institutions such as the Fondazione Opera Campana dei Caduti and the Trentino Forum for Peace and Human Rights (founders of the Osservatorio sui Balcani), the Historical Museum of War and The Historical Museum in Trento.
Thanks to the support of the Secretariat to International Solidarity of the Autonomous Province of Trento, and of the Municipality of Rovereto, since 7 years Osservatorio sui Balcani is active in Rovereto as a cultural laboratory on the Balkans, Turkey, and the Caucasus, and on the cooperation activities between Italy and these countries.

Those who had promoted the creation of Osservatorio had clear in mind that the Yugoslav wars were not a mere Balkan question but were directly inter-related with the European history: the twentieth century was ending with a genocide, just as it had begun.

With this year’s annual conference, “Bad memories”, Osservatorio returns to the issue of war in Europe through a survey on the sites and places of memory, introduced by the documentary of Andrea Rossini “Circle of memory”, produced in the frame of a project of the European Union, which is also supporting this conference.

During the journey which brought us from the production of the documentary to the organization of this conference, we could reflect on the broader issue of memory in Europe, following the disastrous failure of the slogan “Never again” declared after World War Two. Our journey has led us all through the XX century in Europe, following the paradigmatic example of Yugoslavia.

Visiting some of the main World War Two Memorials in the Balkans brought us to discover the extraordinary experience of a group of architects and sculptors who, in the Yugoslavia of the ‘60s and ‘70s, had expressed in completely original forms the issue of representing the past and the victory over Nazi-fascism.

Tito’s Yugoslavia had given much importance to remembering World War Two. Many political and intellectual energies were invested in the building of thousands of monuments and Memorial sites in the whole country, celebrating the great partisan epic and the project of building a new society. Tito’s communist regime had not been imposed thanks to the Soviet tanks, but following a victorious war of national liberation.

On the other side, World War Two in the Balkans had not only been a war of liberation, but also a civil war. Trying to forget this tragedy, Tito’s regime had founded the building of the country on the slogan of “brotherhood and unity”, promoting the idea that the communists were the only political group able to overcome the wounds caused by foreign imperialists and internal traitors of all ethnic groups.

But these were not only public policies adopted by the regime to legitimate its political project. In the Yugoslav society itself there was a strong need and request for Memorial sites. World War Two had indeed taken the lives of over one million people, and survivors showed continuously the need for places of private and public mourning.

Where the regime had been hesitating, civil society had organized demanding the building of Memorials. The most important case we have focused on is that of Jasenovac. As the historian Heike Karge highlights, “the Flower of Cement” of Bogdan Bogdanović represented an answer of the regime to the needs expressed by survivors and relatives of the victims of one of the biggest extermination camps in Europe, building a Memorial site after many years of oblivion.

The official narrative of World War Two aimed at emphasizing the ethnic balance between victims and executioners, but in places like Jasenovac this interpretation diverged with history and local memories. At Jasenovac, the victims of Croat Ustashi had not only been Jews, Roma and political opponents, but most of all Serbs. The building of a giant cement flower presented the regime with a great opportunity not only to commemorate but also to somehow overcome what had happened in that place.

However, although the pressure of civil society had come to surface in places such as Jasenovac, not everyone had the possibility to mourn. The defeated had no space for expression, and it was not to be expected that the regime recognize their sufferings. The official historiography, educating generations of students and visitors of War Museums, presented only brave partisan heroes and cruel foreign and internal enemies, towards whom no compassion was to be showed.

When the crisis of the communist system became irreversible, memories of the defeated came back to the scene. The official World War Two narrative, with its blank pages, once the system which had created it started to collapse, became the subject of furious public debate. Unfortunately, the revisiting of Yugoslav historiography did not open new democratic spaces but served as a tool to justify new violence.

The scholars taking part to the first session of this conference will therefore contribute to the discussion on the role of the communist regime in hampering the political evolution of the post-war Yugoslav generations. These, in fact, were not allowed to elaborate an independent outlook on the past and, without instruments of critic at their disposal, they ended up accepting pre-defined identities which are, as underlined by Rada Iveković, potentially murderous. (1)

Starting from the eighties, the ruling classes of the Republics, determined to divide the country, started to use the memory of the war to stir up resentment for the evil suffered in the past, and to raise the fear for its possible repetition. Instead of bringing to the public discussion the pages that the communist regime had left blank, this operation contributed to reactivate the past traumas.
Using fear as a tool, thousands of people were mobilized to bring “war at home” (2), lined up one against the other on the basis of ethnic belonging. The control and manipulation of the media made civil society particularly vulnerable and helpless before the nationalist forces.

The Yugoslav experience continues to raise important questions about our current condition. Back then ethnic cleansing meant radically denying cultural diversity. Today, Europe seems unable to confront the challenges presented by a multicultural society. These days, the Italian public debate has been focusing on the issues of citizenship and migration following a wave of xenophobia stirred up by the media.

In Italy, until today, media campaigns based on the fear of the aliens did not have dramatic consequences thanks to the political and economical stability and thanks to the strength of local civil society, which has a sixty year-long tradition of participation.

However, the public sphere of a democratic country is not invulnerable. In the past few years we have experienced how the public use of history, also in Italy, can result in an obstacle to a serene critical review of World War Two's historiography. To guarantee an open debate which could allow reconciliation, the understanding of each other’s reasons, the acceptance of responsibilities and persecution of crimes, still represents an open challenge.

The research which we have conducted through the documentary has been focusing also on the transformation of the Memorial areas of World War Two in Yugoslavia and on the rewriting of history during and after the wars of the nineties. Taking also into consideration the fact that some of those sites, through time, had also become sites of memory of the communist system which had created them.

As a consequence of the central role those sites had acquired during Yugoslav history, those monuments were targeted during the nineties, damaged or simply abandoned if their structure and dimensions did not allow their demolition. In Mostar, the iconoclastic fury directed towards the symbols of the past in the end resulted also in the destruction of the symbols of Ottoman history.

After the end of Yugoslavia, the issue of commemorating victims and heroes of the new wars re-emerged once again. The nationalist governments of the nineties somehow reiterated the attitude of the communist regime, imposing one narration of history and silencing all alternative versions.
However, today no one can guarantee the monopoly of public truth, and the quest for remembering is expressed in diverging forms. Together with the growing temptation to forget the responsibilities for the wars which brought to the end of Yugoslavia, there are significant drives to confront the past in a critical manner and to build new Memorial sites.

In our second panel, therefore, we will discuss with the representatives of some of the most important documentation centres on the wars of the nineties the possibility of making available information useful for a historic review of the past free from ideological manipulations. The post World War Two experience leads to assign a greater importance to the collection of data, especially in those areas where the narrations of recent wars are conflicting.

The research conducted through the documentary has also highlighted the struggle of those who are asking for a place to bury and mourn the dead, recalling the international community to its own responsibilities. Once again, the need to commemorate is often interrelated to the wish that violence may not be repeated. However, the risk of raising new illusions remains high.

We still have a long road in front of us to promote a new political culture based on the denial of war as an instrument to solve national and international conflicts. Just how the communist regime had glorified the war of liberation, the nationalist forces keep on considering war as an instrument of emancipation, though of a different nature. This is the reason why we will also discuss how local public opinions are confronting the issue of the wars of the nineties.

In the final round table, we wish to underline once more the need to bring the Balkan Europe firmly inside the political project of European integration. Indeed, within that historic process of overcoming war by building a common political space, something that the Cold War had made impossible.
The speakers of the last session of our conference hold public roles at local, national and European level. With their contribution we would like to critically examine the main issues that challenge the achievement of this aim.

The end of Yugoslavia raised important questions such as: how was it possible to overcome an authoritarian political system replacing it with an apparently anachronistic project, aimed at the construction of Nation-States? Actually, the experience of the last European enlargements showed us that also the old member states do not renounce easily to their sovereignty and hardly overcome the nation-state perspective thus slowing down the birth of a Political Europe.

Concerning the Southeastern Enlargement, the fears towards unrestrained migratory flows and the political instability, which characterises the new post-communist member states, lately prevailed.
Despite the predominance of economic and legal-bureaucratic features, the European integration process remains a fundamental political perspective for the Balkans. Thanks to it, in the recent years, some of the countries of the region have made important steps ahead in the democratization process.

Starting from the Balkan experience, we wish to discuss the possibility for Europe to exist without a shared memory. Can one claim that the construction of a Political Europe needs a sense of belonging to a shared historical, social and cultural process upon which to found its legal and social civilization? And which spaces, sites, and squares can contribute to construct an identity where five hundred millions Europeans can recognise themselves?

The relation between the past and the present always brings about new challenges. As the renowned historian Zvetan Todorov notes: «The obsessive repetition of “never again” after the First World War did not prevent the break out of the Second one. To hear the detailed narrations of past sufferings of one side or the heroic resistance of the other might warn us against Hitler and Pétain, historical figures of World War Two, but may lead us to ignore current dangers - since these narrations neither threaten the same people, nor show the same features. The past becomes the curtain that shadows the present, instead of revealing it and becomes a justification for inaction». (3)

Therefore, besides exiting from the obsessive circle of memory, we should deconstruct the architecture of a memory worn out by rethorics and ask ourselves how to build up a memory for the future. The aim of Osservatorio sui Balcani is to contribute to the elaboration of European conflicts in order not to fear them.


FOOTNOTES:
(1): Rada Ivekovic (1995), La Balcanizzazione della ragione, Roma: Manifestolibri
(2): From the title of the book about the dissolution of Yugoslavia by Luca Rastello (1998), La guerra in casa, Torino: Einaudi
(3): Zvetan Todorov (2007), 'Gli usi della memoria', Quaderno di Relazioni Internazionali, n. 4, Aprile, p.13