Good morning! Thirty years have passed since the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thirty years since the deepest moral and civilizational collapse that our area has experienced in the modern age. And instead of welcoming that anniversary as a mature, self-confident community that knows where it stood, what it suffered and what responsibility it had – we wake up in a distorted reality.
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Montenegro and 30 years since the war that killed Yugoslavia
Today, we are closer to 1994 than to 1997. And 1997 was the year in which Montenegro clearly broke away from the Great Serbian nationalist project, refused to go all the way with Milosevic, and began to take steps towards its own independent future.
Today? The state apparatus – from the top of the government to culture and education – is increasingly working on revising the 1990s. Not only the role of the DPS, which is legitimate, is being re-examined, but also the very direction in which Montenegro went from Djukanovic’s removal in 1997 to the referendum in 2006. In that process of reexamination, the narrative of corruption becomes an alibi—a smokescreen meant to obscure the deeper intention to reprogram Montenegro. To make it something other than what it was—to undo its emancipation, to downplay its exit from the war and the catharsis we went through in order to build relationships of trust with our neighbours.
And that’s why we collectively get confused today when a date like the Dayton Agreement comes around. What exactly are we marking? The end of the war? The beginning of a dysfunctional state architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Or a compromise that was justified by peace, but kept within itself all the injustices that the war produced?
When respect for the Croatian victory in 1995 is expressed today in Montenegro, we hear accusations of insensitivity. Why? Because we allegedly do not respect the fate of Serbian refugees and victims. And why is it impossible to say at the same time that Croatia waged a war of liberation, and that the Serbs in Croatia were victims, but primarily of politics from Belgrade? Why do we keep returning to the either-or logic, when the only thing that would get us out of the darkness of the 1990s is the “both-and” logic – recognition of victim and crime, recognition of rights and responsibility?
Today, Montenegro is increasingly entering a spiral of hysteria and self-censorship. We can no longer freely say that the siege of Dubrovnik was a crime. God forbid that someone mentions Vukovar or Markale – a burst of “what they did to us” immediately follows. And when someone raises their hands in the form of an Albanian double-headed eagle, the entire political scene turns into a show of collective terror.
Whether we want to admit it or not, Montenegro participated in the criminal enterprise. And every attempt to hide, obscure or justify that role leads to a new defeat of memory.
And that’s why, thirty years later, there is no more dangerous moment than this one in which we no longer know what we are marking. We don’t know if we bow to other people’s narratives so as not to offend someone. We do not know if it is safe to say that some people died defending their homes, while others, the “ours”, went to burn and loot them. We don’t know if we can say that the victims in Srebrenica and Racko were civilians, because someone somewhere sees it as an attack on the nation.
And we should know. And that should be the minimum moral literacy of a society.
That’s why this jubilee, instead of being a day of reflection and maturity, becomes a litmus test for our regression. As long as we run from the truth, we will also run from our own responsibility.
That’s it for today and this week. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
