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169 Those who have witnessed the collapse of a regime, presided over an unsuccessful civil war, or mourned the demise of a political party could respond by undertaking a painful reappraisal of what went wrong. Instead, they often divert attention from the failed present to a “golden past” / “bright past,” now retrofitted with a glory it had never originally possessed. “Why shouldn’t we be proud of our past,” a Serbian aphorism claims, “when each new day is worse than the previous one?”1 The aphorism wittily and perhaps unwittingly addresses one of the critical impediments to the often wrenching national process of coming to terms with an onerous past. Both for individuals and for nations, ontological events are imparted with different meanings, which constitute different truths. The aphorism’s subversive disjunction of time frames illustrates that the construction of history need not adhere to chronology or facts; the purposes of the present can change the meaning of the past without changing the facts. The meaning of these facts can seem self-evident if they are put into a persuasive story, whether a personal or national narrative, that meets the current needs of the audience. The longerterm needs of the audience would be better served by a narrative that acknowledges failure and invites audience participation in seeking a remedy. However, this was not the story promulgated by Russia, Serbia, and other formerly repressive regimes. In Russia, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s popularity resurged in nationwide polls, reflecting the longing of many for the country’s former prestige and their previous sense of security.2 Likewise, many Serbs, who formed the largest group in former Yugoslavia, look back with nostalgia to a time of greater national pride and material comfort—for themselves.3 By contrast, the The “Bright Past,” or Whose (Hi)Story? EPILOGUE 170 Epilogue dominated ethnic populations were frustrated in their striving to share a similar national pride. Each polity has a story fashioned by selected and connected events that promotes its national interests. Consequently, instead of the individual or national memory affecting the narrative that emerges, the process is the other way around. Efforts to employ institutionally sanctioned approaches to arrive at a just resolution in the aftermath of mass atrocities—trials, truth commissions, vetting, or their various combinations—regularly fall short of fundamentally reconciling contradictory versions of past events. In effect, they are exercises in “the art of the possible.”4 Legal proceedings, for example, may fail in arriving at “the truth” regarding ethnic clashes because this requires considering many competing “truths” based on different perceptions, as well as different interpretations. Contending parties often enter and leave the court with “their own truths.”5 This is not to say that all valid truth claims have equal standing; courts must make judgments that weight evidence. However, even when their verdicts or legal interpretations are final, their reading of events is not, because ultimately the account produced is the “tacit narrative of the user [i.e., the prosecution or defense].”6 The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) attempted to set the record straight, overcome ambiguity, and “police a violent past”7 by adjudicating claims and counter-claims, all supported by irreconcilable narratives. For example, while the central Serb narrative tends to characterize the catastrophic war in former Yugoslavia as an internal conflict, a civil war in which Serbs were also victims,8 the central Bosniak narrative frames these same harrowing events as unbridled external Serb aggression.9 Thus, years after the physical battle in former Yugoslavia has ended, the divisiveness remains and is perpetuated by competing narratives of what happened and why. As in Russia, the content of school history books and curricula provides useful indicators of how the state prefers the narrative of the past to be shaped.10 In the former Yugoslavia, the teaching of history remains a “thorny issue.” In Bosnia, the three peoples generally do not even share the same view of how the war started .11 These views are reinforced by selective attention, omissions, and emphasis. And in Serbia, while the gruesome facts of Srebrenica were aired on Serbian television in June of 2005 in a video that graphically depicted the brutal murder of six Muslim men by the Scorpions (a Serbian paramilitary unit), “there remained public amnesia about the killings.”12 This amnesia is institutionally perpetuated by the school system. The history of Srebrenica is not covered in school history books,13 where it...

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