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9 Value Changes in the Interpretations of History in Serbia Dubravka Stojanović “Serbs, gentlemen, just without history and similar crap.” This is how Richard Holbrooke, international negotiator and emissary of President Bill Clinton, started one of the many rounds of negotiations during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. By doing so, Holbrooke demonstrated that, through contacts with local political leaders, he understood the great importance of using historical arguments in the existing political culture. He was right. Wars in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s were processed by advertising, rationalised by ideology, and psychologically justified because para-historical explanations put the bloody resolution of the Yugoslav drama in the necessary historical context1. These “games with history” were needed in order to reinterpret lowly war aims as “high intentions” derived from the “historical national grievances,” primarily for setting right “historical injustices.” That is why the war in Croatia was, through constant stirring up of memories of the genocide against the Serbs during the Second World War, presented as a sort of “genocide prevention.” Beginning in the late 1980s, Belgrade historians with close ties to the government, appeared on television , evening after evening, to speak about real or invented details of the Ustaša genocide against the Serbs during the Second World War, which was supposed to serve as an a priori indulgence for the planned, and later realized, ethnic engineering on the territory of the Republic of Croatia. The war in Bosnia was put in the ideological context of the “eternal conflict” between Christianity and Islam, with its historical frame positioned in the late Middle Ages, by using of the term “Turks” for the Bosniak population. That is how a bloody war, with ethnic cleansing and genocide in Srebrenica, received historical justification and almost defensive characteristics. Through many similar actions of historians, history as a discipline needed to change its nature in its entirety: instead of describing and analyzing past reality, it became a kind of experimental science. Like physics or chemistry, it was assigned the task of producing a new reality , based on new junctures of previously known or unknown elements. The recomposed and reworked past had the task of producing a new future. If one wanted to be cynical, one could even say that this was a “creative turn” of Hobsbawm’s or Gellner’s theses about the invention of a tradition: it was no longer the case that every present created the tradition and historical memory it needed, but brutal, surgical cuts in the previous memory model were used in order to change the present. In other words, since the present could not have been changed easily or quickly, and Yugoslavia could not have been dissolved and recomposed in ethnically cleansed national states, it was much easier to first change the model of the national remembering, and then, based on the changed pattern, to intervene in the present. Thus, through para-historiography , written and electronic media, a conflict concept of history was created first, and then the conflict became reality that appeared quite naturally, as the logical continuation of the centuries-old conflict between the Serbs and all the other peoples. In order for that to become possible, it was necessary to change the previous, socialist value system, and to transform it into an equally authoritarian, but opposite system, derived from the prevailing nationalist ideology, dominant from the late 1980s. In the total value system, it was necessary to emphasize national feelings in the first place, and to create a concrete concept of national sentiments and identifications through a specific structuring of the relations me-us and we-others.2 In order to achieve this, it was necessary to create a mythical image of one’s own nation, which was done in the most “authentic” way through the recomposition of historical facts, which were turned into crucial evidence of this new, mythical narrative, about ourselves and others.3 The media served to disseminate this new model of historical consciousness , together with the public debates (primarily of the Serbian Writers’ Union4), and history textbooks. Under the Milošević government, textbooks with altered value concepts were published for the 1993/1994 school year, in the middle of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.5 The sense of these textbooks was precisely correlated with the previously described need to change both present and future, through the misuse of history. The essence of the new, desired model of national consciousness was developed in these textbooks, so that they could be used as the supreme...

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