Playing poker with other people's misery

They see their deadly corruption and raise you their legacy of genocide

This week I will be giving you a text rather than video. This is mostly because I have some pictures and links I want to share with you. And it's partly because I haven't shaved today.

As you know, there have been constantly intensifying protests in Serbia ever since, on 1 November, the canopy over a pedestrian walk at the Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 15 people. The disaster was the product of a party-controlled local government giving a sweetheart deal to an unqualified construction company, who didn't bother to get the plans approved or submit their work for a safety inspection. The tragedy has been taken as emblematic of the country's clientelistic system, where the unending power of one political party is ensured by favours provided by network actors in a position to benefit. The irresponsible companies make it a condition of employment that their workers secure votes for the party, and the party doles out the contracts, sometimes to do the same job (viz. Trg Republike, Trg Marksa i Engelza) two or three times. Protestors have taken over streets, public spaces, city halls, universities, under a slogan that makes the basic point: “Corruption kills.”

If you follow regime-controlled media, you won't know a lot about the protests. When they are acknowledged at all, there is an attempt to give the impression that they are sparsely attended and inconsequential. The articles will tend to feature words like “handful” (šačica) and to suggest that they represent violent attempts to seize power, or (this happens once a week or so) attempts on the life of curiously resilient president Aleksandar Vučić. This doesn't prevent Vučić himself from making wildly inconsistent claims about research (there isn't any) showing that citizens see the greatest problem in their lives (they haven't been asked) as violent (they aren't) protests (about which they don't know anything because they haven't been told).

The rhetoric fits a pattern that is pretty well unbroken from the time it was established during the Milošešelj regime until now. It will be recognisable to anybody who has followed events in the region. A typical incident can be seen in the case of the elite secondary school in Novi Sad, where the principal apologised to the prime minister because students from the school had participated in protests, then told the students that their insubordination to corrupt power was a sign of their deficient Christianity and that they really ought to worry about their souls. Leaving aside the principal's odd theology (it seems to amount to “render unto Caesar and then render a little more unto Caesar”), all the basic elements are drawn from the template: affirm your own subordination, impugn the motives of people who are insufficiently subordinate, project collective dissatisfaction onto its participants as individual moral defects.

Look who's here! Our favourite paper! With its favourite story!

This would seem to raise the question of what, in the world of the obedient, is considered “moral.” This where the newspaper Politika, reliable mouthpiece of violent power, comes in.

We have already established that objection to corrupt power is transformed, in the minds of regime propaganda, as the moral defects of individuals. So what individuals are in question, and what, to the people who want to discredit and threaten them, constitutes a moral defect? You will find that the examples all have a surprising thing in common.

Let's start with the first person Politika identifies as the leader of the protests (in fact, according to Politika [24 November], the leader of the whole opposition! ) the journalist and activist Dinko Gruhonjić, professor of media studies at the University of Novi Sad. Dinko Gruhonjić has been the target of defamation and death threats before, notably in March of this year when some doctored video recordings were used to catalyse a weeks-long campaign of harassment. So let's say they were already after him.

Already in the first sentence of Politika's article you can see what they don't like about Dinko. He is a “promoter” of the “assertion” that “genocide occurred in Srebrenica.” Interesting that this would be the first thing they say. Are you wondering why?

Before we get to the question of why, let's have a look at a couple more examples.

Another person identified by Politika (3 December) as having “led the protest” is Aleksandar Popov, an activist for democratic local government and affirmation of multiethnic communities. Here he is in Politika's photo (with a photo credit to someone named ”Принтскрин”) helpfully circled in red crayon.

And what does Politika dislike about Aleksandar Popov? Once again, let's go to the first sentence of their article: he “considers that genocide was committed in Srebrenica.” So once more, the first thing they say. Intriguing, isn't it?

Just one more example, from a different protest this time. Politika is also concerned about protests against the “Belgrade Waterfront” project, a bizarre adventure in land expropriation that will probably end in fatal disasters larger than the one in Novi Sad, given that here, too, they are not submitting their buildings for safety inspection. And here Politika (4 December) has identified the “leader of the blockade” Biljana Stojković, a professor of genetic biology at the University of Belgrade who was a left coalition's candidate for president of Serbia in 2022. And what does Politika dislike about Biljana Stojković? You will have already guessed what it is and in what sentence in their article it appears. She “advocates that the crime in Srebrenica should be classified as a genocide.” You can see that Politika is getting fatigued from repeating itself and that its attention is slipping, since here they are calling it a “crime.”

Enough of all that. There have been other articles like these and there will be more (ooh! It would be so flattering if they had one about me tomorrow!), but you get the point and the pattern could not be any clearer.

We were talking about corruption, you didn't have to go into denial. Or did you?

Let's go first with the repeated claim itself. Did the summary murder of over 8000 men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995 constitute a genocide? Here both the facts and the law are pretty well established. The finding was initially made by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, confirmed in subsequent cases before the same tribunal, affirmed by the International Court of Justice, affirmed as well in cases in several domestic jurisdictions, and used as precedent in current ongoing cases related to genocide in other places in the world. The ruling was based on evidence clearly showing the massive and planned character of the crime, and legally on Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, which establishes that “killing members of the group” is an act of genocide when it is “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This ruling relies on the narrow definition of genocide that courts have been using since the first genocide conviction was handed down against Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998. Current ongoing cases are likely to see the first applications of other provisions of Article 2, including “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Russia in Ukraine) and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (Israel in Gaza). So if the people engaging in denial of Srebrenica are hoping to rely on very narrow definitions of the crime, that does not seem to be the direction that law is headed. In fact, regardless of how many times politicians like Vučić repeat it and automatons like Politika echo him, the argument that Srebrenica was not a genocide is a marginal one that a few people might make out of ignorance, but it is mostly made out of self-interest or ideology. The origins of the thesis are made clear enough by the branding of the wall graffiti through which it is communicated.

So enough about the substance of the claim. Why is it appearing in a set of propaganda materials concerned with defaming individuals, and ostensibly dealing with a question that is unrelated? Here is a simple way of formulating it: when the regime (through Politika) is trying to intimidate individuals, it is making claims about them. When it says what it dislikes about the people it wants to intimidate, it is making claims about itself. More concretely, it is making claims about its own identity. These claims are partly claims about what the regime thinks established its legitimacy, but they are also admissions about what it fears the most.

In the first instance, by raising a claim about crimes committed by (nominally) another regime in the (recent) past, the regime asserts a basic continuity between themselves and their violent predecessors, identifying both with the state and constructing anybody who resists them – in the past or in the present – as enemies of the tradition represented by that continuity. At the same time that the regime asserts continuity, it makes some choices and gives that continuity a label. The continuity they claim is with the part of the 1990s-vintage regime that created and financed paramilitaries, carried out the destruction of urban spaces in Slavonia, kept Sarajevo under siege for three years, forcibly mobilised refugees into military service, and sponsored the Bosnian Serb “parliament” that in 1992 adopted the “six strategic goals” which provided the framework for genocidal violence. Any recognition of crimes is a threat to that legacy of continuity.

But affirming this claim of continuity rejects another claim of continuity that also derives from the 1990s. This was one in which the ruling parties of the regime called upon the Yugoslav tradition of equality, rejected nationalism, and pretended to be defending the security of groups threatened by the violent nationalism of emerging states. The validity of this claim relies on the validity of another claim that was also made by the regime in the 1990s, that they were somehow socialist. This claim was picked up by a number of bad-faith actors in the West who were gullible (Chomsky), cynical (Parenti), or opportunistic (Handke). In fact that regime, which stripped and sold off public assets, turned obedient party clients into private owners of public property, and thieved assiduously, had about as much to do with socialism as my dog has to do with modern ballet. In particular – and this is why the current generation of criminals defends the past one – it abandoned socialist values among which the most important are equality and justice.

Beyond making claims about itself, the insistence on denial of crimes makes a claim on the behaviour and orientation of other people – namely the citizens of the state. The implication of all of the statements about people who “consider that genocide was committed in Srebrenica” is that this consideration excludes them from the community. Otherwise it would not be mentioned, and it certainly would not be mentioned so repeatedly and prominently. So the lesson to be drawn out of all of the efforts at disqualification we have seen here is that the condition for a person to be affirmed as a member of the national community is conformity with the official denial of historical facts and historical responsibility.

The assertions about identity are interesting here because they relate to the association between identity and statehood. The clear implication here is that a condition for the stateworthiness of identity is that the identity be “clean” of major crimes. This does not mean that the state should not have committed crimes, but rather that it should deny the ones it has committed, claiming either that they did not happen or that they were not crimes, and pointing to people who acknowledge them as threats to identity.

This is not in fact the emerging approach on historical legacies of violence. Although there are limits, around the world we are seeing states documenting, accounting for, expressing regret for, and compensating people for, the abuses and misdeeds that accompanied (and accounted for) the establishment of their territorial dominance and prosperity. Australia has gone farthest in offering official apologies, while the Netherlands is investing major effort into documentation of the ways in which the legacy of slavery continues to permeate public life, and Germany is offering (unsatisfying) compensation to the victims of colonial violence. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has built an extensive record both of research and of reflection on what constitutes recognition and reconciliation. Even recalcitrant multiple offenders like the UK, the US, and the Anglican church show some signs of activity, though who knows what will happen in the US in the near future now that it has lost its mind. The Catholic church is, perhaps, slowly, getting there, but we do not expect miracles.

What this amounts to is an argument that the unity between identity and denial is hardly necessary, when it is equally plausible that identity and recognition, or identity and responsibility, are just as compatible. The main force that would constrain moving beyond this association is a feeling of complicity – either the regime shares in it or wants to encourage the public to feel it, because the shared shame of complicity promotes the fear that illegitimate regimes need in order to survive.

And this is how you get from dirty construction deals and falling train stations to genocide, and back again. It's not just throwaway lines in attack pieces on conscientious citizens by newspapers who are deep enough in the pockets of the regime that they can smell the blood.