Each year when the day marking the liberation of Belgrade from fascism arrives, especially when it’s a significant round-number anniversary, there is a sense of anxiety about how it will be officially commemorated. Then a person such as myself for example might feel somewhat uncomfortable even writing about it because they neither live in Belgrade nor are they a citizen […]

The Croatian War of the 1990s, for Croatian political elites, is one of the historical periods often and gladly used to promote crude ethno-nationalism, exploit the suffering of victims, and ignore court-established facts. One event that marked the 1990s and still holds an important place in state commemorations is Operation ‘Pocket ’93’, better known publicly as the military-police operation Medak […]

There’s nothing more horrifying in the recent history of the Balkans than July 1995 and Srebrenica. No matter how you personally choose to define “horrifying,” “recent history,” and the terms “we” and “us.” Almost everyone active in politics and media in the Balkans, among the creators of public opinion, is deeply aware of this fact. Therefore, every abuse of this […]

The Ministry of Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue of the Government of Serbia announced on July 5th that the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance of the Council of Europe adopted the Report on Serbia within the sixth monitoring cycle.

He was an eight-year-old boy when “Sima’s Chetniks” killed nine members of his family: six sisters, a two-year-old brother, father and pregnant mother.

“[…] in Sušica there was me on one side with weapons and a uniform; and on the other side were women my mother’s age, there were children, there were my friends with whom I had spent years in cafes, on sports fields, vacations.” – Dragan Nikolić, ICTY On May 31, 1992, 32 years ago, by order of the commander of […]

It has been thirty years since the closing of the Heliodrom detention camp in Mostar, and I – which is seldomly the case – simply don’t know what to coherently, let alone optimistically, write on the occasion of this anniversary, which in a better world would represent the starting point of a new life and the overcoming of trauma. A […]

For the past two years and two months activists have been fighting to name a street in Banja Luka, a town known as the “city of women,” after an exceptional woman – Vahida Maglajlić. This fight has lasted longer than the wartime journey of this partisan, adorned with the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia. And it seems it […]

It has now been thirty years since February 5th was marked on Sarajevo’s memory map simply and undeniably as – Markale. Situated in the city center, the green market got its name from the nearby marketplace built during the Austro-Hungarian period (Markt halle). On February 5, 1994, it became the site of an unprecedented massacre. That day 68 residents of […]

In late September, an inscription was written on the memorial plaque in Kazani in huge red letters: Caco lives in us 10 br

For the past few weeks, I have been diligently preparing, almost like a nerd, to write these few dozen lines of thoughts that I had been offered the opportunity to share. In classic historian fashion, this involved studying available sources about those several days in August 1995 and the ensuing consequences. Soon enough, I realized that I had to take […]