A little more than a year ago, I was working on an assignment in Armenia and met a group of displaced ethnic Armenian women from Nagorno-Karabakh – the territory which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. These women had been displaced by the conflict to Yerevan and had set-up a community-center. After going through all the introductions, we sat […]

A report by the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights on dealing with the past in the region of former Yugoslavia has issued a stark warning: “the divisive and hateful narratives that spearheaded the wars of the 1990s are back and regaining strength.”[1] The report highlights a well-documented increase in hate speech, inter-ethnic violence and intolerance. There is an […]

The pendulum swing In the spring of 1999, following the repression of the Yugoslav authorities over the Kosovar Albanians and the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, approximately a quarter of a million Kosovars sought refuge in the Republic of Macedonia. The refugees were predominantly south Kosovar civilians who were forced to leave their homes by the state police […]

“We used to say, ‘We were lucky to be kids during the war,’ a sentiment shared among us sisters, now adults, as we reflect on the unnaturalness and cruelty of wars. It’s a stark realization of the ugliest form human power can take. Today, we feel we understand war better—the dangers, the threats—but during the war in Kosovo, we ‘were […]

The Dominance of Hostility and Self-Victimization On June 9th it will be 25 years since the signing of the Military-Technical Agreement, concluded in 1999 at the military airport near Kumanovo, between the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia on one side, and KFOR on the other. The agreement was signed by General of the Yugoslav Army Svetozar […]

In the search for meaning, catharsis, and understanding of personal and collective experiences after wars, societies turn to memorial practices seeking refuge from forgetting and unforgetting. Memorial practices and the culture of memory (and forgetting) they create clearly communicate the stage of confrontation with the wartime past that a post-conflict society is in and the symbols, ideas, and values on […]

The planned adoption of a United Nations resolution on the Srebrenica genocide, scheduled for mid-May this year, represents a crucial step towards global recognition and commemoration of this tragic event from the still-recent past. Although the resolution itself does not carry direct legal consequences, it plays a fundamental role in the symbolic and declarative recognition of the crime and demonstrates […]

The Kumanovo Agreement never happened. The Ahtisaari Plan from 2007 never happened. The declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008 never happened. The Brussels Agreement from 2013 never happened. The new Brussels Agreement from 2023 never happened. The meeting in Ohrid, that same year, a month later, never happened. From 1999 to this year 2024, nothing has ever happened. The […]