Photo: Media Center Belgrade It seems obvious that the official – and it is official because it’s promoted by local officials – story about the Serbian world is entirely constructed based on the analogy with the story of the Russian world. Which would mean – if we wanted to understand the idea of the Serbian world, we would have to […]

Darko Dimitrijević is attending an Albanian language course, yet he says he is still unable to communicate fluently. He was born in Gorazhdec/Goraždevac, a village with a Serb majority in the Municipality of Peja/Peć. Since the war of 1998-99, it is one of the few Serb villages in this part of Kosovo.  There, the legacy of the past is felt […]

“Everything older than ten and younger than seventy-five will die in Šibenik. And we will not leave a single house standing…”, said the high-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army at the time, and now a convict serving time for war crimes, Ratko Mladić. It was exactly thirty years ago, in early fall of 1991, not half a decade before […]

On September 9, 2021, the children’s section of the library “Dositej Novaković” in Negotin was scheduled to hold a promotion for the book by Veselin Šljivančanin “This is My Land This is Where I Command” (Ovo je moja zemlja ovde ja komandujem). Although in the end the library cancelled this event, the question remained whether war criminals had a place […]

Photo: Archive of the Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo Abductions and forced disappearances are almost regularly used as a strategy for spreading terror during conflicts or by dictatorships. Forced disappearances have become a global problem and they are not limited to a certain region of the world, but occur in almost all conflicts, even internal ones, and they are also used […]

Photo: YIHR In Croatia there are now two dominant political approaches to confronting Operation Storm and its consequences which took place in August 1995, led by two of the highest state institutions – the Government and the President. Through coordinated public appearances, the government, led by HDZ and the minority partner, the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), has directed the […]

Photo: Private archive  A potential law prohibiting the denial of genocide and other war crimes, which will not be a result of a national catharsis, will help the involved communities to heal to a certain extent, although from the perspective of the long path towards the future, it will not suffice to build a good and fair society that is […]

In 2017, officials of the Municipality of Prishtina announced that a forgotten bunker, built during communism to shelter the citizens of the capital city in case of any natural catastrophe or upheaval would be transformed into a museum to commemorate the war crimes of 1998-1999. Four years later, the initiative is still just an idea on paper. A similar announcement […]

Photo: Personal archive The first time I came face to face with what happened in this enclave in the summer of 1995 was five years after the fall of Srebrenica. It was when I heard the testimony of the protected witness DD during the first Srebrenica trial at the Hague Tribunal. And even if that testimony had been the only […]

More than two decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, just like other countries of the Federation, Kosovo too faces the problem of dealing with its communist years.  Latif Gashi was only five years old in 1962 when, construction of a building began in front of his home in Landovica, a village in Prizren, a southern municipality in Kosovo. He did […]

Photo: Private archive The same question has been repeated for three decades among the interested political, academic and general public: did the breakup of Yugoslavia have to be bloody? Some go even further and ask if the breakup was really inevitable. Both these questions are certainly an interesting topic of debate, but they are, at the same time, very unhistorical: […]

Between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma were brutally killed during the Second World War Genocide (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2020). This act of torturing and murdering Roma is also known as ‘Samudaripen’ in the Romani language. Thus, 2nd of August (International Roma Genocide Remembrance Day) and 16th of May (Romani Resistance Day) are dates when Roma remember the ‘Samudaripen’. Although recognized by various […]