How we, as a society, faced with the past, could also be heard recently from the stands of the Banja Luka City Stadium. The only question is what is more defeating: Is that young people, instead of celebrating sports, celebrate hatred and slaughter – "The knife, the wire for Srebrenica", or the silence of those who should not be silent. […]

Transitional justice   When you hear or read the term "transitional justice," you think of a specific kind of justice. In fact, it is a whole set of activities carried out in societies in transition that generally lead to the establishment of justice and the rule of law. This discipline finds its purpose primarily in the need for societies to […]

You know how we always repeat why memories are important and what matters is what we remember about the past? Especially the way memories are transferred and what is ‘saved’ in the collective memory of society. What we remember determines the present and what we are as members of a certain group, collective, community. Our memories are woven into our […]

I remember after the war was over, very soon the public started talking about dealing with the past, and started organizing workshops, the main goal of which was to deal with all those who have any trauma from the war. The media followed the current topic at the time, constantly reminding us of what our past was like. It was […]

Photo: Marko Đurica Translation: Luna Đorđević Those who claim that there is no catharsis without an awareness of guilt are right. And perhaps this is the shortest answer to the lack of true dealing with demons of the past. We live amidst a total confusion of values, a quarter of a century removed from the wars in former Yugoslavia. This […]

Currently, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is stuck in the process of adopting a revised National War Crimes Strategy, which has not yet been discussed by the BiH Council of Ministers. I have been reporting on war crimes for many years, and long ago I lost the initial enthusiasm I had that all victims would find justice. Unfortunately, the time to […]

When I was younger, my biggest fear was to sit with Serbs and hear them talking in their language. After the war, every time I would hear them talk, my eyes would fill with tears and my mind would be overrun with images from the war. I thought that as I got older, I would be able to escape these […]

The phrase “dealing with the past” has been worn out for a while in Serbian society. This was done in various ways. For year those who were accused and who have committed war crimes kept repeating that only traitors of Serbian national interests and foreign mercenaries use this phrase. Many believed them. The other side, which never accepted those crimes […]

Almost two decades have passed since the end of the war in Kosovo. For many, memories are still fresh and cannot be forgotten. It is more so, or hardly possible for people who lost family members; for people who lived through various trauma and did not receive any institutional treatment, in other words, none. Also, they had no-one to turn […]

Free access to information is a human right. It is crucial for the development of open and democratic societies, and for ensuring that governments are accountable to their citizens. Through this powerful instrument, which is a key pillar of developed democratic societies, citizens can have insight into how public money is spent, whether public institutions comply with the laws, and […]

We cannot meaningfully speak about the media and the challenge of dealing with the past in Serbia before we answer a few key questions: Is the past even over? Is our present nothing more than our past, thinly veiled? Can a society, and its media, properly deal with the past if it does not seriously deal with the present, due […]

The media is the power to present the world in a certain way. And that is why there are so many different and conflicting ways in which the meaning of the world can be constructed. It is of elementary importance what is presented and who is presenting it, what is being left out and who is doing it, and how […]