Understanding Normative Gaps in Transitional Justice: The Serbian Discourse on the Srebrenica Declaration 2010(1)
2012; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1617-5247
Autores Tópico(s)International Law and Human Rights
ResumoThe Serbian government has often been accused of in confronting crimes that took place during the Yugoslav war. This behaviour is interpreted as a gap between an underdeveloped domestic norm of the and the international norm of transitional justice. This paper argues that are no contradiction to the transnational norm socialization process, but to the rule itself. By applying methods of discourse analysis, the 2010 Serbian parliamentary debate on the declaration condemning the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica is used as an extensive case study showing how domestic actors use concepts of the past.Keywords: norm socialization, transitional justice, the past, Serbia, Srebrenica, conditionality1. IntroductionUntil recently, Serbia was not regarded as having confronted its war-time in an appropriate manner. However, under President Boris Tadic (2004-2012) Serbia made veritable progress in its cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and symbolic politics. Tadic supported a symbolic policy of the and reconciliation that was warmly welcomed by the international community, although his successor, President Tomislav Nikolic, has since adopted another line. Only days after his electoral success the latter stated that Serbia should be acquitted of a in which nobody could live. The radical wartime politician did not distance himself from his former ultra-nationalist stances and pointed to Slobodan Milosevic as solely responsible for Serbia's misdeeds (Martens, 2012). With his neo-radical statements he created indignation, describing the Croatian town of Vukovar being a 'mainly Serbian-populated town' and by condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre but not qualifying it as genocide. As a consequence, Nikolic was harshly criticized by the European Union (EU), Western officials and by politicians in the region for rewriting history and denial (Ciric, 2012). In particular, Serbian behaviour towards the Srebrenica massacre is understood as an acid test. In July 1995, the UN-protected safe area fell, and an estimated 25,000 women, children and elderly persons were forced to leave the enclave. In the following days, (para-)military forces, mainly from units from the Army of the Republika Srpska under the command of Ratko Mladic, killed approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys.Although Nikolic expresses views that are not shared or welcomed by international observers, in fact his statements combine most domestic and internationally expected perspectives on the wartime past. In the years preceding his presidency, double-speak rhetoric by Serbian government representatives created the impression of in state behaviour, of a difference between the state's normative commitment to an external audience and domestic controversy. Normative gaps in state behaviour could be explained by different rules of discourse in a two-level game or, drawing on phase models of norm socialization, by saying that Serbs had only been symbolically integrated into the transitional justice norm regime but had yet not internalized it. I argue that these normative gaps are not in contradiction to the transnational norm socialization process, but in Serbia they are the rule itself. Normative gaps do not reflect norm competition or normative conflict, but different characteristics of the norm, as well as the particularities of the process of the in Serbia.This article does not analyze facing the past as an objective of international relations and foreign policy, but focuses on the use of facing the past concepts in the domestic political discourse. The Serbian parliamentary debate on the Declaration Condemning the Crime in Srebrenica 2010 provides an illustrative case study. The debate and discussion during the almost four months prior to the adoption of the declaration encapsulate the main points in relation to war crimes in Serbia. …
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