Healing from the past in the Western Balkans requires building a common narrative of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Key tools to help achieve this include education and the proper addressing of intergenerational trauma. 25 years after the final guns fell silent in Kosovo, this goal is yet to be fully realized.
The survivors of the 1990s Yugoslav Wars are central to peacebuilding. Their testimonies serve as a reminder of the broken imperative, “never again”. Recognizing their rights includes reparations. Reparations are crucial for reconciliation and the prevention of recurring atrocities. Moreover, reparations will allow post-conflict societies to pull out the marginalization of war survivors from its roots.
Genocide denial and revisionism continue to hinder reconciliation in the Western Balkans. This is despite ongoing efforts from civil society and the international community. To counter this trend, joint action by representatives of civil society and the international community is necessary to build a sustainable system for atrocity prevention and reckoning with the past.
The Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) and the non-profit Impunity Watch held in March this year a two-day conference on atrocity prevention. Entitled, “Building a Common Agenda for Prevention in the Western Balkans”, the conference took place in Montenegro’s capital of Podgorica. The conference gathered representatives from civil society across the ex-Yugoslav region and beyond. This was a conference with a multi-pronged aim: strengthening regional cooperation, identifying future joint actions, and fostering solidarity with and among post-conflict societies.
War memorialization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) remains a persistent and contentious subject. In the absence of state laws and regulations governing memorials, let alone a national commemorative strategy, the country’s memorial landscape is saturated with a wide range of memorialization efforts stemming from all levels of Bosnian society.
Imagine you sit in front of a world map and get to pick any place in the world. That’s where you will go and live for a year. Harun Čandić sat at home one day and looked at that map showing the 60 countries where he could go volunteer for a year, including such places New York, Cape Town, and even New Zealand. However, with the world at his fingertips, he chose the Srebrenica Memorial Center.