Cultivating Peace in the Heart of the Balkans

On November 28, 2016, Mile Milošević, president of the Serbian War Veterans’ Association, traveled to Sarajevo, where he met with Enver Krluć, president of the Veterans Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their countries had not long ago been mortal enemies. But on this day, they embraced and shared the same message: It was time to heal.

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s—the deadliest conflicts in Europe since WWII—left over a million veterans in their wake. Many veterans, especially in Serbia, have gone unrecognized and without adequate governmental assistance. They face public stigma and even suspicions that they may have been involved with war crimes. This has made several veterans understandably reluctant to make their own status public, let alone to reach out to those in neighboring countries. But now, at the average age of 53 years old, those who fought on both sides are seeking to reconcile with one another and the wider public, working to promote peaceful relations and denounce the troubling rise of ethnic nationalism in their respective communities.

Reconciliation is not uncommon in the Balkans. Neighbors, friends, and relatives who were once divided by the wars have reunited in recent years. What makes this veteran reconciliation remarkable is that it is happening between former combatants, on a large scale, and without any aid from outside institutions.

From 2012 to 2016, I undertook ethnographic field research in former conflict regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, where I had the privilege of meeting survivors and veterans of the Yugoslav wars—including women who might not count as official “veterans” but who fought, just the same, to defend their homes. My colleague, photographer Robin Albarano, took portraits of survivors and veterans. [1] [1] Robin Albarano is a photographer and artist living in Los Angeles, California.

The accompanying portraits are of veterans from Milošević and Krluć’s associations who Albarano photographed during individual ethnographic interviews, prior to formal reconciliation. Most of them did not want their photograph taken during reconciliation. Nevertheless, nearly every veteran wanted to share a message about their experience, why they now stood against war, or why they were dedicated to reconciliation. We exclude their names and national identities because most of those Albarano photographed requested that we share the heart of their message and simply portray them as veterans.

We were fortunate enough to be in the region at just the right time to document the inevitable movement toward reconciliation as it took off. The United Nation’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) made its final indictments at the end of 2004. In the years following that, discussions about and between veterans slowly began to become more open. People became more willing to talk. Our presence interviewing members of different veterans’ groups also helped to build some bridges; many were curious to hear about our experiences elsewhere, and we were able to connect four of the largest groups in the Balkans—including the Serbian War Veterans’ Association and the Veterans Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Before the onset of war in 1991, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia included Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Macedonia. The people of these republics and territories lived in relative peace and prosperity under the benevolent dictator Josip Broz Tito, a Partisan war hero, who unified the people as “Yugoslavs” under socialism during the Cold War. When Tito died in 1980, he left a power vacuum that was filled with political dysfunction and growing economic crises. With the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Yugoslavian state’s economic collapse a year later, the door was left open for ethnic nationalists, who were elected in Croatia and Serbia in 1990.

From 1991 to 2001, these nationalists implemented a succession of ethnically based declarations of independence, expulsions, and insurgencies. Approximately 140,000 people were killed, an estimated 50,000 women were victims of rape, and over 4 million people became displaced. From 1993 to 2017, more than a hundred perpetrators of crimes against humanity, including notorious warlords such as Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Nevertheless, many of the leaders and “triggermen” who participated in mass crimes have gone unpunished, or even remain in positions of power, leaving raw wounds in the community.

Having interviewed hundreds of veterans and engaged in participant observation (a research technique of observing the lives of a participant population), I learned that veterans of the Yugoslav wars have a picture in their minds of what reconciliation should look like. They strive to connect with one another as former soldiers and bond over shared experiences. They may then lament what was lost in the war. If each party acknowledges and expresses sorrow for the other’s losses, reconciliation is possible; most former fighters simply want their narrative to be recognized by their former enemy. Bonding is often deepened by a mutual denunciation of war; the veterans share expressions of a commitment to peace and discuss their pathways to health and well-being.

However, the lofty goals shared by many Balkan veterans, including Milošević and Krluć, are far from being achieved. Many veterans remain confused about the origin of the fighting and, because of a constant stream of propaganda during and after the wars, about which events really happened. One-third of the veterans I interviewed were not sure what caused the wars and expressed an exasperation about ever being able to reliably know the truth of historical events.

Such confusion renders some veterans reluctant to reconcile, despite the efforts of their associations. Many are also unsure about the best way to come together on a large scale. Distrustful of local nongovernmental organizations, Milošević and Krluć’s associations, in conjunction with others in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have reached out for support from Vietnam veterans, with whom the veterans of the Yugoslav wars feel a kinship. Some Vietnam veterans have gotten involved in the project, with the mutual goal of healing and veteran-to-veteran reconciliation, though it is unclear if they and the Balkan veterans will find the funding needed to make large-scale healing and reconciliation happen.

While these Yugoslav war veterans are attempting to mend the wounds of combat two decades after the wars ended, they are striving for large-scale peace and amity between their nations at the very moment the ICTY is ending its work. That stands as an interesting comparison to other broader societal propitiations elsewhere, such as in South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started in 1995, soon after the end of apartheid. Restoring peaceful relations may be a necessarily slow process. The wheels of justice, like the ICTY, may need to turn before the doors of broader reconciliatory work can be opened. The lesson of the Yugoslav war veterans may be that reconciliation takes place years after the justice system has run its course, at which point former combatants can begin to sense a need to heal from their moral wounds.