Louise L. LAMBRICHS

Conférence de Louise L. Lambrichs donnée à l'occasion
d'un colloque international organisé, du 9 au 13 juillet 2007,
intitulé «Responding to Genocide Before It’s Too Late:
Genocide Studies and Prevention»

Le génocide qui s’est produit en Bosnie entre 1992 et 1995, et qui a culminé avec le massacre de Srebrenica en juillet 1995, reste pour la conscience européenne et même mondiale une blessure vive et la source de multiples interrogations dépassant les frontières de l’Europe.
Pour tenter d’éviter de reproduire les mêmes erreurs et stimuler la réflexion collective, l’IAGS (International Association of Genocide Scholars) a organisé, du 9 au 13 juillet 2007, un colloque international intitulé « Responding to Genocide Before It’s Too Late : Genocide Studies and Prevention », qui a été accueilli à Sarajevo par l’Institut pour la recherche sur les crimes contre l’humanité.
Louise L. Lambrichs y a participé, avec une conférence rédigée en anglais et intitulée “Understanding the genocide in Bosnia as a displaced repetition of World War II” (Comprendre le génocide en Bosnie comme une répétition déplacée de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale). Cette conférence - que nous mettons aujourd’hui en ligne dans sa version originale anglaise - a coïncidé avec la publication à Zagreb de la traduction en croate de Nous ne verrons jamais Vukovar (Vukovar nikad necemo vidjeti), par les éditions Naklada Luka, dans la traduction de Marija Basic, et la publication à Sarajevo de la traduction bosnienne de L’effet papillon (Efekt Leptira) par les éditions Armis Print, dans la traduction de Nermina Štraus.

To prevent a disease, it is necessary to identify its causes.
If we accept this medical metaphor, if we agree to consider that war and genocide are social diseases, we must also accept that preventing genocide is impossible without understanding how and why genocide happens.
Concerning the genocide that happened in Bosnia, against the Bosnian Muslims, it is necessary to understand what ideas and ideology were shared by the Tchetniks and the Serbian nationalists and to what extent their propaganda was false or wrong or criminal (in relation to historical documentation).
Having worked on this question since the beginning of Yugoslavia’s war, I was deeply surprised by the contradictions between Serbian nationalist propaganda and historical realities, and even more surprised by their use of this word, “genocide”, to qualify what happened to the Serbs during WWII. Pitting documents from Belgrade’s archives, published by Ljubica Stefan, against - for instance - Draskovic’s letter to Israeli writers (1985) helps us to understand how the Serbian people have been deeply manipulated by their own leaders.

If we take into account the Freudian mechanism that shows how denial engenders repetition, it is possible to read this war, rigorously, as a displaced repetition of WWII. This is, of course, an interpretation (but we should not forget that in speaking, all of us are interpreting reality. The question is: which interpretation is right, in relation to the facts, and which is not?) The interesting thing is that most people living in Croatia and Bosnia agree with this interpretation (even if they do not share the same explanations).

Giving different examples, I would like to show what kind of new work on memory we could or should start now, what new methods we could use, with the young generation, to help them to connect with the past and to understand what happened and why, to help to develop a real historical consciousness, and help to fight this mechanism of repetition. My diagnosis is: if we do not help to start this work, we shall soon be seeing new conflicts. Because of this, it is important not only to commemorate what happened, but also to work on it together.

I’m deeply honoured to be participating in your meeting, and I’d like to thank M. Cekic, M. Hinton and all the organizers for accepting my contribution. I won’t say more, because I don’t have much time to speak, but I’d like you to know that I’m very grateful and glad to be here, with all of you, to share my conclusions.

Summarizing fifteen years’ work in ten or fifteen minutes seems quite impossible. Fortunately, if you are interested in this work, it is now available in Croatian and Bosnian, thanks to Marija Basic in Zagreb and Asaf Dzanic in Sarajevo. Today, I’ll simply be trying to get across the spirit of my work and, above all, how we could try to avoid new atrocities in this area in the future. If we can’t change history, we must understand the true meaning of this history, in other words, we must understand how a new genocide was possible in Europe, sixty years after the extermination of European Jews. After analyzing the facts and the discourses in the light of the definition of genocide given in 1948 by Raphael Lempkin, I came to the conclusion that the Muslims of Bosnia were truly victims of a real genocide, from 1992 to 1995, with the same meaning as the one of which the European Jews, one generation before them, had been victim. And if I came to this conclusion, it’s not only because I’ve been closely following the events since 1990, it’s not only because of the facts and official inquiries I know of, it’s not only because of the work on memory undertaken in Germany and France after WWII on racist ideology and the specificity of the genocide of the Jews, it’s not only because of the Serbian texts we translated and published in France in 1993 about the ideology of ethnic cleansing in Serbia since the 19th Century, it’s not only because of the genetic and racist thesis developed by Biljana Plavsic, the former President of Republika Srpska, a thesis which is comparable to the Nazi way of thinking, it’s not only because of the documents coming from Belgrade’s archives that I recently published, documents which show Serbia’s close collaboration with Hitler during WWII, a collaboration which is still strongly denied in Serbia, particularly by the Serbian nationalists still in power in Belgrade who still think that only Germans were guilty in Serbia for the participation in the Holocaust, it is also for two reasons: the first one is that since 1991, let’s say since the aggression against Croatia in Vukovar by Belgrade, a few of us, knowing the history very well, were able in France to predict what would happen and criticized Mitterrand’s policy strongly, and more generally the European and UN policy, but nobody paid any attention to what we were saying - and unfortunately, we were speaking in French and not in English; and the second reason is that now, the open war being over, I’ve been able to interpret this war in a way which seems obvious for the populations here and showing clearly to everyone what really happened during the hostilities. And what is interesting and constructive is that when you understand the global mechanism of this war, you also understand what we should do now to build a real peace for the young generations, which is still a big question and to be truthful, I don’t think we’ve taken the right way. But maybe it isn’t to late to take it?

Truly, when I experience day after day, and year upon year, the difficulty I have in opening this democratic debate, I wonder if mankind really desires to construct peace. It is a real question and a deep one - deeper than you may imagine. War seems to be very exciting for mankind. And when it is over, despite the danger, the atrocities and all the suffering, the worst is forgotten and it is thought about with a strange nostalgia. Men speak of it with nostalgia. And they transmit this nostalgia to their sons, constructing heroic myths which are both contagious and dangerous. And because of that, most of the sons, ignorant of the real history, want to know the object of such attractive nostalgia… and the war repeats with the alibi of revenge. So, if we want to prevent genocide, I don’t think we should change the definition - as I read some experts are currently proposing, and the debate about this question is really important, especially regarding the situation here. If they want to change the definition of genocide, isn’t it because they didn’t understand with precision the mechanism of repetition and how and why this genocide in Bosnia was possible, one generation after the Holocaust? And if I’m asking this question, it’s because when I read what they write, it seems obvious that they didn’t understand this mechanism. Maybe it’s because they’re not using the right tools?

If now I ask “What happened in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995?” - setting aside the Kosovo question, which is also important -, I’ll get countless different answers. Some of you will speak about civil war, others one will speak about interethnic conflict, and rapidly, we will hear a real cacophony of causes, responsibilities, etc. I won’t enter in a sterile polemic which is part of the current situation, which is still pretty bad. I prefer to develop another approach which seems to be more constructive.

As you know, to prevent a disease, it is necessary to identify its causes.
If we accept this medical metaphor, if we agree to consider that war and genocide are social diseases, we must also accept that preventing genocide is impossible without being precise about what genocide is and without understanding how and why genocide happens. I’ll try to be as brief as possible in developing this new approach, but to make it understandable, it is also necessary to be clear and accurate.

Before starting, I must tell you what my philosophical point of view is concerning what a human being is. Mirko Grmek, the famous historian of medicine and my late husband, used to say that a human being is the monkey plus the passport. I like this joke, which is partly wise and true, but I think he forgot the most important point. The human being is language, namely memory and history. For me, it is the only thing that sets us apart. This war, like all wars, started with propaganda, and this propaganda which led people to fight was based upon an interpretation of history, and unfortunately, the international community remained deaf to this early explosive discourse. Was this national-communist interpretation of history true as regards historical documents and people’s memories? Or was it false? This is the first question. Actually, Serbian nationalist propaganda, which was very powerful in France, in Great Britain and also in the United States and Russia, through the diaspora, strongly manipulated history and memory, replacing historical truth by mythological and so-called heroic stories masking criminal ideologies. And after working hard on this war, I now think that this manipulation of collective memory was the main cause of everything that happened here and, in particular, the genocide, and it is also the main cause of several errors on the part of the international community. The other causes - economics, geopolitics and everything you can imagine - are secondary. If those causes partially explain the war, they fail to explain the specificity of genocide. Actually, the main cause of genocide is language, rhetoric and secret ideology, the language that legitimated the Tchetniks in starting the war, the language they used to convince western democracies to support Milosevic in 1991, the language the western media used to speak about this war… etc. I suppose you can’t imagine that a genocide like this could have been the result of language abuse. It seems so incredible, so foolish, so dumb, so despairing. Moreover, it is difficult for most of you to believe that maybe you have shared in this collective abuse. But that’s how it is, and it’s important to understand this to try to build something better and more rightful for Bosnia, for Croatia and Serbia and Kosovo, and for Europe.
Maybe you don’t understand what I’m speaking about. Maybe you think you’re objective. Maybe you think you don’t interpret the real. Of course you do. In speaking, in using words, you do interpret, just as all human beings do. The problem is: is your interpretation right? The facts are the facts and rationally speaking, they should be the same for everyone. Why isn’t everyone in agreement about how to understand them in the same way? Maybe they forgot to work on the ideology engendering these facts and atrocities? Maybe Tito’s Yugoslavia wasn’t a paradise for those who wanted to work on history and criticize communist dogma?

Now, I’d like you to forget what you already know, to hear what I’m going to try to share with you. If possible, I’d like you to forget your own interpretation of this war to hear mine. And if I’m asking this of you, it is because I think I’ve found a useful tool for building a real and durable peace for the younger generations.

The work I’ve been doing since 1991 has been pretty disconcerting. Instead of only paying attention to the facts, as both academics and journalists generally do, I paid equal attention to the discourses and propaganda, mainly using three fields I’ve been working in for some years, namely literature, history and psychoanalysis. As you know, psychoanalysis is the only field working on the human psyche and memory mechanisms.
In analyzing these discourses, I’ve been able to give a pretty troubling interpretation. Actually, analyzing the succession of the main facts, and also hearing the echoes of those facts engendered in our collective memory, year after year, I read, rigorously, this last war as a displaced repetition of WWII. To try to be clearer, I came across a succession of facts from WWII, from Munich to the Nuremberg Trials, and a succession of facts from this war, from the Brioni conferences to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and those two series, as two sentences, shed light on this war and allowed everyone to understand what had happened here. If you prefer, it allows everyone to hear the meaning of this war, which wasn’t absurd, as most people continue to believe. And, to be scientific, I put my interpretation to the test of the people, first in Zagreb, in Dubrovnik, and also here in Bosnia, when I came in 2005 and 2006 to participate in the commemorative March for Srebrenica. And what seems to be new and interesting is that many Croats, Bosnians and Serbs think the same: this war was a repetition of WWII, and they spontaneously give many examples of this repetition in Croatia and also in Bosnia, for instance in Višegrad, Vlasenica, Foca, and many other places. But of course, they don’t have the same explanations. The question is: how was I able, me from Paris, to discover that? Isn’t it strange? Amazing? I speak neither Croatian nor Bosnian - even if I’m trying to learn -, I was born in France after WWII, and analyzing this war and the propaganda that engendered it, I’ve been able to discover that very often the same events happened in the same places during this war and WWII. I’d like to reassure you: it’s not magic and I’m not Mme Soleil or a clairvoyant. But I work with powerful tools which are very pragmatic.

What is new? If I say “repetition is a novelty”, you’ll laugh and say: those writers have big imaginations. And I’ll answer: you’re forgetting what Freud said, namely: “There is one thing leading us from imagination to reality, and it is art.” In this case, I would add: literature. Because writers, normally, pay deep attention to the words they use. Can you believe, all of you, that this war started with words? And because of these wrong words, many people became criminals against humanity?

To summarize my method: I started reading Peter Handke because I wanted to understand why this famous writer living in France was taking Milosevic’s defence. I discovered the answer in his work, because of the way he speaks about WWII and his own origins. I published the text in 2003, and Peter Handke openly confirmed my interpretation by rendering funeral homage to Milosevic in March 2006. Bringing to light this mechanism of repetition, which is the Freudian mechanism showing that denial engenders repetition, I discovered that it was exactly what was happening here, at a collective level. Serbia’s strong denial concerning its collaboration with Hitler engendered a myth and a repetition of a genocide. As always with repetition, as studied and shown by psychoanalysts, the symptom is displaced, which renders the repetition more difficult to locate. When you understand that, which is a psychic clinic and clinic of memory, you understand what we should do now to help the reconciliation.

What do we want? Do we want to build a durable peace here? When you understand the mechanism, you also understand that we won’t do so by not saying what’s true and just, and by not assuming our own responsibilities.
The International Community began by supporting Milosevic. I remind you of the 1991 weapons embargo, which gave superiority to Milosevic and the Tchetniks. The Security Council couldn’t ignore that. Unfortunately, it was shameful for the UN and it was the first big error for all the people here and also for Serbia. This first big error engendered all the others, like an infernal mechanism. And, at the end, the UN didn’t protect the populations in Srebrenica, as they should have done in accordance with Resolution 836 made in 1993 by the Security Council. Eventually, the International Community accepted, with the Dayton agreement, to cut Bosnia, Europe’s daughter, in two: to give half of her to those who hated her. Had we forgotten the wisdom of Salomon’s judgment? Would we accept in Europe an entity based upon a true genocide? Would the UN accept that, contrary to all the values we try to promote in Europe and in the world? And if those institutions accept that, can you really be surprised if the young generation, whose families have been decimated, are becoming increasingly radicalised?

Since some experts now think it would be necessary to change Lempkin’s definition of genocide, it seems necessary to be more precise. What defines genocide is not only the attempt to exterminate a whole people because of its culture, its identity, its faith - which was the goal of the Tchetniks, and I remind you that Muslims of Bosnia were a people, a true nationality through Tito’s decision, prior to this war, and this was the specificity of Bosnia -, it was also the political will and effort to erase all the traces of the crime, as the Nazis had done with the Jews. And what characterises genocide is also the ideology, based upon a so-called genetic thesis, claiming some people are superior or inferior to others. If you know the theories supported by Biljana Plavsic, the former president of Republika Srpska, this entity based upon the genocide, you understand very well that her theories were comparable with the Nazi thesis concerning the Jews. I remind you that genocide isn’t a quantitative but a qualitative question, it is question of ideology engendering mass murders. I remind you that the goal of the Tchetniks was not only to exterminate all the non-Serbian people, but to erase also their memories, their monuments, their cemeteries, their culture, in a word, their past. Because destroying people and their past is a way to prevent those people from having any future on earth.
All these facts convinced me that changing the definition of genocide isn’t the right way to build a durable peace here, for the young generations. The right way, following my analysis, is to keep Lempkin’s definition and complement it with the analysis of the abuse of this term. You can read this abuse when you hear Tchetnik propaganda and when you analyze the myth, constructed after WWII, saying that the Serbs have always been friends with the Jews. Philip Cohen, in his book called Serbia’s Secret War, shows very well the gap between this myth developed by Vuk Draskovic in his Letter to the Writers of Israel published in 1985, and the truth of history. And I’ve also published historical documents coming from Belgrade’s archives showing the traditional anti-Semitism in Serbia and the way Serbia collaborated strongly with Hitler during WWII. Actually, the abuse of the term “genocide” in Tchetnik propaganda was to say that Serbian people, during WWII, were victims of a genocide, like the Jews. This false identification allowed Serbian nationalists to deny Serbia’s responsibility regarding the Holocaust. And because western democracies didn’t know anything about the true story, they took the wrong path by supporting Milosevic.

To be more reasonable, I think we should help Serbia to face its own historical responsibilities, we should strongly support all the Serbs who recognize the crimes and develop an international collaboration on memory with them, we should help Bosnia to reunify, because we can’t accept, in Europe, an entity based upon a true genocide, and we should promote, in all the countries that emerged from Yugoslavia, a Marshall Plan to work together on this memory. Actually, my interpretation is open to a new kind of work, which could be deeply interesting and constructive for the young generations, scientifically and humanly speaking. We could help populations here to become more conscious of this mechanism of repetition, by working specifically with the young generations in those places where such repetitions were observed and by collecting the different memories transmitted within families. We could maybe help them, in this way, to avoid new repetitions by criticizing their mythologies and comparing them with the facts, with the numerous documents we have and with the archives which are appearing now and will do so more and more in the future. Moreover, since genocide is at stake, we could ask for as many archives as possible to be declassified.

When you understand that this war and the genocide in Bosnia was the result of totalitarianism, of the lack of work on memory after WWII, of the denial of traditional Serbian anti-Semitism and of the lack of criticism regarding their racist ideologies, when you understand all these deep causes which are still difficult to speak about, as it was difficult after WWII to speak about what really happened in Europe with the Jews, you understand more clearly the direction we should be taking to try to help to build justice and peace here. To conclude, I can’t say anything but to the Bosnians: continue to ask for justice, don’t be discouraged by the answer of the ICJ, continue to fight for justice, along with the Croat victims of the same enemy, and continue with those Serbs who are fair and courageous enough to recognize Belgrade’s responsibility. Continue for as long as we have done since WWII, and I hope the Jewish institutions will help you. Because there’s one thing the war here could help to understand: it is that a true genocide can never be seen when it’s happening. It can only be heard. It can be heard in the historical lies leading people to war. It can be heard in the racist and criminal ideologies shared by those who start the war. If we agree to consider the war here as a case study, I think it is now historically proven. Despite all the cameras, few people in Europe understood what really happened here. Because they couldn’t imagine that after the Holocaust, a new genocide could be possible in Europe. And now they want to forget like they wanted to forget after WWII - you remember what Primo Levi said. Nobody wanted to hear, nobody wanted to know. But of course, it is unforgettable. And because it is unforgettable, we must recognize as soon as possible what really happened and help the young generations to understand why it happened, because of what representations, what prejudices shared by different people, what ignorance shared by the international community, and what ideologies. We have a lot of work to do here, research, translations, discussions, for many years to come, but we also have a lot of work to do in Brussels, to ask, together, to start this work on memory, and in our own countries, and in the UN. The sooner we start this work together, the better the chances we have of succeeding and of building a durable peace. The more we wait, the more we run the risk of seeing new violence here. What all the experts have to understand is that repetition is a mechanism. Young Serbs aren’t responsible for what happened here. But they bear the weight of this history, as the Germans bear the load of the Nazi crimes after WWII. If we want to help them, we should help them to judge Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic in their own memory. And we should help Serbia to recognize its own historical responsibility, a responsibility unfortunately shared by all the countries which supported Milosevic. The honour of the UN, to respect the spirit of their charter, should be to recognize this responsibility and not to hide behind their official immunity. If the UN could become more conscious and support this new kind of work on memories, we could maybe build a real and durable peace here. But hope without collective work won’t be sufficient to fight the mechanism of repetition. The only way to prevent genocide is to promote permanent work on history and memory, in order to fight the criminal and racists ideologies which engender systematic extermination. As we know well in France and Germany, this is pretty hard work. But if we have partially succeeded, wouldn’t the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Croats and the Albanians be able to do so too, with our help?
Thank you for your attention.