Ger Duijzings. Perpetrators As Victims in Eastern Bosnia (1992-1995) : Towards Anthropology of Dark Emotions. Keynote InASEA

O PFE R
Dynamiken der Viktimisierung

vom 17. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert
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HARRIET RUDOLPH und ISABELLA VON TRESKOW

Opfer, Opferschaft, Viktimisierung – einleitende Worte 7
Opferschaft als interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld in den Geisteswissenschaften

HARRIET RUDOLPH
Geschichte(n) der Sieger? Historische Opferforschung und ihr
epochenübergreifendes Erkenntnispotential 21
ISABELLA VON TRESKOW

Victima und das Problem der Wertung. Bemerkungen zu „Opfer“ und
„Opferschaft“ aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive 41
Opferschaft im Drama und in der Erzählliteratur
CHRISTIANE HANSEN
Rekonfigurationen des Opfer(n)s um 1700: Relationale und prozessuale
Perspektiven auf Logiken der Viktimisierung in der englischen she-tragedy 67
SIMON AEBERHARD
Ambivalenzen der Opferschaft im Literaturtheater um 1800.
Kotzebues Sonnenjungfrau, Goethes Iphigenie und Kleists Penthesilea 83
MATTEO GALLI
Pathologisierung als Absolution? Opfer-Täter-Diskurse bei E. T. A. Hoffmann 105
SABINE KOLLER
Jüdischer Opfertod, Selbst- und Antiviktimisierung in der jiddischen Literatur:
Chaim Bialik und Lamed Shapiro im Vergleich 115
Opferkonzepte im Kontext von militärischer Gewalt
FRANCISCO J. R. CHAPARRO
Goya and the Humanitarian Revolution.
The Construction of Victimhood in Late Modern Spain 135
URSULA REGENER
„Mancher mußte da hinunter“.
Opferfacetten im Kontext der Befreiungskriegslyrik 155
IRÈNE HERRMANN
Mapping the Contexts of Victimhood: The Example of Switzerland
(1860s to Present Times) 173
SARAH THIEME
Viktimisiert und sakralisiert. Konkurrierende Opfernarrationen
nationalsozialistischer Märtyrerfiguren im propagandistischen Wortkrieg in der
Endphase der Weimarer Republik 187
Nation, Staat und Volk als Gegenstand von Opferdiskursen
VOLKER DEPKAT
American Exceptionalism and Concepts of Victimhood 211
ELENA SMOLARZ
„Unglückselige russische Sklaven“?
Opfernarrative im Kontext der Versklavung russischer Untertanen in Buchara und
Chiwa in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts 225
MAREK NEKULA
Tod und Auferstehung einer Nation:
Religiöse Sprache im tschechischen ethnonationalen Opfernarrativ 245
GER DUIJZINGS
Perpetrators as ‘Victims‛ in Eastern Bosnia (1992–1995):
Towards Anthropology of Dark Emotions 259
Opfer und Opferschaft in Rechtsetzung und Rechtspraxis
ANNEMARIE SCHMOLL und HENNING ERNST MÜLLER

Das Straftatopfer in der Kriminologie und im Strafprozess 283
ROBERT UERPMANN-WITTZACK
Viktimisierung und Empowerment:
Internationales Flüchtlings- und Behindertenrecht im Vergleich 303
TANJA PENTER
Der Untergang der Sowjetunion und die Entdeckung der Opfer 317
GER DUIJZINGS
Perpetrators as ‘Victims’ in Eastern Bosnia (1992–1995):

Towards an Anthropology of Dark Emotions
Individuals and communities that regard themselves as victims of violence and histori-
cal injustices, sometimes cultivate their perpetual victimhood status with such intensity
that they become, individually or collectively, perpetrators of heinous crimes.1 Why the
perpetrators of atrocities and genocidal violence often present themselves, in the first
place, as ‘victims’ and not as perpetrators will be the main topic of this chapter. My
analysis will address three aspects, which I will deal with one at a time. I begin my
reflection on the ‘perpetrator-as-victim’ phenomenon by providing examples and
insights from the available (perpetrator) literature. Next, I will discuss how scholars
have analysed it by using models of explanation that are primarily cognitive, focusing
on powerful myths and collective memories, nationalist ideologies and propaganda.
Third, I will argue that these cognitive models are not enough for a proper understand-
ing of the perpetrators’ mind-set. I will draw attention to the role of emotions, distin-
guishing between, on the one hand, ‘negative’ emotions, such as grief, anxiety, sorrow,
guilt, shame, and despair, which constitute a state of passive suffering, and, on the other
hand, toxic ‘dark emotions’, which constitute an invitation, often collectively framed, to
make an end to that suffering and undo the humiliating status of real or perceived
victimhood, justifying acts of revenge and retribution. Under certain circumstances,
victimhood releases energies to take collective remedial action.
My main case study will be the Bosnian War (1992–1995), in which local Serbs,
motivated by a powerful cult of perpetual suffering, became perpetrators of ethnic
cleansing, mass atrocities and genocide. Alongside my more general and theoretical
reflections, I will repeatedly return to this case and especially to its darkest episode, that
of the Srebrenica massacre, proclaimed a case of genocide by the International Crimi-
nal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. As Biljana Plavšić, a
staunch Serb nationalist and the ‘iron lady’ of the war-time Bosnian Serb leadership
confessed towards the end of her trial for war crimes at the ICTY:
I have now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people
were the victims of an organised, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from
the territory claimed by Serbs. […] [I]f this truth is now self-evident, why did I not see it
earlier? And how could our leaders and those who followed have committed such acts?
The answer to both questions is, I believe, fear, a blinding fear that led to an obsession,
especially for those of us for whom the Second World War was a living memory, that
1 I would like to thank Volha Bartash, Zora Kostadinova, and the two editors of this volume for
their comments on an earlier draft of my paper.
260 Ger Duijzings
Serbs would never again allow themselves to become victims. In this, we in the leadership
violated the most basic duty of every human being, the duty to restrain oneself and to
respect the human dignity of others. We were committed to do whatever was necessary to
prevail. Although I was repeatedly informed of allegations of cruel and inhuman conduct
against non-Serbs, I refused to accept them or even to investigate. In fact, I immersed
myself in addressing the suffering of the war’s innocent Serb victims. This daily work
confirmed in my mind that we were in a struggle for our very survival and that in this
struggle, the international community was our enemy, and so I simply denied these
charges, making no effort to investigate. I remained secure in my belief that Serbs were
not capable of such acts. In this obsession of ours to never again become victims, we had
allowed ourselves to become victimisers.2
Initially, her declaration of guilt was welcomed by the prosecution and judges, as well
as by observers of the trial, as proof of genuine remorse for the crimes she had commit-
ted.3 Later, however, it transpired that it had been disingenuous as its key intention was
to exculpate the Bosnian Serbs, and erase the count of genocide from Plavšić’s indict-
ment. In the plea bargain she negotiated with the prosecution, this most serious count
was dropped, a dubious and controversial decision as Plavšić had been the most extreme
in her nationalist if not blatantly racist and social-Darwinist convictions.4 Her radical
and inflammatory statements were close to shaping an ideology of genocidal intent on
the part of the Bosnian Serb leadership.5 In the memoirs she penned down while serving
her sentence,6 she explained that certain atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs were
the regrettable but inevitable outcome of previous Serb victimization: “Suffering […]
has its limits. When that limit is reached, then Srebrenica happens and victims become
perpetrators of evil”.7 In her writing, she perseveres in conceptualising the situation in
Bosnia in stark nationalist and Manichean terms, not showing consideration whatsoever
for the victims on the enemy’s side.8 She reserves the highest praise for Bosnian Serb
2 Accessible online, URL: http://www.icty.org/en/sid/221 [15.078.2020].

3 The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić described Plavšić’s declaration as an act of courage
and moral stamina: amongst all the Serb war criminals indicted in The Hague, she was the
most radical in her remorse, cf. Slavenka Drakulić: They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War
Criminals on Trial in The Hague, London 2004, 162. Others, though, had strong doubts: Chief
prosecutor Carla del Ponte and journalist and Srebrenica survivor Emir Suljagić were scepti-
cal about the honesty of her statement. Reviewing the available evidence, Jelena Subotić
concludes that Plavšić’s guilty plea and statement of remorse were indeed a cynical fraud
aimed at reducing her sentence, cf. Jelena Subotić: The Cruelty of False Remorse. Biljana
Plavšić at The Hague, in: Southeastern Europe 36(2012), 39-59, cf. also Olivera Simić:
‘I would do the same again’. In Conversation With Biljana Plavšić, in: International Criminal
Justice Review 28,4(2018), 317-332.
4 Being a distinguished professor of biology at Sarajevo University, she claimed during the war
that Muslims in Bosnia were the carriers of inferior genetic material and that ethnic cleansing
was a ‘natural phenomenon’ and not a war crime; see Simić, Conversation (cf. footnote 3),
319.
5 Ibid., 319f.
6 Biljana Plavšić: Svedočim: knjiga pisana u zatvoru, Banja Luka 2004; Biljana Plavšić:
Svedočim: druga knjiga pisana u zatvoru, Banja Luka 2005.
7 Plavšić, Svedočim (cf. footnote 6), 139, as quoted in Subotić, Cruelty (cf. footnote 3), 56.
8 Subotić, Cruelty (cf. footnote 3), 49.
Perpetrators as ‘Victims’ in Eastern Bosnia (1992–1995) 261
Army General Ratko Mladić, the key organizer of the Srebrenica massacre, whom she
describes as “a man with a clear compass”.9
Her memoirs are replete with the theme of perpetual Serbian suffering at the hands
of the “great powers, neighbouring nations and just about everyone else”.10 This is a
dominant theme in Serb nationalist discourse, a ‘chosen trauma’ as psychiatrist Vamık
Volkan calls it, which fuels ideologies of resentment and revenge when instrumental-
ized by politicians.11 The key historical reference point for these Serb narratives is the
Kosovo Battle, a battle fought in 1389, when the Ottoman armies defeated the Serbs and
their Balkan allies, introducing five centuries of Muslim rule. These narratives were first
cultivated by the Serbian-Orthodox church, which has ever since defined itself as
a ‘suffering’ church. In the nineteenth century, the Serbian national movement adopted
this notion of perpetual suffering, turning victimization under a Muslim power into a
key tenet of Serb nationalism: this idea propelled the Serb liberation struggle aiming at
resurrecting the medieval Serbian state. It was harnessed to a programme of Serbia’s
territorial expansion, with the ‘Reconquista’ of Kosovo as the key ambition.
As Kosovo was conquered by the Serbs during the First Balkan War (1912), the
powerful notion of Serbs being eternal victims continued to be instrumentalized during
both World Wars and Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s. The permutations of this
ideological tenet during the 1980s and the 1990s provided a fertile breeding ground and
moral justification for various acts of violence against Muslims, culminating in the
Srebrenica massacre in 1995. In my book Religion and the Politics of Identity in
Kosovo12, I drew parallels with other cults of suffering, taking inspiration, in particular,
from Michael M. J. Fischer’s analysis of Shia Islam.13 Here, reiterating my argument,
I will again use Fischer’s wording, characterizing General Mladić’s call to create a
‘winning army’, while addressing his troops days before the attack on the UN Safe Area
of Srebrenica, as an instance of ‘Kosovo in the active mood’: an invitation to undo
historical injustices, throw off the degrading and humiliating status of the ‘victim’, and
impose a ‘final solution’, bringing ‘liberation’, ‘justice’, and ‘redemption’.
In the following, I hope to draw some lessons on the potentially toxic consequences
of self-declared (‘real’ or ‘imagined’) victimization: it often leads to forms of retribution
which can prolong violence: the self-styled ‘victim’ may retaliate, justifying it by argu-
ing that further victimization needs to be prevented by neutralising the enemy, who is
out there to destroy ‘us’. The argument of tactical pre-emption, of hitting before the
enemy will strike, is common in situations of violent confrontations (including cases of
individual homicide). Killings are justified by the belief that the opponent is about to
imperil one’s life and existence, and that the only chance of survival lies in eliminating
9 Ibid., 52.
10 Ibid., 50.
11 Vamık D. Volkan: Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas. An Aspect of
Large-Group Identity, in: Group Analysis 34, 1(2001), 79-97, here 89-95.
12 Ger Duijzings: Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, London 2000.
13 Ibid., 187-192; Michael M. J. Fischer: Iran. From Religious Dispute to Revolution,
Cambridge/Mass. 1980, 213.
262 Ger Duijzings
that imminent threat.14As sociologist Neil J. Smelser wrote: “He who does the evil is
typically convinced that evil is about to be done to him”.15 Although people can have
many different reasons and motives for the violence they commit, they often prefer to
present it as an unavoidable and necessary act of self-defence, curtailing the lethal plans
of a hostile opponent. Hence the pre-emptive attack is presented as a matter of life and
death.16 In this vein, the Nazis depicted the Jews as a fatal threat before unleashing the
Holocaust.17 Similarly, the Wehrmacht justified its atrocities in Eastern Europe by argu-
ing that the enemy was extremely brutal, so Germans had to be brutal too.18
These justifications elucidate the removal of a collective security risk as a form of
self-defence.19 Mass killings become prophylactic acts of group preservation in the face
of an imagined ominous threat.20 The only way to prevent it is to overcome scruples and
kill mercilessly: “If we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us”.21 Being ruthless in this
pursuit is essential since if the enemy is allowed to survive “we will have to fight him
again!”.22 This was indeed the argument Plavšić used, when she wrote that the Serbs
will and cannot continue to live with their Muslim neighbours: “People don’t want a
‘sticky embrace’, […] from which every thirty years if not sooner, they will kill and
slaughter us, as was the case in the twentieth century”.23
In psycho-analytical terms, the enemy is transformed into a ‘bad object’ or ‘poison
container’ whose designs are inherently persecutorial: hence the destruction of the
enemy is justified.24 Even if the enemy has yet to inflict this suffering on ‘us’, ‘we’ will
have to pre-empt it by attacking first. Killing is not only morally justifiable (right to do)
but also imperative (wrong not to do).25 As Slavenka Drakulić describes in her book
They Would Never Hurt a Fly. War Criminals on Trial in The Hague, perpetrators from
14 See Dorothee Frank: Menschen töten, Düsseldorf 2006, 35; David Riches (ed.): The Anthro-
pology of Violence, Oxford 1986; Pamela J. Stewart/Andrew Strathern: Violence. Theory and
Ethnography, London 2002, 7-8.
15 Quoted in Joanna Bourke: An Intimate History of Killing. Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-
Century Warfare, London 1999, 228.
16 Stewart/Strathern, Violence (cf. footnote 14), 7.
17 Harald Welzer: On Killing and Morality. How Normal People Become Mass Murderers, in:
Olaf Jensen/Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds.): Ordinary People as Mass Murderers.
Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective, Houndmills 2008, 165-181, here 171f.
18 Thomas Kühne: Male Bonding and Shame Culture. Hitler’s Soldiers and the Moral Basis of
Genocidal Warfare, in: Jensen/Szejnmann (eds.), People (cf. footnote 17), 55-77, here 69.
19 Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann: Perpetrators of the Holocaust. A Historiography, in: Jensen/
id. (eds.): People (cf. footnote 17), 25-54, here 41.
20 Andrej Angrick: The Men of Einsatzgruppe D. An Inside View of a State-Sanctioned Killing
Unit in the ‘Third Reich’, in: Jensen/Szejnmann (eds.), People (cf. footnote 17), 78-96, here
89.
21 Kühne, Bonding (cf. footnote 18), 61.
22 Ibid., 70.
23 Subotić, Cruelty (cf. footnote 3), 57.
24 Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco/Antonius C. G. M. Robben: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Violence and Trauma, in: id. (eds.): Cultures Under Siege. Collective Violence and Trauma,
Cambridge 2000, 1-42, here 28-31.
25 James E. Waller: The Ordinariness of Extraordinary Evil. The Making of Perpetrators of
Genocide and Mass Killing, in: Jensen/Szejnmann, People (cf. footnote 17), 145-164, here
155.
all the warring sides in the former Yugoslavia claimed in court that they acted out of
self-defence, selflessly and courageously fighting an evil enemy, which meant, by
implication, that they could not have committed any war crimes.26 Few showed
remorse, even when hearing the court’s verdict: “They heard their sentences and were
visibly devastated by the ‘injustice’ done to them”.27
At the start of the war in Bosnia, Serbs claimed (and convinced themselves) that
they were launching a pre-emptive war to prevent the next genocide against them, as
during World War Two.28 The anticipation of a renewed genocide had been spawned by
years of nationalist propaganda and scare tactics, which began when Serbia’s leader
Slobodan Milošević rose to power in the mid-1980s: his regime showed no restraint
whatsoever in displaying graphic images of dead and mutilated bodies of civilians fallen
victim to the extermination campaigns organised by the Ustashe during World War
Two.29 This propaganda was spread relentlessly, in the printed media, on prime-time
television, and in museum exhibitions catering for groups of school children and
youth.30 As Drakulić writes, “The Serb media stirred people into a nationalist fervour,
spreading propaganda until Serbs in both Serbia and Bosnia were utterly convinced that
they were threatened by the ‘Others’” (meaning Catholic Croats, Muslims and Albani-
ans).31 As has been argued for other atrocities and genocides such as in Rwanda, it takes
time and continuous effort to produce and foster a broad collective hatred of an enemy:
it is manufactured through incessant propaganda over a time-span of years, as was the
case in Serbia too.32 For this to be effective, inculcating existential fear is essential: it
transforms the population into a state of permanent mental and practical preparation for
the conflicts to come. It takes years for the idea to mature in the collective mind-set that
the ‘other’ has sinister intentions, may be about to launch an attack and endanger the
survival of the group.33
In the course of this process, ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are defined across the lines
of (ethnic or religious) division and congealed. These labels are often not ‘real’ but
‘imaginary’, ascribed and constructed through language, propaganda and the media,
26 Drakulić, War Criminals (cf. footnote 3), 9-16.

27 Ibid., 58.
28 Serbian historians portray the systematic violence against Serbs in the territories controlled by
the Independent State of Croatia (the NDH) as full-fledged genocide on a par with the
Holocaust, see David B. MacDonald: Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim
Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia, Manchester 2003, especially 162-165. For a
critical appraisal of this tendency in Serbian historiography, see Dubravka Stojanović:
Populism the Serbian Way, Belgrade 2017, 173-187.
29 The Ustashe formed a Croatian ultranationalist organization, which also included Muslims as
soon as Bosnia became part of the NDH.
30 Cf. for example Svetlana Isaković (ed.): Genocid nad Srbima / Genocide Against the Serbs
1941–1945, 1991/92: žrtve / Victims. Exhibition Catalogue, Belgrade 1992.
31 Drakulić, War Criminals (cf. footnote 3), 82.
32 Abram de Swaan: The Killing Compartments. The Mentality of Mass Murder, New Haven
2015; Frank, Menschen (cf. footnote 14), 196.
33 Olaf Jensen: Introductory Thoughts and Overview, in: Jensen/Szejnmann (eds.), People (cf.
footnote 17), 1-21, here 11.
264 Ger Duijzings
which inscribes and consolidates them in the collective mind-set.34 Even if an individual
never suffered any direct victimization, he or she still may genuinely feel ‘victimized’.
Hence, traumas can be transmitted in such a manner that following generations ‘experi-
ence’ the historical injustices as if they suffered these themselves through a collapse of
historical time.35 Or as Volkan argues, trauma is ‘deposited’ into the next generation
and the desire for retaliation is kept alive.36 In case of collective historical traumas,
these become what Volkan calls ‘chosen traumas’. As a result, the ‘revenge spiral’ may
continue generation after generation.37
Most people prefer these roles of victims and perpetrators to be clear-cut and fixed,
which of course in reality they are not, or not always. Individuals and collectives may
swap positions over the course of an ongoing conflict or in a series of historical
conflicts. They may consecutively assume the roles of perpetrators, victims, witnesses
and/or bystanders of violence. A given configuration at one point in time may be just a
moment in an extended chain of retaliation and retribution during which sides swap
positions. However, all will claim to be ‘victims’ simultaneously, which is the default
rhetorical strategy in conflict situations.38
Not only do perpetrators see themselves as victims, they also perceive their victims
as perpetrators, who deserve their destiny, even if they claim innocence: they are far
from blameless and must have done at least ‘something’ wrong to have caused their
suffering, carrying direct or indirect responsibility for their own victimization.39 There is
yet another way in which perpetrators can perceive themselves as victims, when they
realize that killing leaves mental scars or when they feel forced to carry out the dirty
work of killing, as a result of which they become psychologically affected or trauma-
tized.40 Hence, members of the Einsatztruppe D saw themselves as victims, as superiors
showed little concern for their well-being when they had to carry out the ‘filthy work’
of executing Jews.41
I would like to add that the perpetrator-as-victim is not just a result of ideological
‘priming’, it may also be rooted in a pre-existing sentiment of having been a victim in
terms other than the ideological framework suggests. One may feel ‘victimized’ for
unrelated reasons which have nothing to do with the enemy’s exploits, but are caused by
other conditions, such as there may be unemployment, economic deprivation, problem-
34 For the middle-ranking functional elites in the Third Reich and their self-perception as
‘victims’ rather than ‘perpetrators’, cf. Alf Lüdtke: Funktionseliten. Täter, Mit-Täter, Opfer?
Zu den Bedingungen des deutschen Faschismus, in: id. (ed.): Herrschaft als soziale Praxis.
Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien, Göttingen 1991, 559-590.
35 Maurice Bloch: Autobiographical Memory and the Historical Memory of the More Distant
Past, in: Maurice Bloch: How We Think They Think. Anthropological Approaches to
Cognition, Memory, and Literacy, Boulder 1998, 114-127.
36 Volkan, Transmissions (cf. footnote 11), 85-87.
37 Tomas Böhm/Suzanna Kaplan: Revenge. On the Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its
Taming, London 2011, 65.
38 Stewart/Strathern, Violence (cf. footnote 14), 4; cf. also Frank, Menschen (cf. footnote 14),
260.
39 Waller, Ordinariness (cf. footnote 25), 156-157.
40 Saira Mohamed: Of Monsters and Men. Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity, in: Columbia
Law Review 115.5(2015), 1157-1216.
41 Angrick, Men (cf. footnote 20), 91. Cf. also Lüdtke, Funktionseliten (cf. footnote 34), 589.
atic upbringing, family tragedies, and what more. In the end, the adverse individual
experiences may be rendered meaningful through the ideological or cognitive templates
or frameworks on offer that ‘explain’ one’s individual suffering by putting it into a new
context of collective victimization. Personal and collective victimization start to connect
and intersect. 42
From Serbs as a Suffering Nation to Kosovo in the Active Mood

As pointed out before, Serb nationalists never stopped reiterating the trope of eternal
Serb victimization or persecution, and Plavšić was no exception.43 In the following
section, I will describe the evolution of this master narrative of perpetual Serb suffering,
which revolves around the Kosovo myth, the story of a battle lost against the Ottomans
in 1389. This narrative of victimization at the hands of the ‘Turks’ first emerged in the
religious realm of the Serbian-Orthodox church (the key domain in which the memories
of this battle could be cultivated during Ottoman times) and was then, from the nine-
teenth century onwards, transposed into modern politics, becoming a key turning-point
in Serbian history. Christian victimization was adapted to the modern conditions of the
nation state, morphing the suffering of the church into the suffering of the Serbs as a
nation. Here it would go too far to discuss the Kosovo Battle in all its historical detail44,
yet a key aspect to retain is that the defeat and the ensuing subjugation under the ‘Otto-
man yoke’ was turned into a moral victory in collective memory.45 It inspired the Serbs
to avenge the loss of Kosovo, to resurrect the nation and recover the national homeland.
By signing a covenant with God, they became a ‘chosen’ nation, which called upon all
Serbs not to forsake their duty of defending the nation on the battlefield.
Analogous to Michael Fischer’s analysis of the instrumentalization of the Kerbela
myth, a similar story of a lost battle in Shia Islam, I have called this Kosovo in the active
mood, an appeal to avenge Kosovo and kick off revolutionary (political) action. This
meant liberating Kosovo from Ottoman rule once and for all, the main preoccupation of
the Serbian national movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. ‘Kosovo’
evolved into a powerful ideological instrument of a nation under construction and an
expanding Serbian state, liberating itself from Ottoman domination and reversing histor-
ical injustices. These ideas also provided the ideological ammunition for the wars which
Serbia fought after 1876, especially the Balkan Wars and World War One. On 28 June
1914, or Vidovdan (St. Vitus Day), the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, the Bosnian
42 Stef Jansen: ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ Everyday Serbian Nationalist Knowledge of Muslim
Hatred, in: Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13,2(2003), 215-237.
43 Drakulić writes for example, “[i]n The Hague, Milošević tried to do what Serbs had always
been good at – presenting themselves as victims of historical events, of plots, of misunder-
standings and the wrongdoings of others”. Drakulić, War Criminals (cf. footnote 3), 117; cf.
also Stevan M. Weine: When History is a Nightmare. Lives and Memories of Ethnic Clean-
sing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Brunswick, 1999, 93-98.
44 For this cf. Noel Malcolm: Kosovo. A Short History, London 1998, 58-80.
45 Ivan Čolović: Smrt na Kosovu Polju. Istorija kosovskog mita, Beograd 2016; Duijzings,
Religion (cf. footnote 12), 176-202.
266 Ger Duijzings
Serb Gavrilo Princip triggered the First World War with the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.
The Kosovo myth (or cycle of epic songs) narrates the (hi)story of this lost battle
between the forces of good against the victorious forces of evil. Its hero, Tsar Lazar, the
Christian commander, refuses to surrender to the Ottomans, being well aware that this
will lead to an unavoidable defeat and a certain death. His deliberate sacrifice forms the
key event of the Kosovo story, providing a powerful and emotional theme of martyrdom
and resistance, which has inspired generations of Serb nationalists, accepting suffering
and patient endurance as a necessary step towards redemption. Some of the core
‘messages’ of the Kosovo myth are: the Serbs are in no way an ordinary nation, but a
‘chosen’ people, whose cause is divine and righteous; keeping to Lazar’s covenant with
God they never compromise higher principles for the sake of earthly benefits; therefore,
they never give in to foreign domination and always defy their enemies, even if defeat is
inescapable. The price to be paid for this is loss and suffering, but this predicament is
central to Serb identity, as it is only through perpetual suffering and victimization that
moral perfection is achieved. This makes up the greatness of a small nation surrounded
by powerful empires and hostile enemies. There is, however, the prospect of final
justice and liberation: in the end, God will reward the Serbs, the kingdom that was lost
will be resurrected, and the account with the Muslim enemy will be settled.
Like most myths, the Kosovo story fuses past and present, establishes continuity
between different eras and projects a utopian and redemptive future which is predeter-
mined to come at some point in time. The narrative strongly relies on Manichean
oppositions – between Christianity and Islam, good and evil, faithfulness and betrayal –
which are fundamental and personified in the main protagonists of the story. What
makes ‘Kosovo’ into an effective tool of populist politics in Serbia is that it is deeply
rooted in popular culture, enabling the translation of moral values and political princi-
ples into the language of ordinary people.46 Politicians can instrumentalize and re-enact
certain aspects of the Kosovo story for their own purposes, making them resonate with a
broad repository of popular references to mobilize the masses, legitimate policies, or
explain complex realities in simple black-and-white terms. As Ivan Čolović has shown
in overwhelming detail, the myth is commonly expressed through para-literary forms
(for example in slogans and popular songs) which reference the ‘original’ myth, as
canonized by the nineteenth-century linguist and philologist Vuk Karadžić. During the
wars of the 1990s, politicians, church leaders, and paramilitary leaders adorned their
speeches with quotations from these songs and proverbs, referring to the main protago-
nists of the Kosovo story as role models of patriotic, or, alternatively, treacherous
behaviour. This political ‘folklorism’ or populism is extremely effective because its
very form suggests that messages are in consonance with people’s feelings, representing
the vox populi instead of his master’s voice.47
With the help of these popular tropes Serbian politicians constructed a ‘story’, which
was extensively rehearsed before the Bosnian war broke out. As soon as the violence
started, the very same story ‘explained’ and simplified the chaotic realities and experi-
46 Nebojša Popov: Srpski populizam. Od marginalne do dominantne pojave. Special issue of

Vreme, 24 May 1993; Čolović, Smrt (cf. footnote 47); Stojanović, Populism (cf. footnote 28).
47 Ivan Čolović: Pucanje od zdravlje, Beograd 1994, 8f.
ences of the war. It was, however, first activated in the context of the conflict between
Serbs and (predominantly Muslim) Albanians in the autonomous province of Kosovo in
the 1980s. This conflict was presented, by Serb theologians, ecclesiastics, intellectuals,
writers, and even Communist politicians, as a battle between Christianity and Islam,
whereby Serbs were once again threatened with extinction or a new ‘genocide’. Becom-
ing a leitmotif in the mass media and amongst academics and writers, it was soon adop-
ted by Communist politicians such as Slobodan Milošević who employed the populist
leverage of the Kosovo myth to rise to power. At the basis of this upsurge in Serb
national sentiments and historical grievances stood the so-called Memorandum pub-
lished in 1986 by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, which described the fate
of the Kosovo Serbs in apocalyptic terms, as a “physical, political, legal, and cultural
genocide” comparable to the extermination of Serbs during World War Two.48
Nationalist mobilisation culminated during 1989, with the celebration of the six-
hundredth anniversary of the Kosovo Battle on St. Vitus Day (28 June). Hundreds of
thousands of Serbs gathered in Kosovo, on the site where the battle took place, and
Milošević was flown into the ceremony by helicopter, uttering an undisguised threat to
the other Yugoslav nations: “Six centuries after the battle of Kosovo Polje we are again
engaged in battles and quarrels. These are not armed battles, but the latter cannot
be ruled out yet”. Other Serb politicians started referring to their nation as “the slaugh-
tered people”.49 The bodies of World War Two victims were exhumed and reburied in
ceremonies led by church leaders and attended by Serb politicians.50 It clearly showed
that the notion of the Serbs as a victimized nation did not only refer to a distant past, but
pertained to recent history as well, especially World War Two and the period of the
Independent State of Croatia.
What followed was Yugoslavia’s final disintegration. Slovenia and Croatia were
caught up in war in the summer of 1991, while Bosnia followed suit in spring 1992. The
Bosnian Serbs presented their war efforts as an attempt to avenge Kosovo and turn the
clock of history back (of course the real motives were far more down to earth: control
over territory and economic assets in a state that was breaking up). Muslims were
labelled ‘Turks’, as descendants of the Ottoman oppressors, once again engaging in a
battle with the Christian Serbs. The crucial role of ‘Kosovo’ as a force of legitimation in
Republika Srpska was expressed poignantly in the adoption of Vidovdan (St. Vitus
Day) as the holiday of the Army of Republika Srpska. At the Vidovdan celebrations in
June 1995, only days before the Bosnian Serb Army launched its attack on Srebrenica,
48 Kosta Mihailović/Vasilije Krestić: Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and

Arts. Answers to Criticisms, Belgrade 1995, 128.
49 Zoran M. Marković: Nacija – žrtva i osveta (prema revijalnoj štampa u Srbiji 1987–1991), in:
Republika 1-15 May 1996, i-v.
50 Bette Denich: Dismembering Yugoslavia. Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of
Genocide, in: American Ethnologist 21,2(1994), 367-390; Robert M. Hayden: Recounting the
Dead. The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late and Post-Communist
Yugoslavia, in: Rubie S. Watson (ed.): Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socia-
lism, Santa Fe 1994, 167-201; Tone Bringa: The Peaceful Death of Tito and the Violent End
of Yugoslavia, in: John Borneman (ed.): Death of the Father. An Anthropology of the End in
Political Authority. New York 2004, 148-200, here 184f.
268 Ger Duijzings
Mladić told his troops about the importance of Kosovo, providing Serbs with a duty to
avenge and reverse historical injustices:
Prince Lazar gave his army the Communion, and bowed for the Heavenly Empire,
defending fatherland, faith, freedom and honour of the Serbian people. We have under-
stood the significance of his sacrifice and have drawn the historical message from it.
Today we make a winning army, we will not convert Lazar’s offering into a blinding
myth of sacrifice.51
Two weeks later Mladić’s troops ‘liberated’ Srebrenica, after which 8.000 Muslim men
were killed or executed in the days following the fall of the UN Safe Area.
The Emotional Side of ‘Victimhood’: from Negative to Dark Emotions
Mass violence and atrocities are not only the outcome of cultural ‘priming’ or ideologi-
cal ‘brainwashing’; they are also generated by strong emotional dispositions. I would
like to call these ‘dark’ emotions, distinct from the passive ‘negative’ emotions
mentioned earlier.52 Dark emotions – such as rage, vengefulness and hatred – are intense
and eruptive feelings that can trigger active responses in the shape of hostile and vigor-
ous action. They are ‘toxic’ in terms of threatening social peace. In my view, we need to
take these emotional dispositions, especially dark emotions, seriously as the key triggers
of violent behaviour which often leads to the perpetration of crimes. In order to under-
stand why individuals resort to violence, utilitarian and/or ideological motives are
important but not sufficient, as human behaviour cannot be reduced to these aspects
alone.53 The following section will provide a reflection on ‘dark emotions’ and their
social and cultural construction and political instrumentalization, which will take us
beyond the purely cognitive frames of analysis.54
51 Vreme, 10 July 1995, 54.

52 The adjective ‘dark’ has been applied by academics in various contexts, referring particularly
to the darker aspects of humanity which offer some kind of attraction or temptation. Examples
are ‘dark tourism’, cf. John Lennon/Malcolm Foley: Dark Tourism. The Attraction of Death
and Disaster, London 2000; or ‘dark anthropology’, cf. Sherry B. Ortner: Dark Anthropology
and its Others. Theory Since the Eighties, in: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6,1
(2016), 47-73. A historical precursor of this phenomenon may be detected in ‘dark Romanti-
cism’; I would like to thank the editors for this suggestion.
53 Frank Biess: Discussion Forum ‘History of Emotions’ (with Alon Confino, Ute Frevert, Uffa
Jensen, Lyndal Roper, Daniela Saxer), in: German History 28,1(2010), 67-80, here 76.
54 There is an increased interest in the role of affect in politics, because of the populist ‘explo-
sion’ in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. This affective turn seems to be premised
on the idea that emotions are by their very nature ‘irrational’ and hence form a threat to liberal
politics and deliberative democracy. This presumption is not very helpful. One should not
draw a strict division between emotions and political rationality: there is a logic to populist
politics, as there is an emotional aspect to rational decision-making; see Maruška Svašek:
Introduction. Postsocialism and the Politics of Emotions, in: id. (ed.): Postsocialism. Politics
and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, New York 2006, 1-33, here 2f.
Even if emotions are felt by individual persons, people’s emotional responses are
framed, channelled and expressed collectively. There are obvious similarities with
memory: just as memories pop up in somebody’s mind in the form of flashes and recol-
lections, emotions also occur at the level of the individual. At the same time, they
emerge in the framework of social interaction and specific social and cultural contexts.
Hence, as Maruška Svašek argues, it is crucial “to firmly place emotional discourses
and displays in the historical, cultural, political and linguistic contexts in which they are
conceptualised, framed and experienced”.55 There is a collective and public dimension
to the experience and expression of emotions, which is captured in analytical concepts
such as ‘emotional communities’ and/or ‘emotional regimes.56 These are based on the
realization that there are distinct configurations of collectively framed emotions and
agencies in specific social and historical contexts.57 People act on these emotions,
leading to social feedback processes and a constant ‘navigation of feelings’ in social
interaction, which may alter the emotional fabric of the self and of society.58 Our affec-
tive life is transformed by changing social, cultural, political, and economic factors and
conditions, as Norbert Elias has shown so forcefully in The Civilizing Process.59
Instead of projecting (dark) emotions on a nation as a whole, or assuming the
emotional regimes to persist across (national) time and space, it is much more produc-
tive to see them as historically specific and embedded within particular institutions and
social groups.60 Barbara Rosenwein’s notion of ‘emotional communities’61 starts from
the idea that key social institutions such as family, workplace, schools, student fraterni-
ties, the military, and the judicial system normally develop their own situated emotional
and affective codes which members learn to comply with. The analysis of conflict and
forms of political mobilisation has to take such situated emotional codes into account.
This also means looking at the role and impact of modern media, as the key vehicles for
the evocation and transportation of emotions. By observing the staging and public
expression of emotions in public and semi-public places, we can discover what triggers
collective action.62
One can distinguish between ‘negative’ and ‘dark’ emotions, negative emotions
being more or less ‘passive’. They can be characterized as silent suffering, combined
with social withdrawal and helplessness. Dark emotions on the other hand are far more
‘active’, eruptive, collective, and potentially toxic in their effect. It is difficult to draw a
55 Svašek, Introduction (cf. footnote 56), 6.

56 Barbara H. Rosenwein: Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca 2006.
57 Biess, Discussion Forum (cf. footnote 55), 69.
58 Ibid., 73; William M. Reddy: The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of
Emotions, Cambridge 2001.
59 Originally published in German as Norbert Elias: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Sozio-
genetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, Bd. 1: Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den
weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes, Bd. 2: Wandlungen der Gesellschaft: Entwurf zu
einer Theorie der Zivilisation, Basel 1939. For the most recent English translation, cf. Norbert
Elias: The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, revised Edition,
Oxford 2000.
61 Rosenwein, Communities (cf. footnote 58).
270 Ger Duijzings
clear boundary between the two, they blend into one another: a ‘passive’ emotional state
such as grief, can easily morph into an ‘active’ one, like rage, as Renato Rosaldo has
illustrated so forcefully.63 Hence individuals may experience a sequence of emotional
states which are difficult to control, ‘dark’ emotions being more radical in that they
transform suffering into a drive to retaliate or take redemptive action, similar to what
Fischer calls ‘the active mood’. They may turn into outright hostility representing rather
harsh and non-empathic emotional positions: rage can turn into hatred which the indi-
vidual will then strive “to get rid of” through appropriate action.64 As the psychologists
Tomas Böhm and Suzanna Kaplan argue, victims very often have revenge phantasies,
which can turn into actual revenge acts, having a major effect on them as though they
become “another person”.65 Revenge acts bring relief by neutralizing strong feelings of
victimization and humiliation through outward action.66 This is akin to Jensen’s idea of
‘caged feelings wanting to be more’, of suppressed and relatively undefined and nega-
tive moods turning into aggressive action.67
Dark emotions can be contagious and come in collective waves, in which large
numbers of people fall under the spell of such emotional responses.68 People may be
attracted to ‘dark emotions’ as indulging in them may be comforting or lustful: it is
liberating to give free reign to radical feelings, as Uffa Jensen argues in his book Zorn-
politik.69 Frustration, economic crisis and downward mobility are often mentioned as
important factors triggering such responses, but it is too simple to say that it is only the
poor and socially deprived that are prone to them. The middle classes are certainly not
immune to them, as the decisive aspect is that people see their existence under threat:
they feel that they are losing ground or control over their situation which can occur at all
levels of society.70 Facing some form of adversity without being able to control it is a
key source of resentment, especially if others can be blamed through scapegoating or
otherwise. Lingering resentment can then be discharged or acted upon through ‘dark
emotions’ such as anger and hatred: they start to drive action, turning a more or less
passive state of (real or imagined) victimization into the ‘active mood’.
Hatred is one of the most radical responses, directed at an ‘enemy’ who is seen to
exert such power over us that he can and will destroy us. Anti-Semitic tropes provide
examples of such a belief in an enemy who is intent on undermining our very existence
and identity. This hatred then bleeds into the need to remove and destroy the threatening
object.71 It is commonly linked to envy, the “deeply rooted impulse to begrudge others’
better fortunes”72, as was theorized in psycho-analysis by Sigmund Freud’s student
63 Renato Rosaldo: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage, in: Antonius C. G. M. Robben (ed.): Death,
Mourning, and Burial. A Cross-Cultural Reader, Malden/Massachusetts 2004, 167-178.
64 Böhm/Kaplan, Revenge (cf. footnote 37), 31-32.
65 Ibid.,19-20.
66 Ibid., 34.
67 Uffa Jensen: Zornpolitik, Berlin 2017, 33.
68 Ibid., 36.
69 Ibid., 15-17.
70 Ibid., 36-38.
71 Ibid., 80.
72 Marco Chiesa: Envy and Gratitude, in: Catalina Bronstein (ed.): Kleinian Theory: A Contem-
porary Perspective, London 2001, 93-107, here 93.
Melanie Klein. Envy is bound to greed and produces the powerful drive to take rapa-
ciously everything the hated or despised ‘others’ possess on the basis of an entitlement
‘we’ believe we have. As Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Antonius Robben have argued,
cultural elaborations of group envy are indeed extremely common in the organization of
large-scale violence.73 Ultimately, the violent elimination of a hated and envied enemy
is experienced as a catharsis, as ‘cleansing’ the mind from an intolerable state of rage.
By using Klein’s concepts of splitting and projective identification, Suárez-Orozco and
Robben argue that these (usually unconscious) psychological mechanisms play a role in
explosions of ethno-religious hatred and violence.74 One group starts to impute some
unacceptable and emotionally charged malevolent traits, such as aggression, hatred,

greed, to a disparaged but proximate group of ‘others’ and then proceeds to mobilise the
traits it ascribes to these others as a justification to inflict violence, understood as
pre-emptive. A key ingredient of this narcissistic psychological position is the image of
the self as threatened, insulted, or victimized, urging the self to defend itself.
There are benefits to being victims, as it detaches and distances them from every-
thing that is evil. This is, however, rather unhelpful in preventing future violence as it
supports the victims in terms of justifying retribution, as Tzvetan Todorov argues.75 The
negative consequences of such a position are spelled out by Christian Axboe Nielsen,
who, in his analysis of competitive victimhood in various parts of the former Yugosla-
via, notices an “open-ended and rather unlimited space afforded to collective victim-
hood in the former Yugoslavia”, a region where every nation sees itself now as “the
primary or even sole victim” obsessed with documenting its own suffering. As he ob-
serves for virtually all groups, “‘We’ can never be perpetrators, but only victims; ‘they’
can only be perpetrators, but never victims”.76 There is only room for one’s own suffer-
ing, and no recognition of the crimes that were committed in the name of the nation,
resulting in an “abject lack of interest in perpetrators from one’s own ranks and in the
victims from among the ranks of the others”.77
73 Suárez-Orozco/Robben, Perspectives (cf. footnote 24); see also: Chiesa, Envy (cf. footnote
74), 104; Geoffrey Hughes, Megnaa Mehtta, Chiara Bresciana, and Stuart Strange: Introduc-
tion: Ugly Emotions and the Politics of Accusation, in: The Cambridge Journal of Anthro-
pology 37.2(2019), 1-20.
74 Splitting refers to a psychological process whereby realities are fractured into the ‘good
object’ (I) and the ‘bad object’ (the other). It precedes the process of projective identification,
in which negative traits, such as innate aggression and destructive impulses, are projected
onto an external object, or ‘other’ who is normally close to the subject, and who is then
perceived as dangerously persecuting me. These two phenomena are characteristic for what
Melanie Klein calls the paranoid-schizoid position, one of two elemental structures of
emotional life; cf. Priscilla Roth: The Paranoid-Schizoid Position, in: Bronstein (ed.),
Kleinian Theory (cf. footnote 74), 32-46, esp. 36-38; David Bell: Projective Identification, in:
ibid., 125-147.
75 Tzvetan Todorov: Memory as Remedy for Evil, in: Journal of International Criminal Justice 7
(2009), 447-462, here 449.
76 Christian Axboe Nielsen: Collective and Competitive Victimhood as Identity in the Former
Yugoslavia, in: Nanci Adler (ed.): Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice. Crimes,
Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, New Brunswick 2018, 175-193, here 177f.
77 Axboe Nielsen, Victimhood (cf. footnote 78), 186; see also Ana Mijić: Verletzte Identitäten.
Der Kampf um den Opferstatus im bosnisch-herzegowinischen Nachkrieg, Frankfurt 2014;
272 Ger Duijzings
From Negative to Dark Emotions in Eastern Bosnia
Let us return to eastern Bosnia, which is my main case-study, the Srebrenica genocide
being the culmination of a process. In this final section I will (still tentatively) apply
these ideas on the role of emotions to the war in eastern Bosnia, where I will try to show
that it may help our understanding to include the notions of negative and dark emotions
into a micro-history of the Srebrenica genocide. It includes a built-up or sequence of
collective affective states that led to the perpetration of the massacre. In my previous
book, I tried to provide an understanding why the genocidal massacre occurred in this
particular location at this particular moment, presenting it as the outcome of a local

dynamics that did not happen in the other parts of Bosnia.78 An important theme was
revenge, an obligation on the Serb side to avenge previous wrongdoings committed by
the Muslims or the ‘Turks’.79
I argued that the collective memories and myths of historical victimization of the
Serbs, fed into the living memories of more recent events, such as World War Two and
the first year of the war (1992–1993). This combination of collective memories, myths,
and local experiences formed the breeding ground for Serbs in eastern Bosnia to want to
settle accounts with their Muslim neighbours once and for all, which manifested itself
with such destructive force in July 1995. When Srebrenica went over into Serb hands,
on 11 July 1995, General Mladić, parading through the centre of the town, presented the
take-over of the town as a revenge for the defeat suffered at the hands of the ‘Turks’
during the First Serbian uprising in 1806. The ideas of undoing previous injustices and
throwing off the humiliating cloak of the victim, by purposefully becoming a perpetra-
tor, all of this blended together into one well-organised and concerted military action.
A few days later, 8.000 Muslims had been killed and executed.
At the time of my fieldwork, over a number of visits to eastern Bosnia during the
period 1997–2001, the massacre was impossible to discuss with local Serbs. The massa-
cre was flatly denied, and it was clear that no Serb was ever going to tell me what hap-
pened and what had been their involvement. What could be discussed in great detail,
however, was how they had been victims themselves, in the Ottoman period, during
World War One or Two, or in the first year of the Bosnian war (1992–1993). I heard
stories of how relatives had been killed in the wars that had engulfed eastern Bosnia
during the twentieth century. They saw themselves as the aggrieved and grieving
Goran Basic: Constructing ‘Ideal Victim’ Stories of Bosnian War Survivors, in: Social Inclu-
sion 3,4(2015), 25-37.
78 Between 1997 and 2002, I took part in a Dutch government-funded inquiry into the tragic
events in Srebrenica, carried out by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD),
now called the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. My task was to
write a local history, on the basis of anthropological fieldwork, interviews, oral history, as
well as available open sources (such as local press reports) and archival sources. The book
was published as an annex to the main NIOD report and describes previous episodes of
violence during World War Two, as well as the descent into war at the end of the 1980s and
the beginning of the 1990s. Ger Duijzings: Geschiedenis en herinnering in Oost-Bosnië. De
achtergronden van de val van Srebrenica, Amsterdam 2002.
79 Serbian nationalist rhetoric uses the pejorative designation ‘Turks’ for Muslims, even if the
members of these groups do not identify as Turks and do not speak Turkish.
victims of violence committed by their Muslim neighbours. From their perspective,

renewed victimization had announced itself at the start of the 1990s, when economic
crisis, state collapse, and the break-up of Yugoslavia led, amongst ordinary people, to a
ubiquitous sense of fear, worries about the future and growing existential insecurity, in
other words an increase in ‘negative’ emotions.
Particularly after the first free elections in November 1990 and Bosnia’s declaration
of independence in March 1992, local Serbs started to be anxious about their future in
an area dominated by Muslims. As Muslims formed an electoral majority in the munici-
palities of Srebrenica and Bratunac, local Serbs feared that they would soon lose control
over jobs, economic assets, and other material resources as part of the anticipated post-
socialist process of privatization. They felt they were entitled to these assets, and were
afraid that what was ‘theirs’ was potentially going to be taken away from them. Their
resentment was fuelled by memories from World War Two which had purportedly
resulted in a steep decline of the Serb population due to the ‘genocide’ experienced at
the hands of the Ustashe, a topic touched upon by Biljana Plavšić in her memoirs. In
their view, they could have formed a comfortable demographic majority in the lands
they considered theirs, if they had not fallen victim to the Ustashe campaigns of exter-
mination, or before, if their Muslim ‘brethren’ had not betrayed them and converted to
Islam during the Ottoman period.80
This combination of existential fear, the sense of entitlement, and reactivated histor-
ical resentment translated itself into ‘darker’ emotions and nationalist political designs
for collective ‘remedial’ action that informed the brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns
carried out by Bosnian Serbs in spring 1992. Nothing actually could stop the pursuit of
radical solutions: many Serbs were waiting for this historical chance to create new
demographic realities on the ground, expel the Muslim population, and take what they
thought was rightly ‘theirs’. They had the full backing of the Yugoslav People’s Army
(JNA), which had been arming them to their teeth while disarming the non-Serbs in the
months prior to the outbreak of war. During Spring and Summer 1992, they took over
control in municipalities across Bosnia with the backing of the JNA and paramilitary
forces from Serbia and ethnically cleansed seventy percent of Bosnia’s territory.
Because of its strategic location at the border with Serbia, eastern Bosnia and the Drina
valley were at the forefront of these developments: ethnic cleansing started in this
region and reached Srebrenica and surrounding towns and villages in the middle of
April 1992. Tens of thousands of Muslims were expelled from their homes, while their
property and household belongings were plundered by paramilitaries and local Serbs.
Numerous cars that had belonged to the Muslim inhabitants and truckloads of livestock,
machinery, hospital equipment, television sets, electric appliances, furniture, etc. were
carried out of the town, offering an unsightly spectacle of envy and greed borne out of a
felt entitlement. Serb women participated in plundering the houses of their former
neighbours, pilfering jewellery, carpets and fur coats. Also the land registry was taken
away to leave Muslims without any documentary proof to claim back their properties.
Unlike elsewhere in Bosnia, Muslims in Srebrenica nevertheless organized an effec-
tive resistance, from the hills where some inhabitants had been hiding, seizing back
control of the town in early May, and, from there, reconquering territories in the follow-
80 Plavšić, Svedočim (cf. footnote 6), 149; see also Subotić, Cruelty (cf. footnote 3), 50f.
274 Ger Duijzings
ing months. Srebrenica became a key refuge for tens of thousands of Muslims displaced
from villages across eastern Bosnia. Men joined the irregular armed forces led by Naser
Orić, attacking Serb positions and villages, also involving civilians in search of food
unavailable in the besieged town. Most Serb villages and hamlets, scattered widely
across the hills around Srebrenica, were unable to withstand the overwhelming force of
these attacks in which hundreds of armed Muslims and thousands of unarmed civilians
(the so-called torbari or bag-carriers) participated, leading to a constant fear on the Serb
side that the enemy could strike anywhere at any time. For nine months or so, the popu-
lation of Serb villages and hamlets were exposed to these attacks, and many Serbs had
to leave their houses behind and go to the Serb-held town of Bratunac. On the part of
the Serb population, there was a deepening sense of powerlessness and exasperation,
‘negative’ emotions, so to speak, which translated into revenge phantasies on the pages
of the war-time local newspaper Naša riječ.81 An example of this is the map with
destroyed Serb villages printed on its June 1995 issue front page, weeks before the
actual massacre, accompanied by the ominous caption ‘The terrible salvation-bringing
truth’, ‘salvation-bringing’ being indicative of the anticipated ‘redemptive’ and radical
solutions going to come.
Ill.: Map of Serb settlements attacked by Muslim forces in and around Srebenica, with the cap-
tion: THE TERRIBLE SALVATION-BRINGING TRUTH, from: Naša riječ, June 1995, 1.
81 Between July and December 1993, Naša riječ published the lists of names of the victims and
perpetrators for every Serb village attacked by Muslims.
Thus, a defining aspect of the local context in eastern Bosnia and Srebrenica was that, in
Serb eyes at least, the Muslim enemy, showing resistance and resilience, was far more
powerful and ‘evil’ than elsewhere. It allowed local Serbs to see themselves as the main
and primary victims, ignoring the brutal ethnic cleansing operations they had carried out
and the immeasurable suffering they had inflicted on the Muslim population at the
beginning of the war. This ethnic cleansing, however, produced effects Serbs had not
anticipated, that is, the creation of a Muslim enclave with tens of thousands of hungry
and embittered Muslim internally displaced persons determined to put up an effective
resistance.
A turning point was the Muslim attack on the key local Serb stronghold of Kravica
on Serbian-Orthodox Christmas (7 January 1993). Kravica had been already an epicen-
tre of conflict before the war, when everyday life in the municipalities of Srebrenica and
Bratunac became punctuated by incidents, provocations, quarrels and café brawls. The
first casualties of these rising local tensions occurred in Kravica, when two Muslims
were killed in a Serb ambush on the main road running through the village in September
1991. These were the first deaths of ethnically related violence in the region, months
before the war started. Then on Orthodox Christmas, January 1993, Naser Orić and his
forces attacked Kravica. Forty-six Serbs were killed (most of whom were combatants
but also a dozen or so civilians), and houses were destroyed and burnt down.
The fall of Kravica produced a shockwave among the Serb population in eastern
Bosnia, as this important Serb stronghold apparently failed to defend itself against the
Muslim attacks. In the nearby town of Bratunac, overrun with displaced Serbs from
surrounding villages, the population was in a panic and the local authorities had to close
the bridge over the Drina to prevent them from fleeing across the border into Serbia. In
her memoirs, Plavšić mentions the Kravica attack as one of the key Muslim assaults on
the Bosnian Serbs, in which the latter “were killed in ritualistic fashion”, suggesting that
Muslims kill Christians as a matter of standard religious practice.82 At this point, grief,
shame and humiliation transformed into calls for revenge, transforming negative into
dark emotions. The newspaper Naša riječ published contributions in which local Serbs
expressed their determination to settle accounts and deliver a final blow to the Muslim
side as soon as that possibility would arise. The oscillations between potent ‘negative’
and ‘dark’ emotions, especially grief, rage, and vengefulness, were captured in the
documentary The Unforgiving, shot in Serb-held territory close to Srebrenica during the
first year of the war: it shows a Serb mother searching for the body of her eleven-year
old son killed by Muslims, who is overwhelmed by various emotions.83 Such casualties,
irrespective of whether the victims were combatants or civilians, were commemorated
through collective burial ceremonies as well as remembrance days, in which many local
Serbs transformed their grief into resolutions for future action. As Pamela Stewart and
Andrew Strathern write, each commemoration potentially fixes and solidifies such
resolves: grief is turned into a desire for revenge84, which, I would like to add, belongs
82 Plavšić, Svedočim (cf. footnote 6), 107.

83 Clive Gordon: The Unforgiving. Barraclough-Carey Production for Channel Four Television,
1993 (78 minutes). The film is available online (in four parts), URL: https://vimeo.com/
101080058 [15.07.2020].
276 Ger Duijzings
to the realm of ‘dark’ emotions. War propaganda adds to this transformation by demon-
ising and dehumanising the enemy.
To avenge such humiliation and get even with Muslims seems to have been a key
objective for General Mladić, an intention which he clearly expressed already in 1993.85
As indicated above, Mladić wanted to retaliate and form a ‘winning army’, which would
be able to undo all these historical injustices. Indeed, as soon as Mladić’s troops took
Srebrenica in July 1995, Bosnian Serb army officers helped to set a killing machine in
motion by ordering executions and removing all the remaining inhibitions. The availa-
ble evidence suggests that the massacre was not planned long in advance, with the deci-
sion to dispose of Muslim prisoners reached most probably on 12 July, one day after the
fall of the UN Safe Area, and then expedited by high-ranking security officers who
passed on the orders to the lower army echelons. Bosnian Serb police units, paramilitar-
ies, and civilians too, did their share of the killing at approximately ten smaller and
larger execution and killing sites in eastern Bosnia. Locals turned up to spectate where
Muslim men and boys were kept before being executed, showing themselves keen to
assault the prisoners.86
Not much is known about the motives and group dynamics that may have played a
role on the side of the Serb perpetrators, as only very few have spoken up about their
participation in the executions.87 Nevertheless, a recurring theme in Matthias Fink’s
book, the most detailed account of the Srebrenica massacre based on ICTY court
transcripts, is revenge, the moral urge to settle accounts and avenge wrongdoings
committed against the Serbs during the Second World War and in 1992/93. As Fink
writes, in the course of the war, the Serbs started to imagine a final solution, changing
the situation from one of ‘us-against-them’ into one of ‘us-without-them’ (‘them’ refer-
ring to the Muslim population).88 Even if some executions started on impulse, as Fink
claims, with a massive shooting spree in an agricultural warehouse in Kravica, killing
around 1.300 Muslim prisoners, on other killing sites the executions were well prepared
and organised. Bosnian Serb military leaders realised that it was easy to kill thousands
of Muslims in a matter of hours, with a relatively small number of executioners and
helpers doing the ‘dirty’ work. The victims were disposed of in mass graves prepared in
advance, which imparted momentum to the genocidal intention to ‘finish the job’ and
continue with the executions at other sites. Aware that these atrocities represented a
violation of the laws and customs of war, and anxious that the mass graves would be
discovered in time, the Serbs dug up and re-buried the victims in secondary graves, in a
follow-up operation carried out in great secrecy and during the night.
85 Block, Madness (cf. footnote 44), 7.

86 Matthias Fink: Srebrenica. Chronologie eines Völkermords oder Was geschah mit Mirnes
Osmanović, Hamburg 2015, 641f.
87 In my future work, I hope to be able to provide more diverse biographical and motivational
portraits of the perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre, on the basis of a detailed reading of
ICTY transcripts and a number of (additional) interviews.
88 Fink, Srebrenica (cf. footnote 88), 774.
Conclusion: Revenge, its Moral Underpinnings and Traps
In her book An Intimate History of Killing, Joanna Bourke shows how the perpetrators
of killings, even if insisting on the rightness of their acts and on their own moral integri-
ty, slip momentarily into an ‘agentic mode’ and act in ways they would otherwise find
unacceptable.89 Combatants rationalize atrocities, post-factum, by claiming that they
were defending the nation, killed out of hatred or revenge because of the senseless and
unheroic deaths of their comrades, or were simply ‘obeying orders’. As Bourke points
out, perpetrators usually recognize their violent acts and engage in elaborate ways of
justifying the killings.90 If the violence is acknowledged, revenge is commonly used as

the most powerful excuse for using violence.91
Scholars of political conflict and violence often ignore this logic of revenge because
of its primitive and uncanny qualities, which is odd since revenge, or Lex Talionis (The
Law of Retaliation) has been inscribed for millennia into the Judaeo-Christian tradition
through the biblical principle “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”.92 Also Stewart
and Strathern claim, in the book Violence: Theory and Ethnography (2002), that in the
anthropological literature revenge is largely ignored as a central motive in violent
contexts, even if it is shared across societies and social contexts. As a form of negative
reciprocity, it is seen as an almost natural and righteous or legitimate act of balancing,
through which justice can be achieved or restored.93 Even though revenge is a recog-
nized psychological and social urge, scholars seem to have largely avoided the topic.
Böhm and Kaplan’s book Revenge: On The Dynamics of a Frightening Urge and Its
Taming (2011) is one of the few exceptions in psychology, in which they try to “lift up
revenge as a neglected and insufficiently understood psychological mechanism”.94 They
argue that victims may have strong and elaborate revenge phantasies, which they see as
a common and normal psychological response allowing the victim to regain self-esteem
after having been humiliated. Only under certain conditions do these revenge phantasies
indeed cross over into violent revenge acts.95 When acted out, revenge is often experi-
enced as a form of justice, in the sense of ‘getting even’. It also makes a claim to legiti-
macy, exculpating the perpetrator of the violence.96
Revenge phantasies often include the dehumanization of the enemy, whereby
aggrieved victims and the perpetrators-to-be refuse to consider their opponents as
human: “If they do not act as human beings, they do not have to be treated as such”.97
The way in which this is often done is by labelling them as a lower form of life, as
animals like pigs, rats, worms or cockroaches, as inanimate ‘things’ or, as in the case of
Srebrenica, as ‘packages’ to be disposed of. The body of the dehumanised victim has no
89 Bourke, History (cf. footnote 15), 8f.

90 Ibid., 8.
91 Ibid., 182.
92 Böhm/Kaplan, Revenge (cf. footnote 37), 13.
94 Böhm/Kaplan, Revenge (cf. footnote 37), xviii.
95 Ibid., 19-38.
97 Bourke, History (cf. footnote 15), 230.
278 Ger Duijzings
value, it is simply seen as waste and its removal a matter of sanitation.98 Some perpetra-
tors may enjoy the violence and take pleasure in killing out of cruel and sadistic excite-
ment, but for others the job of killing is a rather unpleasant but inevitable task, a job that
has to be done for the benefit of future generations. Killing is experienced as a kind of
catharsis, through which a ‘solution’ or a wished-for new situation can be engineered in
the form of a human sacrifice.99 The idea is that the only permanent solution to an exist-
ing problem consists in the complete elimination of the other, even if not all participants
in genocidal violence may actually share this motive. As Harald Welzer has argued, in
decisive moments such as these, people may suspend their moral codes despite ‘know-
ing better’; only later will they try to legitimise why they acted immorally and against
their better judgement, why they had to lie, cheat, betray or kill.100 This suspension of
our moral compass is made possible by what Abram de Swaan calls ‘compartmentalisa-
tion’, which consists of the mental, social, political, legal, spatial and temporal separa-
tion of the enemy, which makes mass murder possible. It consists of the creation of
hostile categories of despised ‘others’, the construction of an enemy group that needs to
be eliminated, the rounding up of the target population, the creation of ‘killing
compartments’, that is, the formation of separate (isolated or secluded) spaces where
mass killings are permitted in demarcated spaces and temporal slots, and last but not
least the ‘doubling’ taking place in the minds of those perpetrators who separate the
mass-murderer-in-them from their purported ‘real self’.101
Despite being given some prominence in the anthropology of feuding102, or in
Stewart and Strathern’s book, at closer inspection revenge remains a rather problematic
analytical concept, even if it may provide us with important hermeneutic insights.
Although I employed it in my earlier work on Srebrenica, I have grown uneasy with it
as a monocausal explanation and analytical category, also since many Bosnian Serb
politicians (like Biljana Plavšić) started to use it as a justification for the genocidal
massacre in Srebrenica, more or less suggesting that the Muslims in Srebrenica were
complicit in provoking this otherwise contemptible Serb response. By using revenge as
a redress for previous victimization, they are making claims to the partial legitimacy of
the violence as some kind of exculpation. A justification speaks to the righteousness of
the act, and this may indeed work on the ‘emic’ level, that is, from the point of view of
the insider (or perpetrator in this case), but to adopt it as an overarching analytical
concept may be a dangerous moral and ethical trap.103 Besides, revenge is certainly not
98 Waller, Ordinariness (cf. footnote 25), 155.

99 Angrick, Men (cf. footnote 20), 90.
100 Welzer, People (cf. footnote 17), 166.
101 See my review of Abram De Swaan’s book: The Killing Compartments. The Mentality of
Mass Murder, New Haven 2015, in: Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society 64,4(2016),
574-576.
102 See for example Jacob Black-Michaud: Feuding Societies, Oxford 1980 (1975); Christopher
Boehm: Blood Revenge. The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and
Other Tribal Societies, Philadelphia 1986.
103 In legal studies this justification is called the tu quoque (latin for “you too”) argument which
holds that the adversary committed similar atrocities. International humanitarian law
considers this justification as inapplicable, because international law creates obligations that
are erga omnes (latin for valid “towards everyone”): that is, they must be adhered to by all
the only explanation for the use of violence, other factors and motives may play a role
such as economic gain, comradeship, group dynamics and collective pressures (includ-
ing what psychologists have labelled ‘collective potentiation’, which stands for the
phenomenon that groups always act with far greater cruelty than the individuals each on
their own would104), as well as lust for power, pleasure in killing, and sexual arousal.
Revenge remains ultimately a highly problematic response, as Böhm and Kaplan
argue, which “never actually has any moral justification”.105 The more violent our expe-
riences are, the more care we should take to tame our emotional responses, not to end up
in contributing to another vicious cycle of retaliation, or ‘spiral of revenge’, in which
innocent others become victimized. This is a lesson that can be drawn from Didier
Fassin’s text On Resentment and Ressentiment (2013): as the author argues, ‘resent-
ment’ (in the English rendering) is part of human nature, usually adopted by people who
are not the real victims but have the will and power to harm others. It is a negative,
undesirable and noxious emotion, an ‘unsocial’ passion and a poison for the mind, even
if there is some kind of justification.106 On the other hand, ‘ressentiment’ (in the French
rendering of the term) is the true victims’ response, of people who may have experi-
enced terrible historical wrongdoings, and may refuse to forgive, but are searching no
revenge whatsoever. ‘Ressentiment’ (as expressed paradigmatically in the work of Jean
Améry) is about recognition, not forgetting, and the search for truth on behalf of those
who suffered the worst violence.
parties. “Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that an act of genocide should not be subject to
prosecution because it was committed in response to a foregoing genocide”. Gerd Hankel:
International Law After the Nuremberg Trials and Rwanda. How do Perpetrators Justify
Themselves?, in: Jensen/Szejnmann, People (cf. footnote 17), 201-220, here 209. Mark Osiel
too argues that massive killings which have been prompted by revenge, in retaliation for
previous violence, can well constitute a serious war crime or even a genocide, if the perpe-
trators intend to contribute to the group’s partial destruction. Evidence of revenge is not
inconsistent with genocidal intent; the perpetrators’ desire for revenge is not logically incom-
patible with their intention to contribute to the group’s partial destruction (email to author 30
May 2005).
104 Böhm/Kaplan, Revenge (cf. footnote 37), 46.
105 Ibid., xxvii.
106 Didier Fassin: On Resentment and Ressentiment. The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions,
in: Current Anthropology 54,3(2013), 249-267, here 252.

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O PFE R

Dynamiken der Viktimisierung

HARRIET RUDOLPH und ISABELLA VON TRESKOW

Opferschaft als interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld in den Geisteswissenschaften

ISABELLA VON TRESKOW

Opferschaft im Drama und in der Erzählliteratur

Opferkonzepte im Kontext von militärischer Gewalt

Nation, Staat und Volk als Gegenstand von Opferdiskursen

Opfer und Opferschaft in Rechtsetzung und Rechtspraxis

ANNEMARIE SCHMOLL und HENNING ERNST MÜLLER

Perpetrators as ‘Victims’ in Eastern Bosnia (1992–1995):

allowed ourselves to become victimisers.2

2 Accessible online, URL: http://www.icty.org/en/sid/221 [15.078.2020].

26 Drakulić, War Criminals (cf. footnote 3), 9-16.

From Serbs as a Suffering Nation to Kosovo in the Active Mood

46 Nebojša Popov: Srpski populizam. Od marginalne do dominantne pojave. Special issue of

48 Kosta Mihailović/Vasilije Krestić: Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and

The Emotional Side of ‘Victimhood’: from Negative to Dark Emotions

51 Vreme, 10 July 1995, 54.

55 Svašek, Introduction (cf. footnote 56), 6.

unacceptable and emotionally charged malevolent traits, such as aggression, hatred,

From Negative to Dark Emotions in Eastern Bosnia

particular location at this particular moment, presenting it as the outcome of a local

victims of violence committed by their Muslim neighbours. From their perspective,

82 Plavšić, Svedočim (cf. footnote 6), 107.

85 Block, Madness (cf. footnote 44), 7.

Conclusion: Revenge, its Moral Underpinnings and Traps

justifying the killings.90 If the violence is acknowledged, revenge is commonly used as

89 Bourke, History (cf. footnote 15), 8f.

98 Waller, Ordinariness (cf. footnote 25), 155.

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