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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
computation of Serbian casualties presented in media and academic discussion.
The past was being evoked in order to strengthen the unity of
pan-Serbian people… (Jambresic Kirin, 1996: 71)
Milan Milosevic provides further insight on this matter, in his description
of the so-called “media wars”, and the role of television in constructing the
space in which history was negotiated and narrated:
In its effort to argue the sense of grievance in the population at large, television
especially exploited World War II. The goal was to plant the idea
that the official history of World War II did not tell the complete story
and that the full extent of Croatian atrocities had been covered up. The
number of Serbs who perished during the war in the Croatian death camp
Jasenovac and from Croatian persecution, was, according to television
media, much greater than had been calculated. The “demystification of
history” had been launched, with television as the main medium. The
campaign was in part a response to Franjo Tudjman’s book Bespuca
[Wilderness], published in 1989, a year before his election as president
of Croatia, in which he alleged that official Communist history had greatly
exaggerated the wartime crimes of the Croatian side. To prove
Tudjman wrong, a bizarre process of systematic unearthing of World War
II Serbian mass graves was undertaken in the summer of 1989 and
throughout 1990 in the glare of the Belgrade television. To establish the
“true” number of the dead, concrete-sealed mass graves in limestone terrain
in the Krajina, and later in Herzegovina, were opened, and the skeletons
displayed and bones counted. After funeral services at the site, the
remains were reburied and the graves resealed, with TV cameras eagerly
recording the event. The ceremonial and official character of these events
slowly awakened the sense that the past might have been far worse than
anyone had imagined…” (Milosevic, 1997: 111-112).
There are many other examples of the past being used to build the nationalistic
agendas which have been especially effective in arousing hatred and
pushing populations into war. The resulting tragic conflicts could persuade
one to take a defiant position from which to propose the “absence of memory”
as a way of countering the manipulations of the past that attempt to
justify violence and “ethnocratic” States. Yet, if the idea of “absence of
memory” can prove to be provocative rhetoric in discourses of political
opposition, we, as researchers working with oral sources, must work with
these subjectivities and the ways in which they arise through different
identifications such as ethnicity, gender, class, race and many others.
Luisa Passerini, through the works of Marc Augé and Jean Bertrand
Pontalis, amongst others, wrote of remembrance that:
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All our memories are screens, but not in the traditional sense, as traces
for something which they reveal and hide at the same time. What is registered
on the screen is not directly the sign of a piece of memory but a