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Orli Fridman and Krisztina Rácz are guest editors of this issue’s thematic section focusing on “Memories and Narratives of the 1999 NATO Bombing in Serbia.”
Sixteen years after the actual event, the current issue’s essays aspire at complicating a coherent portrayal of the NATO bombing by taking a closer look at the reactions, memories and commemoration practices of different sectors and communities of Serbian society by focusing on local perceptions of the intervention from the “receiving end.” Indebted to interdisciplinary social memory studies, the essays engage with the politics of memory but also the broader context of the social construction of collective remembering during and after the conflict.
Orli Fridman (Belgrade) scrutinizes the memories of Belgrade residents of different generations and divergent political orientations; Marija Mandić (Berlin) analyses 14 years of commemorative discourses and practices through the lens of the local media; Srđan Atanasovski (Belgrade) focuses on the soundscape of Belgrade during the bombardment, from government-organized concerts to the sound of sirens and elaborates on their significance as meaning-producing machines; Gruia Bădescu (Oxford) examines the spatial articulations of Serbian narratives and how they are inscribed and negotiated in urban space by different stakeholders; finally, Krisztina Rácz (Novi Sad) analyses the mnemonic practices and narratives of a group of intellectuals around Symposion, a Hungarian-language journal in the Vojvodina.
In addition, this issue hosts an essay by Jagoda Rošul-Gajić (Munich) on the role of women’s NGOs and their contribution to the advancement of gender sensitive politics and to broader democratization processes in postwar Croatia. Finally, the Travelogue section conveys the lively impressions and thoughts of a group of German graduate students after a self-organized study trip to Kosovo.
Her paper analyses the memories of Belgrade residents of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia (then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). By focusing on the memories of this event, yet placing them in a broader context of the conflicts of the 1990s—the breakup of Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav wars—this essay explores what international intervention has meant to respondents in Belgrade by documenting memories of international intervention among older and younger generations, as well as among active members of antiwar NGOs in Serbia and citizens who were not engaged in activism during the 1990s. The paper aims to expand the scope of the discussions on dealing with the past and on transitional justice in the Western Balkans and to place them in the context of social memory studies and the study of post-conflict transformation processes. Furthermore, by presenting the case study of Serbia, this text contributes to the analysis of local mnemonic batt les as part of the creation of collective memories of the 1990s in post-Milošević Serbia, and it sheds light on the memories of the bombing as related to the war in Kosovo and the subsequent effects on shaping postwar Serbia–Kosovo relations.