(Un)remembering deserters from the Yugoslav wars

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia crumbled in violent wars in the 1990s that led to the loss of over 140,000 lives, alongside unfathomable consequences for the (post-)Yugoslav societies. The political elites, needing to legitimize their wars and demands for independence, resorted to different forms of nationalist mobilization and imposed ethnocentric narratives. Nevertheless, media and nongovernmental reports have noted thousands of cases of desertion and draft evasion. Men sought refuge in neighboring countries or avoided participation in the wars in numerous other ways. Conscientious objection was not recognized by law at the time and/or not implemented, and the wartime regimes responded with (show) trials, threats, torture, and forced mobilizations. Many European countries, however, did not accept requests for asylum from deserters and war resisters from the (post-)Yugoslav space, despite their continuous calls for the wars to end. While there are a variety of profiles and a multitude of motives behind each act of desertion, the (un)remembrance of this act within specific historical and national contexts plays a significant role in memory politics. Today, acts of antiwar, but also anti-ethnonational, resistance during and after the Yugoslav wars are included in, or excluded from, official memory politics of the (post-)Yugoslav states in accordance with the ideological aims of contemporary political struggles: through its epitomizing as the ultimate ethical act, or by purposefully forcing it into oblivion. Putting the act of desertion and draft resistance into the frame of cultural memory studies, this project will be the first to answer the question of how, in the interplay of public and private memory narratives, diverse mnemonic actors create a story of the deserter from the Yugoslav wars in todays (post-)Yugoslav space. Through archival research (military, judicial, international and national NGOs, and media), and in-depth qualitative interviews with deserters from Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, this project will establish the first typology of deserters. Moreover, it will give an overview of diverse understandings and representations of deserters in laws and in media, addressing the question of whether we see deserters as traitors or heroes. The project will also show how the act of desertion is dependent upon the perception of masculinity in a specific society, and the role women and families play in an act which is portrayed as exclusively related to men. Overall, the project contributes to expanding our knowledge on the understanding of desertion in a post- conflict society, both as an individual and a collective act; uncovering the discursive strategies of organized forgetting as much as organized remembrance; and to the understanding of the (post-)Yugoslav space and Yugoslav wars per se.