Sharing the future to avoid conflict

I spoke earlier today via Zoom at the opening session of a conference in Pristina on Bridges of Memory: Reconciliation and Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict Societies/Diplomacy, Memory, and Historical Interpretation. Here are the notes I prepared for the occasion:

First I apologize to you for appearing remotely. I’d much rather be in Pristina. But I was in the Balkans 10 days ago and will be in Kosovo at the end of this month. At my age, two trips across the Atlantic in a month is already a lot.

Second I congratulate all those involved for putting together such an interesting program. I’m worried I have little to add but I’ll try.

Let me start at my own beginning in the Balkans.

The diplomatic perspective

The prevailing view at the State Department in the 1990s was that the truth would set everyone free, as the Gospel of John teaches. And the truth required a neutral setting where lawyers could determine it according to judicial rules of evidence.

So most of us supposed that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, affectionately known as ICTY, would reveal essential data and enable everyone to come to evidence-based conclusions on the history of the 1990s conflicts.

On the basis of that common database, reconciliation would follow.

It didn’t happen

Obviously that has not happened. I don’t fault the Tribunal. It did its job reasonably well once it got going and the indictees were all delivered to The Hague. That was a good thing, as the presence of the indictees in their homelands would have made the post-war peace processes much more difficult.

But politics in the Balkans was more potent than evidence in The Hague. I blame democracy and the negotiated peace agreements for that.

The agreements left the warring parties in place. That is an essential characteristic of negotiated peace agreements, a feature not a glitch. Democracy—or at least a semblance of elections in too often unfree or unfair environments—gave the previously warring parties the power to reject and distort what was said in The Hague to their own political advantage.

Thirty years have passed

Thirty years later, the ideologies and even some of the people who invented them are still rejecting and distorting. The Serb students’ Kragujevac Memorandum is the most recent example of persistent pernicious memory.

I fear the Specialist Chambers now treating the Kosovo Liberation Army as a criminal conspiracy will create an equal and opposite reaction among Albanians.

The celebrated returns of indictees to their home countries tells you what you need to know.

Memory has become not a bridge but a dead end. Transitional justice has not led to transition or reconciliation but rather to echoes of past conflicts.

Those echoes are less deadly than the original conflicts. But they may well lay the basis for future violence.

The problematic R word

It is reasonable to imagine that a magic potion known as “reconciliation” could ensure that does not happen.

Here I pause for a moment, because I confess to problems with the R word. Things happen in the world that I cannot ask people to be reconciled to. Some of them happened in Kosovo and Bosnia.

I cannot ask people who suffered murder of loved ones, rape, unjust imprisonment, and property destruction by security forces that should have been providing protection to reconcile with the perpetrators.

The future counts more than the past

The best I think people can do after wars like those in the Balkans is not to reconcile to the unreconcilable but rather to begin building bridges to a better future.

This needs doing not only at the elite level but also among ordinary citizens.

That is perhaps the biggest gap in the Balkans. Political leaderships would behave differently if their electorates built a future across ethnic differences.

That is particularly difficult in Kosovo, because of language differences and physical separation.

So let me offer a specific proposition: I believe that if Kosovo were to offer English language education from kindergarten to 12th grade, many citizens, both Serbs and Albanians, would enroll their children in integrated schools, hoping that good English would open a path to better employment.

Making the future prosperity of your children a common enterprise would help overcome ethnic differences. Sure there would be problems, both in the classroom and on the playground. But the children would learn each other’s language as well as English.

Yes, acknowledge the unreconciliable

People can make common enterprises like this work, but it will require acknowledging the unreconcilable (not necessarily reconciling) and deciding to look past it.

I conclude: people are entitled to their own memories of the past. But to avoid conflict they need to share the future.