From Srebrenica to Gaza, from Legitimation to Denial

08 Jul From Srebrenica to Gaza, from Legitimation to Denial

Debate Zone, next to the Museum of Yugoslavia, July 4, 2026, 12 PM
Participants: Dubravka Stojanović, Ger Duijzings, Olga Manojlović Pintar. Moderated by: Snežana Stanković.

The debate on Srebrenica and Gaza did not take place in the silence befitting it. It unfolded to the sound of children’s songs from a neighboring zone, with the occasional passage of visitors who didn’t know where they were going. And at one point, from the film zone across the park, the voice of Slobodan Milošević arrived.

It wasn’t an organizational error. It was, quite by chance, the most accurate possible image of our relationship towards what was being discussed on that small stage. Srebrenica and Gaza exist in the public space exactly as they existed in that park — as a heavy topic unfolding in the background, while children’s songs are sung in the foreground and people pass by, smiling unconsciously because they do not know what is being spoken about. There is no intent here. There was none there either.

When Ger Duijzings began to speak about dark emotions — about anger, disgust, and vengefulness as anthropological categories that explain genocide — trumpeters broke through from the film zone. Loudly and distinctly. Not as a commentary on what he was saying, but as its negation. A noise that suppresses and stifles emotions that must not be heard because they are terrifying. The mechanism we came to name was operating right in front of us, at the same time we were speaking about it.

Olga Manojlović Pintar spoke about how personal memories disappear under the pressure of collective ones — and how a political program is constructed from that collective memory. This is not an abstract thesis. It is a description of a mechanism that has its own economy: corruption is not a moral problem but an economic branch, a functional part of a system that reproduces itself because it has its own actors, its own flows, its own logic. Social and economic components are not side effects of nationalism — they are its infrastructure.

Dubravka Stojanović reminded us of all those who warned in time — and who were systematically marginalized precisely because they warned. She mentioned Slavenka Drakulić, who recently passed away, and her work in the field of anti-nationalism which is still being sidelined today. It is no coincidence that there is silence regarding Drakulić. She was accurate, and that is an uncomfortable truth that the system does not know how to handle. Stojanović also spoke about the Museum of the Nineties, a space opened in Belgrade a year ago — not to teach anyone what to think, but how to ask questions. That is the essential difference between propaganda and education, and she insisted on that difference at a moment when such a distinction has never been more vital.

Language was the central theme — not as an academic subject, but as an instrument. How things are named, how they are skipped over, and how silence is maintained. On a small stage in the park next to the Museum of Yugoslavia, three researchers and one anthropologist spoke about the mechanisms that make Srebrenica and Gaza irreconcilable with the everyday life that flows around them — undisturbed, loudly, and unconsciously.

Lazar Mojsilović, KROKODIL’s journalist for a day