Controversies in Military Ethics & Security Policy
War on memory – Museums and Memorials in Croatia and Bosnia 30 Years after the Yugoslav Wars
Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, German-language media repeatedly claimed it was Europe’s first war since World War II. The wars in the former Yugoslavia seemed oddly forgotten – not just the ten-day war in Slovenia in 1991, but also the Croatian war (1991-1995), the Bosnian war (1992-1995) and the Kosovo war (1998-1999).[1] Today, 30 years after the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995, the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia, and the Dayton Peace Agreement, these anniversaries are overshadowed by a larger global event – the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II – but they are also indirectly connected to it. This article examines the development of politics of history and the culture of remembrance in Croatia and Bosnia through contemporary memorial museums. They serve as flagships of the national politics of history in place at the time they and their permanent exhibitions were created. The Yugoslav wars of disintegration are also seen here as a “war on memory”[2] of the unresolved legacy of World War II – above all, the civil war between the Croatian fascist Ustasha regime, the Serb Chetniks and Tito’s Partisans. Museums dedicated to the wars of the 1990s show how contentious and emotionally charged these memory conflicts remain today.
The war on memory between Serbs and Croats
The Jasenovac concentration camp, located in the Nazi-aligned satellite state, has been at the heart of the war on memory between Serbs and Croats since the late 1980s. There, the Ustasha carried out genocide against the Serb, Roma and Jewish populations of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH, 1941–1945). Serb nationalists vastly exaggerated the number of victims, while Croat historical revisionists denied that it was a death camp and cited entirely unsupportable low victim counts. During the Croatian War starting in 1991, the Serb side adopted symbols of the Chetniks – Serb monarchists who had initially resisted the Nazi occupation in World War II but later collaborated with Axis forces and carried out massacres against non-Serb populations. On the Croat side, Ustasha symbols and names were also revived – for example, in 1990, the initially used national coat of arms was the same one last used by the Ustasha. And in 1994, Croatia reintroduced the kuna, the same name the currency had during the NDH period. Soldiers of the newly formed Croatian army played a key role in destroying anti-fascist monuments, now portrayed as part of a Serb historical narrative built on lies. Croatian President Franjo Tuđman promoted the idea of “Croatian reconciliation” (pomirba). According to him, both the Partisans and the Ustasha had, in their own way, fought for the Croatian cause during World War II. As a result, after 1990, former Yugoslav security officers were now expected to work with former exiled Ustasha whom they had once hunted abroad.
Serb nationalists, meanwhile, justified their aggression and eventually their war crimes in the 1990s by claiming they were trying to prevent another genocide against Serbs. Opposite the Jasenovac concentration camp memorial, across the bordering Sava River in the Serb part of Bosnia, lie the camp’s mass graves. Following this logic, Bosnian Serb politicians appear on television in front of plaques – erected during socialist Yugoslavia – with heavily inflated[3] victim numbers for Jasenovac, preferably the one stating “500,000 Srba/Serbs,” to advance current political goals or discredit opposing views by invoking the Serbs’ suffering.
The first memorials
When the first memorials to the 1990s wars were opened in Croatia and Bosnia in the 2000s, the Serb side was referred to as Chetniks. A memorial established in 2006 stands in Ovčara, the site of the only Serb mass killing in Croatia, near the town of Vukovar on the border between Croatia and Serbia, which was under a prolonged siege in 1991. It was established by the “Croatian Association of Inmates of Serb Concentration Camps” (HDLSKL). The name of the organization already drew a parallel between the Serb perpetrators of the 1990s and the Nazis. This is even more evident in the memorial room, also established in 2006, located in the nuclear shelter of the infamous Vukovar Hospital, from which the future victims of Ovčara were taken after the Serbs captured the city in 1991. The editor of the publication on the Vukovar Hospital memorial describes the events using terms like “war dead, massive devastation, the physical destruction of a city, a holocaust of its citizens”[4]. The hospital’s director during the siege, Vesna Bosanac, also refers to the “genocidal Greater Serbia policy”[5] of the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Serb paramilitaries. Croats are thus portrayed as the “new Jews” of the Serb Nazis.
Beyond the issue of references to World War II enemy imagery, it can be said that the two memorial rooms – in Ovčara and in the Vukovar hospital – primarily commemorate the victims with dignity, naming them and, in some cases, showing their portrait photos. In Ovčara, items recovered during the exhumation of the mass grave, along with objects donated by relatives, are also displayed beneath a glass floor. This approach – drawn from Holocaust museums – commemorates individual victims without assigning broader meaning or glorifying them as heroes or martyrs, by displaying their names, personal photos and belongings. It offers a more implicit form of Holocaust remembrance, avoiding both victimhood competition and demonization of the other side.
In Bosnia, the main memorial site is in Srebrenica and the nearby suburb of Potočari. The first commemorative event was held in 2000 at the former socialist-era battery factory, which had served as the UN peacekeepers’ headquarters and lodging during the war. In 2003, the High Representative – the international community’s envoy in post-Dayton Bosnia – pushed through the creation of a memorial despite resistance from the Bosnian Serb side. An imposing memorial cemetery was built across from the former UN headquarters, consisting of a seemingly endless field of Muslim graves – white, narrow marble obelisks engraved with the names of over 6,700 genocide victims buried there to date. Because the Bosnian Serb perpetrators had exhumed the bodies from the original mass graves and reburied them in secondary, tertiary, and sometimes even quaternary graves to hide their crimes, the search for many victims is still ongoing. Individual bones from the same victim are sometimes found in different mass graves and later identified through DNA analysis. The bereaved are faced with the agonizing decision of when they have “enough” of their loved one’s remains to bury them at the annual ceremony on July 11. Most recently, in 2024, 14 coffins were buried, including the remains of Beriz (Omera) Mujić from Zvornik, who was 17 years old when he was killed. To this day, the Serb side has not acknowledged the genocide as such. However, there were periods when the massacre was acknowledged, Serb officials issued apologies and attended the commemoration ceremony – where they were met with hostility.
A memorial room was established in the former battery factory in 2007. Alongside personal photos and moving short biographies of 20 genocide victims – all of them men – objects recovered during their exhumation are also displayed in a central area. This early memorial space – like in the Croatian case – also draws a parallel between the genocide in Srebrenica and the Holocaust. It exhibited a painting by the artist Tarih Samaran which depicts one of the Mothers of Srebrenica, as the relatives’ association is known, gazing at a photo of the young Dutch Jew Anne Frank and her sister, both of whom died in the Holocaust. The piece is titled 1945–1995–2005 (the last date marking the year the installation was created).
Museums and permanent exhibitions in Bosnia
In the 2010s, the first museums with permanent exhibitions on the 1990s wars were established in both Croatia and Bosnia. In Srebrenica, the exhibition “Srebrenica Genocide – Failure of the International Community” opened in Bosnian and English in the building to the right of the memorial room. It was developed in collaboration with two Dutch organizations: the Westerbork Memorial and the NGO Pax. Their involvement in the project is tied to the fact that Dutch UN peacekeepers were stationed in Srebrenica and stood by in July 1995 as Bosnian Serbs loaded women and children onto trucks bound for safety in Bosniak[6] territory – while the men were put on separate trucks and taken to their deaths. This permanent exhibition does not draw a parallel between the fate of the Bosniaks and that of Holocaust victims. On the contrary, a closer look suggests that such analogies were deliberately avoided. The column of people fleeing Srebrenica through the forests into Bosniak territory – about half of whom were killed by Bosnian Serbs – is referred to as “the march of death”. Although the term is similar to “death march”, used for the forced marches of mostly Jewish prisoners in the final phase of World War II, it is by no means an attempt to equate the two. The exhibition centers on individual victim biographies and limits itself to illustrating the “void” left in the wake of the genocide while deliberately avoiding to give it any meaning.
In the section added in 2021 about the column that fled through the forest, the curators included a symbol familiar from Holocaust museums – shoes – while deliberately avoiding any direct comparison of the suffering. The curators – in their dual role as both curators and survivors – spent years collecting objects for the exhibition with other survivors. The shoes are now arranged in pairs on a glass plate so that they cast shadows on the floor below, resembling footsteps. Fittingly, the exhibition is titled In the footsteps of those who did (not) cross.[7] The shoes, then, don’t represent the masses of those murdered – like the seemingly endless pile at Auschwitz-Birkenau – but instead reflect the specific context of this column of people fleeing. Together with the objects – symbolizing the resilience and resourcefulness of those who hid in the forests, sometimes for months – they offer a concrete account of what happened.
The private Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, located in Sarajevo’s central pedestrian zone, stands in marked contrast. Not only are “the Serbs” labeled as Chetniks. In a stylized torture cell, they are also likened to the Nazis, with a quote from Heinrich Himmler displayed on the wall. Both at the museum’s original location, which opened in 2016, and at the nearby location it moved to in 2019, there is an exhibit at the start of the exhibition that links the crimes against Bosniaks in the 1990s to the Warsaw Ghetto. Next to the photo of a boy handing out armbands with “Jewish stars” in the Warsaw Ghetto, a photo of a man wearing a white armband was displayed. The caption refers to “extermination” and “concentration camps” in the Bosnian town of Prijedor in 1992. It also states: “This was the first time since the 1939 Nazi decree for Polish Jews to wear white armbands with the blue Star of David that members of an ethnic or religious group were to be marked for extermination in this way.” Interestingly, the parallel is not drawn to the Holocaust in Sarajevo itself, where countless Bosnian Jews were killed, but to the Warsaw Ghetto, which has become a symbolic focal point in the “universalization of the Holocaust”.[8] The Bosnian museum landscape thus reveals a diverse range of approaches to referencing the Holocaust.
This museum in Sarajevo also highlights overwhelming images of horror – slashed bellies of pregnant women, the bloody bodies of children and decomposing human remains. At the same time, it features personal photos and belongings of the victims, whose stories even bring visitors like me – who have spent years analyzing museums with a professional, detached view – to tears. While the early exhibitions in Srebrenica and this museum in Sarajevo focused almost entirely on victimization, newer exhibitions increasingly highlight resilience and creativity in the struggle to survive. What moved me most to tears was a seemingly simple plate, accompanied by a caption explaining that it belonged to a former restaurant owner who, along with many other women, endured unimaginable violence in a Serb rape camp. When the camp was dissolved and she was among the last to leave, she recognized the dishes from her own restaurant, took one with her, and later donated the plate to the museum. This is another difference between the two museums: While sexual violence is only briefly mentioned in Srebrenica, it is a primary focus in Sarajevo.
The latter museum has faced strong criticism for its overwhelming “pedagogy of horror” and crude comparisons, but it also provides the most comprehensive view of the Bosnian war across many of its dimensions. What both Bosnian museums mention only in passing, however, are Bosniak fighters. There were, after all, armed Bosniak troops, some of whom committed crimes in response to Serb attacks – though by no means on a scale comparable to those of the Bosnian Serb side. However, not only these crimes but the very presence of Bosniak fighters seems to disrupt the (self-)portrayal of “pure” victimhood in museums about the genocide and crimes against humanity – and is therefore largely omitted. Today, the museums created from a Bosniak perspective are located in a country often described as a failed state – mainly due to the strong secessionist tendencies of the Serb entity, Republika Srpska, toward the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – and where the Serb side still does not acknowledge the genocide.
Museums and permanent exhibitions in Croatia
The opposite is true of the museums devoted to the “Homeland War”, the name used in Croatia for the Croatian War. In these museums, also opened in the 2010s, the focus is primarily on the “defenders” of Croatia – a collective term that includes fighters from the period before the official Croatian army was established. Croatia won the war in 1995 with the recapture of Serb-held Krajina, which led to the flight and expulsion of its Serb residents – and, in some cases of those who stayed behind, particularly the elderly, to murder. In contrast to the Bosnian case – including the memorial to the victims of Ovčara – a narrative of victory dominates the Croatian museums.
Particularly in the permanent exhibitions at the Memorial Centre of the Homeland War in Vukovar (2013) and the Museum of the Homeland War in Karlovac (2019), the war is largely reduced to heroic portrayals of the defenders, while civilian experiences are strikingly absent. While this was typical of older war and military museums, the international trend for museums opened in the 21st century is now moving in a different direction. The Military History Museum in Dresden, for example, explores the devastating effects of war on the bodies of both soldiers and civilians, and takes a self-critical look at its own earlier, heroizing exhibitions. The Museum of World War II in Gdańsk, Poland, which opened in 2017, dedicates the entire central corridor of its vast permanent exhibition to civilian aspects of wartime life – such as food, clothing and entertainment. It also explores, for example, forbidden sexual relationships between farmers and forced laborers. Under new leadership, the Museum of Military History in Vienna is finally preparing a self-critical exhibition on the period from 1918 to 1955, set to open in 2026, which will include civilian perspectives of remembrance beyond the Wehrmacht and the victim myth.
It’s not surprising that addressing crimes committed by the Croat side during the war is difficult, given how recent the traumas still are – nonetheless, a self-critical examination can be called for. What is surprising, however, is that in the Karlovac museum, civilians are relegated to a symbolic shelter at the very end of the main exhibition space. In what I call the “hierarchy of visibility”[9] within the exhibition, certain information is only given a secondary place. In an incredibly detailed chronology of the war – which even after hours in the museum is still impossible to read in full – there’s a brief mention that, during the constant attacks on Karlovac, school lessons had to be moved to radio broadcasts. The Museum of the Homeland War in Dubrovnik gives somewhat more attention to civilian experiences than the museums in Vukovar and Karlovac. As in Sarajevo, a sledge once used to carry goods during the war stands as a symbol of the people’s resilience and ingenuity in unbearable times.
As in Sarajevo and at the memorials in Vukovar and Ovčara, Serbs are also referred to in Croatian museums as Chetniks who operated “concentration camps”. However, since the museum in Karlovac cannot claim a genocide of the Croat population, it instead presents “urbicide” and “culturocide” – framing it as the “genocide of the city of Karlovac” and its culture. One could argue that, in this context, the Holocaust no longer serves as the primary negative “reference point”; instead, it is the Srebrenica genocide – the event for which the Hague Tribunal established the term.
The article’s strong focus on how references to World War II enemy images appear in historical politics and newer museums in Croatia and Bosnia may come as a surprise. This focus not only comes from my comparative project on “Globalized Memorial Museums”, but also from the way references to demonizing enemy images from World War II continue to obstruct peaceful – and even thriving – coexistence. This doesn’t mean that, after a certain amount of time, everything should be forgiven and forgotten – quite the opposite. Only a critical reappraisal can help bridge the divides between ethnic groups – especially if each side acknowledges its own responsibility. That said, the scale was not comparable, as the Bosnian Serbs committed by far the most and gravest crimes. But if “we” are the “new Jews” and “they” the “new Nazis”, this only leaves room for black-and-white narratives of pure victimhood and absolute evil.
However, just as after National Socialism, the Holocaust and the genocide of the Sinti and Roma during World War II, the term “reconciliation” should be used with caution. Such a demand must not come from the perpetrators or their descendants to the persecuted and their families – not even after fully acknowledging their own responsibility. If the persecuted and their descendants choose to use this term themselves to describe the process they are pursuing – like the Tutsi-led government did after the genocide in Rwanda – that’s a different matter (even if there’s much to criticize about Rwanda’s military regime and its politics of history). It’s possible that Bosniak returnees to the former Bosniak enclave of Srebrenica, now in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, may one day speak of reconciliation as a way to build a future for themselves in the Serb-dominated town. However, it is the opposite of reconciliation when Bosnian Serbs choose to commemorate Serb victims every year on July 12 – the day after the Srebrenica memorial event. Such rivalry and tallying of victims keep the “war on memory” alive.
In Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, however, there are also organizations and individuals who firmly oppose the pattern of downplaying one’s own crimes – if they’re acknowledged at all – while obsessively highlighting those committed by others. In Belgrade, Women in Black have long campaigned for the Serbian government to acknowledge the Srebrenica genocide. In Croatia, organizations like Documenta – Center for Dealing with the Past continue to investigate Croat crimes against Serbs from 1991 to 1995 – a process first initiated by the magazine Feral Tribune in the 1990s, despite restrictions on media freedom. In 2023, while the Croatian government took many welcome steps to address the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma and Sinti during its chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), it also used that position to deny the genocide committed by the Ustasha against the Serb population. The former director of the Jasenovac Memorial cited government pressure on this issue as a key reason for his resignation. Documenta and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research in Southeast Europe, newly established at the University of Rijeka in 2024, protested strongly.
At best, the commitment is directed against any distortion, biased portrayal or misuse of history – whether related to World War II, the Yugoslav wars of disintegration or beyond. A multi-perspective, critical approach to the past places painful questions about the shared responsibility of one’s own “we-group” at the heart of politics of history, remembrance culture, research and public discourse – alongside the empathetic commemoration of one’s own victims. In Europe, unlike in Russia, we have the privilege of being able to protest without risking our personal freedom – although in Hungary, for example, since 2010, it means risking one’s career and financial security. As an Austrian scholar born in Croatia, I’m repeatedly told that Austria also took a long time to overcome the victim myth, so it’s not surprising that it is also taking time in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. I can only respond that this way of thinking leaves the tireless advocates of a self-critical, honest reckoning out in the cold – or worse, we simply shrug and accept the situation in the so-called Balkan powder keg as just the way things are. After all, the Holocaust and the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in the region are also part of Germany’s and Austria’s legacy – so the consequences of this unresolved past concern them as well.
[1] An overview of the Yugoslav wars of disintegration can be found, for example, on the website of the Baden-Wuerttemberg State Center for Political Education: https://osteuropa.lpb-bw.de/jugoslawien-krieg (accessed May 19, 2025).
[2] Radonić, Ljiljana (2010): Krieg um die Erinnerung. Kroatische Vergangenheitspolitik zwischen Revisionismus und europäischen Standards. Frankfurt am Main.
[3] Credible Croatian and Serbian scholars today estimate around 100,000 victims at Jasenovac, of whom more than 83,000 have been identified by name by the Jasenovac Memorial thus far. https://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6711 (accessed June 4, 2025).
[4] Biro, Štefan (2007): Bolnička logistika u sustavu ratne bolnice Vukovar 1991. godine. In: Biro, Štefan (ed.): Vukovarska bolnica 1991. Vukovar, pp. 179-188, p. 179.
[5] Bosanac, Vesna (2007): Ratna skloništa u Vukovaru. In: Biro, Štefan (ed.), see endnote 4, pp. 108-111, p. 111.
[6] The term Bosniak is now predominantly used instead of Bosnian Muslim to avoid emphasizing religious affiliation – just as with Croats and Serbs – since many Bosniaks are secular.
[7] Srebrenica Memorial Center (2021): In the footsteps of those who did (not) cross. An exhibition of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, Srebrenica.
[8] The photo of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – featuring a small boy with his hands raised – can be found in museums around the world, including German, American and Israeli institutions, as well as in the Holocaust exhibition at the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum in Dubai.
[9] Radonić, Ljiljana (2024): Croatian Homeland War Memorial Museums – Exhibiting Urbicides and Concentration Camps. In: Nationalities Papers 52(4), pp. 935-960, p. 937.
Ljiljana Radonić is Vice Director of the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she led the ERC project “Globalized Memorial Museums. Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals” from 2019 to 2024. Her habilitation thesis “Der Zweite Weltkrieg in postsozialistischen Gedenkmuseen” was published by De Gruyter in 2021. Since 2004, she has taught at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, focusing on antisemitism theory and (East-Central) European memory conflicts since 1989. She is a member of Austria’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
