Introduction

Memorialization is a crucial category through which human rights regime enforces moral responsibilities for past atrocities. As part of ontological security-seeking, a term that refers to a state’s alleged need to have a consistent and assured perception of itself (Mitzen 2006), human rights-centered bodies and institutions arguably aim at providing for a “securitization of memory” for the sake of universal human rights values. The securitization of memory is understood here as the part of ontological security which refers to the need of a political elite governing a sovereign polity to have a secure identity by maintaining distinctiveness and routinizing their relationships with other groups (Mitzen 2006). In such processes, by the means of law, certain historical remembrances are secured while others are completely delegitimized and criminalized (Malskoo 2015). In other words, securitization of memory is generally used by the political elite to secure state’s own national identity; thus, there is a clear tension between nationalist and human rights-centered securitizations of memory and the aims they try to achieve. Hence, in this article, I ask what happens when the realm of memorialization is (partially or fully) outsourced to external security providers? Whose ontological security is actually at play once the securitization of memory is being externally imposed?

Here, I problematize the ways in which the human rights-centered ideology applies securitization of memory, through the provision of legal or other mechanisms, mediated by a variety of supranational agencies such as the Office of the High Representative (OHR) or the European Parliament (EP), and consequently, how such securitization of memory affects the potency of nationalism in BiH. I have chosen the case study of BiH, which is ethnically divided into two self-governing entities—the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim (Bosnjak)-Croat Federation of the Croat and Bosniac—created by the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. The external memorialization policies often clash with the state in numerous ways—they can be accepted, challenged, glocalized, instrumentalized, or banned, because the interpellations between the local, national, and transnational agencies are always messy, complex, and cacophonic. Precisely because sovereignty is fragile and fragmented, the Bosnian case offers fertile ground for assessing first: the impact that international supervision has on memorialization and consequently on ontological security, as envisioned and promoted through human rights institutions, discourses, and practices. And second: what happens to ontological security-seeking when the international community, or in the case of BiH, the EU, regulates and enforces a particular vision of an ethnically contested past.

I suggest here that the external attempts to secure memory derive from the need of the international community to shore up its own ontological security and that of the international human rights regime. The growing organizational power of human rights displaces the concept of historical memory from its home within the setting of nation states where memory is delimited by clearly defined borders, to the international arena, resulting in an enlarged practice of public historical memory, promoted and sustained in new ways by international actors. In doing so, it actually actively promotes social construction of “ancient hatreds,” where ethnic identities are promoted and understood as primordial. Additionally, external memorialization policies are always constructed from the moral position of a bystander—a party that has a moral obligation to intervene: either as an abstract marker of the communities of belonging, simplified categories of victims–perpetrators–bystanders or as decontextualized memory without any content. I argue here that such tailored administrations of memorialization policies actually obscure complexities and further promote and cement societal division along binary and mutually exclusive categories of victim and perpetrators.

This article proceeds in four parts. In the first part, I locate memory in studies of ontological security. In the second part, I briefly theorize the understanding and conceptualization of memorialization processes within two very different sets of ideologies: human rights and nationalism. In the third part, I discuss different mechanisms of the securitization of memory promoted as human rights solutions for ontological security seeking in Bosnia and Herzegovina by focusing on three different realms of external memorialization policies in BiH: general, regional, and country-specific. In the fourth part, I analyze the implications of the securitization of memory on ontological security and nationalism.

Ontological Security and Memory

While the literature in both ontological security and in memory studies is extensive, that dealing with the intersection between ontological security and memory is nascent. Jennifer Mitzen pioneered the displacement of Giddens’ (1991) ontological security theory from an individual experience as a sense of order and continuity to ontological security of states. Giddens’ theory shows how transformations of classical modernity on the way to late modernity (postmodern or radicalized modernity) make the social world unpredictable and unstable and change the relationship between time and space, as well as perception of fate, trust, risk, danger, and security. Thus, he claims, ontological security is derived from psychological needs based on maintaining routine. Mitzen (2005, p. 343) uses this theoretical framework to explain why some conflicts persist, claiming that the conflict itself at times “comes to fulfill identity needs, (and) breaking free can generate ontological insecurity, which states seek to avoid.” However, it is important to stress that in spite of the fact that applying ontological security to states and political entities proved to be an insightful theoretical tool in understanding the ways in which states allegedly behave, states are not homogeneous entities; thus, their anthropomorphic-like identities are constructed and promoted by the ruling political elite often guided by a strong and charismatic leader.

Within the ontological security literature, memory has been submerged under the wider category of identity and treated only in passing. The inquiry into the role that memorialization plays in ontological security has just recently been opened asking what and who may provide a sense of security among the competitive securitizers. Pioneering works of Subotić (2016), Zarakol (2016), Malksoo (2015; 2016), Lupovici (2012), Gustafsson (2014), and Ejdus (2017a, 2017b) are bringing ontological security into the realm of memorialization seeking to understand the ways in which a basic need for predictable social order and biographical continuity is being constructed (Ejdus 2017b). However, ontological security is in a close relationship with identity and memory. If collective memory provides groups with a sense of Self (that is, with ontological security), such memories need to be protected and secured from fading into oblivion through security measures (Gustafsson 2014). A way to secure identity often comes in forms of securitization of memory. Securitization in the international realm “means to present an issue as urgent and existential, as so important that it should not be exposed to the normal haggling of politics but should be dealt with decisively by top leaders prior to other issues” (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 29). As the Copenhagen School suggests, it is not only the threats themselves that are socially constructed, but the ways that these threats could be resolved (Buzan & Wæver 2003, p. 489). The concept of mnemonical security relates to the idea that distinct understandings of the past should be fixed in public remembrance and consciousness in order to buttress an actor’s stable sense of Self (Malskoo 2015). Memory laws became central to the politics of memory, that is to the political means by which events are classified commemorated or discarded to influence community values and attitudes (Malskoo 2009). These memory laws and regulations are utilized with regard to difficult and violent histories and are of two central categories: one that bans and criminalizes a positive perception of an atrocious past such as genocide or mass-violence, and the other that bans a negative perception of a violent past (Gutman 2016, p. 576), reflecting also what is called a militant democracy (Belavusau 2014), which refers to the prohibition of hatred from constitutionally protected rights of free expression in order to preserve liberal democracy. However, it is important to stress that memory laws and regulation are used for both nationalist and human rights-centered ideologies as legitimate means to secure (or obscure) a certain vision of the past.

Memorialization Through the Lenses of Nationalism and Human Rights

Regardless how we understand human rights and nationalism on the spectrum of Mannheim’s (1936) “particular” or “total” conceptions of ideology, Seliger’s (1976) “fundamental” or “operative” levels of ideology or Freeman’s (1998) “fully fledged” or “thick” ideologies, understanding both as ideologies offers us the analytical tools to systematically evaluate their impact on the ground. What is even more important, understanding both human rights and nationalism through the prisms of the institutionalization of ideological power and the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion may advance our understanding of how and to what extent the values and norms they promote become internalized across different socio-political strata.

For both, nationalist and human rights-centered ideologies, memorialization matters greatly. In nationalist ideologies, memory is used for the sake of defining boundaries across geographic and ethnic lines (Brubaker 1996; Malešević 2006). Here, the emphases are on particular subjective elements such as memory, myth, and symbols through which ethnicity and nationalism may be understood while the essential element of collective identity is shared culture (Smith 2001). Nationalism is “an ideology that is grounded in the popularly shared beliefs and practices that conceive the nation as the most important unit of human solidarity and political legitimacy” (Malešević 2013b, p. 19). Through various forms of commemorative practices and memory discourses, official memory clearly demonstrates governmental efforts to simulate spontaneous, natural, and authentic processes of collective memory formation that take root over time in society and to provide ontological seeking solutions. The state, as the most efficient agent of memory that expresses its vision of the past through the activities of various official bodies, has the central task of building the national memory and the ceremonies that surround it. However, people become receptive to nationalism within small group encounters; thus, it is important to stress that top-down approaches can have limited success on the ground.

However, in spite and because of nationalism, during the past few decades, human rights have become a meta-ideology of our times, with a globally accessible moral and legal language for expressing universal claims and measuring development. One of its core assumptions is that coming to terms with the past is crucial for the implementation of democracy and the principles of human rights. Memorialization emerged as a crucial category through which the human rights regime enforces moral responsibilities for past atrocities. Since the 1980s, the human rights vision of memorialization—the process of remembering the wrongs of the past and honoring the victims—has grown together with the prevalent idea that public and official recognition of crimes is essential to prevent further violence in divided or post-conflict societies (Hazan 2010). The “third wave of democratization” has brought an explosion of previously suppressed collective memories and adjoining dilemmas of how to address past wrongdoings (Huntington 1991). Over the last three decades, a global norm has emerged proscribing appropriate ways for states to deal with crimes of the past, including primarily accepting the demands and values of the human rights regime. There are widespread assertions that memory is important for a democratic community to achieve its potential, avoid dangers of past crimes, and secure its continuation (Misztal 2005). It is further argued that a culture of forgetting threatens democracy because real democracy requires a self-critical working through of the past (Adorno [1959] 1986).

Recently, the UN (Shaheed 2014) adopted the memorialization standards—promoting Western memorial models as “a template for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes” and in so doing requires states with difficult pasts to adhere to the proscribed standards of memory. Memorialization is “commonly understood in terms of commemoration, the non-recurrence of violence and symbolic forms of reparations, must be considered as contributing in much more dynamic and diverse ways to attempts to deal with a violent past, including truth and justice” (Shaheed 2014, p. 49). Attempts to incorporate memorialization processes as an integral part of democratization mechanisms and to move from the “duty to remember” as a moral instance onto a policy-oriented “proper way to remember,” are designed and envisioned through a standardization of memory—a set of policies for combating injustice and promoting reconciliation. These memorialization policies administered through resolutions and laws are meant to ensure a standardization of memory by securing a single proper way to commemorate past human rights abuses that are supposed to serve as an insurance policy against the repetition of violence and to prevent future human rights abuses. Memorialization policies that criminalize denial or other forms of impropriate and dangerous forms of memorialization are understood here as part of an institutionalized system of the human rights regime that regulates and promotes memorialization standards. A proper memorialization refers to the radical jump from the concept of a “duty to remember” that was meant to bring debates over contested pasts into the public sphere, to a policy-oriented “proper way of remembrance”, designed and envisioned through standardization of memory (David 2017b).

Notwithstanding these developments, and for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this paper, nationalism, which opposes the uniform standardization of global rights, still remains the most potent ideology across the globe, in particular in conflict and post-conflict settings (Hutchinson 2014; Malešević 2013b). The article questions the usefulness of the human rights agenda, enforced by various external actors (with a varying degrees of success) which is based on the assumption that “a proper memorialisation” is effective in promoting universalist human rights values across the globe and in particular in post-conflict settings, and further addresses the side effects of this agenda. The human rights regime is understood here, not only as a normative system of values but as an institutionalized system, potent with organizational power, that produces values and constitutes interest through the conferral of political legitimacy which forces states to adapt their national memories to norms and values expected by the human rights standards. I refer here to the human rights ongoing historical process that grows through discourses, knowledge, and institutions, and involves the constant increase of organizational capability for coercion and the internal pacification of social order (Malešević 2013a). This is particularly important as it means that in practice the organizational power of human rights promotes and enforces its ideological agenda, while gaining legitimacy and power through institutions, discourses, and practices. Consequently, as with any other ideological system, the human rights regime includes norms and values that are also meant to provide ontological security via securitization of standardized memory. It engages the securitization of memory as a means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others (Malskoo 2015). Consequently, binding memorialization processes together with human rights policy means that the manner in which official memory in post-conflict states is constructed is no longer solely an internal matter in those countries. External factors are meant to exert a significant influence over local memory, and to impose externally determined values on local actors through the human rights regime and the normative policy “recommendations” (Blustein 2012). Demands for dealing with the past, together with other political, social, and economic requests and conditions, place enormous pressure on nation states and currently play a central role in the process of memory construction (David 2015).

Policing Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In 1992, Bosnia, one of six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, declared independence following the earlier international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs, following the leadership of the Serbian Democratic Party, feared minority status in the new Bosnian state and thus opposed independence. The Bosnian Croats and Muslims, following their respective leaderships of the Croatian Democratic Union and the Party of Democratic Action, strongly favored independence, seeing it as a way of avoiding the dominance of neighboring Serbia. As the European Community recognized Bosnia’s independence, one of the most ruthless conflicts in recent times began between the Belgrade-aided Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The war in Bosnia lasted from April 1992 to October 1995. It resulted in thousands of casualties and nearly half the population becoming displaced or refugees, and was only brought to an end by forceful US-led international intervention. As a result of the intensive NATO bombing campaign between August 30 and September 20, which was carried out in response to the massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995, the Dayton peace agreement was declared. In December 1995, the Dayton peace agreement, which provided the immediate cessation of hostilities as well as an institutional framework, for a Bosnia and Herzegovina nation-state, was finally signed. It was meant not only to bring back peace and stability to region but also to heal the wounds of ethnic division. The agreement created an independent Bosnian state divided between two separate entities, the Muslim (Bosniac)-Croat Federation, occupying 51% of the territory, and the Serb-held area, Republika Srpska (RS), occupying 49%. Though proclaimed as a sovereign state, BiH was de facto under protectorate of the international community, the EU bodies, with the Office of the High Representative being directly in charge, with the purpose of overseeing the Dayton agreement implementation. Further, following the Dayton Agreement, BiH formally committed to the Europeanization process, a process of the adoption of the European values, which was conditioned upon, among other things, facing its “criminal past” of human rights abuses.

The situation, in which ethnic divisions in Bosnia were institutionalized and internationally closely monitored (with different degrees of success and interest over time), produced two effects on the ground relevant to this paper. First, the international community has played a significant role in pressuring BiH to shape their national histories in accordance with its own agenda, that, though changing and evolving over time, was always dressed up in a human rights grab. Secondly, through the enforcement of developing state institutions based on an ethnic key, the Dayton agreement cemented the importance of ethnic categories disabling any formal ambiguity in regard to ethnic identities. Consequently, the structural embedding of ethnic divisions largely reduced the complexity of Bosnian society to its ethnonational dimensions.

Post-war realities in Bosnia have been scrutinized abundantly. Researchers from a variety of disciplines, policy and law makers as well as activists, all contributed to our current understanding of Bosnia’s political economy of the war and its implications for identity making. A broad literature on transitional justice in general and memorialization processes in particular covers subjects that deal directly or indirectly with memorialization processes and administrations of memory. Literature on memory politics brings to the fore mnemonic battles between various (local as well as international) carrier groups and institutional agents over narratives (Miller 2006; Mannergren Selimovic 2013) both from top-down and bottom-up perspectives (Correli 2013; Pollack 2010) and across spatial and temporal dimensions (Duijzings 2007; Nettelfield & Wagner 2015; Palmberger 2016). Significant works deal with the ways in which transitional justice mechanisms, in particular the ICTY and domestic courts, affect memorialization processes and identity making (Subotić 2009; Humphrey 2003; Nettelfield 2010). This literature is particularly important, since “transitional justice institutions aim to challenge the legitimacy of prior political practices by confronting denial and transforming the terms of debate on past abuses, yet they also seek to establish their own legitimacy by minimizing the challenge that they pose to dominant frameworks for interpreting the past” (Lebow 2008, p. 215). All research testifies that conflicts over the interpretation of the war and the past do not only follow ethnic lines but are also inherently entangled in political, local, international, gender, and generational struggles. Though this is undeniable true, my focus here is to uncover the effects which external memorialization policies have on ontological security-seeking. I suggest that precisely the two political conditions in place—structural division along ethnic lines and external pressures to adjust to memorialization standards—enabled the social construction of two distinctive phenomenon. First, the external securitization of memory actively promotes social construction of “ancient hatreds” by emphasizing the importance of ethnic identities. Secondly, external attempts to secure memory are actually designed to secure the moral boundaries of those who impose and mandate the memorialization policies. To demonstrate and explain those claims, I wish here to briefly address three realms of memory securitization in BiH, envisioned and enforced by different EU human rights bodies and institutions,Footnote 1 with each having a different mechanism to implement and impact upon memorialization processes in BiH: (1) general, (2) regional, and (3) country-specific memorialization policies.

The memorialization policies in the first set are not only directed towards BiH. On the contrary, BiH, like many other states that are, or aim to be, a part of the EU, has to comply with the prescribed memorialization standards. There is little to no real enforcement, but the power of coercion lies in the symbolic meaning-making process of belonging to a “proper” moral community. This relates to what is emerging as the EU human rights memorialization calendar, somewhat overlapping with UN awareness days. Although the European Union does not determine public holidays for its member states, there is a list of commemorative days and holidays that have strong symbolic meaning and present a contour of the boundaries of the EU moral community of human rights.

The memorialization polices in the second set deal specifically with the legacies of the wars in the 1990s and have implications for the entire region, namely, Serbia, BiH, and to a lesser extent, Croatia. In this case, all states involved are explicitly asked to implement these memorialization policies, while the enforcement mechanism operates through sanctioning benefits. The second set of memorialization policies, which have significantly more impact on forging the ontological security of the region, are resolutions tailored and promoted by the European Parliament (EP). While the memorialization policies in the first set are mostly declaratory in their calls for implementation, the policies in the second set are direct and specific, and call for their wide distribution and implementation. These memorialization policies are specifically tailored for the region and issued by the EP in the form of resolutions. The last paragraph always includes a direct instruction commending “Its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, the governments of the Member States, the Government and Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its entities, and the governments and parliaments of the countries of the Western Balkans”Footnote 2 to ensure the desired impact. The most important and influential EP resolutions concern the Srebrenica genocide which refers to the July 1995 killing of 7000 to 8000 Bosnian Muslim males in the town of Srebrenica during the last months of the Bosnian War (1992–1995). The European Parliament adopted three resolutions on the Srebrenica genocide—the first one on 7 July 2005, the second one on 15 January 2009, and the third on 7 July 2015. All three resolutions outline the proper way to remember Srebrenica. Moreover, each resolution “[C]alls on the Council and the Commission to commemorate appropriatelyFootnote 3 the anniversary of the Srebrenica-Potočari act of genocide by supporting Parliament’s recognition of 11 July as the day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide all over the EU, and to call on all the countries of the Western Balkans to do the same.” The policy framework of the proper memorialization standards is tailored through precise wording that was meant to establish power orders of the moral community of righteous. Although the Resolutions are “minimalist in nature in view of the spatial and temporal limits in defining this particular crime of genocide” (Karčić 2015, p. 204), the EP draws a clear vision of “the world as it should be”. Thus, the EP: “Stresses,” “Recalls,” “Regrets,” “Expresses,” “Praises,” “Urges,” “Condemns,” “Reaffirms,” and “Instructs”—for the sake of forging moral lines between three distinct communities: ethnically bounded victim and their counters—ethnically bounded perpetrators, and the bystanders, personified and embedded in the international community in general and in the EU in particular.Footnote 4

The memorialization policies in the third set deal with the securitization of memory within the boundaries of BiH, and primarily affect the two entities of Republika Srpska and of the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats. Refusal to enforce the given resolutions is subject to a penalty and fine. This set of memorialization policies come from the Office of the High Representative (OHR) that not only has the power to decree resolutions but also to enforce them, including to fine and criminalize all sides involved. Established as part of the Dayton Peace Accords, the OHR’s task was to implement the civilian aspects of the internationally brokered peace agreement.Footnote 5 Faced with serious resistance to the implementation of the Dayton agreement in 1997, the international community awarded the OHR special intervention prerogatives that could henceforth directly impose or nullify laws if deemed necessary as well as remove from office public officials if they violate the peace agreement. Under this authority, the OHRFootnote 6 has issued a large number of decisions on issues of monitoring, coordinating, and promoting state-building capacity in accordance with the Dayton accord. Several decisions, however, were directly related to identity and memory formation. First, as far back as in 1998 and 1999, the OHR issued three important decisions regarding the national symbols: “Decision Imposing the Law on the Flag in BiH” (1998) and “Decision on the Flying of the Flag in BiH” (1998) and “Decision imposing the Law on the National Anthem of BiH” (1999). Second, Wolfgang Petritsch, the third High Representative for BiH, in October 2000, issued a “Decision designating in perpetuity a plot of land at Potočari to be set aside as a cemetery and as a solemn place for the erection of a memorial to the victims of the Srebrenica Massacre”. In May 2000, he issued a “Decision establishing and registering the Foundation of the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery”, which received and disbursed funds to build and maintain the memorial and cemetery. Third, as Annex 8 of the Dayton Peace Agreement provided for the formation of a Commission to preserve national Monuments whose mandate was to receive petitions to designate property of “cultural, historical, religious or ethnic importance” as national Monuments. In 2002, the OHR issued “Decision amending the Federation Law on Preservation of Assets Declared National Monuments of BiH under Decisions of the Commission for Protection of National Monuments” and “Decision imposing the RS Law on Implementation of Decisions of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments established under Annex 8 of the Dayton Peace Agreement”.

These three types of memorialization policies, though very different in the mechanism through which international pressure is applied and enforced, all have in common a pretext or a particular framing of memory. This pretext refers to a specific positioning of and relationship to an object of study (Burke 2002). The pretext of all memorialization policies mentioned above is the same and has the same purpose: to re-organize and re-define the existing categorical order. It is precisely this particular framing of memory, I argue, that serves as a setting within which the specific content of a memory may be situated and, when situated in a certain way, is imposed through the normative schemes of administrations of memory. In other words, the primary goal of the enforcement of this normative schematization is to defend the ontological security of bystanders, whose “ontological narrative” is historically rooted in the notion of moral responsibility to intervene. However, this schematization, emerging from the Holocaust experience and based on the triad matrix of victim–perpetrator–bystander tends to ignore the specific histories, political and economic conditions, and contexts of individuals. Such framing of past human rights violations, constructed from the moral position of a bystander, as a party that has a moral obligation to intervene and possibly set things right, further promotes societal division across binary categories of victims and perpetrators, neglecting temporal and spatial dimensions and bleaching all gray areas to fit the two opposing and mutually exclusive categories (David 2017b, p. 316.) In human rights discourse, victims and perpetrators are usually referred to as two completely separate and homogenous sets of people, while in reality not all victims are the same, nor are all perpetrators the same, and some victims are also perpetrators and vice versa. Thus, by applying the human rights regime’s own normative moral standards to victims and perpetrators serves, first and foremost, to defend their own position as those in charge of the world vision “as it should be.” This is in a way paradoxical, especially when having in mind that the memory studies literature is abundant with a well-grounded research that shows that those distinctions are often blurred and contested.Footnote 7

Securing Memory—Enforcing Divisions

It is hard to account for the numerous mnemonic groups and the ways in which they responded to those very different external memorialization policies. External pressure to construct a particular post-conflict cosmological map of proper remembrance never unfolds as a homogeneous project since in different spatial and temporal dimensions, different supranational agents have multiple (often opposing) agendas. This is true also for the role of domestic political actors in memory policy-making. The ways in which they adopt, challenge, glocalize, instrumentalize, or reject externally mandated memorialization policies are diverse and the interpellations between the local, national, and transnational agencies are always messy, complex, and cacophonic. The international presence in Bosnia since its installment has been subject to OHR’s growing self-restraint and call for more active local ownership (Bougarel et al. 2007). However, I do not engage here directly with the role of domestic political actors in memory policy-making. Though those are not completely analytically or empirically distinguishable, the focus of my interest is to outline the outcomes of the human rights-centered securitization of memory, promoted through administrations of memory and the ways in which such securitization of memory affects the potency of nationalism.

Despite multifaced bottom-up reactions to the external securitization of memory, what is indisputable is that different political elites use those external memorialization policies as a platform to promote their political agendas. For example, references to the European calendar are present in both entities but are often framed differently. Commemorative dates are selectively adopted and honored by various mnemonic groups and NGOs. Some are promoted also at governmental levels. Two of such commemorative dates, the International Holocaust Day and Europe Day (also commemorated as Day of the Victory against Fascism), receive official support in both Republika Srpska and in Federation. In spite of the fact that BiH has not been able to establish an official Holocaust Memorial Day, the Council of Ministers of BiH annually marks 27 January as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust “by addressing the public through a press release as part of its program of marking important human rights dates” (OSCE 2015). In 2013, a large-scale project was launched, aiming to promote Holocaust education “into the educational system of BiH” as well as “the maintenance of active public remembrance of the Jewish Holocaust victims from BiH.”Footnote 8 These efforts to promote Holocaust remembrance and education have the symbolic power of claiming Bosnia’s democracy (David 2017a) and its alleged commitment to the European path for the BiH future which also includes among the other practices, impression management of Bosnia’s image through obligatory diplomatic visits to Yad Vashem in Israel (McDowell & Braniff 2014).

The same is true for Europe Day or Day of the Victory against Fascism that is celebrated all over the region on May 9. In BiH, the official celebrations started in 2005 and since then this day is celebrated with a series of manifestations with a different city hosting the European Days each year. Although Europe Day is about the EU and the EU integration, marking this day across the region in general and for BiH in particular is not surprising since the European integration is part of the post-Dayton commitment, thus again, the celebration of Europe day is an opportunity to display their European outlook. Having said that, once European Day framed as Day of the Victory against Fascism, it raises political tensions high (often not along ethnic but ideological lines). Paradoxically, both RSFootnote 9 and FederationFootnote 10 use this holiday to claim simultaneously fascist and anti-fascist legacy, shaping it for their own political gain. Other commemorative days such as International day of non-violence International Day (2 October), Support of Victims of Torture (26 June), and International Romani Day (8 April) follow the same pattern and are commemorated sporadically either for a narrow political gain or by small groups of human rights promoters and activists.

Again, to understand memorialization standards as contributing to a reorganization into a novel hierarchical order, one has to understand what the content of a “proper memory” is and which memory-frame is promoted through these memorialization policies. In this context, it is easily noticed that in the case of the first set of memorialization policies, remembrance is decontextualized and de-historicized, being reduced to just a marker. Holocaust commemoration and education became markers for the communities of belonging as a signifier of Westernized moral boundaries—“a unit of measurement” (Levy & Sznaider 2002). Similarly, Europe Day often serves for international display (whereas for domestic purposes it can be framed in a completely different manner) as an indicator of the side one picks. In this sense, the struggle over unifying EU memory that is intended to overcome territorial disputes and nationalized histories is fundamentally based on human rights conceptualization of memory, probably best outlined in the UN ceremonial calendar. Human rights promotion of “a proper way of remembrance” promotes “an evolving global commemorative matrix” (Katriel 2015, p. 194) wherein localized atrocities become de-territorialized from their original context and elevated to the level of pure abstraction. Yet these decontextualized remembrances are highly emotionally engaging, clearly drawing the lines between the moral communities of the excluded and the included, with these communities being mutually exclusive and positioned as good vs. evil.

Whereas the commemorative days are reduced to abstract markers of the communities of belonging, reaction to the EP Srebrenica resolutions are, as expected, highly polarizing along ethnic lines. The Bosnian Muslims see it as foundational documents, whereas Bosnian Serbs reject it entirely. Having said that, it is not that other voices, rather than being based on ethnicity, are not existing but those are flattened and “buried” by the might of ethno-nationalist discourse. On the one hand, from its inception, Srebrenica commemoration have been hijacked by the Bosnian Muslim political elite subsuming survivors under their political agendas (Duijzings 2007). The resolutions further instrumentilized survivors’ voices, often ignoring their complexities and framing them to utilize the needs of the political elite. On the other hand, while in Serbia the struggle with denial and the magnitude of the massacre (Obradović-Wochnik 2009) and to issue their own resolution continues (Dragović-Soso 2012), Bosnian Serbs on the Srebrenica municipal assembly, declared the resolution “unacceptable for the Serbian people” (Karčić 2015).

The Srebrenica genocide resolutions directly address the recent troubled past in the region, while providing further important evidence on the ways through which human rights advocates understand and promote memorialization processes. All Srebrenica resolutions use the schematic conceptualization of past human rights abuses, based on simplified and ”purified” categories of victims–perpetrators–bystanders, for the sake of creating a universal pattern as the only framework through which memorialization should take place in post-conflict settings in general and in BiH in particular (David 2017a). It is precisely this categorization into the triad of victims–perpetrators–bystanders, I argue, that in contexts within which ethnic symbols and collective histories have played immediate roles in conflicts, and were further legitimized and embedded by peace agreements and human rights institutions, leads to collective categorization of others as enemies. External pressures to adjust to memorialization standards coupled with structural division along ethnic lines make the ethno-nationalist apparatus become the ultimate factor in the processes of recollecting collective solidarity and feeling of belonging. In other worlds, identity and belonging is always a function of an interpretation of symbols and history, thus, the simplified matrix of victim-perpetrator and bystander reenacts and magnifies already existing nationalist sentiments. Additionally, it sets a stage for competing not only for nominal recognition and particular rights but also for the supremacy to determine who gets to be perceived as an ultimate victim, creating competing hierarchies of suffering.

The third set of memorialization policies, introduced and enforced by the OHR, bring to the fore a vision of memory “as it should be,” as opposed to memory “as is.” Two of the most potent national symbols, a flag and an anthem, that encapsulate the very essence of the state, have been imposed on BiH by the international community. The flag, which has a yellow triangle on a blue background and white stars allegedly represents the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the three constituent peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, while stars evoke Europe and the Bosnian commitment to the European path. The anthem is currently solely a musical theme. Whether it was intentionally named an “intermezzo” is beside the point; however, it does reflect the past two decades during which BiH has been frozen in the state of limbo, a state on a pause. In February 2009, the lyricsFootnote 11 were accepted by a parliamentary commission; however, the decision still requires approvals of the Council of Ministers of BiH and the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH. The proposed lyrics do not mention two administrative entities nor the constitutional nations. They are whitewashed of any history, any event, people, or a name. The song addresses “Mother Bosnia” and its natural beauties: rivers, mountains, and the sky. The entire song organically links the territory of BiH with the heart and soul, ending with a sentence “We are going into the future together!” Who “we” actually are remains unknown. Both of these examples testify that the desired memory in post-conflict Bosnia, as envisioned by the international community, is a memory without a content. A poster memory that cannot do any harm.

Although the intentions of the human rights promoters were never in favor of categorical simplification, the transition to a policy-oriented proper way of remembrance, where memorialization became a significant part of ontological security seeking, enforced just that—simplified and purified binary categories of abstractions. Such framing of past human rights violations, promoted either as an abstract marker of the communities of belonging, or through simplified categories of victims–perpetrators–bystanders or as a bleached memory without content is always constructed from the moral position of a bystander as a party that has a moral obligation to intervene and allegedly set things right. However, in doing so, it flattens complexities and further promotes and cements societal division along binary and mutually exclusive categories of victim and perpetrators that are often coupled with ethnicity. This memorialization imposition is actually meant to secure the bystanders’ ontological narrative of a particular morality. Finally, there are never abstract universal values—there are always somebody’s values and those values are actually enforced not by the people whose lives are affected by the conflict, but by members of a third party, the “bystanders.”

Whose Security? Whose Identity?

The securitization of memory, carried out through the organizational power of human rights, is supposedly meant to forge a desirable ontological security for a post-conflict sovereign polity, in this case that of BiH. However, when the EU, backed up by other human rights bodies and institutions, secures memory, whose ontological security is on the line? A patronage over a sovereign stateFootnote 12 further complicates the notion of ontological security seeking because it becomes rather unclear whose security needs protection. I argue here that the securitization of historical memory by means of law, resolutions, or any form of externally enforced policies, actually reproduces a sense of threat and insecurity which under certain conditions drives people back into their ethnic groups which are often perceived as the most stable identity providers. Memorialization policies should be read as cosmological maps through which new hierarchical orders are being placed. All resolutions are written from the position of a bystander, a third party that has a moral duty to interfere and bring back order. This order is always dressed up in human rights garb that, behind the notion of universal morality, actually promotes ontological security seeking for those who are allegedly assisting others to find and stabilize their ontological security. This is particularly true in the case of Bosnia, where the same international community, in particular that of the EU, that was a bystander during the war in Bosnia and did not/could not help preventing the atrocities, is actually enforcing securatization of memory for the sake of its own moral outlook. Once we understand the memorialization policies as being a way to restructure and reclaim hierarchical orders, it becomes clear that these policies are not meant to secure the ontological security of the Bosniaks, the Serbs, or the Croats living in BiH, but rather that of the policies’ creators. The securitization of memory stabilizes the identity of the bystanders by satisfying their needs as a moral human rights community. Thus, standardization of memory is first and foremost meant to keep this human rights community’s identities safe and secure.

If such a stabilization of the ontological security of bystanders were also beneficial for the Bosnians, it probably would be a win-win situation. The truth, however, is far from this. The result of the external imposition of memorialization policies is that existing divisions along ethnic lines do not become blurred through mutual empathies based on universal human suffering, as envisioned by the human rights regime. Instead, the categorization into victims–perpetrators–bystanders is automatically employed by nationalist claims linking together the very existential ontological security of the “self” with the animosities directed both to and from the hostile “other.” Once people are convinced that they are threatened, they slide back into their ethnically bounded identities. And this is precisely what the external securitization of memory does. In other words, external pressures to adjust to memorialization standards coupled with structural division along ethnic lines in reality help constructing “ancient hatred” discourse, not the other way around. It triggers ethnic sentiments and cements ethnic divisions and animosities, and not human rights appreciation. Unfortunately, the external imposition of memorialization policies does not promote moral responsibilities for past atrocities as the human rights regime advocates, but it does strengthen nationalism.