Twenty years after the break up of Yugoslavia relationships between transitional justice, political myths and narratives about the past in Serbia and Croatia are still contested and vague. This paper tries to analyse the impact transitional justice mechanisms (TJMs) have on the historical narratives and creation of collective memory about war. As the “existing empirical knowledge about the impacts of transitional justice is still limited” , we explore indirect influence it has on local societies by means of political myths and historical narratives triggered by war crime trials.
So far, war crimes trials have been the main mechanism of transitional justice in the region of Western Balkans. We argue that transitional justice, instead of triggering truth seeking and truth telling processes that would lead to reconciliation, multiplied mutually exclusive historical narratives that determined national collective identities.
Taking Hegel’s work on the direct relation of historical narrative and law as a theoretical framework, we explore the transformation and development of law narratives in media and society, by using critical discourse analysis. We approached the problem by analysing trial transcripts and media reports about domestic war crimes trials held in Serbia and Croatia (Ovcara-Vukovar hospital and Medak pocket case). This research compares notions of collective and individual responsibility, guilty and accountability and their relation with new post-modern political myths. Legal documents are describing only the context of war and represent easily manageable historical material.
Finally, compliance with the international tribunals and apparent judicial reforms aiming to fulfill the EU conditionality, have put the need for transitional justice away from national priorities. As a consequence, new historical narratives are constructed simultaneously with the destruction of political alternatives willing to deal with the past. Thus, historical memory is used as a tool of power and comprises elements of compulsory forgetfulness, denial and silence about war crimes.
