When it comes to transitional justice mechanisms in Serbia, scholars, (most of practitioners and new political elites alike) have mainly focused on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and way in which the country deals with the ‘outside’ legacies of the previous regime, i.e. the regime crimes related to wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. By the same token, human rights violations and ethnic harassment that took place within Serbia’s borders during 1990’s (directed towards Muslims-Bosniaks from Sandžak and Croats from Vojvodina) have been put a side. In case of Sandžak Bosniaks, instead of openly facing state’s violence and failure to protect its own citizens, the new political elites that came to power after 2000 changes opted for ‘closing the books’ as a healing strategy. The chosen strategy involved a model of power sharing with minority’s elite, very limited and selective retributive measures, and a process of democratization in general that was supposed to improve position of all the minorities, and among them Bosniaks, in Serbia.
By analyzing the strategy that Serbia employed in order to reintegrate Bosniaks into the political and moral community from which they were excluded due to the state’s harassments, the article argues for a holistic approach to transitional justice, the one that would go beyond the retribution-restoration dilemma and take more into account victims’ needs and perceptions.
