In the Balkans, Let Us Remember to Forget

To remember victims of injustice is the duty of the living, is it not? Memorialising the dead seems like a moral imperative for those of us who live on. An ethical testament to being human.

But to what extent can memory be beneficial when it slips away from the privacy of people and becomes a political project that requires "national strategies", "commemorations", "resources", "funds" and "anniversaries"? What does an-all consuming, industrial-scale memory with impersonal and dystopian-sounding names like "commissions of truth" have to do with recovering from a tragic past?

Do we need absurd institutions like a Ministry of Memory to make sense of society's past upheavals? Because such Orwellian creations with mandates of "officialising memory" will eventually be captured by government propaganda. Take Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, for example, which began as a government effort to memorialise the past, but now "functions rather as a propaganda outlet and a 'Ministry of Historical Truth' operating under the false presumption that there is one objective truth about the past", according to historian Tom Junes.

And what does it mean to "forgive but never forget"? How do these artificial creations help a traumatised community look ahead to better days?

Such politically-charged remembrance is typical in the Balkans, and it creates a pernicious context for past violence. It aims to maximise the harm done to us by our former enemies, but then rationalise our own role in that past.

To this political premise is added the memory of victims for an emotional effect that feeds the feeling of victimhood and resentment. Taking less of an active role as a government to make memory official is critical to give peace and...