From Penal Code to Memorandum: The Uses of the Term Genocide in Communist Yugoslavia

Abstract

During the 1980s in Yugoslavia, memories of the Second World War were instrumentalised to feed reciprocal fears and hatreds. It is also well known that, at the same period, Serb nationalists used the term "genocide" to refer not only to the massacres committed by the Croat Ustashas between 1941 and 1945, but also to the situation of the Serb population in Kosovo. This political instrumentalisation of the term "genocide" cannot be understood without going back to its definition and uses in the previous decades. Therefore, this paper first analyses the definition of the term "genocide" by the Yugoslav authorities in the first decades after the war, then its use by Vladimir Dedijer and his Committee to gather material on the genocide against the Serb people and other peoples in Yugoslav territory, as well as by representatives of the Serb Orthodox Church. Lastly, this paper looks at the widespread use of the term "genocide" in Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim nationalist circles in the late 1980s. Adopting such a perspective, it not only reveals the origin of certain semantic drifts, but also shows how legal and historiographical logics were related, as well as developments specific to the Yugoslav space and others common to the wider European continent.