| Abstract [eng] |
In contrast to the generation that was in direct contact and shared life experiences, Croatian youth, who are no longer children, have no memory of the war itself. It is often argued in the academic literature that it is the memory of the second generation that is more easily influenced, altered, homogenised and subject to social and political influence. There is very little research on the memory of Croatian youth, so it remains unclear what Croatian youth really think about these issues. Academic youth – students of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb – is a more educated group, theoretically more sophisticated, with a need to be interested, and therefore potentially reacting accordingly to war crimes, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the prosecution and ongoing trials of perpetrators, and the exposure of war criminals in the public space, and more openly accepting the ‘truth’ and the historical narrative produced by this institution. The analysis of this group helps to understand how the memory of academic youth in relation to the war and the ICTY behaves under the constant influence of nationalist rhetoric – whether it resists or surrenders. Meanwhile, the aim of this study is to determine the perception of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia among Croatian academic youth. The objectives of this research: 1) to define the concepts of collective memory and second-generation memory that are relevant for the study, and to identify how postmemory is formed; 2) to formulate a questionnaire based on the article „Caught between The Hague and Brussels: Millennials in Serbia on ICTY War Crime Trials” by Katarina Ristić et al., and on the theoretical assumptions of social and political memory and postmemory; 3) to conduct interviews with students from the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb and analyse the interviews; 4) to find out the perception of the academic youth on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. On the basis of the types of social and political memory described by Aleida Assmann, extending this with Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory and the theoretical assumptions of other authors, and complementing this with the work of scholars researching Croatian public memory of the wars of the 1990s and attitudes towards the Tribunal, insights into the dominant nationalist narratives, fifteen interviews with Croatian academic youth studying at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb were analysed using content analysis to reach the study's objective and to draw the following conclusions. Many of the young people are critical of the involvement of all sides in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, referring not only to the responsibility of the Serbs, but also, for example, to the Croatian hostility and inadequate reaction towards the Croatian Serbs, and to the responsibility of the Croats in the Bosnian war, etc. Croatian youth have knowledge of the criminal proceedings initiated by the Tribunal and the charges brought against them, and focus mainly on high-profile cases or cases of interest to Croats themselves. In terms of attitudes and confidence in the institution, respondents are divided into three groups of similar size, representing a negative, positive or “middle of the road” position. All respondents are unanimous in rejecting the institution's exclusively positive impact on the issue of coming to terms with the past. The memory of Croatian academic youth is most in line with the type of social memory rather than political memory, as young people’s memory is influenced more by the stories of family and relatives than by the narratives shaped by politicians and the media. This may be because the political science students are more critical, have a relatively high level of media literacy, are more cautious about attempts to politicise memory. |
