Exhibition 360°: Once upon a time and never again
Exhibition Once upon a time and never again is displeyed in Documentation Center Kosovo, which is managed by Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (HLCK), in memory of 1133 children killed as a result of war in Kosovo 1999-2000. Due to coronavirus pandemic exchibtion will not be shown in Belgrade, therefore virtual tour has been created.
Once upon a time, is a normal beginning of every fairy tale. In this case it is the beginning of a war story. A world that is revealed to us, through the innocent eyes of children, is a world that similar to a fairy tale should never belong to reality.
More than two decades have passed since the end of the armed conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia which took more than 130,000 lives. In today’s Serbia, the official memory politics on this period is characterised by historical revisionism, which sees the wars of the 1990s through a binary ethnocentric narrative about Serbian heroes and victims. Convicted war criminals enjoy public and institutional support, and many are even politically active. At the same time, in the memory politics and public discourses, the facts established before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and in numerous research projects are ignored or denied.
How and why does wartime violence against civilians occur in the communities that have lived together in peace for a long time? Why does this happen in some local-level communities and not in others? How does memory of the past waves of violence matter in this context? In our first episode in English, we are discussing these questions on the examples of armed conflicts in Croatia, Uganda and Guatemala. Our guest is Mila Dragojević, Associate Professor in Politics at the University of South, Sewanee and the author of Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War.