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Anthropologically Identifiable: Vukovar Between the Terror of Universalism and Humanitarian Tourism

From 1991. onwards Croatia became one of the countries in which the cult of the Western liberal self nurtured and its mantra of existence protected: the social construct of Universal Human Rights, hardly universal and globally present. They were certainly not universal for Croatia, in the eyes of the international community – then (in the early 90ies), as well as today – as if the War never was ; aggression, maybe ; and in the interpretation of many in the international community, or even national community – it was a conflict, yet in fact only another name for the civil war still unaccepted by the still „unaware“, „undemocratized“ and „nationalistically prone“ citizens of Croatia. The fact of today’s, already visible, rehabilitation of the Chetniks within the (inter)national community and deliberate overlook of the truth about the Serbian aggression are just part of a sequence that many authors perceive as a dangerous blindness and amorality on the part of the international politics (Lambrichs, 2005, 2011 ; Meštrović, 1996, 1997 ; Rogić, 2004, 2012). The author challenges this reality through a number of recent culminating events – from celebratizations, festivalizations, univerzalizations of places, non-- places and happenings of the Homeland War, to the attempts of total negation of the survivors and their testimonies. Case in point is the recent „invitation“ from the highest political levels to the war raped women to join the routine parades, much in the fashion of turning them into „majorettes“ of universalism, but not partakers in Justice for all. The paper directs towards psychological anthropology and recognition of the psychodynamic level of a consolatory role that universalism has for the moral deficit of the Western conscious and individuals. The awareness of one’s own incapabilities for auto-reflexivity and interpretation of crimes, started through the violence of one’s own people throughout the colonial and postcolonial world, is easier to bare, control and silence when there is an Other that needs a continued disciplining. Based on the anthropological discourse of critique towards the evidenced profiteering humanitarianism (Harrell-Bond, 1986), the author joins other authors that sense a dangerous punctum saliens of the universalistic tourism crowned with „good deeds“ of the humanitarian, as well as the politics of Human Rights (Baxi, 2006) crowned with „democratization“, all the way to the relativization of violent deaths and genocide, as in the case of Vukovar.

Anthropology, Vukovar, Universalism, Humanitarianism

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