Anastasija Mladenovska

I was born in 2003 in Kumanovo, the third largest town in suburban Macedonia, a 30 minute drive away from the Serbian border. Our dialect, heavily influenced by Serbian, is almost indistinguishable from the mannerisms spoken in many of the southern Serbian regions. Because of this, we were often called Serbs by Macedonians living in the west and south, as well as by many Serbians we met annually on vacation in Greece. My family proudly accepted this honorary title, as our news and entertainment consumption at the time was entirely Serbian. My grandmother still refers to our “brother Serbs” whenever Serbia is mentioned.

A few months ago, I began to question this title of “Honorary Serb” for the first time. I noticed a similar treatment from my Serbian American college friends in the U.S. diaspora, who didn’t necessarily share the same collective past or the “Balkan syndrome” of mutual understanding I had always known. This perspective shift became even more pronounced when Srebrenica once again became a topic of international attention because of the newly adopted UN Resolution to designate an International Day of Reflection. I then came to realize the broken dynamics of our multiethnic communication that I had witnessed in my childhood. This was not mediated conflict but person-to-person interactions: who my parents let me socialize with, who was acceptable to date, who was the subject of political stigmatization, who was considered “dirty,” which coffee shops and bars were okay to visit and which neighborhoods were to be avoided at all costs after 7 PM.

If there is something that can describe what I previously referred to as the Balkan syndrome of collective understanding, it is Svetlana Boym’s simple definition of nostalgia. According to Boym, a Russian-American cultural theorist, the nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal. She states, “nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but a new understanding of time and space that made the division between ‘local’ and ‘universal’ possible.”

As a Macedonian woman, I feel as if I shut the door on displacement the moment I decided to leave my hometown. Before coming to study in the U.S., my identity was split between the need to define a nascent Macedonian identity in the international context as a post-Yugoslav experience and the unavoidable belonging to the “Balkans.” Being a Balkan woman was my universal point of reference. When this feeling is rekindled by the many “honorary” titles of nationality I’ve received and continue to receive—whether asked for or not—such as Serbian, Bulgarian or Greek, I often wonder what might have been different in a more equitable political climate where the greatest, mightiest, and largest don’t overshadow the smallest.

Conversations in the U.S. about the Balkan states (Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia) almost entirely revolve around political conflict and its scalability, impacts, and consequences. This tends to further polarize the already extreme U.S. diasporas and some domestic groups. In recent years, as discussions about Srebrenica have emerged in the domestic scene and comparisons between Rwanda and Srebrenica have become inevitable. While this comparison might be productive in assessing the failure of the UN, EU, and U.S. policy to protect human rights, it also confuses the positioning of the (add year) Srebrenica massacre in shared Balkan collective memory.

The true scalability of everyday life practices in sectors such as education, healthcare, socialization and cultural contribution of different ethnic groups in pre- and post-Yugoslavia cannot be measured through international reactions but only through listening to people’s lived experiences and understanding the deeply rooted “why” of our lives. In high school, I wrote a poem to commemorate the Macedonian soldiers who died in the 2001 insurgency. I remember thinking that an incredibly multiethnic home cannot sustain itself without multiculturalism.

From my lived experience, I spent 19 years in the public school system in my hometown without ever questioning the segregation of Macedonians and Albanians. A common sentiment in society was to assume that the post-Yugoslav legacy of a never-acquired shared language, in every sense of the word, was simply the way things were. Muslims, mostly Albanians, and Orthodox Christians, mostly Macedonians, grew up in parallel worlds, sometimes only a couple of blocks apart. Most Albanians never learned to speak Macedonian and had their own schools, barbershops, coffee shops, bars, gyms, neighborhoods, beliefs, systems and ideas, rarely interacting with us. We, in turn, never made the effort to get close to them either.

I grew up years after Srebrenica, and I often heard the parents of my friends joking that “it’s better to be a lesbian than ever marry an Albanian or a Muslim.” I witnessed this disgust firsthand at night when we would sit on the boulevard in my hometown as teenagers. The Albanian and Macedonian boys would always start a fight, someone would get stabbed, beaten, shot or just verbally assaulted. I continue to see this hate spread easily in the hearts of many who left Macedonia and suddenly became patriots vigorously defending the national interests of our country.

Many times, I wish someone had told us about Srebrenica during those moments when we cursed each other in the street. I wish there had been a holiday then to honor the 7,000 innocent men and boys who fell as a result of our collective inability to reconcile with Boym’s “local under the universal” and set our priorities straight. There is no Balkan nation today that can exist without adopting policies for the successful and full integration of its ethnic minorities and majorities. Within the current Balkan framework, the most outcast are the most marginalized people and communities whose multiple identities intersect with ethnicity. If it’s supposedly ‘better’ to be gay than marry a Muslim, the perception is that it is even more difficult to be a gay Muslim. Many have suffered because of this failure to create spaces of tolerance.

I often read about the lessons of Srebrenica being forgotten, but as a Macedonian woman, I realize they were never really taught to us in the first place. No matter how much we, the Gen Z kids of the Western Balkans, wished to adapt to a post-Srebrenica, post-2001, and post-2015 reality, society always eventually returned to our segregated religious and ethnic realities. The modern challenge after 2015 became acquiring EU membership, and under this framework, everyone preached tolerance and called for immediate multiethnic cooperation. This only further eroded our confidence in each other and polarized our people as nothing this sensitive could ever be achieved immediately. 

In 2021, I attended a multicultural podcast project in Tirana with Serb, Bosnian, Albanian, Kosovar and fellow Macedonian youth. They sat us down and made us talk to each other. I remember thinking, if only you sat down with my parents and grandparents and their grandparents—this story would’ve been very different. The youth is young everywhere except in the Western Balkans, where the mistakes of previous generations still encapsulate every aspect of our lives: our ability to get a job, earn a good education, secure a good salary, start a family, talk to each other, and contribute to society. Those who can leave leave, and the polarization continues as governments grapple with depopulation and brain drains. When efforts are made to engage the diaspora of those who stayed, those who left protest and exert their influence.

It’s a vicious cycle that reminds me of my high school sociology professor, who used to say that we, the Balkans, like everything that’s ours and hate everything that’s ours at the same time.

The reality is that without the EU and US’s help, we’ve rarely been able to find solutions to escape the post-Srebrenica “minority rights’ ‘ crisis. But this assistance, rather than being a collaborative and preemptive effort aimed at fostering self-sufficiency, has consistently been a reactive post-crisis response, addressing only immediate needs without promoting long-term stability and development. To achieve lasting progress, it is crucial to refocus EU and U.S. attention on the Balkans. However, given the current global climate and the emergence of more rogue powers, this shift in focus seems unlikely in the near future.

In this process, the U.S. Western Balkan diasporas have played an enormous role, for better or worse. Srebrenica was a massacre, and it needs to be acknowledged for what it was—not as a source of pride or a stain on Balkan collective identity, but as a lesson for policy development. However, for it to be a lesson, it must be taught.

The Serbian domestic discourse over the years against the 2024 UN Srebrenica Resolution and Srebrenica in general has largely been driven not only by political propaganda and erasure of history,  but also by a narrative that “we don’t do those things.” This narrative is not purely Serbian, but a story many tell themselves every day. Phrases like “We can’t know what truly happened,” “It might have been a conflict, not a genocide,” and “We don’t kill—they do,” are things I hear and read about daily from well-meaning people who refuse to even look at the videos, photos, and stories all over the web.

Learning about Srebrenica made me realize that my 19 years of Macedonian education hadn’t prepared me for it at all. 

Macedonian dependence on the U.S. is as great today as it was then. U.S. Ambassador William Montgomery, reflecting on the U.S. response to Srebrenica, casually remarked in one video:

“I can tell you that there were many in the State Department that were really, really angry in 1993, 1994 to see these atrocities going on and us doing nothing about it. When we finally did go in, the way we handled it and resolved it with the Dayton Accord was great for bringing a war to a close but horrible for Bosnia, which remains to this day all screwed up. The frank reality is—we don’t care. We say we do, you know, and we urge them to do this, do that, but we don’t care enough. The same holds true with many other countries—we are willing to have a dialogue, talk, this and that, but to make a real difference, we are not really willing to do it, and that is our fault, that’s on us.”

This has been a trend in U.S. foreign policy, where initial interventions are not followed through with sustained commitment, resulting in superficial diplomatic efforts in countries like Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia. Whether the exact responsibility can be placed on the U.S. and whether it can be blamed for not caring about our own backyard is a complex and prolonged question. However, peace is a collective effort. Recognizing a UN Srebrenica Resolution is a peace effort, and in these peace offerings, I, and we, need:

My fellow college students; my parents and grandparents and your parents and grandparents who are still home; my mayor and Prime Minister and first female President; all the minorities and majorities that attribute the word “ethnic” to their identities; the Serbian and Macedonian media responsible for keeping my high school-educated relatives informed; the U.S. Serbian, Macedonian, and all the other Balkan diasporas to care.