I just got back from Dubrovnik. Scene of an attempt at cultural genocide. Here’s what I heard from a very dear, frank and honest Serb:

“You don’t understand” – you’ll hear it a thousand times in Serbia. We lie. We lie to foreigners. We lie to the Croats, the Bosniaks, the Kosovars. But most of all we lie to ourselves. Our standard refrain of “you don’t understand” hides a multitude of denials. We are so good at the lies, we even believe them to be true. “We have always been victims, in World War II the Bosniaks killed us, during the days of the Roman Empire they killed us, they hate us, you just don’t understand”.

But there are things only a Serb can say to a Serb. When I hear their lies, I can say to them: “Look, we all know what happened. We know who was responsible. It’s clear. It was us. You and me. You. My father, my uncle. Me. I remember you, how you’d come home on a Sunday night stinking of liquor and fire. With treasure from Bosnia.” Then they go quiet. Well, not quiet. They shout, they rage. But at least they stop the lying, this awful self delusional lying.

But occasionally, rarely, you get the true story. The victims, they only know part of the picture; the real victims are all dead anyway. But the guys who did the deed, who killed and raped, you need to hear them when the open up. I asked one of them: so how did it start, for you:

“I was a policeman and along with my colleagues was told that I was needed in the fight to protect the Serbian people. And I believed it. So we get into the back of the truck and drive, drive, drive. As we reach a fork in the road, I see that the road on the left takes them to a Serbian village and the one on the right to a Croat settlement. I am surprised to see the truck take the road on the right. Right, but in a very real sense very far from right.

“When we get to the village, my orders were clear: get rid of this. And we did. We burn it to the ground, we kill its men. We rape its women. And then we kill them too. We chase its children into the forest.

How does it feel? It’s shocking. It’s a real shock, that first time. But then it becomes normal. Its what we did at the weekend. Now we go drinking, we watch a movie. Those days, we did this.”

When I ask my father how he feels about the whole mess, what his first instinctive emotion is, he tells me it’s the hurt he feels at having always been the race that suffers. That has been the victim. And I ask him what his next thought is: “We need to screw them, before they screw us”.

When I arrived in Sarajevo last time, my taxi driver told me it wasn’t my fault. I tell him of course it was definitely my fault. He says I didn’t pull the trigger, I didn’t throw the grenade. He’s an idiot. I ask him where he was during the siege, when we had him and his city surrounded, blockaded, broken. He was there, in Sarajevo. But tells me it wasn’t me in the hills staring down the sniper rifle sight. I tell him that it was me who voted Milosevic out in 2001. At the ballot box. Why didn’t we do that earlier? Why did 70% of us vote him in? We’re all responsible, of course we are – those of us who voted for him, sure, but those of us who didn’t change our society, who didn’t get him out sooner. That’s all of us. That’s me. He just doesn’t understand.

Reconciliation is so sexy in Serbia. We were all to blame, all races in Yugoslavia. Lets all hold hands and forgive each other. So sexy. So wrong. I’m against reconciliation. Until we have truth, until we have justice, reconciliation does more harm than good. You don’t understand.

You don’t understand. By letting him die in his sleep, as merely the accused rather than the guilty, you transferred Milosevic’s guilt on to me. He cheated you, and most of all he cheated me. Us.

You don’t understand.

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