Changing Frames of Reconciliation

Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, and the Debate about the Role of the ICTY

While many argue that reconciliation is an essential part of any post-conflict process, there is no consensus on which steps exactly should be taken to achieve reconciliation. Some authors have tried to solve this problem by specifying the meaning of the term and associating it narrowly with particular forms of transitional justice. ¹⁷ According to the UN Secretary General’s 2004 report on the subject, for example, “transitional justice encompasses the processes and mechanisms associated with a country’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.” ¹⁸ But such a direct linkage between transitional justice and reconciliation has also occasioned debate. While some authors claim that reconciliation might be reached when a transitional justice process is designed in which truth, forgiveness, and justice are promoted, ¹⁹ others argue that transitional justice processes in and of themselves cannot provide a solution for the psychological tensions and ambiguities that follow a conflict—they might in fact deepen the gulf between the parties formerly in conflict. ²⁰

This discussion is, of course, highly relevant for the case of the former Yugoslavia. How has the term reconciliation been understood and given meaning in the discursive field revolving around the activities of the ICTY? Although the court’s primary goal lies clearly in the field of international justice, it is also clear that from the very beginning, it has had to find a position for itself in the debate on reconciliation. A simple search on the ICTY website reveals about 220 documents that mention reconciliation; these may not all be documents that support the view that the ICTY should be directly involved in promoting reconciliation, but it demonstrates at least that the debate looms large and cannot be ignored. We have examined these discursive acts and have thereby focused in particular on statements that may have a direct impact on the functioning and the public perception of the court—that is, public statements by judges and prosecutors as well as press releases and broader media outreach documents of the court.

Analyzing the evolution of almost two decades of public documents emerging from the ICTY’s activities, and in particular the assumptions implicit in those documents about the relationship between international justice and reconciliation, we can detect a shift towards a clearer conceptualization of the court’s role, resulting, recently, in a more outspoken emphasis on the distinction between, on the one hand, the judicial mission of the court and, on the other hand, the social and political implications of the judgements made by the court. If during the early years of the court’s existence reconciliation was more or less assumed to be a direct product of the court’s functioning, later on that direct relationship was increasingly the object of critical reflection and was to some extent even problematized.

The view of the early years is clearly detectable in general statements about the reasons for the establishment of the court. In a joint statement in 1995, for example, the president and prosecutor of the ICTY reacted to the signing of the Dayton Agreement in the following manner: “Justice is an indispensable ingredient in the process of national reconciliation. It is essential to the restoration of peaceful and normal relations between people who have had to live under a reign of terror.” ²¹

Over the years, the connection between international justice and reconciliation was captured more specifically under the terms “individualization of guilt.” In 2001, ICTY president Claude Jorda, for example, said in a speech in Sarajevo: “the mission (of the Tribunal) is to promote reconciliation through the prosecution, trial and punishment of those who perpetrated war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. By ensuring that people are held individually responsible for the crimes they committed, the International Tribunal must prevent entire groups—be they national, ethnic or religious—from being stigmatised and must ensure that others do not resort to acts of revenge in their search for justice.” ²² In this view, reconciliation relates to the prevention of revenge among ethnic communities, and the instrument through which such prevention is to be pursued is the legal procedure that holds individuals, and not ethnic communities, accountable for war crimes.

But this connection has not remained without criticism in more recent times. The court indeed invidualizes guilt in the sense that only individual persons can be charged and convicted. Moreover, the court simply has no choice but to work on the level of individuals because collective guilt is a political notion that does not make sense in the legal sphere. ²³ Yet the view that individualization is a straight-forward instrument to achieve reconciliation among ethnic collectives ignores the social and political reality surrounding the individual cases, ²⁴ and reflections by the court on collective responsibility remain somehow unavoidable. Certainly in the early years of its existence the ICTY did not take into account any “collectivizing” responses by local populations and elites. Later, however, it did. This became clear, for example, through the establishment of an ICTY Outreach Programme, which was meant to be, among other things, a tool of education and communication with the societies of the former Yugoslavia. The Outreach Programme started in 1999 and was initiated because “the court had become deeply aware that its work would resonate far beyond the judicial mandate of deciding the guilt or innocence of the individual accused.” ²⁵ While some academic authors go as far as to see the programme as an attempt to restore confidence among the populations of former Yugoslavia in an international justice system that is mostly viewed as untrustworthy, ²⁶ it is clear that at the very least the outreach activities are an indirect attempt to bring the ICTY within the framework of a broader process of reconciliation, an attempt that is based on the assumption that judicial work needs to be connected to broader socio-political processes.

The ICTY’s concern with societal influence is not only clear from the documents that highlight the value of the public outreach programme or emphasize the court’s role in individualizing guilt but also from documents that portray the court as an important creator of an (authoritative) historical record of the conflict. It remains a point of debate among legal scholars and historians, however, whether judicial institutions can indeed establish historical truths. Many would argue that it is not appropriate to expect a court to adopt the methodology or epistemology of academic historiography, ²⁷ let alone expect that an exercise of establishing historical facts for judicial reasons would lead to something like a broadly internalized and shared vision of the history of a conflict. ²⁸ Insofar as the ICTY has created a historical record, it is likely that such a record will be framed and reframed in the world outside the court. There are already many examples of outright denial of the facts that the court has established, most notably with regard to the genocide in Srebrenica. ²⁹

In light of such criticism, the optimism in the documents and statements coming from the sphere of the court has, over the years, become more cautious. More recent statements are careful about the possibilities of a direct link between the judicial realm and reconciliation. They are more in line with the criticisms put forth by various scholars that transitional justice is not necessarily conducive to reconciliation, that the tribunal may reinforce (or indeed, has already reinforced) opposing public narratives of the Yugoslav wars, ³⁰ and that the judicial process as such has not helped victims ³¹ or perhaps does not even have the capacity to help them. This cautious view gained further force through key statements coming from the heart of the court’s activities. In September 2013, for example, Judge Theodor Meron complained that too often “judgements are expected to be definitive histories of the conflict,” and that they are wrongly expected “to foster reconciliation” or “to bring victims closure through convictions.” Meron argued that while judgements may produce some of these results, “this is not their judicial mission nor is it a yardstick for measuring success. . . . Judges must be blind to outside sentiment.” ³²

The fact that reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia is part of a sensitive domestic political debate in various Balkan countries—most importantly but not solely, as we shall discuss, in the context of EU accession—has made some international criminal justice advocates refrain even more vehemently from addressing the issue in the context of a war crimes tribunal. Like Meron, they are critical of the idea that social change should be made an integral part of the international criminal justice agenda. While they may not deny that judgements can have social and political implications, they argue that it is not the court’s task or responsibility to pursue those effects directly or take these social and political implications into consideration during the judicial process. Discussions about some controversial acquittals since the autumn of 2012 at the ICTY—in particular those of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač, JNA chief of Staff Momčilo Perišić, former Chief of the Serbian State Security Service Jovica Stanišić, and former employee of the Serbian State Security Service Franko Simatović—have brought such cautious views even closer to the surface. ³³ The controversies not only show, as legal scholars have argued, that international criminal justice jurisprudence is in full development but that ICTY decisions might have an important influence on this development. It also reveals something about the understanding of reconciliation in the broader debates around the ICTY, more particularly a shift towards a more conscious understanding of the difficulties in establishing a direct link between two dynamic fields: that of international justice and that of societal reconciliation. This shifting understanding of the role of the court is not only visible from Meron’s recent statements but, while the insistence on the independence of the proceedings of the court by Meron could be seen (and indeed has been understood) as an argument in defence of recent acquittals, other actors within the realm of the court have also expressed caution about the link between court proceedings and societal reconciliation. For example, ICTY prosecutor Serge Brammertz said that while he believed accountability through prosecution is still the best way to achieve reconciliation, this should not be the only way. ³⁴ In his view, tribunals act only as a catalyst for reconciliation.

That in recent documents there is a more pronounced insistence on the distinction between judicial decision and reconciliatory effect is a fact that should be kept in mind when exploring, as we shall do in the next two sections, the way in which the EU, and in particular the European Commission, has positioned itself as a promoter of reconciliation in the context of the EU enlargement process, and how prominent civil society actors as promoters of social change have acted towards the EU, the ICTY, and political elites in the region.

Reconciliation and EU Enlargement: Conditionality and Transitional Justice

The second field of political discussion we want to highlight relates to the discursive practices of the EU revolving around its foreign policy and the enlargement to the Western Balkans. This discursive field is obviously also part of a larger debate on EU identity and reconciliation. The EU sees reconciliation as a key element of its own identity narrative; it has proclaimed it a quintessentially European value that needs to be promoted through foreign policy. ³⁵ The Lisbon Treaty states that the EU “is guided by and designed to advance in the wider world, the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement” (Article III -193(1)). Reconciliation is an essential part of the principles the EU seeks to advance. The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) strategy paper for 2007–2012, for example, mentions that “transitional justice and reconciliation is recognised as helping build consensus on disputed and controversial areas of policy in deeply divided societies.” ³⁶ The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize has provided a further external ratification of the EU’s narrative of self-identification as a reconciliatory power. The EU has “brought together nations emerging from the ruins of devastating World Wars,” Jose Manuel Barosso and Herman van Rompuy stated in their acceptance speech. ³⁷ Their view is not only prevalent in the realm of the European Commission and Council. In 2012, the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, argued along similar lines that “the EU’s principles and values of reconciliation can serve as an inspiration to other regions in the world. From the Balkans to the Caucasus, the EU serves as a beacon for democracy and reconciliation.” ³⁸

As is implicit in these and other examples, the EU understands reconciliation primarily as the result of the normalization of state relations. Various key representatives of the EU project have framed reconciliation as a re-establishment of normal diplomatic and political relations between sovereign countries that have been divided by war. An ideal outcome of reconciliation, and at the same time a sign of its success, is economic and political integration in the EU. Even if trends towards economic and political union were in practice not primarily driven by demands related to international security, the idea of Europe as an area of stability and peace between formerly belligerent neighbours has had a powerful resonance in the discursive space that has accompanied the integration process. Hence, it is not surprising that the same logic has entered the discursive context surrounding the process of further enlargement to the Western Balkans. What was initially a process that focused on trade and aid has now become a project of democracy and stability promotion through conditionality and Europeanization ³⁹ in which the post-war reconciliation process between France and Germany after the Second World War serves as a guiding example. ⁴⁰ In an interview in 2010, the High Representative and EU representative Valentin Inzko explicitly mentioned the example of Franco-German reconciliation as a “recipe” for Bosnia-Herzegovina. ⁴¹ A central aspect of the EU discourse on reconciliation in the Balkans is the notion that the region should come to terms with history, that the past should be put to rest, and that people and politicians should focus on the future. ⁴²

The implicit understanding of reconciliation as a matter of diplomatic relations, official apology, and institutional integration (not primarily a matter of relations between individual citizens) is clearly revealed in official EU statements in the context of the enlargement process; it is reflected most clearly in the progress reports. These are statements that frame reconciliation as a process that takes place between countries and, in particular, between the ruling (ethnicized) elites. The overall stated purpose of reconciliation is “regional stability.” ⁴³ That reconciliation and regional cooperation are to be interpreted mainly in economic terms is clearly shown in the following statement by Inzko: “Compared to six months ago, we have now an incredibly good climate for regional cooperation, but, what’s even more, regional reconciliation. We are speaking now of a different region, or a different era, and in this regard, as far as regional cooperation and reconciliation is concerned, we have arrived in the 21st century.” ⁴⁴

The EU’s 2011–2012 Enlargement strategy document mentions “enhancing regional cooperation and reconciliation” as one of the key objectives. In the progress reports on Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2011, 2012, and 2013, the term reconciliation is included in the section on good neighbourly relations, under the heading “regional issues and international obligations.” The sentence is the same in each report (and the exact same sentence can be found in the 2011 report on Croatia): “Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to actively support the Igman initiative on reconciliation, which brings together NGOs from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro and the RECOM initiative.”

These examples show that the EU frames reconciliation in terms of a process that takes place between regional neighbours (countries). Only the 2010 progress report on Bosnia-Herzegovina represents an exception. In this report, an explicit link is made between the issue of missing persons and reconciliation: “Working towards the resolution of the remaining (missing persons) cases within a reasonable timeframe is essential for the reconciliation process.” Yet in that same report the Serbian Parliament’s declaration on Srebrenica is mentioned as a significant step towards reconciliation: “Relations with Serbia improved overall. Serbia’s parliament adopted a declaration on Srebrenica, which was welcomed as a significant step towards reconciliation.” ⁴⁵

The strategy of issue linkage (the fact that the EU seeks to make enlargement dependent on reconciliation) now appears in various places and contexts in the progress reports and the EU’s official communications, but it is also rooted in a longer history of EU foreign policy towards the region. Already shortly after the end of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the EU defined reconciliation as one of the main aims of its policy towards the Western Balkans. Both the Regional Approach (1997) and the SAP (1999) were geared towards “reconciliation, reconstruction and reform.” ⁴⁶ In this sense, reconciliation has from the beginning been understood as a step towards political and economic stability, along with the often mentioned but equally vague “regional cooperation.” ⁴⁷ At the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003, EU leaders officially recognized the Western Balkan countries as potential EU candidates, realizing that if these countries were to accede, they would be the first EU member states with such a recent history of conflict. Therefore, the EU has significantly altered the enlargement process, adding a new chapter in the negotiations, Chapter 23, on the rule of law and human rights protection, covering the issues of reform of the judiciary, preventing and combating corruption, human rights protection, political rights, national minority and returnee rights, processing war crimes, and cooperation with the ICTY.

Cooperation with the ICTY was an essential element of conditionality even before the enlargement process towards the Western Balkans. In other words, reconciliation is not only understood as related to the politics of enlargement, it is also understood as closely related to cooperation with ongoing transitional justice systems. In the understanding of the EU, transitional justice should lead to reconciliation, and the most important aspect of transitional justice is cooperation with the ICTY. ⁴⁸ According to Pierre Mirel, the former director of DG Enlargement, “[Reconciliation] is part of the Stabilisation and Association process that was established in 2000 that includes [the] prosecution of war criminals, whether before the ICTY or locally, support [for the] return of refugees, good neighbourly relations, [and] regional cooperation. All these elements . . . should lead to reconciliation.” ⁴⁹ This means, for instance, that Western Balkan countries have been stimulated to hunt down and arrest suspects or hand over certain military documents.

With regard to stepping up the level of government cooperation with the ICTY the EU’s strategy of issue linkage has generally been regarded as successful. An estimated ninety percent of all those indicted for war crimes were brought to justice as a direct result of EU conditionality. However, there are disadvantages. The support of the member states for this form of conditionality has not been stable. Governments have sometimes ignored prosecutors’ assessments or interpreted them differently. Moreover, it has brought the discussion revolving around the essentially legal proceedings of the ICTY into the political context of European international relations. As Subotić has argued, ⁵⁰ ICTY conditionality has made cooperation with the court not a matter of a moral choice but one of practical and political strategy. More recently, the EU has even gone a step further along this road and has also supported local war crimes trials. The results of this support have been mixed at best. ⁵¹

It is important to note, however, that the EU has not developed any clear unified strategy to link enlargement conditionality with a demand for supporting reconciliation initiatives outside of the judicial sphere of international or domestic transitional justice or refugee return. Various EU representatives have paid lip service to the RECOM initiative, but cooperation with RECOM has never been a requirement for EU accession. Although the demand to “deal with the past” is sometimes mentioned in debates in the European Parliament, we cannot see such a broadening of focus across EU actions, and the debates in general remain strongly connected to the judicial sphere of transitional justice systems. ⁵²

The EU’s framing of reconciliation in the Western Balkans presupposes equal parties (countries) willing to take steps in a process of symbolic reconciling and re-establishing common ground or a consensus over formerly divisive issues. As a result, the term reconciliation acquires the connotation of being a kind of rapprochement between different ethno-national groups, and such understanding has been criticized for its tendency to reinforce a simplifying “groupist” view of the conflict ⁵³ —a view of the conflict as a war between ethno-national groups—thereby legitimizing ethno-nationalist accounts of the conflict. ⁵⁴

The EU’s approach also starts from the assumption that the political representatives of these countries act as representatives of their people and of the various groups of victims of the conflict. As a result, the EU vocally supports symbolic political gestures by the various heads of state of the former Yugoslav countries and hails them as examples of reconciliation. Croatian president Ivo Josipović and Serbian president Boris Tadić, for instance, received the European Medal of Tolerance in 2012. At the awards ceremony, EP president Martin Schulze said both Tadić and Josipović had faced great challenges in “putting the past behind and to focus on progress and on the future,” adding that “through tolerance and reconciliation, through the work of Presidents Tadić and Josipović, the Western Balkans have overcome painful division and are on the right path.” In the speech he also mentioned the example of the EU: “the European Union was founded on the commitment that war in Europe must be prevented and that reconciliation of arch-enemies is the best way to ensure peace.” ⁵⁵

All the presumptions we have discussed here stand in contrast with the notions underlying civil society actors’ and individual citizens’ understandings of reconciliation. ⁵⁶

Reconciliation from Below: The Role of Civil Society

The term reconciliation has not only been employed by international and state actors in the judicial and political sphere. Its meaning has also been actively shaped by the views and actions of activists and civil society organizations. In this section, we focus first on the discussion revolving around RECOM; then we briefly zoom in on the case of Prijedor. Both examples clearly illustrate the existence of tensions between various frames of reconciliation coming “from below.”

RECOM is a consortium set up by three high-level NGOs (Humanitarian Law Centre, Serbia; Documenta Zagreb; and Research and Documentation Centre, Sarajevo) aimed at establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for all the countries of the former Yugoslavia. RECOM is a regional cross-border initiative strongly rooted in a network of NGOs and individual activists. Since its official start in 2006, ⁵⁷ it has organized 127 public discussions in which 6,187 people have participated. These gatherings took place across the region and fostered citizens’ deliberations on the issue of transitional justice and reconciliation. ⁵⁸ RECOM’s activities towards setting up a TRC have made it run into several problems related to the conceptualization of reconciliation. RECOM’s view that any attempt at reconciliation should go beyond current state borders has turned out to be an important obstacle: the establishment of a region-wide truth commission requires the full support of all the region’s governments, and this has proven hard to obtain. Within the RECOM network, moreover, there has been a lack of consensus among civil society organizations on whether reconciliation could indeed be acquired through the actions of a cross-border network. In 2008, for example, one of the leading organizations, the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, withdrew from RECOM because it no longer believed that such a cross-border regional strategy was viable, especially given the fact that organizations from Croatia and Serbia were leading RECOM. Similarly, local NGOs from Bosnia complained that their voices were not heard in Belgrade and Zagreb. ⁵⁹

The reports of the public citizens’ consultations furthermore reveal that there has been, among organizations and citizens, a variety of views with regard to how one can come to terms with the losses and legacies of the war and how, in this context, reconciliation should be interpreted. ⁶⁰ Many victims’ organizations directly opposed the term reconciliation because they argued it was another word for “forgiving,” which they were not prepared to do. The Association of Mothers of Srebrenica stated that they found the very use of the word reconciliation offensive. In an attempt to solve the disagreement, RECOM saw itself forced to specify the aspects of reconciliation that they wanted to focus on: the suffering of individuals (victims and perpetrators), the fate of missing persons, the right to truth, the role of bystanders, and the recognition of the suffering of others. RECOM foregrounded the principle of “giving voice to the victims,” which was reflected in the RECOM Statute, adopted in 2011. It is perhaps telling that the term reconciliation does not feature in this text; rather, we find there various references to restoring “confidence between individuals, peoples, and states in the region” ⁶¹ and the need “to create a culture of compassion and solidarity with victims.” ⁶² Especially, shared victimhood became a central operating term in the context of RECOM, something that eclipsed the term reconciliation, even though it was understood that the two terms were related. Nataša Kandić, for example, the director of the Humanitarian Law Centre (Belgrade), pointed out that “justice for victims” needs to be foregrounded as something around which consensus can be built: the participants of the citizens’ consultations, she argued, “mostly understand [reconciliation] as a creation of a new atmosphere, a new climate in which there will be more compassion for all victims, especially for victims from other ethnic communities, through manifestations of solidarity and respect.” ⁶³ And, as Kandić argued, the citizens’ discussions around a TRC show that people are mostly concerned about individual victims, and not about “ethnic communities,” “groups,” or entire “countries,” which are the focus of reconciliation attempts by the international community or governments. Several participants of the citizens’ consultations called for an acknowledgement of the victims of all sides. “The role of civil society is not only to mention and honour its own victims while ignoring the victims from the other side in the conflict.” ⁶⁴

Through framing reconciliation in this way, RECOM has emphasized aspects of the term that have remained largely absent from the EU and ICTY understanding of the concept. As, for example, Eugen Jakovcić from Documenta (Zagreb), one of the three NGOs that initiated RECOM, argued when comparing the RECOM initiative to the ICTY, “Victims need something more than a court-established individual responsibility for war crimes. This need of the victims, combined with a large number of missing persons from the entire region of the former Yugoslavia, is the main motivation behind the initiative for RECOM.” ⁶⁵ The argument here is that victims feel a deep need for recognition that has not been adequately addressed by either the governments of the region, the so-called international community, or the ICTY. The stress on the fate of individuals caught up in the conflict also challenges the preconceived notion central to the EU’s understanding of reconciliation that political elites are the legitimate representatives of the victims from their respective “sides.” During a consultation in Zenica in 2010, for example, Zahid Kremić (president of the Association of Returning Refugees in Doboj) argued, “No one is allowed to speak on my behalf because I am the one who suffered. I can give a mandate or an authorization to someone to represent me. So it is a message for those preparing for elections: you can’t speak for me or us, whether there is a thousand, two, five or ten thousand of us.” ⁶⁶ Vehid Šehić, from the Citizens Forum of Tuzla, formulated it in this way: “You are talking here about Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, and I advocate the inclusion of another category no one mentioned—the victim. There are some of us who do not belong to any ethnic entities and we are not national minorities, we are something ‘former’ that no one cares to mention.” ⁶⁷ The RECOM consultations also demonstrated that there is a widespread feeling among NGO representatives that politicians have a vested interest in instrumentalizing the process of dealing with the past. Many NGO representatives believe that politicians cannot be relied upon to lead or support any type of truth-finding. Senka Jakupović (DIAKOM, Prijedor), for example, argued, “We need people who have suffered the horrors of war and their truth, and we will impose that truth upon the politicians and they have to accept it eventually.” ⁶⁸ Nedeljko Mitrović (Organization of the detained, killed, and missing soldiers and civilians of the RS) said, “the entire (RECOM) project must be free from politics. . . . When I say free from politics I mean free from instrumentalization and manipulation.” ⁶⁹

While the public consultations surrounding RECOM clearly illustrate how civil society organizations may find a consensus around reconciliation when it is framed in terms of shared victimhood, discussions around specific cases show how fragile such a consensus might be. A number of victims’ and war veterans’ organizations, for example, have criticized RECOM for putting all victims on an equal footing, or they have voiced suspicion about RECOM’s generally supportive view of the ICTY. ⁷⁰

The public discussions around Prijedor are also a case in point. ⁷¹ In the early 2000s, Prijedor was generally considered a success story of foreign intervention, and the large-scale return of refugees was thought to have improved “interethnic relations in the town.” ⁷² Indeed, since the end of the 1990s, many refugees have, despite opposition by local Serb political leaders, returned to this north-western Bosnian city. War-time mayor Milomir Stakić and many others responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the city and neighbouring villages have been convicted by the ICTY. One would expect the place to be conducive to RECOM’s attempts at propagating a victim-based approach to reconciliation, yet despite some positive developments, the atmosphere has remained strained, mostly due to the denial of war-time atrocities well documented by international nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International, ⁷³ Human Rights Watch, ⁷⁴ TRIAL, ⁷⁵ Bankwatch, ⁷⁶ and others.

The existence of frame variation is clear in particular in the ongoing discussions around the lack of a monument for non-Serb victims in the city, and especially in the area of the former Omarska camp, situated at a mining complex that is now owned by the global corporation ArcelorMittal. ⁷⁷ Various returnee and survivor organizations have urged both the owner of the Omarska site and the mayor of Prijedor to build a memorial, and several groups of citizens and activists from the Prijedor area such as Izvor, Centar za Mlade Kvart, Jer me se tiče and others have, as a way of protesting the status quo, built their own memorials. The citizens’ association Jer me se tiče (Because I Care), for example, has erected small self-made monuments in Bugojno, Foča, and Konjić. ⁷⁸ The discussions around the missing memorial at Omarska show that “solidarity with victims” is not necessarily a frame conducive to the reconciliation debate among citizens and civil society organizations. ⁷⁹ While ArcelorMittal did set up a consultation process to find consensus on the question of the memorials—both the victims’ organizations and the local authorities were invited, and the religious organization The Soul of Europe was assigned to take care of the coordination and make sure that all participants accepted a focus on victimhood—no agreement was found. ⁸⁰ One of the reasons was related to the local authorities’ view that a monument for the non-Serbs would be counterproductive for the recognition of equal victimhood. While the RECOM’s view on equal victimhood as a shortcut towards reconciliation was supported by a number of citizens’ associations, others disagreed. Both ArcelorMittal and Mayor Pavić ⁸¹ argued on that basis that a memorial for non-Serb victims would upset efforts at reconciliation and hurt inter-ethnic relations.