No Lying Required

Yesterday, Bosnian Serb military officer Ratko Mladić was buried in Belgrade with state and military honours. His coffin was draped in Serbian and Republika Srpska flags. Soldiers fired a three-volley salute. Police lined the route. Serbian government ministers attended, as did Bosnian Serb political leaders and thousands of mourners. The Orthodox Patriarch Porfirije led the funeral service.¹

»A state funeral isn’t just a ceremony for the dead – it’s a decision about how the dead should enter the memory of the living«

Mladić died in prison on August 27 while serving a life sentence in The Hague. In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, including his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed and Mladić earned his nickname the »Butcher of Bosnia«.²

The European Union condemned the funeral’s »glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism«.³ A state funeral isn’t just a ceremony for the dead – it’s a decision about how the dead should enter the memory of the living. The flags, the uniforms, the salute, the Patriarch’s presence: they don’t express a memory so much as construct one.

That’s what makes memory stranger than forgetting. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who coined the term »collective memory«, argued that societies don’t retrieve a fixed record of the past. They remember within the frameworks of their present, and what a group remembers, and how, is continually reconstructed to fit who is doing the remembering now.⁴ The political theorist Ernest Renan gave the same idea a harder edge: a nation is built not only from shared memories but from shared forgetting, since no community can hold its whole past with equal intensity.⁵ Put the two together and you get a nation that doesn’t just have a memory but an organising memory. Whichever version of the past its present arrangement of power and emotions needs is kept in front.

The past doesn’t come back unchanged. Mladić clearly hasn’t disappeared from Serbian memory. Quite the opposite: his face, his uniform, his military career are being vividly brought back into public view. But the funeral places all of it inside a particular frame – commander, soldier, defender, national figure. Srebrenica is still there. The verdict is still there. The victims are still there. But they have stopped being the organising memory.

Scale up the same mechanism and it stops looking like an abstraction. Heinrich Himmler killed himself in 1945, days before he could be tried alongside the rest of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg for his role, as head of the SS, in the grotesque machinery of the Holocaust. Imagine instead that he had lived, stood trial, been convicted – and that in 1977, Germany had brought him home from prison and buried him with full state and military honours: an honour guard, a rifle salute, his coffin draped in a swastika flag.⁶ The scenario reads as obscene precisely because everyone can see immediately what such a funeral would be doing: not disputing the verdict, but replacing it as the organising memory. China doesn’t even need the thought experiment: Mao Zedong, whose policies are estimated to have caused over 70 million deaths, still appears on every banknote in circulation – his face part of the ordinary visual furniture of a country that never had to stage a single funeral to get there.⁷

There’s an obvious temptation to call this collective amnesia, but amnesia means something has been lost. What if nothing has been lost? What if the actual mechanism is that something else has become more memorable – and more ceremonially reinforced – than what came before it? Spain spent years fighting over the exhumation of its murderous dictator Francisco Franco for exactly this reason: not because anyone doubted what he’d done, but because where and how a dead authoritarian is memorialised decides which version of him a country keeps in daily view.⁸

A society doesn’t need to erase Srebrenica to change what it means. It only needs to give another memory enough ceremony, repetition, and institutional authority that the relationship between the two shifts. The Serbian government can call Mladić’s funeral an act of mourning. His supporters can call it a matter of national dignity. The EU can call it the glorification of a war criminal. The families of Srebrenica’s victims can call it an insult. All four are looking at the same funeral. None of them is remembering the same thing.

The European Union called this genocide denial. But denial isn’t quite right. Nobody needs to stand up and say Srebrenica never happened. That’s the truly worrying part. It only takes a flag, a salute, and a priest, arranged with enough conviction, to replace one memory with another. Srebrenica is still true. The verdict still stands. The Butcher is buried. No lying required.

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