Researching norms, narratives, and transitional justice: focus group methodology in post-conflict Croatia

Abstract

This article is based on the assumption that norms can help better understand one of the expressivist aims of transitional justice, that of building a new narrative about the past. The main argument is that focus groups, as an interactive method of inquiry, are well suited to investigating how this “judicial” narrative interacts with the official and dominant war narrative in Croatia. Focus groups are more adept at this than other methodological approaches since they can effectively reflect independence of opinion; they lead to more truthful answers through spontaneity; they effectively probe taken-for-granted concepts; and they can more easily overcome distrust in post-conflict societies, especially with ex-combatants. The approach faces new challenges in such a situation since recruitment problems, insider/outsider status, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other ethical concerns, present problems that often arise due to the group process. The powerful and unpredictable effect of the group dynamic can, therefore, provide a deep exploration of social norms, but it can also cause significant upset among participants. In this instance the methodology explores how widely accepted the war narrative is, how it is constructed, and how important the public believes it is not to question it.

Keywords:

• transitional justice
• Croatia
• war narrative
• focus groups
• norms

Acknowledgements

This paper was developed in cooperation with the project “Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of 20th Century Traumas” (FRAMNAT), which was funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ).

Notes

1. In 2003 Mirko Norac became the first former Croatian army general to be found guilty by a domestic court. When the initial arrest warrant against Norac was issued in 2001, between 120,000 and 150,000 people publicly protested on the streets of Split. Tomislav Merčep was a senior politician before and during the war who ultimately came to command a large number of paramilitaries. He was implicated in war crimes (including murder, torture, and the blowing up of Serb homes) in Vukovar, Zagreb (the Zec family murders and the Zagreb Fair), Pakračka Poljana, and a number of locations around Gospić. At the time of writing his trial was ongoing. Branimir Glavaš is most well known as the wartime leader of Osijek and later as a member of the Croatian parliament, a role he was still in during his war crimes trial. Following the 2005 indictment for the torture and murder of Serb civilians in Osijek during the war, legal proceedings against Glavaš were met with frequent setbacks, but in 2009 the Zagreb County Court found him guilty and he fled to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he remained at large until his arrest in 2010. In 2015 he was released from prison as the sentence was rescinded.

2. This was the trial before the ICTY in the Hague of three former Croatian generals accused of ethnic cleansing in the Republic of Serbia Krajina (2008–2012). They were eventually acquitted on appeal.

3. Dario Kordić was indicted in 1995 together with a number of other individuals for the events that occurred in the Lašva Valley part of Bosnia. In 2001 Kordić was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.

4. Ante Gotovina was the Croatian general in charge of the controversial Operation Storm. After a 2001 indictment by the ICTY, he spent four years in hiding, before being captured. In 2011 he was convicted of committing crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment, but in 2012 he was acquitted by an appeals panel of the ICTY and immediately released.

5. Subotić (2009) provides such a contribution relating to the former Yugoslavia in her critique of the spiral model of norm diffusion developed by Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999).

6. Other useful studies with varied methodologies that are not covered in this paper are those by Blanuša (2005), Clark (2012), and Jeffrey (2011) among others.

7. It is questionable how “recent” the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia are, as nearly 20 years have passed since they ended. Obradović-Wochnik (2013) has, however, shown that the public in Serbia continues to speak as if the past is still continuing, as if the wars are not over.

8. For an overview of the shortcomings, see Fontana and Frey (1994), Morgan (1996), and Stewart, Shamdasani, and Rook (2007).

9. Ideally all groups would have had a minimum of three participants. Even with two, however, a small group dynamic is formed, as consensus and disagreement are still present. Moreover, the benefits of spontaneity and added trust remain, although not to the same degree. Focus groups with history teachers proved to be by far the most difficult to arrange. Putting suspicions aside, the nature of teacher work rotations (schools have morning and afternoon sessions; usually one teacher takes one and another the other, meaning both are never free at the same time) and personal commitments meant that even in Zagreb only two turned up to the agreed upon session, the others were interviewed individually. Focus groups and interviews with teachers, therefore, were more akin to elite interviews in terms of organization.

10. If a dyad was held with, for example, two additional individual interviews then this is denoted as “2; 1; 1.”

11. Indicative of this are the 2003, 2007, and 2011 parliamentary election results where right wing parties have consistently fared better than in other parts of Croatia. See http://www.izbori.hr/2003Sabor/index.htm; http://www.izbori.hr/izbori/izbori07.nsf/fi?openform; http://www.izbori.hr/2011Sabor/rezultati/rezultati.html.

12. Dario Kordić and Tihomir Blaškić were initially indicted in 1995 together with a number of other individuals for the events that occurred in the Lašva Valley part of Bosnia, but their cases were later separated. Blaškić was sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment in 2000 after being found guilty of committing, ordering, planning, or otherwise aiding in crimes against the Bosnian Muslim population in the region. In 2001 Kordić was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for many of the same or similar crimes, committed in the same localities, as Blaškić. In 2004 Blaškić had his sentence reduced on appeal after his legal team successfully showed that, due to the Kordić judgment, it was clear that Blaškić did not have effective control of troops in the area. What was a good outcome for Blaškić was a bad outcome for the Croatian state. See http://www.icty.org/case/blaskic/4; http://www.icty.org/case/kordic_cerkez/4.