The Question of Montenegrin Guilt in Vojislav Pejović’s The Life and Death of Milan Junak and Ognjen Spahić’s Under Both Suns

ABSTRACT

The article explores the questions of responsibility and guilt in two novels by contemporary Montenegrin authors. Vojislav Pejović's The Life and Death of Milan Junak (2008) and Ognjen Spahić's Under Both Suns (2020) problematize the active role of Montenegro in the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and shed new light on the mnemonic aftermath of the armed conflict(s) in present-day Montenegro. Using Michael Rothberg's concept of implicatedness as a theoretical starting point, the article argues that Pejović's and Spahić's novels provide a new perspective on conceptualizing and understanding the notion of collective guilt in the countries of former Yugoslavia – one that goes beyond understanding guilt and responsibility (both individual and collective) in binary terms. The article argues that the novels achieve originality in contemporary Montenegrin and post-Yugoslav literature by establishing links between seemingly unrelated historical traumas in different places and through an implicit critical engagement with the literary canon and cultural heritage to which they belong.

KEYWORDS:

• Yugoslav wars
• Post-Yugoslav literature
• Montenegro
• Memory
• Guilt
• Implicatedness

Introduction

1991 marked the beginning of the Yugoslav wars of succession. In early October of the same year, the Yugoslav People’s Army (henceforth YPA), together with Montenegrin reserve forces, besieged the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia. The city itself, a UNESCO heritage site since 1974, was of little-to-none military or strategic importance but was nonetheless heavily bombarded and blocked for several months. The image of Dubrovnik’s Old Town engulfed in flames became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Yugoslav Wars, both domestically and internationally. To this day, the role of the Montenegrin government in the siege and the question of responsibility, individual and collective, remain controversial. As Srđa Pavlović observes, ‘'the War for Peace has turned out to be one of the most shameful episodes in recent Montenegrin history, and it has left a dark spot on the memory maps of many Montenegrins,’ while noting that ‘ordinary Montenegrins and Serbs are left to their own devices to cope with their feelings of uneasiness about the recent past.’¹

This article analyses two novels as literary responses to Montenegrin complicity in the attack on Dubrovnik: Vojislav Pejović’s The Life and Death of Milan Junak (Život i smrt Milana Junaka 2008) and Ognjen Spahić’s Under Both Suns (Pod oba sunca 2020). The two authors belong to the newer generation of Montenegrin authors (Pejović b. 1972, Spahić b. 1977) whose novels are rare examples of fictional narratives that thematize and critically engage with Montenegro’s contemporary history, as both authors pose pertinent questions about the ramifications of the country’s engagement in the wars of Yugoslav succession. Pejović’s debut was published two years after Montenegro gained its independence from Serbia through a peaceful referendum in May 2006, whereas Spahić’s novel was published in 2020, which coincided with the year of the regime change in Montenegro.²

The article will explore how The Life and Death of Milan Junak and Under Both Suns aim to disrupt (the officially supported version of) Montenegrin collective remembrance of the siege of Dubrovnik and its lasting aftermath, which is characterized by awkward balancing between collective forgetting and scapegoating the third party. The blame for the whole operation has usually been put on Serbian politics, nationalism, and hegemonic tendencies, which deliberately ignores Montenegro’s own ideological wandering and responsibility for the Dubrovnik episode. In addition, the paper argues that Pejović and Spahić, by shedding light on the complicated relationship between Montenegro and its collective memory of Dubrovnik, implicitly offer a more comprehensive critique of Montenegrin national myths perpetuated by the literary canon.³ The principal theoretical foundation of my argument will be Michael Rothberg’s notion of implicatedness, through which he reconceptualizes the dynamic between perpetration and victimhood by adding another category, that of implicated subjects.⁴ Rothberg provides a salient point of departure for the analysis of ambiguities of Montenegrin collective remembrance since the concept of implicated subjects operates beyond the lines of binary divisions, which is characteristic of post-Yugoslav memory wars, i.e. conflicts over remembrance and memorialization of the past, and offers a conceptual alternative to the political stalemates in the former Yugoslav republics.⁵ To date, modern Montenegrin literature has not been critically read through the lenses of implicatedness and guilt; the article aims to bridge the gap by integrating these concepts into the analysis of the two novels.

The Life and Death of Milan Junak explores the mnemonic legacy of the Dubrovnik siege by linking it to collective trauma from a geographically, historically, and politically unrelated context – Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. Therefore, the text creates what Kaisa Kaakinen labels as ‘ambiguous historical linkage,’ as it brings closer two different historical traumas without necessarily equating them, which in turn shines a new light on the events and their remembrance.⁶ Under Both Suns narrates the complicated legacy of the war in Yugoslavia through the perspective of the perpetrator, which is a sporadic practice not only in Montenegrin but in post-Yugoslav literature as well, despite the overwhelming interest of regional authors in the topic of the breakup of Yugoslavia.⁷ Finally, the article reflects on the reception, circulation, and remediation of the novels and comments on the effect that politically charged literature as a medium of cultural memory might have among the ex-Yugoslav audience(s) and beyond in relation to understanding and narrating collective trauma.

Historical and Theoretical Background

During a visit to the city of Dubrovnik in August 2022, Montenegrin Prime Minister Dritan Abazović tweeted that the Dubrovnik campaign is the biggest disgrace in the history of Montenegro and that in the 1990s, Montenegro was a prisoner of hatred, nationalism, and war profiteering. In 1991, the prime minister was Milo Đukanović, who fully supported the attack on Dubrovnik and advocated the revision of the southern borders of Croatia in Montenegro’s favour. Đukanović remained the president of Montenegro and de facto the most powerful person in the country until May 2023. Once a staunch Serbian nationalist who supported Slobodan Milošević and later became a pro-EU Montenegrin nationalist, Đukanović’s power grew steadily over the years as he managed to navigate the Balkan political scene and remain a prominent figure, all while amassing immense material wealth during the post-socialist transition to liberal democracy.⁸ No steps have ever been taken towards holding him accountable for events of the early 1990s, despite the current PM's amiable messages of reconciliation with Croatia. Montenegro has indeed been held hostage, albeit not in the sense Abazović suggests – it would be reductionist to suggest that Serbian nationalism imposed from outside is the only guilty party and that the Dubrovnik chapter is not fundamentally an internal Montenegrin problem.

Đukanović’s multiple pivots from Yugoslavism to Serbian and later Montenegrin nationalism were motivated purely by lucrative motives, less by a sudden national awakening. As Chip Gagnon has argued, ‘the violence of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s was part of a broad strategy in which images of threatening enemies and violence were used by conservative elites […] This, in turn, enabled conservatives to maintain control of existing structures of power, as well as to reposition themselves by converting state-owned property into privately held wealth, the basis of power in a new system of liberal economy.’⁹ In other words, the 1990s violence was not primarily motivated by hatred and ancient divisions along the ethnic lines, nor was violence a ‘democratic expression of political and cultural preferences of the wider population in Croatia, Bosnia, or Serbia.’¹⁰ The conflicts were primarily fueled by economic reasons, which were overshadowed by the image of the Balkans as an inherently unstable space of ethnic hatred.¹¹

In an attempt to homogenize Montenegro as the war in Croatia was already underway, the employed narrative was that of an imminent outside threat. In the case of Dubrovnik, a Montenegrin general, Pavle Strugar, claimed on October 1, 1991, that ‘30.000 Ustasha are about to attack Montenegro,’ which soon proved to be false, but not before the invasion was underway.¹² Montenegrin leadership explained the rationale behind the aggression as an attempt to protect the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, hence the paradoxical label – the War for Peace.

Some officials indeed faced legal consequences for Dubrovnik: Strugar and Miodrag Jokić, a YPA Navy Commander, were found guilty of war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague; Strugar was sentenced to eight years of prison, Jokić to seven. As Marko Milanović has argued, the ICTY succeeded (to a certain extent) in prosecuting high-ranking military officers and political leaders. Still, its success in establishing indisputable facts, crucial to combat denial and attempts at revisionism, has been modest: ‘denialism and revisionism are not just alive and well in the former Yugoslavia – they are thriving.’¹³ In the case of Montenegro, only a handful of people stood trial. None of them were a part of the decision-making political leadership, which left the impression that the ones, in fact, responsible for Montenegro’s war efforts never faced any legal consequences whatsoever, all while seizing considerable power. As Pavlović has observed, ‘It became clear that the actions of the YPA around Dubrovnik were not the case of a group of disobedient generals going astray, but part of the broader political strategy of expansionist nationalism employed by the Montenegrin leadership.’¹⁴

Despite the undoubtedly apologetic and conciliatory tone of PM Abazović, the passive phrasing and invocation of abstract collective shame are problematic since this discourse circumvents the question of concrete Montenegrin responsibility. Although Abazović is nominally a political opponent of the previous regime, the rhetoric of ‘collective shame and disgrace’¹⁵ is the continuation of the narrative propagated by the Democratic Party of Socialists since the late 1990s, as it sought to distance itself from Slobodan Milošević and prolong its political life. In that sense, I argue that the narrative of collective guilt perpetuated by Abazović creates fertile soil for revisionism, as it (inadvertently) absolves the real culprits from criminal guilt by distributing the abstract notion of moral guilt among the entire population. Such practice has proven counterproductive in resolving mnemonic crises elsewhere.¹⁶

Michael Rothberg’s most recent book, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), deconstructs the binary perpetrator-victim dichotomy by adding another category. Taking cue from Karl Jaspers’s and Hannah Arendt’s writings on the question of guilt, Rothberg expands the framework by arguing for the notion of implicatedness. He offers the following definition:

Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less ‘actively’ involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the ‘passive’ bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present.¹⁷

The excerpt captures the essence of implicatedness: differentia specifica between a mere bystander and an implicated subject lies precisely in the fact that implicated subjects, although not ‘direct agents of harm,’ still benefit from the status quo of power relations within a given society, in which implicated subjects represent an indispensable link. One cannot talk of criminal guilt here since implicated subjects do not possess agency in the sense of being criminally responsible; however, being aligned with power and privilege without being a perpetrator per se points to the existence of structural injustice, which is innately collective.

Implicatedness is a common thread in both novels: direct and indirect actions (and equally important, inactions) represent essential plot devices on the one hand, while they also constitute the foundations of general and collective ethical issues raised by the authors, both implicitly and explicitly. Ultimately, as Rothberg shows, implicated subjects aid the perpetration of historical legacies, which points to the ever-present past when it comes to contentious chapters in history: ‘Without a link to the present, historical injustices do not implicate us; they remain of strictly antiquarian interest.’¹⁸ In that sense, this article aims to explore how fiction engages ‘the structures of inequality that mar the present’ in Montenegro today, as the 1990s memory luggage is still not unpacked.

Such a proposition (implicated subjects) may help understand the mnemonic situation in the countries of former Yugoslavia by holding up a different type of mirror to the persisting problems. Analyzing the texts together with Rothberg’s framework can help disentangle what James Wertsch calls a ‘mnemonic standoff’ – a real-life situation where two (or more) mnemonic communities insist on impeccability and absolute truthfulness of their own versions of historical narratives, which usually results in a perpetual circle of whataboutism, competitive victimhood, and zero-sum game, to refer to Rothberg.¹⁹ Collective memory constellation(s) in the countries of former Yugoslavia are in a seemingly endless state of mnemonic standoffs. In that sense, the novels may provide an alternative view to the binary logic dominant in the public sphere.

Milan Junak – The Critique of Montenegrin Warrior Ethos

Vojislav Pejović’s novel fits the sub-genre of post-Yugoslav literature, which I label as highly political (anti-) war novel. Here, the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ indicates both the temporal distance and thematic indebtedness to the former country and its pre-1991 history and literary output.²⁰ Works by renowned authors who originally come from former Yugoslavia, such as Dubravka Ugrešić, Aleksandar Hemon, and Saša Stanišić, all contain powerful anti-nationalist, transnational, and leftist undertones, and their works can be read to various extents as counter-narratives. Pejović follows a similar trajectory concerning the ideological content of his fiction.

The plot of The Life and Death of Milan Junak begins in New Orleans in August 2005, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Among the victims is Milan Junak; he has gunshot wounds and is HIV positive. The narrator/fictionalized author, a surgeon at a local hospital, and Milan realize they both come from Montenegro. Milan dies several hours later, leaving the narrator with his diary. Using unreliable entries from the early 1990s, he patches together a story about Milan, then a twenty-four-year-old student, and his life in Belgrade, Podgorica, and Dubrovnik shortly before the war. In September 1991, Milan is drafted for the Dubrovnik campaign; his best friend Vojin offers to go instead, as he wants to make sure that his father and grandparents, who are Croats and live in a village near Dubrovnik, are safe. The two friends look alike, and Milan takes Vojin’s job on a transatlantic ship and leaves for the USA. Finally, we learn that Vojin is among the first victims of the Dubrovnik campaign – killed by his fellow YPA soldiers as he tries to prevent the pillaging of his grandparents’ house.

The war is staged in such a way that is simultaneously omnipresent and quite abstract, almost unimaginable for Milan – he (initially) dismisses any possibility of an armed conflict based on his personal feelings and convictions: ‘January 1991: What war?! He remembers his mandatory stint in the army when twenty fellow soldiers, all from different parts of the country, chanted YU-GO-SLA-VI-A while watching Cibona from Zagreb demolish the opposing team.’²¹ Later on: ‘June 1991: The YPA units are ordered to protect the borders. Milan is depressed and watches TV all the time, he almost wishes Operation Desert Storm was back on again’²²; ‘July 1991: ‘Some Europeans with funny names are trying to bring some order, any order, to this Balkan tavern.’²³ – an observation Milan makes while watching the news. In order to recreate the anxious atmosphere in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the focus is therefore on the period leading up to the outbreak of the war seen through the protagonist’s non-reliable point of view. Suggestive chapter titles augment the tension: the first chapter is titled ‘Republic Day,’ (the story begins on November 29, 1990), the last ‘October 1991’, and each chapter in between is chronologically labelled (one chapter per month), which in hindsight points at the country’s inevitable demise.

Other characters comment on the situation even more explicitly than Milan – we are presented with different views and attitudes that illustrate the overall political mood. For example, Milan’s father resembles the voice of a hard-lined centralist with nationalist undertones: ‘I’m afraid that if these Croats keep on doing this, there is going to be a bloodbath.’²⁴; ‘This is all one big conspiracy to take down a great country’²⁵; ‘Father can’t understand how a handful of separatists can embarrass and destroy a country.’²⁶ On the other hand, Milan’s friend Dejan is the voice of the anti-war youth, many of whom avoided conscription: ‘Gotta rush home, got a letter from the army, gotta pack and run to Salzburg, to his aunt’s place. Can’t be bothered with ‘warriors’ and ‘morons.’²⁷ In the chapter titled ‘March 1991,’ a taxi driver starts talking to Milan about the ongoing situation in Croatia, prompted by the radio:

Good news, huh? We are fucking them up big time over there in Pakrac! Milan now realizes the radio is on and that they are listening to the news from Slavonija, Croatia. He cannot open his mouth. ‘They are slaying our children, sonny. Kids, younger than you.’ The taxi driver is very well informed. He claims that we cannot lose this war. ‘Look, for example, if something happens to Milošević – god forbid – and if the opposition seizes power, if this Vuk Drašković guy comes – they are even crazier, man. They would mess up everything! Milan cannot say anything. He pays for the ride and leaves a tip. As he leaves, he can hear the driver saying: Only Unity Saves the Serbs!²⁸

The taxi driver is the voice of state propaganda, characterized by the weaponization of nationalism in mass media in order to homogenize the society and create a binary divide – ‘They are slaying our children, sonny.’ (italics are mine) The us vs. them narrative is identical to the one general Strugar infamously employed in relation to the (false) imminent threat coming from Dubrovnik and illustrates Gagnon’s point about the top-down fabrication of national unity and inter-ethnic tension, while the actual situation was quite different: Milan and the driver, a nationalist par excellence, are ideologically poles apart. These characters exemplify the position of implicated subjects; they are neither victims nor perpetrators but participants in social formations that generate such categories. While the public is not a direct generator of injustice and agent of harm, it nevertheless inhabits and contributes (by participation, in an Arendtian sense) to the regime in power.

Even though Milan is not taken in by either the news or the driver’s interpretation, he cannot respond or react accordingly, which foreshadows his later development as a character. Milan’s (in)actions, interwoven with the notion of heroism during precarious times, are a recurring motif in the novel. This can be observed, for example, when Milan fails to protect his girlfriend from a group of hooligans – he runs away while she stays to fight. The girlfriend leaves Milan, who feels emasculated: ‘Shame slowly replaced fear, while the paleness of his cheeks was replaced by traitorous blush.’²⁹ Pejović introduces the question of heroism and cowardice, inseparable from what Beganović identifies as ‘Montenegrin soul.’³⁰ The notion of Montenegrin soul is synonymous with the country’s traditional ethos: warrior heritage, the primordial tribal structure of the country, a complex yet glorious past, the struggle for freedom and independence, and so on. Petar II Petrović Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath, a nineteenth-century epic, helped immensely in formulating this cultural code. The epic simultaneously represents the pillar of collective memory and the country’s most significant work of art: Montenegro’s literary heritage is not particularly rich, and Njegoš has been its focal referential point, both as a writer and a historical figure. Unsurprisingly, Pejović’s novel briefly references The Mountain Wreath (a note in Milan’s diary).³¹ Therefore, the question of heroism (and more importantly, the absence of heroism) is highlighted to deconstruct the archetypal image of a Montenegrin warrior, adding another layer to the implicit criticism of Montenegrin nation-building myth(s) and, more importantly, their present-day implications. As Beganović suggests:

To give the hero of a narrative such a surname – ‘Hero’ – which is not very common is the author’s gesture of argumentative invocation of the ever-present past.³² (…) The naming is about very precise irony by the author, who sheds new light not only on the current state of affairs in the country, which knowingly slides into the abyss, and no matter how cathartic it may be – war – but also on its past which wants, by all means, to champion heroism as a perpetual state of a diffusional, ephemeral Montenegrin soul.³³

To further clarify Beganović’s point: Milan’s surname highlights the historical continuity of the myth that heroism, bravery, and warrior spirit are constituent parts of Montenegrin cultural DNA, and Dubrovnik is an extreme example of this myth disintegrating spectacularly. Still, the author asks a pertinent question – has the country’s heroic tradition been nothing but deception? Apart from the omnipresent Njegoš (both as a leader of the nation and a literary figure) in the collective memory of Montenegro, Marko Miljanov's The Examples of Humanity and Bravery (1901) is the second most influential literary work that comes from the pre-modern Montenegro. A general-turned-writer from the Kuči tribe (the same one the Junak family originates from), Miljanov's non-fictional tales and philosophical observations represent a valuable insight into life in nineteenth-century Montenegro. Miljanov's most famous maxim, and an integral part of the ‘Montenegrin soul’, is ‘Bravery is to defend yourself from another; humanity is to defend the other from thyself.’

Pejović refers to this ancient Montenegrin telos – Vojin shows the highest level of humanity by defending the other/Other (the Croats) from ‘himself,’ himself here being his nominal in-group and the army of the country he represented. On the other hand, Milan ‘Hero,’ the novel's hero, exhibits neither heroism nor humanity, observed through the prism of Montenegrin warrior tradition. Therefore, Montenegro’s past and present are brought together by renegotiating the idea of heroism through Milan and his actions. The deaths of Milan and Vojin, through the reversal of ideas of heroism and humanity, critique the ‘Montenegrin soul’ – both in its historical sense and its 1991 manifestation.

The last scene in Milan’s diary shows Vojin’s death (we learn in the epilogue who the victim was). Milan listens to the radio news from the frontline as his ship departs; it is implied from the description of Vojin’s murder that the truth will be covered up.

The Yugoslav Army dispersed the Ustaše bandits from Konavli, our warriors are taking out various artefacts from their houses—I apologize—they are taking out ham that these savages stashed away in their houses preparing for a long siege. What’s this, there are some martyred heroes here, in front of this stone house; all are slain, everybody has a hole in their forehead. Dear listeners, let us pay our respects to those who were slain by Tuđman’s beasts, let us pay our respects to this young man in the Yugoslav Army uniform who tried to help them. There he is, beautiful like an angel, lying dead, they shot him in the back.³⁴

The passage stages the lootings and simultaneously shows how this was downplayed by the state media: ‘our warriors'‘ and ‘martyred heroes’ on the one hand, and ‘savages'‘ and ‘Tuđman’s beasts’ on the other. The reporter's lapsus and the cover-up – ‘ham, not artefacts’- show how the campaign was supposedly justified, whereas, in reality, the soldiers were taking whatever they could find.

The conditions under which Milan and Vojin die are closely comparable. Although their deaths happen on different continents fourteen years apart, the circumstances under which they occur invite a comparison between the places where they happen. If we return to the notions of heroism and heroic death, – ironically, Vojin died a genuinely heroic death, whereas Milan (Junak - ‘Hero’) died a significantly less heroic death amidst the flooded city. Both died of gunshot wounds – Vojin is killed by unnamed soldiers from his unit who are essentially committing a war crime, while Milan is killed by an equally unknown perpetrator during the post-hurricane chaos. We never thoroughly learn the circumstances surrounding Milan’s death, apart from the fact that he himself broke into somebody’s property in New Orleans: ‘he didn’t stand a chance, neither as a patient, nor as a burglar – he was malnourished, intoxicated, and HIV positive.’³⁵ Therefore, it is hinted that Milan may have done exactly what he ran away from some fourteen years earlier. Ironically, since Milan was drafted, he should have been the one in Dubrovnik had Vojin not offered to go in his place. The narrator does not pass moral judgment; the obfuscation of roles (hero, saviour, addict, and looter) adds another layer of ethical questions, rendering Milan’s character more ambiguous. By positioning the two deaths that take place in New Orleans in 2005 (Milan) and in Dubrovnik in 1991 (Vojin) at the beginning and the end of the novel, respectively, the author subtly hints at the possible similarities between the two cities, which I will explore further in the following section.

From Dubrovnik to New Orleans

Although the author’s decision to set one part of the novel in this southern US city may appear arbitrary at first, placing New Orleans in the plot is far from incidental. Ann Rigney calls this practice ‘hetero-remembrance.’ Unlike ‘auto-remembrance,’ where one’s own individual or group memory is narrativized, ‘hetero-remembrance’ implies narrating the historical experiences of an outgroup, which consequently transcends linguistic, cultural, and mnemonic borders and promotes some ‘degree of identification with actors at a different location.’³⁶

The New Orleans storyline does not have the same prominence as the Dubrovnik storyline in the text, as the plot is primarily scattered across the former Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the New Orleans section allows identification with an outgroup; at the beginning of the novel, we are shown the atrocious conditions in New Orleans in 2005 - ‘bloated corpses lying in the southern sun.’³⁷ The very end of the text shows a visually similar situation around Dubrovnik in 1991 - ‘all slain, with bullet holes in their foreheads.’³⁸ The juxtaposition highlights the senselessness of the Dubrovnik campaign—by observing it through the prism of the New Orleans lootings and the post-disaster chaos that ensued, Pejović likens this aspect of the war in Croatia to the stealing of the property of civilians that took place in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Although the background of the destruction of the two cities is entirely different, the events that followed the initial devastation are comparable and enable these cities to be observed together. The historical contexts and factors contributing to the formation of collective urban memories in Dubrovnik and New Orleans diverge significantly. However, one collective memory may help illuminate the other; by looking at New Orleans in 2005, one can, through literariness, understand the 1991 events in Dubrovnik better. Ana Mijić has pointed out that when talking about the war in Bosnia, many Bosnians see it as an ‘external event that overwhelmed ‘innocent’ people and set them against one another,’ which not only places the war outside the realm of human actions but also assigns it subjectivity and almost a will of its own, much like a natural disaster.³⁹ Such practice tends to absolve the in-group from guilt and responsibility.

My reading of the Dubrovnik-New Orleans juxtaposition is the author’s suggestion that the war is not something that just happened, an event ‘outside the realm of human actions.’ Even though devastation is the common denominator, armed conflicts, unlike natural disasters, are orchestrated by humans. This is not the only instance where Dubrovnik and New Orleans are linked in the text. In one of his letters from abroad, Vojin writes to Milan and describes how ‘New Orleans looks a little bit like the Mediterranean cities and is full of tourists.’⁴⁰ Although it is not specified which Mediterranean city, at this point in the novel, it is clear that it reminds him of Dubrovnik. What is even more suggestive is that he tells Milan about a village near New Orleans where many second and third-generation Croats live; symbolically, they all originally came from Konavle, a village where Vojin’s father is from and where Vojin eventually dies. When Milan receives Vojin’s letter from New Orleans, the war in Yugoslavia is already in motion in the background, even though Milan refuses to accept this. It takes Vojin from New Orleans (where Milan dies later) to remind him about the war.

Apart from these connections between New Orleans and Dubrovnik that are established through the characters’ personal stories, letters, deaths, and so on, there are also certain similarities between the collective memories of destruction in the two cities that are addressed implicitly. The way the author opts to frame the story suggests that there is a new kind of dynamic taking place between the two cities, which does not necessarily require looking at the collective memories of Croatia and the US. The idea that local memories do not exist merely on a horizontal plane but rather as a complex dynamic – ‘connected dots on a map,’ is applicable in this case for explaining the connections in the novel between the former Yugoslav cities and the cities ‘abroad.’ After Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, New Orleans did not get sufficient aid on time. The delayed aid resulted in a sense of betrayal, as if the lives and property of the people of New Orleans were not significant.⁴¹ Regarding the collective remembrance of the siege of Dubrovnik in Croatia today, the battle for the city and its subsequent liberation represent a pillar of Croatian independence and identity. However, some believe that the city was purposefully poorly defended at the beginning of the siege so that the images of the burning Old Town would resonate with the Western powers, thus attracting their military and political support for Croatia in the war's later stages.⁴² In other words, the fact that Dubrovnik was left for some time to defend itself without any meaningful help from Zagreb, the capital, resembles the situation that occurred in New Orleans fourteen years later. Although the causes of the suffering are poles apart, the sense of being abandoned may bring the collective memories of these two cities together – the collective memories of New Orleans and Dubrovnik are observed in parallel, and the juxtaposition is based on their shared experience of suffering. The novel does not spell out the apparent existence of the collective traumatic memory of Hurricane Katrina; however, the author does imply this by making numerous transitions in the narrative from New Orleans to Dubrovnik and back.

By adding the New Orleans dimension to the novel, Pejović makes this narrative more complex. The role of New Orleans in the novel is twofold: on the one hand, by looking at the events that occurred immediately after the natural disaster in 2005 and comparing them to the events that surrounded the attack on Dubrovnik (lootings, thefts, and other criminal activities), the author employs another multi-layered ‘tool’ for tackling the nationalist narratives that originate from the early 1990s. Furthermore, New Orleans here highlights collective memories primarily tied to cities as focal points of memory: the aftermath of the natural disaster is likened to the aftermath of the siege, while simultaneously, the existence of the collective memory of the siege points to the inevitable formation of the collective memory of the hurricane. Finally, this can be read on a purely symbolic level: war resembles a natural disaster that affects ordinary and (poor) people the most, leaving nothing but desolation and wasteland behind.

Under Both Suns – From Victimhood to Perpetration

Whereas Milan Junak mostly takes place during the build-up to the Dubrovnik campaign, the central section of the plot of Under Both Suns is situated in the present. Branimir Lončar, a former career military officer in his sixties, is living out the remainder of his days together with his wife, Danka, working as a lighthouse keeper on a secluded cape in southern Montenegro.⁴³ At the beginning of the Dubrovnik campaign in October 1991, Branimir refuses to allow the volunteers to use military transport vehicles to get to the frontline. This results in punitive measures and Branimir’s transfer to Morinj, a POW camp, where he is assigned as a guard. In Morinj, he refuses to take part in the torture of prisoners in the Morinj camp, where Croatian soldiers and civilians from the Dubrovnik area were brought and held from 1991 to 1992, and is subsequently discharged from the army as a punishment. Today, Branimir is depressed, guilt-ridden, and suffering from PTSD, and his childless marriage with Danka is crumbling. A young couple from the capital city of Podgorica, Mitar and Nevena, come to the lighthouse for a weekend of camping in an attempt to salvage their failing marriage. After dinner, Danka decides to leave the lighthouse; in a drunken stupor, Branimir accidentally kills her and then commits suicide, symbolically leaving the couple as the next lighthouse keepers.

As mentioned above, the novel’s specificity lies in its focalization. Spahić switches between intimate third-person and first-person narration, presenting the plot in the present time and through a series of flashbacks. The four main characters – Branimir, Danka, Mitar, and Nevena – are each employed as focalizers in different sections of the text, thus giving the reader insight into four different psychological profiles across two generations of Montenegrins. However, the largest segment of the novel is dedicated to Branimir, the main focal point and, at the same time, the most morally ambiguous character, if not more tragic than the rest. Unlike in Milan Junak, the war segment of Under Both Suns takes place within Montenegrin borders. The author focuses on a lesser-known part of the Dubrovnik campaign, the behind-the-scenes aspect of the siege, which is the treatment of prisoners in the Morinj camp. The camp, located relatively close to the border with Croatia, operated between October 1991 and August 1992: 292 Croatian POWs and civilians passed through Morinj, where they were subjected to beatings, mock executions, and other forms of torture. In 2014, four former guards were sentenced to a combined prison sentence of twelve years.⁴⁴ Interestingly, Spahić does not change the real-life names of two of the guards – Ivo Menzalin and Špiro Lučić are depicted in the novel, which on the meta-textual level briefly erases the line between facts and fiction, alluding that Branimir was actually there himself and creates an illusion that we are reading a non-fictional testimony.⁴⁵ The turning point in the plot occurs when Branimir decides to stand up to his fellow soldiers (among them is Menzalin, the camp cook and chief torturer) by holding them at gunpoint, thus attempting to protect three newly arrived young Croatian prisoners. One of the boys seeks to spark empathy in Branimir by urging him to think about what he would do if his children were mistreated in a camp; once they see Branimir is hesitant and unresponsive, they desperately say, ‘To hell with his kids, he’s just like everybody else.’⁴⁶ Unbeknownst to the Croats, Branimir and Danka lost their child due to a complicated pregnancy and subsequent abortion, which left her sterile (I shall return to the symbolic value of sterility in the following section). These swear words are a trigger that makes Branimir snap: he proceeds to beat the prisoners savagely and, in an ironic reversal of roles, has to be restrained by the fellow guards he threatened himself moments earlier, showing that he is ‘just like everybody else.’ The following morning, the three boys are gone (it is not clear what happens to them), while Branimir is released from the army and ends up as a lighthouse keeper, almost in complete isolation from the rest of the world. In many ways, the scene mirrors Vojin’s death scene in Milan Junak - both Vojin and Branimir are protecting the Other from the nominal in-group members. Above, I argued that Pejović in Milan Junak questions the warrior-hero archetype by showing its insidious manifestation during the Dubrovnik campaign, thus deconstructing one of the cornerstones of traditional Montenegrin collective identity. Spahić here also plays with the notions of bravery and humanity in Miljanov’s sense, by showing the failure of both through Branimir’s (in)actions.

As Rothberg points out, being a victim (or a perpetrator, or an implicated subject) ‘is not an ontological identity’ but ‘a position that we occupy in particular, dynamic, and at times clashing structures and histories of power.’⁴⁷ At the beginning of the text, Branimir is presented as a victim of the system that he tried to challenge, gradually becoming a part of it himself and perpetuating the crime he sought to prevent in the first place. The complexity of his position and the obfuscation of the bystander-perpetrator dichotomy is perhaps best visible in the following excerpt, in which he reflects on what transpired in the camp:

They chucked them in the trunk of a car and drove away. Strugar is assured that they were dumped across the Bosnian border, as a gift to our Trebinje friends.⁴⁸ Danka never learned the whole truth. And no one ever will. I myself learned only some parts of it. (…) Menzalin and Lučić are dragged through the courts. No one is mentioning me, but they should. Involuntary war crime?⁴⁹ Legal practice does not recognize such a thing. I would stand mute anyway. Even this silence that he and Danka are locked in is nothing but a right to remain silent. I have nothing left to say. I already told everything to myself and God. Everybody has their own story, and I could do nothing but repeat the same: Branimir Bato Lončar, a man who killed three children. ⁵⁰

If we revisit the previous point about the facts versus fiction demarcation line concerning the Morinj camp, officially, no prisoners were killed at the camp itself. At the same time, unofficial records claim that eight people died as a result of torture afterwards.⁵¹ This is cleverly conveyed in the text through the use of vague language that creates ambiguity: Branimir says that the boys were ‘chucked’ and ‘dumped,’⁵² which could imply that they were dealing with either dead bodies or living people at the time of their disappearance. In that sense, it is unclear what the fate of the three fictional prisoners is, which complicates matters further, despite Branimir gladly accepting guilt as a futile attempt at redemption. Branimir’s tragedy is almost Shakespearian, his peripeteia occurring immediately after the decision to act and not to be a mere bystander, which eventually leads to his ultimate downfall: ‘There was no return. I was doing it in the name of my own humanity, for Danka Lončar, for the honour of our dead child.’⁵³ Paradoxically, it turns out that he commits an ‘involuntary war crime’ in humanity’s name, which lays bare the intricacy of his position and illustrates the inherently complex nature of perpetrator fiction. In the context of perpetrator literature and the representation of perpetrators in narrative fiction, Stephanie Bird suggests that

The strength of fictional representations of perpetrators and perpetration is their freedom to challenge coherence and dissociate accurate portrayal from any lingering notions of consistency or logic, be that of motive, action or moral positioning. Fiction insists that ambiguity may itself be an accurate state of affairs, even if this fundamentally challenges our moral expectations or desire for redemptive narratives. Such ambiguity is inseparable from fiction’s emphasis on the dialogic and often incoherent interplay of voices, perspectives, emotions, and memories.⁵⁴

Bird’s notion of ambiguity (logical, narratological, or moral) as a key tenet and modus operandi of perpetrator literature is visible in the abovementioned scene. Spahić challenges the coherence of the scene by leaving an open ending, at least when the extent of Branimir’s criminality is at stake. ‘I only learned some parts of it (the truth),’⁵⁵ Branimir says, which challenges the reader’s ‘moral expectations’ and ‘desire for redemptive narratives’ to refer back to Bird. If the protagonist is unsure of what happened, and his point of view is the only one that the reader gets, the reader is facing a moral dilemma themselves when it comes to decoding the text and forming a judgment. In that sense, Branimir’s guilt is presented as fundamentally incoherent and fragmented, even if it is clear that he unequivocally (albeit inadvertently) turns into a perpetrator. Another reason for the protagonist’s lingering feeling of guilt and his transformation into ‘a grumpy lighthouse keeper, misanthrope, and drunkard’⁵⁶ is the official explanation for his discharge: ‘neglection of duty and insubordination,’ not the actual crime that he feels guilty of, effectively taking away from Branimir any possibility of redemption and closure.

Personal Guilt and Collective Implicatedness

Branimir and Danka’s post-war life as lighthouse keepers is imbued with symbolism on several levels, consequently inviting a political reading of the text. Danka reminisces about their life in Podgorica immediately before the outbreak of the war:

It was good in Titograd.⁵⁷ An apartment in Block 5. A lot of children, greenery and pleasant neighbours. It resembled life. A few of us pregnant women gathered on a bench in front of the bakery. The ultrasound scans were more important than the war in Slovenia. What was to become the bloody Yugoslav drama, smouldered under the shadows of our curved bellies, in the footnotes of conversations about antibodies and bilirubin levels.⁵⁸

The pre-war peacefulness in Yugoslavia (Danka says Titograd, not Podgorica) is contrasted with their exile-like sorrowful lighthouse years:

People are made to suffer through worse things, let alone twenty-seven years on a lighthouse. (…) We talked so we did not have to remain silent. Because thorn bushes grow sharp in silence. They get tangled around your neck, come through your eyes, and wrap around your tongue. In silence, the past renews itself like a lizard’s tail. An evil bud blooms by dinner and withers in dreams, only to grow again the next morning.⁵⁹

The imagery of thorns and silence is employed extensively throughout the text; Branimir and Danka live in a place of outstanding natural beauty, representing a sharp contrast to their inner state of silent decay. Indeed, their daily life is unmistakably Sisyphean, interwoven with heavy irony: although they live on what is a universal symbol for a beacon of hope, their hope(s) were cut short by a failed pregnancy, the camp tragedy, and if we consider the broader context – the war in Yugoslavia. As a result, they have slowly become overgrown with brambles and thorns, literally and metaphorically. Branimir and Danka reflect on the inner silence: it is a constant punishment in which the past perpetually renews itself ‘like a lizard’s tail,’ without possibly overcoming it and moving on.⁶⁰ Therefore, the couple of lighthouse keepers may also be read as a symbolic representation of the old, pre-war Montenegro and the inability of the new Montenegro to come to terms with its past. Silence is everywhere around them physically, too, only occasionally interrupted by lost tourists whom Branimir then urges to keep off the property, as if not to disturb their ‘peace’ and dig in the (painful) past. His movements around the cape are intertwined with the imagery of brambles – Branimir must constantly clear his way around the cape through thorns with a machete-like tool, which shows his struggle with the past at a performative level.

Mitar and Nevena are local tourists that Branimir initially tries to drive away; they are initially presented as the antipodes of Branimir and Danka, but the two couples gradually prove to have more in common than visible at first. In their late thirties, they represent a new generation of Montenegrins, born and raised within the new system – the opposite of Branimir and Danka’s socialist Montenegrin background. However, their marriage, too, is falling apart, and they are contemplating divorce. Nevena: ‘The ceiling of our apartment got lower and lower every day. The concrete slab was cracking, turning the 60m2 into a horizontal pharmacy of anxiety. That’s why I came up with the tent and camping.’⁶¹ Mitar: ‘We were on the edge. I assume that a combination of laziness, lack of initiative on my side, and cowardice prevented the final decision.’⁶²; ‘With time, I find it more difficult to withstand the feeling of suffocating emptiness which extends between our existences.’⁶³ Their last resort is camping at the secluded cape: Branimir eventually allows them to stay close to the lighthouse, and Danka even invites them for dinner.

I suggested earlier that the inability to have children is a plot device and a carrier of symbolic meaning. During the dinner, it is revealed that neither couple has children. Branimir scolds the couple for their agreement not to have any, while Danka tries to dismiss the fact by assuring them that life is ahead of them, which both Mitar and Nevena find difficult to believe since Mitar is infertile. Gradually, it becomes clear that the two couples mirror each other – Mitar and Nevena realize they are slowly turning into the older couple, who, on the other hand, see pieces of their youth in the two. Infertility may be read as Montenegro's collective inability to move on from the perpetual mnemonic stalemate and face the future. Although the younger generations (Mitar and Nevena) were not around when the old system (Branimir and Danka) fell apart, they are implicated in the past by being members of the society, i.e. by participation, in an Arendtian sense. After the dinner, Danka decides she has suffered enough and abandons Branimir and the lighthouse, and Nevena follows along.⁶⁴ Branimir wakes up and chases them, shooting in the air and through the trees indiscriminately; one of the bullets ricochets and kills Danka. Again, it is ambiguous what his real intention was, as he was drunk and enraged. Finally, he holds Nevena and Mitar at gunpoint, walks them back to the lighthouse, and commits suicide. Symbolically, it is their turn to grow old, childless, and alone, wrapped in thorns (literally and figuratively), a legacy left by the previous generations.

Naturally, we cannot speak of Mitar and Nevena’s guilt for what was previously done on behalf of Montenegro’s ‘glorious past.’ Still, this generational shift illustrates how the past lingers on and affects the present, testifying to the young couple’s implication in what Beganović calls Montenegro's ‘ever-present past.’ Although one could argue that infertility may be read as a punishment or a consequence of what happened in the 1990s in the whole region, I read the notion of inability to conceive as metaphorical transgenerational incompetence to break with the past and face the future, a reminder of the past inherent inescapability and perpetual repetition. Like the previous generations, the young Montenegro (embodied by Mitar and Nevena) is destined to live on a lonely cape, slowly overgrown with silence and brambles. Spahić’s vision may project an impression of exaggeration, darkness, and nihilism. Still, it undoubtedly points to the existence of the problem within Montenegro itself, that is, Montenegro is a hostage of its very own myths, tradition, and problems, and not anyone else’s.

Conclusion

During an interview I conducted with Vojislav Pejović, he revealed that he felt an absolute need to write The Life and Death of Milan Junak as a form of working through his personal war trauma. Similarly, Ognjen Spahić describes the historical trauma of Under Both Suns as the ‘only thing he knows how to write about.’⁶⁵ The sense of urgency both authors mention is tangible throughout the text(s) and comes across as an attempt at collective therapy and mnemonic decontamination through the creation of counter-narratives. However, as mentioned earlier, despite the potential that literature undoubtedly possesses – the potential to position itself as a counter-narrative – the actual realization of such potential upon circulation is difficult to gauge. Pejović’s novel has not been translated from Montenegrin so far; Spahić’s novel, however, was shortlisted in 2021 for the prestigious NIN award in Serbia, and more importantly, successfully adapted for theatre in Montenegro, showing that the novel’s afterlife is not in a cultural vacuum.

As Rothberg shows, people may only be held partly responsible, not collectively guilty for the crimes committed by their fellow members of a given people. The novels at hand explore the notion of responsibility by exposing several aspects that surround the participation and culpability of Montenegro in the breakup of Yugoslavia - succumbing to profit-driven nationalism, the proliferation of nationalistic myths, pragmatically switching ideologies and even ethnicities based on current needs, and more than anything, the silence about all of the above. As Daliborka Uljarević points out, and both novels exemplify,

The overall social atmosphere in Montenegro is still characterized by a severe aversion towards facing the war crimes committed in the name of the entire people. Facing the truth is difficult; we run away from it, and that is a fact. Many perpetrators of the 1990s war crimes, due to loyalty to the current regime, evade criminal responsibility, obstructing legal proceedings.⁶⁶

Although several people have been convicted for the crimes in Dubrovnik and Morinj (in international and domestic courts, respectively), the convictions were arguably on the micro-level. They did not address the more comprehensive, structural issue – the contemporary decision-makers and macro perpetrators. In a sense, both texts at hand avoid being overtly political, i.e. they are not explicitly aiming at one person or one political party; instead, the scope is more comprehensive as the critical mirror is held to Montenegro’s perpetual structural problems and their far-reaching consequences, while specific episodes such as the siege of Dubrovnik and the Morinj prison camp are used as foils. The texts may not be beacons of hope, but they undoubtedly shine a new light on a problem deliberately ignored for decades. In light of these findings, the question of guilt and implicatedness emerges as a compelling topic for future research – not only in Montenegrin literature but in post-Yugoslav literature as a whole, given the prominence of Yugoslavia and its dissolution in contemporary works from the region.

The latest (failed) episode of war commemoration in Montenegro best illustrates the lasting inability of the officials to satisfactorily resolve the mnemonic standoff, not only between Croats and Montenegrins but within Montenegro itself. In October 2021, thirty years after the aggression, a commemorative plaque was put in place at the former camp in Morinj by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense.⁶⁷ The plaque states that the crimes were committed ‘In order to embarrass the spirit and name of Montenegro.’⁶⁸ The active role of Montenegro is not mentioned; the guilt is ascribed to the Greater Serbia ideology. Paradoxically, Prime Minister Abazović promptly ordered the removal of the plaque put there by his own ministers, as it ‘falsified history.’⁶⁹ However, to this day, the plaque still stands under constant surveillance of military personnel. In other words, the regime may have changed, and the 1990s decision-makers might nominally be ousted from power. In reality, the whole country is still very much implicated in the past, and the repercussions are more than tangible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pavlović, “Reckoning,” 78. The phrase “War for Peace” was a euphemism for the siege of Dubrovnik that was coined by the ruling Montenegrin politicians and propagated by the pro-government media in 1991. Cohen and Soso, State Collapse.

2 The regime (Democratic Party of Socialists, a direct successor of the Communist Party of Montenegro), which had steadily remained in power since the early 1990s, lost the August 2020 general election.

3 Wachtel, Making a Nation, 19-67.

4 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1-31.

5 Jedlicki, ”Historical Memory,” 225-232; Kirn, “Primitive Accumulation,” 1470-1483; Saryusz-Wolska et al, “New Constellations,” 1275-1288.

6 Kaakinen, “Reading Literatures of Trauma,” 257-265.

7 Ilić’s The Dog and the Double Bass, Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una, Danyi’s The Carcass Remover are some of the few examples of post-YU fiction where the perpetrator is also the narrator.

8 Currently under the Montenegrin state prosecutor’s investigation (as a part of a larger Pandora Papers investigation, aided by Interpol). https://www.vijesti.me/vijesti/drustvo/661065/istraga-o-pandora-papirima-i-interpol-traga-za-novcem-djukanovica.

9 Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War, xv.

10 Ibid., 51.

11 Kirn, “Primitive Accumulation,” 1470–1483.

12 https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/4673231#References, accessed July 1, 2023.

13 Milanović, “The Impact of the ICTY,” 235.

14 Pavlović, “Reckoning,” 72.

15 First employed in 1991 by the opposition during anti-war protests.

16 See Clark, “Collective Guilt,” 668-692. for an excellent analysis of the question of Serbian collective responsibility and guilt for the 1990s war(s).

17 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.

18 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 9.

19 Wertsch, How Nations Remember, 1-31.

20 Beronja and Vervaet, Post-Yugoslav Constellations; Matijević, “From Post-Yugoslavia”; Militunović, “A Note on Post”; Rakočević, “Postjugoslovenska Književnost?”; Postnikov, Postjugoslovenska književnost-konstrukcija polja” give an extensive overview of the term “post-Yugoslav literature.”

21 Pejović, Milan Junak, 27.

22 Ibid., 101.

23 Ibid., 105.

24 Ibid., 74.

25 Ibid., 101.

26 Ibid., 103.

27 Ibid., 27.

28 Ibid., 57-58.

29 Ibid., 79.

30 Beganović, Protiv kanona, 145.

31 Njegoš is referenced through an ironic wordplay; as Milan sips beer, he writes down “Gorki vijenac,” which in Serbo-Croatian means “bitter wreath” and is similar to Gorski vijenac, the original title of Njegoš’s epic.

32 “Junak” means “hero” in Serbo-Croatian.

33 Beganović, Protiv kanona, 145.

34 Pejović, Milan Junak, 143.

35 Ibid., 5.

36 Rigney, “Articulations of Memory,” 163–184.

37 Pejović, Milan Junak, 5.

38 Ibid., 143.

39 Mijić, “Identity,” 483.

40 Pejović, Milan Junak, 90.

41 Doise, “Katrina,” 428-437.

42 Pearson, “Dubrovnik’s role,” 197-216.

43 The lighthouse and the surrounding area are based on a real lighthouse on Cape Mendra, Montenegro.

44 An article published by Radio Free Europe that explores the case: https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/morinj-logor-crna-gora-ploca/32093271.html; the trials were held in Montenegrin courts.

45 Menzalin and Lučić were convicted to four and three years of prison, respectively.

46 Spahić, Under Both Suns, 68.

47 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject

48 Part of the Army of the Bosnian Serbian Republic.

49 Italics are mine.

50 Spahić, Under Both Suns, 70-71.

51 https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/morinj-logor-crna-gora-ploca/32093271.html accessed June 10, 2023.

52 “Strpali” and “istovarili” in the original text.

53 Spahić, Under Both Suns, 65.

54 Bird, "Perpetrators and perpetration in literature," 307.

55 Spahić, Under Both Suns, 71.

56 Ibid., 33.

57 Name for Podgorica that was in use from 1946 until 1992.

58 Spahić, Under Both Suns, 27.

59 Ibid., 24.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 107.

62 Ibid., 133.

63 Ibid., 137.

64 While Pejović in Milan Junak makes several references to Montenegrin literary canon and the “warrior hero” archetype, Spahić in Under Both Suns makes intertextual references to the opus of the most famous Montenegrin director Živko Nikolić and his exploration of Montenegrin mentality, tradition, and most notably, gender roles. Nikolić’s most famous film is The Beauty of Vice (Lepota poroka, 1986), which shows a young couple caught between Montenegrin tradition and sexual liberation.

65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOJi27nFtjA&t=1106s, accessed July 1, 2023.

66 Uljarević is the executive director of the EU sponsored NGO “Centre for Civic Education.” https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/slucaj-morinj-srustvo-nespremno-da-se-suoci-s-zlocinima/26746821.html

67 https://www.vijesti.me/vijesti/politika/627179/ploca-u-morinju-u-16-tacaka-sta-je-sporno-a-sta-nije-sporno

68 The full text of the plaque reads: “During the Serbian aggression on Croatia, a camp for imprisoned Croatian defenders and civilians, the camp Morinj (3.10.1991–18.8.1992), was here. We remember the crimes committed in order to embarrass the name and spirit of Montenegro. We express regret for all the suffering endured by the victims. Never to be repeated!”

69 https://www.vijesti.me/vijesti/drustvo/637562/ploca-u-morinju-ce-biti-zamijenjena-onom-koja-nece-falsifikovati-istoriju, accessed June 28, 2023.