A Criticizing Article on Persistent Denialism
Twenty-eight years after the end of the Kosovo War, the same patterns of minimization, inversion, and grievance resurface with depressing regularity. A recent post from the Facebook page “Serbian Times” offers a textbook example. It announces that “the so-called Kosovo” will submit the film “Dua” as its Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film. The film, according to the post, tells the story of an Albanian girl growing up in Kosovo and Metohija during what the filmmakers call “Serbian occupation.” The trailer, the page notes with satisfaction, has provoked “furious reactions from the domestic public,” and a large red banner over a still from the film declares: “SRBI PRIKAZANI KAO ZVERI” — “Serbs portrayed as beasts.”
The contact info for Serbian Times is antonije.kovacevic@gmail.com
The framing is not neutral. “So-called Kosovo” is the standard formulation of those who still refuse to accept the political reality that emerged after 1999. Putting “Serbian occupation” in scare quotes treats the lived experience of the majority population under the Milošević regime as an ideological invention rather than a historical condition. The banner does not merely criticize a cinematic portrayal; it performs a moral inversion in which the primary victims of the conflict are recast as propagandists and the perpetrators’ side is cast as the injured party.
This is not an isolated outburst. It is continuous with a broader narrative that has never fully confronted the scale of violence directed against civilians in the 1990s. Across the wars of the former Yugoslavia, Serbian forces and associated paramilitaries were responsible for the large majority of civilian deaths. In Bosnia and Croatia the numbers ran into the tens of thousands. In Kosovo, independent estimates and documentation by organizations such as the Humanitarian Law Center place the number of Albanian civilians killed at approximately 12,000. Mass graves continue to be discovered and exhumed more than a quarter-century later; the work of identifying the missing is still incomplete. These are not contested fringe claims. They are the findings of international tribunals, forensic teams, and multiple governments.
Against that record, a domestic outlet that responds to a film about an Albanian girl’s childhood by emphasizing Serbian victimhood and denying the legitimacy of the entity that produced the film is not engaging in legitimate cultural criticism. It is practicing a form of soft irredentism that keeps the wounds open. The film *Dua* is not required to be a balanced documentary of every side’s suffering in order to be legitimate. Stories of occupation, repression, and coming of age under political violence have been told about many conflicts; the fact that this one centers an Albanian perspective in Kosovo is treated by the post as inherently provocative rather than ordinary.
The passive-aggressive tone — the inverted commas, the “so-called,” the invitation to “see for yourself” why the trailer angered people — does not hide the underlying message: that acknowledging the Albanian experience of the 1990s is an attack on Serbs as a people. That is the humiliation the user correctly identifies. It is directed not only at the characters on screen but at the real victims whose experiences the film draws upon, and at the communities still living with the consequences of mass violence and unresolved disappearances.
Responsible journalism and public discourse in the region would start from the opposite premise: that the scale of civilian suffering inflicted by Serbian forces is a matter of established historical record, that denial or minimization of that record is itself a form of political violence, and that a film about an Albanian girl growing up under those conditions does not require defensive outrage. Until outlets stop treating basic acknowledgment of those facts as an insult, the cycle of grievance and inversion will continue long after the last mass grave is closed.
