The case is almost incidental. What is being assembled is a principle: that Serbs are innocent by ethnic category, and that any accusation is therefore a campaign.
Ngadhnjim Brovina | 19 June 2026
A doctrine is being prepared in Belgrade's public sphere for delivery to a negotiating table. It can be stated in one sentence. Serbs are innocent by virtue of being Serbs, and any accusation directed at a Serb is, by that fact alone, an episode in a campaign against Serbs. The proposition is not new. What is new is the discipline with which it is being repeated, and the purpose behind the repetition, which is to fix the moral baseline of the Kosovo Serbia dialogue before the dialogue reopens. Whoever sets the baseline governs everything that is later measured from it.
The doctrine is worth examining as a structure rather than as a list of claims to be answered one by one, because its strength is structural and an answer offered claim by claim concedes its premise. Its internal logic is closed. Innocence is treated as a property of the ethnic category rather than of the individual or the act, so the individual is dissolved into the collective and the collective is held incapable of guilt. From that premise it follows that an accusation can never be a response to a wrong, because a wrong is ruled out in advance. An accusation can only be a response to who the accused is. Animus becomes the sole available explanation. Hence conspiracy. Hence persecution. And because the premise admits no counter evidence, the system seals itself: evidence against a Serb is reclassified as part of the campaign, and an acquittal registers as the campaign failing on a given day rather than as a finding of fact. A doctrine that cannot be falsified does not require facts. It requires only occasions.
Occasions are not in short supply, and a recent one is unusually clean. On June 18 the Belgrade daily Novosti reported, on anonymous sourcing, that summonses in connection with wartime cases had reached more than two hundred addresses, and presented the precision of those addresses as proof of coordination among neighboring states, the civil society sector, and Pristina. A subheading reclassified the dead at Reçak from civilians into combatants. The indictments were assimilated to the secret indictments once issued in Croatia, so that a legal process could be read as itself the crime. At the level of state action, a figure inside the governing structure proposed that Serbia adopt what he called the Israeli model, the protection of Serbs wherever they are found by services unconstrained by evidence or trial. The specimen is useful precisely because it is undisguised. Every element in it is an operation of the doctrine: the dissolution of the individual into the category, the conversion of competence into conspiracy, the recasting of accountability as persecution.
The doctrine's relationship to law is the most revealing part of it. It never contests evidence. It contests jurisdiction, and where a verdict is inconvenient it manufactures one from a verdict's absence. The Reçak count formed part of the Kosovo indictment against Slobodan Milošević, a case that produced no judgment because the accused died in 2006. In the doctrine's telling, a trial ended by death becomes an acquittal on the merits. The maneuver is general rather than particular. Wherever accountability stalls, for whatever reason, the stall is reported as exoneration, and the absence of a finding is presented as a finding.
Because the doctrine is indifferent to the act, the particular case is interchangeable. Reçak is a token, not the type. Any prosecution of any Serb, for any conduct, would serve the same function, because the function has nothing to do with what was done. This is why the doctrine cannot be defeated on the ground of a single case, however strong the evidence in that case may be. Win the argument over Reçak and the apparatus simply selects another occasion. The frame has to be named as a frame.
Naming it requires one precision, because the doctrine's defenders reach for the accusation by reflex. To identify collective innocence as the organizing claim is the opposite of a generalization about Serbs. The charge is exactly that the doctrine ethnicizes a question that is properly individual and evidentiary. It is the mirror image of the collective guilt that Serbs have themselves, and rightly, resented when it has been assigned to them. Collective innocence is the same error with the sign reversed. A settlement built on it would not correct the ethnicization of responsibility. It would install the ethnicization of innocence in its place.
Returned to the negotiating table, the doctrine operates as a precondition wearing the costume of a grievance. The concession it seeks is not agreement about one killing in one village in 1999. It is acceptance of a principle, that the ethnic category is a standing immunity and that accountability directed at it is persecution by definition. A principle of that kind does not settle a contested past. It forecloses the possibility that any past can be adjudicated at all, and with it the entire apparatus by which a post conflict order assigns responsibility. That is a far larger price than a revised account of any single event, and it is the price actually being asked.
The objection to refusing it is familiar and deserves its strongest form. Normalization between adversaries routinely asks both parties to set the past aside, and a demand that history be settled before talks begin would hand either side an indefinite veto. The objection holds, but it is met by a distinction the doctrine depends on no one drawing. Forbearance over interpretation is one thing. Ratification of inversion is another. Parties to a settlement may leave contested readings of a shared past unresolved, and durable settlements often do exactly that. What they cannot be asked to do is to certify that the victims of a documented killing were its authors, and to call the certification peace. The first is the ordinary discipline of reconciliation. The second is the imposition of the aggressor's history under the name of compromise.
Revisionism cannot be a condition for normalization.
Ngadhnjim Brovina is a political scientist at the University for Business and Technology in Pristina, where his research addresses party systems, democratic consolidation, and transnational party organisation in postcommunist Europe.
