Forget About It

This article examines how peaceful reintegration of Croatia’s Danube region is today publicly remembered and shows that it has remained a marginal part of collective memory of the 1991–1995 war in Croatia. The article attempts to move the attention from research on the memory of violent events during conflict and to focus on the slow memory of a peaceful process in the aftermath of violence. It is argued that, in post-war Croatia, public remembrance of the war has mostly included only violent episodes from the war and has marginalised public memory of peace. This has created an impression that alternatives to violence were and are not possible, although a non-violent, peaceful solution proved exactly the opposite by playing a crucial role in ending the conflict. The article aims to expose this cultural continuity of seeing conflicts as necessarily and inevitably violent and pays more attention to peace processes that are harder to recognize because they are not one-off events and because of their slowness.