Over the past thirty years many articles, including serious scholarly studies, have been written about the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986). Meant to stand as a signpost for Serbia’s course at the turn of the century and a list of rational solutions, the SANU Memorandum did not serve this purpose, agree the authors who have analyzed it. The reality created with the participation of both academicians and the Academy was not just an aberration and not even the fruit of some individuals’ evil intent . . . .

There have been no attempts, to this very day, at the factual explanation of how come Serbia is where it is now. Why is this so? It is hard to ignore the following, well-known fact: A society’s ability to objectify its indivisible past matures inasmuch as that society stops living in that past and, by understanding it, loses the appetite for its rerun. This is probably the key question that should have been raised on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the SANU Memorandum. As things stand now, the same parties seem to be conflicting in these new-old writings while the sands of time are trickling through the hourglass.

26. septembar 2016, NIN

Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji

Latinka Perović (born 4 October 1933) is a Serbian historian and former politician.

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