This chapter analyses the emergence of the first generation of memory activists in Serbia, in the aftermath of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. It explores the mnemonic claims of these actors, whose activism extended from that of anti-war groups already formed in the early 1990s and focuses on the alternative calendars and alternative commemorative rituals they have established – which have become sites of the contested territory of counter-memories (Zerubavel 1995). I am particularly interested in this generation of activists as members of a community of memory, among various communities of memory in Serbia, where activists present countermemories of the wars of the 1990s and insist on engagement with these unwanted memories. As a community of memory, these activists have brought their feminist, anti-nationalist, and anti-war agenda into their memory activism, carrying their work in the 1990s into the 2000s.

The alternative calendars and commemorative rituals created by these activists lay the path for this chapter, which traces the ways in which anti-war groups, and particularly the Women in Black in Serbia, maintained their presence in the streets after regime change on 5 October 2000. I show how they have continued to play the role of a critical, if marginal opposition in their society, doing so largely through street actions centred around alternative commemorative rituals. At the heart of these rituals, I argue, remains the annual 10 July commemoration of victims of the Srebrenica genocide.