| Balkan Impressions |
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Impressions Last April I had the great chance to take part in the Balkan course’s study trip to Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb and Budapest. This has been a very enriching time in several aspects. Firstly because of the very small, nice group of students – travelling in pleasant company is always better than without. Secondly due to the time I had to spend preparing at least a little and during which I managed to learn quite a few new things (as well as to re-discover many things that I had once learned and then forgotten). And thirdly and most importantly because of, well, travelling. Whatever is written about journeys often tends to be either a lot more boring than the actual thing or horribly romantic nonsense – it is hard to say which one of those is worse. And I am sure that whatever I could write is going to be one of the two, if not both at once. But though I know I am now dangerously close to exactly this nonsensical romanticism, I just have to say a few things: Go to Bosnia. Please. It is so, so, so beautiful. Do not go hiking (because of the mines), fishing (because of the pollution) and do not rely on finding enough tourist sites in Sarajevo to keep you busy for more than a week. Still, please go. Bosnia is amazingly beautiful. Sarajevo is one of the most moving places I have been to so far. That was it. As I have not attended any of the preparation classes the following can only be a very rough and incomplete sketch of my impressions and thoughts during and after the trip. I am hoping for a little lenience from all those whose more profound understanding of the situation will be insulted by my rather free assumptions. I have no illusions whatsoever about their faultiness. Tuesday It is everywhere: 1389 on houses, walls, flower pots. For some reason the scrawled reference to the battle on the Kosovo Field mostly stays confined to Belgrade inner city. In the outskirts people prefer today’s martyrs - graffiti demands ‘pravda za Uroša’, justice for Uroš. Uroš Misic, member of Red Star Belgrade’s leading fan club Delije, has been convicted for attacking a police officer during a match of Red Star Belgrade and Hajduk Kula, leaving the man partially undressed and severely burned. Whatever he said in defence (‘I didn’t know it was a cop, I thought it was a fan of Partizan Belgrade’) was surely not to his advantage, still the sentence of ten years of imprisonment is uncommonly high. Not only fellow Delije-members but also several members of the Serbian Association of Lawyers have publicly protested, now his face can be seen painted all over Belgrade. Though his guilt cannot be denied his supporters argue that Misic is merely receiving such a disproportionally high sentence pour encourager les autres – and as a politically tinted as well as belated attempt to make up for shortcomings in the past. Violence among members of soccer fan clubs had before been treated rather neglectfully. To make the situation appear even more absurd the well-known newspaper Politika published the case of another young man who had received merely five years of imprisonment for murdering a fellow student. It probably shows the ineffectiveness and inconsequence of the judiciary system and this, of course, is as part of the general political situation intrinsically linked to pastime events. But it also shows that today’s Serbs have other things to think about than the Battle of Kosovo. 1389 may be still far too ever-present in Belgrade’s streets and minds – but after all its 621 years ago. Saturday If in one metro station in Budapest inner city there are about 15 homeless men and Budapest has 42 stations in total, it is 15×42=630. Friday One of Belgrade’s advertising posters: A woman in her twenties dressed up in a rather cheapish angel costume. She is obviously trying to sell some sort of wine, next to her knees a fruit basket. The slogan reads ‘Don’t look back in anger’. A similarly future-oriented attitude had earlier been expressed by Mrs. Popović whom we had the chance to meet on Thursday 8th of April in the DVV’s Belgrade office. Though for her it seemed to be sufficient not to look back very much at all – and to concentrate solely on upcoming tasks such as creating a wealthier society while hoping that cooperation in as many areas of culture and economy as possible will slowly help easing remaining social tensions. This sounds first of all like a rather sensible (though admittedly optimistic) approach: active inclusion rather than mere lip-service and the ‘memorial-site building’ way of coming to terms with the past that most western European states surely would like to see – and which may probably have major symbolic value but would be as likely to have little effect on the actual situation. Mrs. Popović also referred to the Kosovo issue as frequently returning topic whenever other conflicts need to be covered up or public opinion needs to be influenced in favour of one political actor or the other. Keeping this in mind it may actually be the case that a certain economic prosperity or, in Serbia’s case, even any noticeable improvement of the overall economic situation helps supporting more harmonious interactions among social and ethnic groups. Even if the actual conflicts originating in a country’s past have stayed mostly unresolved yet: a society in which most people can expect the satisfaction of their (real or perceived) needs to be granted might be less in danger of manipulating or actively creating ethnic tensions as a means of distracting public attention from its actually failing social policy. This, of course, is a crude oversimplification. An improvement of a state’s economic situation alone, without the framework of an at least in its main aspects properly functioning civil society, will surely not help resolving anything – or at least not astonishingly much. To actually achieve a more relaxed way of dealing with ethnic conflicts of the past and today in the ‘Popović-way’ it actually needs quite much; an improving economic situation alone would not necessarily act to the social/ethnic situation’s benefit. If not accompanied by sensible regulatory social and taxing policy (or whatever statesmen do, to keep things going nicely) an increase in wealth of just some parts of society would surely rather create new fuel for ethnic tensions. As it is today actually there are rather big differences between the financial and political options of taking influence of the very little group of oligarchs and the remaining population. So to make the ‘Popović-way’ work, it actually needs more than just the ‘Popović-way’. Why not including a cautious look back into recent history? This does not refer to slamming the Kosovo question in your opponent’s face at every possible occasion but simply to not ignore what has been. Which, regarding the strikingly visible remainders of the 1999 bombing in Belgrade city, would anyway be quite an amazing feat. It is without saying that either way the aforementioned ‘properly functioning civil society’ cannot probably exist without allowing also an open discourse on past conflicts, preferably one free of overly harsh animosities. I would like to tell you a story about how we in the Balkans kill the rats. We take thirty to forty rats from the same family, put them in a cage and give them only water to drink. After a while their teeth start growing, they get hungry and they are facing suffocation. Naturally, they will not kill the members of their own tribe - but in fear of dying they will kill the weakest one of them. And then another weak one and another weak one and another weak one. Until only the one [...] rat is left in the cage. Now the rat catcher continues giving water to this one rat. Its teeth are growing and the timing is very important. When the rat catcher sees that there is only half an hour left [...] he opens the cage, takes a knife, and pulls both eyes out of his head; then lets him free. Now the rat is nervous, is outraged, is panicking, facing his own death. He runs into the rat holes of his own family and kills every single rat on his way. Till the strongest and more superior rat kills him. This is the way how we in the Balkans make wolf-rats. Marina Abramovic, *1946, Belgrade [How we in the Balkans kill rats was part of the Balkan Baroque performance shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999] Sources
Judith Apell |
