Zrinski
03-17-2006, 05:41 PM
Milosevic was not solely responsible for the malign energy in Serbia that
caused so much death and destruction in the region.
By Gordana Igric in London
For years now I have been suffering from Milosevic fatigue. Ever since the
moment that I saw his pathetic figure, leant slightly forward, defeated,
walking through the prison yard in The Hague, just after his arrest in 2001.
Now I feel nothing about the man, whether he is alive or dead, and I care
still less where his body is buried.
Some would find this paradoxical, given that I witnessed and reported on so
much of the terrible suffering he instigated by sending the Serbian army,
police and paramilitaries into Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the Nineties.
And even more so, since the Milosevic regime finally forced me and my two
children to leave Serbia in order to avoid arrest in the spring of 1999.
Even my daughter, aged 14, who blames him for uprooting her life, is more
upset over his death than I am. How he can just die in prison, with no real
punishment when so many people were killed, she asks?
It is not that I don't hear her voice, or those of the thousands of victims
who feel cheated by his death, disappointed that the genocide charge will
never now be confirmed by the Hague war crimes tribunal.
I hear these voices loud and clear. What I refuse to do is to lend exclusive
importance to a man who was only the executor of forces behind him - the
dark and dangerous forces of Serbian nationalism.
It must be recalled that Milosevic was not a dictator. Even if he was not at
first elected democratically, he was supported by the majority in Serbia and
cannot be held solely to blame for the crimes that were committed.
It was the masses who empowered him, who got rid of him when he failed to
conquer territories, and who found new heroes in the ranks of the
ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party and in parts of the current
government.
Behind their tears and mourning is a sense of deep frustration that they can
no longer impose their warmongering xenophobia on society by force, or press
the idea of Greater Serbia on their neighbours by killing, burning and
looting.
When I look back on the early Nineties, and on 1991 in particular, I recall
my unease. Yugoslavia still existed but sharp and painful divisions had
already opened up in Serbian society, pitting families and friends who
supported Milosevic against those who did not. Wars had yet to start, and
nobody had died, but a silent war was already going on in Serbia.
Even the restaurants were politically split. Some became "ours" and others
"theirs". The various media found their own journalists and believers,
though only "theirs" had money, power, printing houses and frequencies.
The masses were most definitely "theirs". Workers and peasants were driven
in buses with Milosevic's portrait on the front to vast rallies. Their
demonstrations flooded the television screens, as they sang, as if in a
trance, "Slobo, mi te volimo", meaning "Slobo, we love you".
Many Serbs who until then couldn't have told the difference between a
Catholic or an Orthodox church became suddenly deeply religious. Children
and old people rushed to be baptised, almost as a political statement. The
Serbian Orthodox Church, always a powerhouse of nationalism, underwent a
dramatic revival, celebrating Milosevic as Serbia's saviour.
On March 9, 1991, I joined the riotous opposition demonstration in Belgrade
against Milosevic. As a student protest turned into widespread rebellion, it
was the first - and probably the last - time that a powerful anti-war
demonstration would shake Serbia. Protestors broke windows, overturned cars
and fought with police, while the police responded with tear gas and water
canons.
That day it still seemed possible that we might avert the slide to war and
defeat "them" internally.
But then the tanks of the Yugoslav Army appeared on the streets to disperse
the crowds. Behind the closed door of my flat I listened to the rumble of
armoured vehicles, as I struggled to combat my own anger and helplessness.
That March, Milosevic declared that Yugoslavia was dead, and months later
the tanks were travelling from Serbia towards the town of Vukovar, in
Croatia, which they would turn into dust.
Over the summer, as long lines of armoured vehicles and tanks trundled
through the towns of Vojvodina towards Croatia, I watched the euphoric,
smiling faces on television. Masses of people packed the streets, applauding
and throwing flowers.
Then, when a bomb was thrown into the house of a local dentist, a Croat, in
the Vojvodina town where I was born, I heard people say, "He deserved it, he
was secretly preparing for Croatian forces to occupy the town!" A
75-year-old man.
When the Croats of the village of Hrtkovci, in Vojvodina, were expelled all
in one day, few words of protests could be heard.
In April 1992, a Serb acquaintance of mine from Zvornik, in eastern Bosnia,
reached Belgrade, having taken off his army uniform and thrown away the
weapon that he had been given when he was mobilised. At night and in secret,
he had crossed the river Drina and deserted, rather than take part in the
ethnic cleansing of his Bosniak neighbours.
His main duty, as a soldier, he told me, was to shoot at the dead bodies of
Bosniaks, which had been thrown into a lake and had been floating for days,
like balloons. By sinking the corpses, he would be concealing the evidence
of a crime.
At first, in shock, he tried to explain in Serbia what had happened, but the
local radical nationalists soon marked him down as a deserter and a traitor.
The less radical just sighed, "What can be done? It's the war."
So he stopped talking. He had left his elderly parents in Zvornik, hiding a
young Bosniak couple in their flat. Then he heard that somebody had reported
this fact to the paramilitaries and they had come to kill the young couple.
Then, I interviewed women from the eastern Bosnian town of Foca. Serbian
forces had kept them over the summer of 1992 in an improvised brothel, where
they were systematically raped.
I have written and talked about this in Serbia, wherever I can, to whoever
will listen. Most don't. The taxi drivers, hairdressers, and the others just
say, "Come on, Serbs would never do that."
Then came 1995, when the Serbs outside Serbia paid the price. Pressurised by
the international community, Milosevic turned his back on the Bosnian and
Croatian Serbs and refugees started flooding into Serbia. The nationalist
elite and the Church had to face the fact that their executor had not
fulfilled their dream.
Many remember the winter of 1996 and the three months of massive peaceful
protests against the way Milosevic had stolen votes in the local elections.
By then I could see that a hybrid phenomenon had been born. The genuinely
democratic forces had now been joined by others who were very different -
disappointed nationalists, disappointed Orthodox churchmen, the
disillusioned nationalist elite of Serbia.
Only a new war could temporarily recover the position of Serbia's shaken
God. So along came Kosovo in 1998. At the end of February, in Qirez and
Likosani, in Kosovo's Drenica region, the first mass killing of civilians
occurred.
On the floor of a house in Qirez I saw the body of a woman who was eight
months pregnant. In other homes lay other victims. The same day, in
neighbouring Likosani, every man in the Ahmeti family who had been at home,
all nine of them, were executed. Only one brother survived, as he had been
away that day, visiting a neighbouring town. Nine mothers, nine wives and
many children were left with nothing to live on.
I wrote up the story in Serbia for an already marginalised newspaper. A
handful of sympathisers read it and understood. The rest commented,
"Shiptari [Albanians] - They're all terrorists!"
That summer, I drove across Kosovo, with the police and army in full swing.
In the early mornings, from the hills, the army would start shelling
villages. When peasants escaped to the woods, the police went in. First,
they took everything valuable from the deserted houses, then they set them
on fire. House by house and village by village they went, until they had
burned the whole of Kosovo, apart from the towns where Serbian forces held
power. Hundreds of thousands of civilians found themselves walking through
the mountains, carrying their elderly with them and burying them if they
died in the woods.
At one point a Serbian policeman, from Kursumlija, in southern Serbia,
stopped me and asked for a lift to Pristina. "Why for God's sake, are you
burning those houses?" I asked.
"Once you start doing it, you can't stop," he replied, "though no police in
the world could do that without orders." I argued, saying there was
something more important than orders. He got out of the car, angry.
When I spoke about what was happening in Kosovo, some people in Serbia
offered justifications. "Albanians don't come back once you burn their
houses," they said. "Now they will leave for Albania. It had to be done."
And, so on and on, towards Drenica, the Racak crime in January 1999 and the
NATO strikes that followed against Serbia.
Now in London, on 5 October 2000, I watched on television as people from
across Serbia flooded into Belgrade, breaking into and torching the
parliament building.
Milosevic was overthrown. But by then I had no illusions. What had tipped
the balance against Milosevic was not the rise of truly democratic forces,
but the massed ranks of disappointed nationalists.
That dark side of Serbia was angry now with Milosevic as the serial loser of
wars and territories. It was the Milosevic who lost Kosovo, not the
Milosevic who committed crimes there, whom they hated.
Since then, I have followed public opinion surveys closely, trying to detect
how many of his old followers had switched over to the strongest opposition
nationalist party, the Radicals, and how many had softened their position
slightly and rallied to the current government of Vojislav Kostunica, which
plays the pro-European and "moderate nationalist" cards at the same time.
Meanwhile, Milosevic is yesterday's man, and real tears are only shed for
him in small provincial towns, among the housewives and pensioners who -
strangely - identified him with communism and Yugoslavia.
But Serbia's old nationalistic demons are still there, with no remorse, and
their frustration grows with each bill that Serbia has to pay for the
mistakes of the Nineties. One is possible war reparations to Bosnia, another
is the likely independence of Kosovo and Montenegro, and yet another is the
extradition of the war crime indictee Ratko Mladic, still seen by many as a
hero.
Milosevic's death has only acted as a catalyst for their existing
frustrations. The real question is which side in Serbia - those disappointed
nationalists, or the genuine democrats - will come out on top.
Gordana Igric is BIRN's editorial and development director, and editor in
chief of BIRN's internet publication Balkan Insight.
http://www.iwpr.net/
caused so much death and destruction in the region.
By Gordana Igric in London
For years now I have been suffering from Milosevic fatigue. Ever since the
moment that I saw his pathetic figure, leant slightly forward, defeated,
walking through the prison yard in The Hague, just after his arrest in 2001.
Now I feel nothing about the man, whether he is alive or dead, and I care
still less where his body is buried.
Some would find this paradoxical, given that I witnessed and reported on so
much of the terrible suffering he instigated by sending the Serbian army,
police and paramilitaries into Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the Nineties.
And even more so, since the Milosevic regime finally forced me and my two
children to leave Serbia in order to avoid arrest in the spring of 1999.
Even my daughter, aged 14, who blames him for uprooting her life, is more
upset over his death than I am. How he can just die in prison, with no real
punishment when so many people were killed, she asks?
It is not that I don't hear her voice, or those of the thousands of victims
who feel cheated by his death, disappointed that the genocide charge will
never now be confirmed by the Hague war crimes tribunal.
I hear these voices loud and clear. What I refuse to do is to lend exclusive
importance to a man who was only the executor of forces behind him - the
dark and dangerous forces of Serbian nationalism.
It must be recalled that Milosevic was not a dictator. Even if he was not at
first elected democratically, he was supported by the majority in Serbia and
cannot be held solely to blame for the crimes that were committed.
It was the masses who empowered him, who got rid of him when he failed to
conquer territories, and who found new heroes in the ranks of the
ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party and in parts of the current
government.
Behind their tears and mourning is a sense of deep frustration that they can
no longer impose their warmongering xenophobia on society by force, or press
the idea of Greater Serbia on their neighbours by killing, burning and
looting.
When I look back on the early Nineties, and on 1991 in particular, I recall
my unease. Yugoslavia still existed but sharp and painful divisions had
already opened up in Serbian society, pitting families and friends who
supported Milosevic against those who did not. Wars had yet to start, and
nobody had died, but a silent war was already going on in Serbia.
Even the restaurants were politically split. Some became "ours" and others
"theirs". The various media found their own journalists and believers,
though only "theirs" had money, power, printing houses and frequencies.
The masses were most definitely "theirs". Workers and peasants were driven
in buses with Milosevic's portrait on the front to vast rallies. Their
demonstrations flooded the television screens, as they sang, as if in a
trance, "Slobo, mi te volimo", meaning "Slobo, we love you".
Many Serbs who until then couldn't have told the difference between a
Catholic or an Orthodox church became suddenly deeply religious. Children
and old people rushed to be baptised, almost as a political statement. The
Serbian Orthodox Church, always a powerhouse of nationalism, underwent a
dramatic revival, celebrating Milosevic as Serbia's saviour.
On March 9, 1991, I joined the riotous opposition demonstration in Belgrade
against Milosevic. As a student protest turned into widespread rebellion, it
was the first - and probably the last - time that a powerful anti-war
demonstration would shake Serbia. Protestors broke windows, overturned cars
and fought with police, while the police responded with tear gas and water
canons.
That day it still seemed possible that we might avert the slide to war and
defeat "them" internally.
But then the tanks of the Yugoslav Army appeared on the streets to disperse
the crowds. Behind the closed door of my flat I listened to the rumble of
armoured vehicles, as I struggled to combat my own anger and helplessness.
That March, Milosevic declared that Yugoslavia was dead, and months later
the tanks were travelling from Serbia towards the town of Vukovar, in
Croatia, which they would turn into dust.
Over the summer, as long lines of armoured vehicles and tanks trundled
through the towns of Vojvodina towards Croatia, I watched the euphoric,
smiling faces on television. Masses of people packed the streets, applauding
and throwing flowers.
Then, when a bomb was thrown into the house of a local dentist, a Croat, in
the Vojvodina town where I was born, I heard people say, "He deserved it, he
was secretly preparing for Croatian forces to occupy the town!" A
75-year-old man.
When the Croats of the village of Hrtkovci, in Vojvodina, were expelled all
in one day, few words of protests could be heard.
In April 1992, a Serb acquaintance of mine from Zvornik, in eastern Bosnia,
reached Belgrade, having taken off his army uniform and thrown away the
weapon that he had been given when he was mobilised. At night and in secret,
he had crossed the river Drina and deserted, rather than take part in the
ethnic cleansing of his Bosniak neighbours.
His main duty, as a soldier, he told me, was to shoot at the dead bodies of
Bosniaks, which had been thrown into a lake and had been floating for days,
like balloons. By sinking the corpses, he would be concealing the evidence
of a crime.
At first, in shock, he tried to explain in Serbia what had happened, but the
local radical nationalists soon marked him down as a deserter and a traitor.
The less radical just sighed, "What can be done? It's the war."
So he stopped talking. He had left his elderly parents in Zvornik, hiding a
young Bosniak couple in their flat. Then he heard that somebody had reported
this fact to the paramilitaries and they had come to kill the young couple.
Then, I interviewed women from the eastern Bosnian town of Foca. Serbian
forces had kept them over the summer of 1992 in an improvised brothel, where
they were systematically raped.
I have written and talked about this in Serbia, wherever I can, to whoever
will listen. Most don't. The taxi drivers, hairdressers, and the others just
say, "Come on, Serbs would never do that."
Then came 1995, when the Serbs outside Serbia paid the price. Pressurised by
the international community, Milosevic turned his back on the Bosnian and
Croatian Serbs and refugees started flooding into Serbia. The nationalist
elite and the Church had to face the fact that their executor had not
fulfilled their dream.
Many remember the winter of 1996 and the three months of massive peaceful
protests against the way Milosevic had stolen votes in the local elections.
By then I could see that a hybrid phenomenon had been born. The genuinely
democratic forces had now been joined by others who were very different -
disappointed nationalists, disappointed Orthodox churchmen, the
disillusioned nationalist elite of Serbia.
Only a new war could temporarily recover the position of Serbia's shaken
God. So along came Kosovo in 1998. At the end of February, in Qirez and
Likosani, in Kosovo's Drenica region, the first mass killing of civilians
occurred.
On the floor of a house in Qirez I saw the body of a woman who was eight
months pregnant. In other homes lay other victims. The same day, in
neighbouring Likosani, every man in the Ahmeti family who had been at home,
all nine of them, were executed. Only one brother survived, as he had been
away that day, visiting a neighbouring town. Nine mothers, nine wives and
many children were left with nothing to live on.
I wrote up the story in Serbia for an already marginalised newspaper. A
handful of sympathisers read it and understood. The rest commented,
"Shiptari [Albanians] - They're all terrorists!"
That summer, I drove across Kosovo, with the police and army in full swing.
In the early mornings, from the hills, the army would start shelling
villages. When peasants escaped to the woods, the police went in. First,
they took everything valuable from the deserted houses, then they set them
on fire. House by house and village by village they went, until they had
burned the whole of Kosovo, apart from the towns where Serbian forces held
power. Hundreds of thousands of civilians found themselves walking through
the mountains, carrying their elderly with them and burying them if they
died in the woods.
At one point a Serbian policeman, from Kursumlija, in southern Serbia,
stopped me and asked for a lift to Pristina. "Why for God's sake, are you
burning those houses?" I asked.
"Once you start doing it, you can't stop," he replied, "though no police in
the world could do that without orders." I argued, saying there was
something more important than orders. He got out of the car, angry.
When I spoke about what was happening in Kosovo, some people in Serbia
offered justifications. "Albanians don't come back once you burn their
houses," they said. "Now they will leave for Albania. It had to be done."
And, so on and on, towards Drenica, the Racak crime in January 1999 and the
NATO strikes that followed against Serbia.
Now in London, on 5 October 2000, I watched on television as people from
across Serbia flooded into Belgrade, breaking into and torching the
parliament building.
Milosevic was overthrown. But by then I had no illusions. What had tipped
the balance against Milosevic was not the rise of truly democratic forces,
but the massed ranks of disappointed nationalists.
That dark side of Serbia was angry now with Milosevic as the serial loser of
wars and territories. It was the Milosevic who lost Kosovo, not the
Milosevic who committed crimes there, whom they hated.
Since then, I have followed public opinion surveys closely, trying to detect
how many of his old followers had switched over to the strongest opposition
nationalist party, the Radicals, and how many had softened their position
slightly and rallied to the current government of Vojislav Kostunica, which
plays the pro-European and "moderate nationalist" cards at the same time.
Meanwhile, Milosevic is yesterday's man, and real tears are only shed for
him in small provincial towns, among the housewives and pensioners who -
strangely - identified him with communism and Yugoslavia.
But Serbia's old nationalistic demons are still there, with no remorse, and
their frustration grows with each bill that Serbia has to pay for the
mistakes of the Nineties. One is possible war reparations to Bosnia, another
is the likely independence of Kosovo and Montenegro, and yet another is the
extradition of the war crime indictee Ratko Mladic, still seen by many as a
hero.
Milosevic's death has only acted as a catalyst for their existing
frustrations. The real question is which side in Serbia - those disappointed
nationalists, or the genuine democrats - will come out on top.
Gordana Igric is BIRN's editorial and development director, and editor in
chief of BIRN's internet publication Balkan Insight.
http://www.iwpr.net/