“Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities”

There’s a fascinating piece by Vladimir Arsenijevic (the Serbian author of In the Hold) in Sign and Sight, an online magazine about Europe. Entitled “Our negroes, our enemies“, it’s a sketch of Serbian attitudes towards Albanians - specifically Kosovars - and the way in which those attitudes have been both a cause and effect of the poisoning of Serbian society.

This felt particularly relevant to me because I just spent a few days in Kosovo after not having visited for three years, and was interested to note that there is much less surface tension than there was. Shortly after I arrived in 1999, a Bulgarian UN staff member was shot in the street in daylight for answering a question in Serbian; while I was there, I accidentally answered people several times in Serbian, and received nothing worse than a slight look of distaste. While the Kosovars have not by any means forgiven the Serbs, they do seem to be increasingly confident that they’ve won.

And if the Kosovars have won, that must mean that the Serbs have lost. Arsenijevic nails a few things - the Albanians were the “negroes” of Yugoslavia, suffering from a lot of the usual prejudices reserved for threatening out-groups, particularly the classic fear of fertility. There’s some good observations about the cult of victimhood that seems to haunt Serbian politics, the old Yugoslav racism of “sto juznije to tuznije” and how tired the Serbs are of the endless disappointment of politics.

The article is by no means hopeful - he ends by saying “perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children” - but without understanding just how badly the Serbs have been affected by their recent history, it will be impossible for the international community to make any progress on reconciliation with or reconstruction of the country.