In an interesting but patchy essay from 2004, Goran Stefanovski wrote:
It is street wisdom in the Balkans that it is impossible to be born and die in the same country. Within one’s lifetime, the house will fall on your head and you’ll have to start building again.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia. I was against the repression of Kosovar Albanians by state and state-sponsored institutions, I was against the NATO bombing campaign and I was against the killing and cleansing of Serbs from the province by Kosovar Albanians. Generally speaking, I’m against things that increase the sum of human misery, and all three of those things fall into that category. Could i make my position any clearer?
In the beginning, the first few days, it was scary because nobody knew what to do in this situation… ou decide after a couple of days that this bombing is not so terrible after all. Schools are out, university too, almost nobody goes to their jobs. It’s a big party on the streets… But after a while, it starts to get boring, and towards the end it really gets intolerable. Not even the pirated films on the TV and endless arguments over the internet represent much joy to you. So you are really glad it’s over.
Yet I get more angry with the Serbs than I do with the Kosovar Albanians or NATO. I like Serbs, and I think they were royally screwed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it astonishes me that ten years later there still doesn’t seem to be the will to face up to their situation. It was always fairly clear (if not always explicit) that NATO hoped the Kosovo campaign would lead to Milosevic’s downfall (which it did, eventually); meanwhile, the Kosovar Albanians were usually honest and unapologetic about their desire to extract revenge on the provincial Serbs who stayed behind after the bombing (which they did, immediately).
… others said the action would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe resulting from Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanians. (in 1999 there were 81% ethnic Albanians and 11% Serbs in Kosovo…so how realistic are these theories?!)… Yugoslavia had been attacked because it had used its sovereign right to fight terrorism and prevent the secession of a part of its territory which had always belonged to Serbia and Yugoslavia.
Yet as I watch Serbian and Montenegrin television (with my comically limited Serbian), I can’t help but notice that there seems to be very little mention of the reason/excuse (take your pick, as if I care) that NATO had for bombing in the first place. When talking with Serbs, you sometimes feel that they believe that the bombing campaign came out of nowhere – almost an act of god – with a casualty list that seems to include a lot more people than the ones that actually, you know, died.1 The NATO campaign emphasised the positive aspects of the Serb character (such as their dark sense of humour) but also exposed the negative aspects, particularly the victim mentality.
There is a saying about Serbs, that we always forgive but never forget and this is very true… For most of us, the war and the hatred towards the West ended with the last bomb that fell in Serbia… We come back to this and many other events every year, to remember the fallen and drop a swear or two on our miserable lives, but that’s pretty much it.
Perhaps it isn’t forgetting that’s Serbia’s problem, but remembering – at least, remembering the decade that preceded the NATO campaign. Ten years ago their house fell, and I would argue that Serbia has barely begun the difficult task of rebuilding that house. Raise your glasses to the dead of the past ten years, both Serbian and Albanian, and then let’s get on with the job of construction.
UPDATE: Phew, it’s not just me, Nenad Pejic spotted it as well.
- Amusingly extended to include Albanians who were actually killed by Serbian military and paramilitary forces, as if that was NATO’s fault – “Don’t make me beat you!”, as my old boss used to say. [↩]