Dear Serbia

So you’re almost alone now. Like Garbo. Except for Kosovo. And Kosovo is leaving soon. I think you know that already.

And when Kosovo leaves, you will be alone at last. Is this really what you wanted? And, if not, how did it happen? Why do all your neighbors look the other way now?

The only group that really does want you is the European Union. It finds you geographically irresistible. And still you push the EU away. Why? Do you really prefer to flirt with Russia?

I’m writing this letter to you because it makes me sad to see you all by yourself. To hear the politicians and intellectuals of the world mock you and insult you.

For example, I was at a party with a prominent Canadian politician last week. When the topic of the Balkans came up, he proclaimed that, in his view, Belgrade was a “sewer.”

Imagine my shock. I love Belgrade. It’s not a sewer. But that’s a very common opinion in the West these days.

And do you know what’s worse? As I rose to your defense with that politician, Serbia, I discovered that it’s very hard to defend you these days.

Let me say, in advance, that I know I am an American. And such advice from an American might seem presumptuous. We have very big problems of our own. Nobody wants to know us anymore either.

I read last month that The Pew Global Attitudes Project took a poll recently and found that the favorable view of the United States has now slipped to 9 % in Turkey. Back in 2000, that number was at 52 %. In Indonesia, we are down to 29 %. We used to be at 75 % in 2000.

But the elephant shits where it wants to shit, right? And Serbia – for all its important geography and rich history and vital culture – is not an elephant. Even in Europe.

But I digress. We were talking about how one wants to be around you anymore. Whenever I see you on my television, Serbia, you’re always in trouble: protecting a war criminal or standing proudly on some pedantic legalism. Last week, I saw a news report on American television which reported that you were cruelly neglecting mentally ill patients in your country.

Like I say, it’s very sad. What makes it sadder is history. Serbia’s present unpopularity is a rather new phenomenon. For centuries, outsiders looked on you not with fear and loathing but as a brave underdog.

First, the world saw you take your freedom back from the Ottoman Empire. Yes, it was messy and sometimes unpleasant, but very few nations have an immaculate conception.

And yes, there was all that business with the Archduke and the Black Hand and lighting the spark of World War I. You survived that potential P.R. disaster, too, with your positive image largely intact. You were on the victorious side and the victors write history.

And then there was your greatest moment of glory. Serbia stood up to the Nazis. Bolje rat nego pakt. Yes, you suffered greatly. But you were also heroes – and at just the right time in history.

Has there ever been a better public relations agent for Serbia than Rebecca West? Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is the greatest travel book ever written in English – and she told your stories and your legends so wonderfully to the West that they survived World War II and communism and still had tremendous power even when Tito died in 1980.

All that good P.R. was part of the problem, of course. The worst thing anyone can do is believe their own P.R., right?

And somehow those old stories of tragedy and betrayal and loss were transmogrified. A history that should have been remembered so as not to be repeated – as George Santayana once said – became a contemporary danger that needed to be vanquished.

It’s all there in the SANU Memorandum of 1986. You were strong, Serbia, but you wrote to your neighbors as if you were a victim. And the diminishment of Serbia in that memorandum? A self-fulfilled prophecy.

I bring up George Santayana because you, Serbia, actually turned his famous aphorism on its head: You remembered the past too well, and then willfully repeated it, with the polarities reversed. Serbs remembered themselves as victims – and became oppressors. They remembered the crimes committed against them – and then committed similar crimes.

I won’t waste too much of this letter rehashing the wars in Slovenia and Croatia and Bosnia. But I could. Even now, you do not know enough about the wars in former Yugoslavia. Most of your media kept you in the dark about what was happening in Serbia’s name – or twisted those events into something unrecognizable to those of us outside Serbia.

Those wars are the foundation of your present unpopularity. While you were being kept in the dark, the rest of the world was not being kept in the dark. We saw Vukovar and Sarajevo and Srebrenica. And we saw that it was Serbs in those countries who were doing those things – mostly with the help of Serbia’s government, or, at times, with a shocking and complicit silence from Serbians themselves.

Your crimes were so immense that they threw a shadow on the crimes of others – and the cruelties inflicted on Serbs. Operation Storm is seen by many in the West not as a war crime, but as a justified settling of the score.

Those people are wrong. But they argue that the crimes done to Serbs were karmic retribution – and a rough justice of a sort. And the court of public opinion often ignores the mere letter of the law. (Something that Mr. Kostunica has never really learned, has he?)

It’s the same story with the 1999 NATO bombings. The West saw a repeat of Croatia and Bosnia in Kosovo about to happen. And when it weighed the suffering of ordinary Serbs against the maintenance of political order in Europe, you lost. Again.

But as I say, the era of Milosevic was the foundation of your present unpopularity. Wars do end. Bad leaders are deposed. Countries rehabilitate themselves and rejoin the community of nations.

And this where I find you so difficult to defend, Serbia. Instead of destroying the foundation of your unpopularity, you have clung to it for years and built new structures of injustice on it.

You’ve built a safe house for the biggest war criminals. You’ve built a fancy new dacha for Putin.

And those are just the big things. You’re always in the news for stupid things, too. You get banned from soccer championships for rioting and fined by UEFA for racism. And you have a reputation for intolerance of gays and lesbians and foreigners.

The shocking video on American television the last two weeks was a perfect example, Serbia. The NBC television network ran stories for a week about the shameful neglect of your own mental patients – even children! The pictures of grown men in cribs were bad enough. But the video of emaciated and neglected children was a shameful nightmare.

And this is where the bad P.R. comes in. Yes, there are such conditions in many countries – even members of the European Union and the United States.

But the West is sick of hearing bad news from you, Serbia. And they are willing to believe the worst about you, Serbia, because they have come to expect it.

Your public response to this mental institution scandal is a perfect case in point. For me, someone who is a friend to you, this response is the worst part of all.

The proper response to such a shameful display is to show shame and remorse and compassion – and then begin to fix the problem. And to be fair, Mr. Ljajic has said some good things.

But your prime minister, also speaking on your behalf, in an even louder voice, says that it’s not your fault. It’s bad P.R. Let me quote his words: “We are witnesses to systematic propaganda against Serbia, loaded with fascist overtones.”

These words would be laughable if they were not so grim and pathological. To say that the Serbian state is the victim in this situation is indefensible. Even your best friends cannot defend it. The victims are the people in those institutions – and the good name of ordinary Serbs.

Yes, this is a harsh letter. But I want to end it on a positive note. Serbia has given the world so much. You have a proud history and great ambassadors in culture and the arts.

Not so long ago, when the world thought of Serbia, they thought about Kis and Makavejev. Large, generous talents who found inspiration – and not incarceration – in Serbia’s history. They embraced the world on your behalf.

Your friends – including me – think you have more great talents like that. When we talk about Serbia, we talk about Rambo Amadeus and EXIT festival. When someone calls Belgrade a sewer, we say it’s not true. Not true at all.

Bu the first move in repairing the bad P.R. is yours, Serbia. Your friends can’t do it for you.

You have to close the door on history. You must recognize that justice often lives beyond the mere letter of the law – or the U.N. resolution – and fulfill the obligations that the world has placed on you. You have to accept that a peaceful Serbia and Kosovo in the EU is the best way to protect and empower the Serb minority in the province and also defend its treasures of Serbian culture.

Your enemies are willing to consign you to the darkness for another generation if you do not help yourself. They are happy to have more sanctions and more conflict in Serbia because they believe that you deserve such a fate. That you cannot avoid it. That you cannot change. They think this bad P.R. is your destiny.

Your friends – like me – are distressed to hear such things. But only you, Serbia, can prevent it from becoming your fate.

Please. Serbia as the defender of the faith against Islam? The latest Serbian excuse for being scum. Only a Serbian could use Islamofascism as a justification for attacking Christians in Croatia and Slovenia before they actually fought any Muslims. And the first Muslims they attacked were the most Westernized Muslims in the world — those in Bosnia. At this rate, the mighty Serbs will actually fight Al Qaeda in another millenium or so. Of course, you’d have to get a book on US military history because you’d need the maps inside to help you find the graves of those Islamic fascists that died like worms at the hands of a real military — the American.

Besides, Serbia can’t even be bothered to take care of it’s own weak. With your pathetic birth rates, you and your patron Russia will be distant memories of dead nations a century from now — when the USA will be still protecting the world from Islam and whatever new evils emerge.

Your last gasps will be to sell some more weapons to Iran or Syria before they overwhelm you. Maybe some Muslim dictator will let you build some more bunkers for him and let you live as slaves. But then being slaves to Muslims is what Serbia did best throughout much of history — besides slaughtering civilized and peaceful peoples such as your Byzantine neighbors (just as you did recently with the Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, etal.).

It is Serbia that groveled before the Turks and provided so many of their best killers over the centuries. It is Serbia that despises freedom and capitalism. It is Serbia that competes with Islam only when it comes to treating the weak as dirt or raping women and children. It is Serbia that casually starts world wars and then blames others for their own self-imposed misfortunes.

To Belgrade with (tough) love
Richard Byrne

December 18, 2007 7:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_byrne/2007/12/to_belgrade_with_tough_love.html

Dusan Velickovic is one of Serbia’s most pro-European voices. Ten years ago, in the bleak days of Slobodan Milosevic’s rule, he founded Alexandria, a magazine and literary press that promulgated the principles of civil society and tolerance. (I worked with him as the journal’s American editor.)

When Velickovic was named editor-in-chief of the Belgrade-based weekly Evropa in September, I knew he would use that platform to challenge Serbia’s pall of nationalism and isolation.

Sure enough, a revamped Evropa debuted this month as “Serbia’s first European newsweekly”. Velickovic told me that he wanted “to address the topics which are the most important and hardest issues for Serbia: political extremism, nationalism, war crimes, the Kosovo problem, corruption and a number of Serbian cultural and social myths”.

He asked me to write something about those tough issues from a western perspective. So I gave him an open letter to Serbia, which was published last week.

I acknowledged the awkwardness of an American lecturing Serbs on global unpopularity. But I also explained why those of us who believed that Serbia could change for the better - even in the darkest days of Slobodan Milosevic’s rule - now felt that the country might be a lost cause. That Serbia wanted, like Greta Garbo, to be alone.

I also bemoaned the impossibility of defending Serbia’s current political climate when confronted by those who call Belgrade a “sewer”. More than seven years after Milosevic’s fall, Serbia still refuses to grapple seriously with the horrible legacy of its actions in the 1990s. Its best chance to do so - former prime minister Zoran Djindjic - was brutally gunned down by paramilitary scum. Its worst war criminals, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, remain at large. And its politicians cling foolishly to keeping Kosovo in Serbia, against all demographic tides, to the point of provoking even more conflict in the region.

My letter also pointed to a contemporary Serbia that finds inspiration - and not incarceration - in the country’s heritage and history: the cosmopolitan writings of Danilo Kis and the provocative films of Dusan Makavejev, the annual Exit music festival in Novi Sad and the brilliance of its brightest musical star, Rambo Amadeus.

I ended the letter this way:

You have to accept that a peaceful Serbia and Kosovo in the European Union is the best way to protect and empower the Serb minority in the province and also defend its treasures of Serbian culture.

Your friends - like me - are distressed to hear such things. But only you, Serbia, can prevent it from becoming your fate.

Only you can decide that you do not want to be alone.

The responses I received - even from some of my best friends - are a window into just how difficult resolving Kosovo and integrating Serbia into Europe will be.

My ignorance was one ready retort. One reader emailed Evropa: “Let Richard try to justify and defend his friends ... to us. The fact that he knows Serbia through [the] Exit [festival] is like loving Japan because of Sony TVs.”

Others proclaimed a pox on all sides. It’s an answer with merit, if only because of the west’s blatantly inconsistent positions on self-determination and international justice in the entire Balkan region.

As one friend wrote to me: “I’ve just read your article and there is just one crucial thing that I don’t agree with: the premise that European Union ‘really wants Serbia’. I even agree with that Canadian politician that Belgrade is a sewer. It is just necessary to notice that besides the tons of Serbian shit here, there is also plenty of western shit. Our misfortune is that both those sides enjoy the smell of their shit a lot.”

But the most stunning response came from a friend whom I’ve known for many years. Writing in the voice of Serbia, he said that the country was Job, and not Garbo:

And you seem to be one of three of Job’s friends who came to console him,” he continued, “reminding him how sinful he is, because it appeared so to them. (I can even tell you which one of the three you are in this case: Eliphaz the Temanite, the most benign one, who reminded Job of his previous virtues.) In their logic there was no other alternative, and they sincerely tried to lead him to repentance. His friends turned to be worse tormentors than the horrors he was going through. Because they insulted his intelligence and his sense of right and wrong.

My friend’s reply blazed with vivid but all-too-familiar themes: Kosovo’s heroin trade, the growing Islamisation of Europe, the province’s centrality in Serbia’s culture. But what surprised me most was that he ended his reply by quoting the words of Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church: “If men are men, there will be enough space for everyone who lives in Kosovo. But if men are not men, the entire planet will not be big enough for only two men, like it was in the times of Cain and Abel.”

That my friend reached so readily for the grim spectre of failed sacrifice and fratricide, articulated in the name of religion, convinces me that the looming crisis over Kosovo will end neither easily nor happily. And, also, that Serbia needs a dozen more Evropas to make any dent in that country’s public opinion.

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