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A L S O+T O D A Y
Banned in Belgrade
T A B L E+T A L K NATO bombs are blasting Yugoslavia. But will the airstrikes be enough to halt Milosevic's ethnic cleansing? Take your place at the round table in the Headlines area of Table Talk
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THE KOSOVO MYTH | PAGE 1, 2, 3
What did you learn about Kosovo when you were young? I was born in Belgrade in 1955 and ethnically my background is Serbian ... When I was young, I remember as a boy sitting with my grandfather who, after a few shots of slivovice (plum brandy), would start reciting poems about heroes of old. I would get very emotional about this as a child. It stood for the tremendous sacrifice that the nation had to endure under Turkish domination for the sake of Europe and the West. But growing up I never in my mind connected those Turks that were described as the bad guys in the epic poetry with the actual Muslims around me. While growing up, our Communist education meant we did not know what ethnicity anyone belonged to. We all spoke the same language, we all looked the same, so there were no visible markers or identities to speak of. Only now when I try to recall a name -- I left in '82 -- I think, "Oh, that person must have been a Muslim, or that person must have been a Croat." But at that time I had no idea -- we were all friends. Do you have a sense of what other Serbs think of Milosevic and what is happening in Kosovo now? The Kosovo myth was a part of the national imagination up until the mid-'90s or so, but after the Bosnian war there has been such a level of disillusionment and depression in Serbia that less and less people will be swayed to believe in any part of the Kosovo myth. It really is a question of those Serbs who live in Kosovo, which is such a tiny minority. I have a mother and father and relatives living there [in Serbia] who are anti-Milosevic. I don't know a person who is for him when I go there. Everybody despises the man and they see the game that he is playing basically by signing all these agreements with the West after threats ... he is just buying himself another two or three years of time as ruler. Then how does Milosevic stay in power? Although he's a malignant person, he is incredibly cunning and smart as far as his own power is concerned. You cannot really call him a nationalist, because you always think that nationalists will care for the nation that they are part of. That's absolutely not the case with Milosevic. He just knows how to stay in power. He controls almost all media outlets and manipulates public opinion almost at will, in the style of old totalitarian dictators. The only way that rural Serbs have of finding out what goes on around them is through state-run radio and television. So, they keep voting for Milosevic and his party, since they represent themselves as defenders of Serbian national interests. There were tremendous demonstrations in Belgrade during '96, and this was the first signal to me that if the West really wanted Milosevic out they would have supported these demonstrations in some material way, they would stand behind them. Instead there were statements of support but there was nothing concretely done. Now people have to devote considerable energy just to daily survival, finding food, finding a light bulb or something like that that was a normal thing in the past [Yugoslavia is under economic sanctions imposed during the Bosnian war], so they don't have any energy for political engagement, especially after the failure of the 1996 demonstrations. To what extent do you think that the Serbs have been wronged? One issue is how did Kosovo become so predominantly Albanian, which is not really discussed. The Ottomans had a policy of population transfers in which they would never allow too many of the indigenous communities living next to each other, which really created a tension between the communities there. Then during the Second World War was the worst legacy, and the closest to us, which was that Albanians were allied with fascist Italy, and in Kosovo they carried out ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. This is when the majority of the Serbs were expelled or murdered. The Serbs have also been wronged by the media, which is notorious for its selective reporting. In 1995 when there was a two-week campaign by NATO against the Bosnian Serbs ... I think many [of the Serbs in Yugoslavia] at that time thought that maybe it was justified because of the atrocities that the Bosnian Serbs committed. But of course at the same time there were all these atrocities committed by the Croats and the Muslims that were sort of covered up, but nobody really wanted to talk about that then. There were also massacres of Serbian civilians in Kosovo during the summer and fall of '98, but no major interest in the West to learn more about them. There is a feeling that the Serbs deserve to be punished for all their past transgressions in Bosnia and Croatia and that their lives are worth less than the lives of other ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia. Are NATO and the West being hypocritical? There is clearly a double standard if you compare the situation in Kosovo to the situation of the Kurds in Turkey, for example, or in the case of Israel and its gross abuses against the Palestinians. There is no threat of bombing Istanbul or any part of Turkey, and [the West] is not threatening to bomb Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, obviously. Somehow the Albanians at this point have been chosen as a "pet nation." N E X T+P A G E+| Serbs anguish over their image in the West as bloodthirsty barbarians |
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