Budapest, May–June 1999

Seven years ago, in a short essay on the situation in the region, I resorted to irony in offering a possible solution for Serbia and the Milosševic´ regime. In the essay, which I called War Island, I proposed that on an island in the Danube near Belgrade, an island which is indeed called War Island, we build a place called Milosševic´-land. This land, which we would generously give him, would provide President Milosševic´ and his regime with a real little oasis where they could happily and freely advance their own visions without anything standing in their way. In this small island country, Milosševic´ could pursue his policies to his heart's content, under "laboratory conditions", without endangering Yugoslavia's citizens or "the rest" of the world.

Once again, however, it transpires that mad ideas made in jest are easier and faster to carry out than those that are long-contemplated and rational. Because, unfortunately, the experiment I spoke of as an incredible madness has actually happened, and sadder still, it is being conducted not within the negligibly small area of War Island, but throughout the whole of Yugoslavia itself. The horror movie that has been entertaining viewers world-wide for the better part of two months has as its setting an entire country, one that has been isolated from the rest of the world for eight years now, a country that is assiduously producing a bunker mentality. There will soon be a time of neither war nor peace in this devastated land, because the Island of Serbia project will start playing out. The scope of the humanitarian disaster provoked by NATO's aggression has yet to be fathomed. NATO not only failed to prevent the humanitarian disaster suffered by the Albanian refugees, it actually induced it, for it was not until NATO's aggression that the number of Albanian refugees soared to such dizzying figures. And at the same time, NATO brought about another humanitarian disaster: the scorching of a land and the death of thousands of innocent civilians.

We know from experience that there is a setting for every event, that there is no event without a stage. But for every stage there is a backstage, behind the curtains, where the heart of the theatre lies, and it begins to throb when the stage lights go on and the curtains go up.

Thousands of observers, experts and newspaper reporters are expounding and explaining their theories about the need to "remodel" a people, while for almost three months television screens across the world have been bombarding their viewers with chilling images of Albanian refugees. Occasionally they also show the ruins of Belgrade, Novi Sad, Prisština, Nisš, Podgorica, Valjevo and dozens upon dozens of other Yugoslav cities and towns whose names foreign reporters can barely pronounce. Only yesterday, the people living and dying in these towns were politically a very diverse group. The NATO bombing has done much to change that. Night and day people stand on the bridges of Belgrade, defending them with their own bodies. I recognize faces which only yesterday were on different sides, I recognize faces from the Milosševic´ political establishment and faces that were once, or are still, part of the opposition. NATO's bombs have wiped out the differences between them. At this time, therefore, it is as unrealistic as it is hypocritical to expect any demonstrations against Milosševic´'s regime. Having said that, such things have yet happened. After two months of incessant destruction, several towns in southern Serbia witnessed demonstrations by the mothers of soldiers who have been dying in untold numbers throughout Serbia. When bombs destroy even civilian structures, when they demolish heating plants and bridges, tobacco and foodstuff factories, schools and maternity hospitals, cemeteries and churches, the people's gut reflex does not lead them to change those in power. On the contrary, a cohesion has been achieved that was unimaginable in peacetime.

For years, the only reference for Serbia in the western media was Slobodan Milosševic´. For years, the West equated Serbia with Milosševic´. It therefore said nothing about the hundreds of thousands of the young and educated who left Serbia during the war in Croatia and Bosnia, people who now live all over the world as refugees themselves from Milosševic´'s regime. No one mentions that these hundreds of thousands of young people could have been a potential army. But that "army" refused to take up arms, from day one it refused to fight for the goals of the Milosševic´ regime. Such things, however, do not sell news-papers. My point is reflected in the Amazon syndrome. What exactly is the "Amazon syndrome"? When a herd of cattle crosses the Amazon, the herdsmen sacrifice one of them by throwing it downstream and while it is being devoured by the piranhas, the rest of the herd crosses the river upstream. At the moment, the Amazon syndrome is determining NATO's natural strategy, but in reverse form. The system now is to throw the entire herd downstream so that just one member of the herd, Slobodan Milosševic´, can cross upstream. The main question is, of course, what will happen once the weapons fall silent? The people I meet daily in Budapest, where there are currently about fifty thousand refugees from Yugoslavia, are very worried. They are worried not only because of the refugees, both Albanian and Serbian, but also because NATO's bombs have released toxic matter into the air in Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries and the effects will be so disastrous that one day they will no doubt inspire Steven Spielberg to make a movie about it all. What I mean to say is that, so far, this ill-conceived destruction of Milosševic´'s regime has only destroyed innocent people, the environment, buildings, and in particular, perhaps even because of this, any democratic structure once meant to replace this regime.

The aggression waged against Yugoslavia by the NATO armada has validated the language used by Milosševic´'s regime. Today's Yugoslavia will become a polygon for staging a production of Beckett's "optimism": we will not only be hungry, no, there will be more, we will also be thirsty, and not only that, we will have to be optimistic, and we will also be sick, and not only that, there will be much more, a profusion of terrible things will happen to us, we will be rich, we will be flooded with an abundance of disasters.

For the first time in my life I experience mechanical expulsion. At ten o'clock in the evening on Tuesday, March 23rd, Belgrade's only opposition radio station, the independent B-92, reports that NATO attacks on Yugoslavia have been approved. I know what this means, but I have no feeling of fear or panic, I simply sit there quite calmly, listening to the news and wondering whether it will be cloudy tonight because they say that cloudy weather may postpone the attack. I do not think of leaving the country, I do not think of stirring from my armchair. I turn the radio up every hour on the hour to hear the latest news. At two o'clock in the morning, however, there is nothing. Radio B-92 has gone off the air. The bombing has scored its first result before it has even started. There is not the slightest chance anymore of speaking differently, which means there is no chance at all. That is when I realize that I must leave. I realize that perhaps, by tomorrow even, anyone who has spoken differently these past ten years, will have to keep silent so as not to be silenced. I decide to avoid being muzzled. It is not yet daybreak as I pack the bare essentials into a small suitcase, and take the early morning Avala train to Budapest. I cross the border around noon. Veran Matic´, the editor-in-chief of Radio B-92, one of the rare reeds of bamboo that allowed Belgraders, drowning in the swamp of their isolated country, to breathe all these years, was arrested an hour earlier.

To write from a point defined by the last stop of the Belgrade train? Does this new position change even what I can say? Of course it does, because what I see is determined by my vantage point. At first I see everything from a floating place called a train. All men under the age of forty get off the train at the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, in Subotica. They are seeing off their wives and children, they can go no farther, a state of the immediate threat of war has been declared, one step short of general mobilization. Men under the age of forty have to go back, they have to report to the army—another form of mechanical expulsion, another important result of the NATO attack. Several hours prior to NATO's first attack on Yugoslavia, there is no diversity of voices, and everyone must go into the same army. The diversity of voices has been wiped out, there is but one body of the nation.

That was two months ago. Seven to eight hundred thousand people have left Kosovo since then. At the same time Serbs are leaving for Hungary. This latter exodus, incomparably smaller in numbers, is unfolding silently, almost secretly; it is barely mentioned in the media. Meanwhile, in the past two months a country has been destroyed, and this means not only forty bridges, infrastructure, the entire industry, but also thousands of dead, innocent civilians.

Every day, usually in the morning when NATO attacks taper off, I talk by phone to friends in Belgrade. The smokers among them fret most about the cigarette shortage. Before the start of the attack on Yugoslavia, the cigarette market, like the money market, was a black market. Like cigarettes, German marks and US dollars were bought and sold exclusively on the street. A sure sign of a collapsing economy. Now, however, there is no black market, no black money market and no cigarettes to buy. So now there are no signs of collapse. This does not mean, of course, that the economy has recovered as a result of the war, it simply means that the war has destroyed the collapse itself, and that Yugoslavia may be the only country in the world where there is no longer even the perverse "hope" of a collapse, because the collapse itself has collapsed.

My friends in Belgrade are upset more than anything by being unable to buy cigarettes. They are being forced to give up smoking. They are being forced to be healthy. This is the underlying perversity of the situation they have been living through these past two months: the harbingers of death are ensuring their health. As if bombs prefer to blow away healthy bodies. As if health is the insane ambition of death. As if an ordinary, sometimes healthy and sometimes sick body cannot be killed, or helped.

A few days ago, it is now already late May, a friend in Germany told me about a woman friend of his who goes home after work every evening and sits in front of the television set, anxiously waiting for news about the bombing of Serbia. My friend's friend derives particular enjoyment from this, not because she is "bad", but on the contrary, because she is "good". For, when she sees Belgrade burning, she has the feeling that justice is finally being done, that the criminals are being punished for their crimes. For she believes that every bomb that is dropped on Serbia, wherever it may fall, is falling in the right place. She believes that no one is innocent in Serbia, that all Serbs are criminals and that the death of every Serb means one murderer less in the world.

An innocent or good Serb is, therefore, a contradictio in adiecto. Serbs are guilty by definition: either because they were for Slobodan Milosševic´, or because, if they were against him, they failed to oust him from power. No one is innocent in Serbia and, therefore, nowhere is safe in Serbia. No one in that country over there will be able to hide or be safe, because no one deserves it.

This thesis, which has been the underlying premise of western media portrayals of Serbia for the past ten years, speaks for itself and, as such, is ripe for the rubbish heap in the history of ideas. No additional arguments are required to relegate it to the dump yard of idiocies. It discredits itself by its very nature, a twisted nature that is structurally identical to the Serbian nationalist thesis which claims, for instance, that "all Albanians are stealing our money".

But if this thesis is discredited by both common sense and the whole of twentieth century history, then we must give serious thought to its anti-thesis, which says that there are innocent people living in Serbia as well. At present, for instance, hundreds of thousands of young men in Serbia are hiding from the military police, sleeping in a different apartment every night, unable to leave the country. And if by some miracle they do manage to get out of Serbia, then they go to Budapest, a city where there are currently dozens of thousands of Serbs. And if in Budapest they try to get a visa for, say, Great Britain, they will be turned down because they do not have a proper permit from the military office of the Yugoslav Army. That is the official explanation given by the British Embassy in Budapest.

I hear from my friends in Belgrade that people there are divided into those who go down into the shelters, those who stay at home and those who go out during the NATO bombing to cheer. The latter assemble around ten o'clock every night in the oldest part of the city, Kalemegdan, the old fort on the Danube, or somewhere on the New Belgrade side of the river. They then cheer, carry banners and signs, sing their own songs, shout out slogans and even have their own outfits —it is all like at a soccer game.

The game kicks off with the appearance of the AWACS, glowing like a star, motionless in the sky throughout the night. Then come the American, British, French and German planes. Their twinkling lights are easy to distinguish from those of the Yugoslav anti-aircraft defense, for whom the assembled home crowd is, of course, rooting. And finally, after all these different lights, the fans see a missile, the device that possesses the very human attribute of killing people and destroying buildings. In most cases, the missile appears as a straight sparkling line. This is the trail it leaves behind and it means that the missile is heading for Batajnica, or some other place on the outskirts of Belgrade. When the missile is directed at Belgrade itself, then it looks very different. It leaves no trail visible to the city-dwellers watching it. On the contrary, it creates an optical illusion: like the last version of Jaws where, if you donned special glasses, you felt as if the terrifying shark was always heading straight for you. In this case, without any glasses, you feel as if the missile is going straight at you, wherever you are. You hear a soft, unpleasant sound, and see the light tracing a clear circle in the sky as it heads straight for you. That is when some people, in the grip of fear, start running. They run even though they know everything there is to know about missiles, even though they know that they should not run just because of this impression that it is aiming straight at them.

They know that a missile is not dangerous as long as you can see or hear it. They know that a missile becomes dangerous only when you can no longer see or hear it. A missile becomes mortally dangerous once it is invisible and inaudible, once it is in every respect imperceptible. The missile's logic is this: it is only when the mortal danger has disappeared from your field of vision, when it has vanished from the horizon, when it has given sensory proof that it is harmless, that it kills and then it kills for sure, because its utter absence from sensory perception is a sure sign that the person has been "hit" even before the fact. In a way, therefore, this missile's strategy is extremely complex: first it announces itself, gives a warning and strikes fear, then it removes itself, withdraws, lets you relax and feel relieved, even happy at having escaped death. Then, and only then, inaudibly, invisibly and without sensory perception, is it sure to kill. Its mode of operation can be followed from the facial expression of the person who is already dead only he does not know it yet: first he goes pale, then there is a panicked look in his eyes, then he begins to run, to flee, he still hears the dangerous fearful sound, and then, suddenly, nothing, silence, he stops, checks the silence, the panic disappears from his eyes, a look of relief appears on his face, then a smile, and then, suddenly, in mid-smile, the bomb strikes and the smile spills into the blood of that one moment of relaxation.

If we were to take the missile's killing strategy as a kind of metaphor, in other words if we were to try to "apply" it to another case, a case known by the name of Slobodan Milosševic´, then we could say, perhaps, that Slobodan Milosševic´ is the only person whom NATO's bombs cannot hurt, because he is just such a bomb himself—his entire strategy is the strategy of the NATO bombing—indeed he knows of no other strategy, tactic or manoeuvre, which is why he is the only person who does not flee, who does not panic, who is not afraid at all.

On the one hand, he knows that as long as the bombing lasts, as long as the bombs can be seen and heard, he is not the target, he is absolutely safe, he is protected, his power is not in danger, on the contrary, it is ever stronger, support for his regime is ever more compact, the people will not rise up against Milosševic´, who is opposed to those who are killing the people. The idea that it is actually Milosševic´ who is killing them, except they do not know it because they have been duped by his propaganda, that the people need to be enlightened so they can realize that it is Milosševic´ bombing them, is a shallow and stupid theory, not only because it counts on the impossible—that someone will support the very people who are dropping bombs on their head—but also because it is simply wrong: people cannot be convinced that it is "actually" Milosševic´ killing them when they are actually being killed by NATO. The killer is always the person who is shooting at you, and not a court in the world would put anyone else in the dock. The same is true here. NATO is killing civilians, whatever NATO officials may claim, and these killings are no different from those that NATO is accusing Milosševic´ of committing. An innocent dead man is simply an innocent dead man. Milosševic´ knows this, and it is because he knows it that he knows he is safe as long as the bombing continues.

He also knows something else, however: he knows how to avoid the fate of ordinary mortals who are sure to be hit when the missile becomes invisible and inaudible. Because, when the bombing is over, he will be the big winner, and the more casualties there are, unimaginably more, the bigger a winner he will be. This means that his defeat will be so profound, so catastrophic, so terrible, so unbearable that few in Serbia will see it as a defeat, but rather the opposite, they will see it as a triumphant victory, as the victory of the innocent, who by very virtue of the fact that innocent people were killed, and they were, cannot be defeated. And conversely, (NATO's) victory based on the death of thousands of innocent people can never be a victory, but always only a defeat.

At the present moment, therefore, Milosševic´'s strategy is this: defeat is victory. But not just any kind of defeat, it must be real, absolute defeat. Only such defeat can be turned into victory and, however the story of his political power should end, only such defeat can ensure him immortality in the national myth, the immortality of someone who fought with justice on his side. What nobody seems to understand at this moment is that Milosševic´ is no longer fighting to stay in power. That battle finished the moment the first bomb was dropped on Yugoslavia. He is no longer fighting for some present or future time, he is not fighting for anything that has a time frame, he is fighting for immortality, for absolute victory, for the kind of victory that can only be achieved through heavy defeat. But how did this all begin? And when did it begin?

Everything started, of course, with a story, or, to be more precise, with a change in the register of the narration. The talk that during Tito's rule was for decades kept underground as something illegitimate, talk about our forgotten origins, about our first ancestors who saved us, about our great battles, became the dominant mode of speech after Josip Broz Tito's death. In other words, historical and political speech rather than the speech of law became dominant. The principal question became not the legal foundations of the state, or state and legal matters, but rather the desire to show that the universal truth of the state's legal foundations was in reality a lie that worked to "our" detriment.

This mode of speech implies, first and foremost, that instead of the universally valid truths on which a state should be founded, truth becomes a weapon, a weapon for a "biased" victory. The logic of historical speech is that we are being "defeated" by the universally valid truth, and that the time has now come for us to tell "our" truth which will contribute to our victory. In other words, the dominant stories became the old stories about how much "we" have lost, how much we have been constantly losing since times of yore, for centuries, but especially in these past several decades, when we were forced to forget our victory in the Second World War, when as "victors" we were forced to surrender victory to the "defeated".

The age-old victors who keep losing their victory are, of course, the Serbs. The age-old losers who, despite defeat, keep winning, are, of course, the Albanians. The Albanians are the ones who defeated us after our victory by establishing a law which would apply universally to both us and them. Because we were forced to accept this law for them as well, we lost all our rights and were defeated.

That, in brief, was the mode of speech that gripped a part of the Serbian intelligentsia in the late 1980's. It was then that two statements were revived in ghostly fashion, and the said Serbian political talk organized itself around them. One was the statement by writer and Academy member Dobrica Cosic´ that "Serbs always lose in peacetime what they gain in war", and the other was the statement by poet and Academy member Matija Beckovic that "Kosovo is the most precious Serbian word".

That Serbs always lose in peacetime what they gain in war basically means that peace brings Serbs the greatest losses, that Serbs are ruined in peacetime, that peace as such defeats them and that their only way out has always been, as it is now—war. Because Serbs win, Serbs know how to protect themselves only in war. The other statement, by the other Academy member, denoted the region where this reckoning of wins and losses was to be conducted over the ensuing ten years. It said clearly that this region was Kosovo, and that Serbs would pay the highest price for it. And the highest price, of course, is life, or death—which amounts to the same thing. And so a historical and political ideology started being produced in the region delineated by these two statements, an ideology which finally proclaimed our truth and promised our victory.

Slobodan Milosševic´, an apparatchik of no account, already politically alive but unnoticeable, lost in the dusty chambers and vast buildings of what was the disappearing ruling party, was suddenly invented as a phantasm who could speak the historical language of our justice and our truth. Slobodan Milosševic´ is a phantasm of Serbian "national" ideology, a Pinocchio made solely for the purpose of finally telling everyone, once and for all, our truth, more truthful than all other truths, for ensuring us our biased victory.

This Pinocchio, however, was designed carefully. He was made so that he could oblige the phantasm of the nation. Like every phantasm, he emerged suddenly, out of nowhere. Noone (except, perhaps, for a small number of people still versed in matters of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, a party which was disappearing) knew anything about him. He appeared like a blank sheet of paper, on which anything, of course, could be inscribed. Written onto this empty sheet of paper was how Slobodan Milosševic´ is a modest, simple man who works in a bank, lives in a small apartment with his wife, a university professor, and his two children who are good at school and like sports. Written onto this sheet of paper was how Slobodan Milosševic´ is a very ordinary man, one of us, someone who thinks the way we do, and who wants what we want, who feels all our pain and suffering.

The invention known as "Slobodan Milosševic´" was not based on the logic of law: for that you have to want what the law wants. Here, on the contrary, the logic was historical and political: I will wish what you wish for, all my wishes are simply your desires, but all your desires run counter to the existing law, because that law deprives you of your rights, that law causes you harm. From the very start, Slobodan Milosševic´'s style of historical and political speech was anti-law.

This style of speech, like the action that followed it, was based on the struggle against the existing "ruler", the existing state legal system, which, according to this style was legal but not legitimate, because it was in contravention of Serbian interests. Symbolically speaking, this struggle for absolute justice was launched the night that Slobodan Milosševic´ promised Kosovo Serbs: "no one will beat you up anymore". He made this promise to Serbs demonstrating in Kosovo, who had "confronted" the state police. With the words "noone will beat you up anymore", Slobodan Milosševic´ stood up to the state police, in rebellion against the existing state system and the existing state.

But in the coming years, when Milosševic´, legitimized as a fighter for "justice" and the truth of the Serbian people, himself became president of the Serbian state, his famous statement that "noone will beat you up anymore"(which helped to bring him to power!) took on other connotations. In the years that followed, Albanians who demonstrated against the Serbian state were killed, and that at a time when Milosševic´'s new, rising power proclaimed the new Serbian constitution. They reportedly had not been killed as citizens of a country whose president had promised a state where there would be no beatings; they had been killed because, by very virtue of their rebellion against that same state, they had proven not to be citizens of that state, to be against, and therefore, outside that state.

The historical discourse thus began to reshape itself into a legal discourse, into talk of sovereignty which had to be protected. And it was this legal discourse, based on the monstrousness of various historical stories, that was used in Belgrade several years later, this time against Serbs who were demonstrating against Milosševic´ and against the advent of war. It was only then that the terrible divide in the strategy of Milosševic´'s rule revealed itself. Because Milosševic´ has held on to power by resorting to the language of law against anyone who threatens to rock his regime. Such people, who, as it was explained, attack the very sovereignty of the Serbian state, could be imprisoned, beaten up, killed. On the other hand, Milosševic´ has managed to maintain his supporters by constantly using the language of historical speech and talking about the constant harm being done to Serbs.

This is the only explanation for how Milosševic´ has managed to stay in power even after the war in Croatia, even after the war in Bosnia, after wars which most people in Serbia saw as defeats. For the war in Croatia ended with the expulsion of the entire Serbian population from Croatia, with the utterly successful ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia. "Storm", the military operation carried out by the Croatian army and planned with the logistic assistance of American and German generals, did not overly upset the world media, and the hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees were incomparably less visible on CNN and other world television stations than the hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees all these past weeks. Why this should be is a story in itself, and the reasons probably lie in Milosševic´'s constant confrontation with the West ever since he took power, which is not the case with Tudjman's regime in Croatia.

By simply bearing in mind the historical and political style of speech around which Milosševic´ has built his rule, we can understand his readiness to fight NATO. It is wrong to assume that Milosševic´ did not believe NATO would attack Yugoslavia. The assumption, of course, is logical, but mistaken all the same.

Eleven weeks after the NATO attack, the result is a country in ruins and close to two hundred thousand Serbian refugees from Kosovo joining three hundred thousand earlier Serb refugees. Those three hundred thousand Serbs left Croatia in no more than a week in August 1995, when the Croatian army in the course of Operation Storm cleansed Croatia of Serbs. This was one ethnic cleansing operation that proved successful. Four years later, many of these Serbian refugees from Croatia are ‘living' in camps the length and breadth of Serbia.

The Kosovo refugees, however, have not arrived in Serbia yet. The Milosševic´ regime does not want them in Serbia, and even if they are allowed in, that will only be into the south of the country, in no way must they come to Belgrade. The Serbian regime is intent on hiding from its citizens the true proportions of the catastrophe which its own policy over the past ten years triggered off. The fruit of this war is a new level of hatred in the relationship between Albanians and Serbs. One thing is certain: the International Community steps into the 21st century with Kosovo as an active volcano. Nor shall we forget that in consequence of the war, the demographic map of Macedonia has changed, which may well lead to conflict there.

The Albanians who fled from Kosovo, close to a million of them, will slowly return to their homes, or rather to the ruins of their homes. At the same rate, light will be thrown on the crimes committed by the Serbian regime in Kosovo. Of course the foul deeds of the KLA must be taken into account too, but after all that has happened, given the way in which Milosševic´ has "cut through" the Kosovo knot, it is no secret who is responsible for most of the crimes in Kosovo.

I do not know if the Serbian regime will, this June, celebrate the 610th anniversary of the Battle of Blackbird's Field, as they celebrated ten years ago when Milosševic´'s star started to ascend. But it is certain that Milosševic´, the uncrowned king of the ruins playing the wounded lion (carrion eater would be more appropriate) will do his best to cling to power. In other words, the citizens of Serbia will have to travel through the circles of Hell before they can turn towards a better future. This means that they must survive a winter in a country in ruins. In other words the citizens of Serbia can look forward to sinking further into catastrophe. It remains an open question how much longer this last journey between the two poles of their catastrophe will take. ß

Translated from the Serbian by Mary Dennis