Most of us, struggling to understand what is happening in Yugoslavia begin to see ever more clearly the ugly visage of the New World Order powers trying to bomb an ethnic conflict into smithereens - by insisting that folks of different ethnic interests ***must*** get along, or else it will rain bombs!
This is where personal vignettes come in that act as antidote to massive media indoctrination. Read this fine essay titled "The Serbian Nightmare" which first appeared in Final Conflict, a UK-based news service. (FinalConflict@dial.pipex.com)
PARAGE, Apr. 11 - We received the following contribution from Charles Alverson, an American journalist and teacher, formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a writer for Rolling Stone, who has been living in Serbia for nearly five years. He says he intends to go on living there.
"Right now, for an American being in Serbia is like living in a bad dream but not exactly a nightmare. Here in the Vojvodina countryside about midway between Belgrade and southern Hungary, disturbed only by anti-air raid sirens and the dull boom of distant anti-aircraft fire, everyday life is too peaceful to support such a dramatic description.
But all the same it is very strange.
I mean, the country is being bombed by NATO, those defenders of European peace, allegedly to protect the ethnic Albanian Yugoslavs in Kosovo. But ethnic Albanians are daily fleeing Kosovo and Serbia in ever-greater masses. The bombing is obviously not working. Some 28,000 NATO troops perched just across the Macedonian border await, President Clinton tells us, an "invitation, from the Yugoslav government to come in and restore the peace." Bombs, apparently, do not need an invitation, but troops do. So the troops, potential saviors of the ethnic Albanians, sit idly amid growing Macedonian hostility while the international media scream louder and louder about "ethnic cleansing."
The curious current worldview of the Serbs asks us to believe two things simultaneously: that the Serbs are superhuman and that they are also subhuman. They are superhuman in that they should not really mind turning over a nice chunk of their nation (just under 10 per cent) to an ethnic Albanian republic because the majority there simply does not want to be Yugoslavs. The world asks Serbia: What is the big deal about this? Never mind the Serbian view of Kosovo as the cradle of Serbian culture drenched with the blood of Serbian martyrs over more than 600 years, etc. In a very real way, it is the equivalent of telling Mr. and Mrs. Jones: "Look, the relations sharing your house outnumber you, and they are unhappy about the way you have treated them. So, why don't you just move out of a couple of rooms and let them take over? And invite in some nice policemen for an unlimited time to make sure things go smoothly? Come to your senses, folks or we'll keep bombing you until you do."
Your superhuman Serb is supposed to be above such mundane concerns as patriotism, historical and cultural pride and simply the fact that a part of his country is suddenly going to require a visa to visit. He is supposed to reject not only Big Serbia, that mythical state beloved of the editorial writers who have forgotten all the Serbian history they never learned, but positively embrace Little (or even Minimalist) Serbia, the small-economy size nationlet the world might possibly leave him to enjoy. My Serbian wife, Zivana, claims that the Vojvodina region where we live with large ethnic Hungarian, Slovakian and German minorities will be the next bit of Serbia to be surgically removed. Before the Kosovo-inspired bombing, I thought she was being paranoid.
At the same time, the Serbs are urged to be superhuman enough to ignore a little thing like an armed uprising and to fight a civil war against guerrillas without upsetting or displacing non-combatants, (and) they are accused of being subhuman in their treatment of the ethnic Albanians. No atrocity, no brutality is too extreme to be attributed to the vicious Serbs, especially by journalists far from the scene or those with an axe to grind. Their blood lust whetted by the Bosnian War, the Serbs are caricatured as eager to persecute the innocent ethnic Albanians simply because they are not Serbs and do not want to stay Yugoslavians.
It probably does no good for me to insist that these do not resemble the Serbs that I have come to know in nearly five years of living in the country. You may think that I am naive to mention that in all that time I have seldom witnessed a public argument and never seen even a fistfight. Perhaps there is something magical about donning a uniform that turns an 18-year-old conscripted Serb into a "beast."
I don't pretend to know what is going on in Kosovo in these dark times. But I hope for the best while fearing the worst. What I see in Belgrade is a maligned and persecuted people reacting with courage and humor to the phenomenon of defenselessness under the bombs of NATO.
All over Belgrade people wear pinned-on target badges to reflect their contempt for the bombers and those who sent them. The sight of a young mother pinning targets on her toddler and a baby in a pushchair at a huge pop concert in the center of Belgrade typifies the spirit of a people who are battered but not yet defeated."
Charles Alverson, Serbia
Thought for the Day:
"A post World War II-type reconstruction plan will be needed in the Balkans once the current conflict there is over, but the region 'will never be safe with a belligerent tyranny in their midst,' President Clinton said Thursday."
(Attributed to an "AP story" sent in by a ZGram reader.)
Back to Table of Contents of the April 1999 ZGrams