If the "resistance" bona fides of Sartre's Occupation-era work has been called into question (I am often prone to paraphrase the historian Julian Jackson and argue that if you have to parse out the meaning and intent and even then it is still available only to a discreet few then I wonder what is meant by "resistance" or member thereof - in more cynical moments I fall to the postion of Merleau-Ponty and say that all resisters were killed) there remains no doubt about the cultural legacy of said work. Particularly the premier piece of insouciant, though incessant, dread - or at least the life-looping, shoulder-shrugging, make of it what you will static maze - No Exit. The "aura" of this work (to steal from Walter Benjamin) - if not simply France's 20thC Voltaire, as de Gaulle was wont to call the wobbly walleyed philosopher - and the more than faint residual draw that existentialism generally has left in the land of the champions of ennui, still marks much of the most frequently (and vociferously) lauded cultural products. Despite its relative age (being just over a decade old), I admit that I think most here of Kassovitz's 1995 "La Haine." True, the frowsy interior of a Second Empire parlor has been replaced by the more expansive (but equally entrapping) confines of the banlieue and the conversation has changed from discussions of the inappropriateness of a man presenting himself to a woman in his shirt-sleeves to any manner of dress in a space of decidedly fractured social scapes, but the general dynamic of three characters interacting in a setting besotted by a very Sartrean utterance "tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie" (you are nothing else but your life) remains tightly to type.
Of course it's hardly a secret that the banlieues have (overtly?) re-entered the French political and social scene in the last couple of years; and given Sarkozy's use of the inflammatory "racaille" during the 2005 riots they were an important part of the presidential election this spring. Even with all this being said, I was still caught by how perfectly and peculiarly "French" the recent attempt to manage urban deliquency in the port city of Le Havre was. Anyone familiar with Luc Besson's 2006 parkour vehicle knows that the entry-ways of the modernist blocks of apartments that make up the banieues are frequent hang-out spots for local toughs with little other place to go. According to Jean-Pierre Noit, Director General of the Public Housing Authority, this has become a serious issue in the port city's housing projects. "Entry-halls should be places of conviviality," he insisted, "but the reality is that they become the focus for social tensions, and many tenants find them unbearable." To that end, a daringly existential experiment has been undertaken that once again reduces the outlines of the social experiment called life to the confines of a single space - this time not a drawing room but a "faux hall" intended to create the illusion of a foyer to an apartment building - complete with door and windows, interphone, entry code-pad, mail/letter boxes, fake elevator door, and a stairway to the roof of what is actually a former 12 meter long shipping container - some 30 meters away from an apartment block of 400 "real" apartments. The results, and discussion, of the experiment have been mixed. Nathalie Nail, of the PFC, has called it a "total failure" and another example of how the youth of France are "made fun of" rather than listened to. One of the local youths has insisted that no one ever goes to it while another, Kevin, testily called it a joke; "They're trying to pack us in like sardines in tins."
Given the awkward way in which the French are only beginning to address the role and place of immigrants in the country - beyond futbol of course - there is something about this that does stike uneasily. Though is it much different than a midnight basketball league, just with a little more ennui? Whatever else might be the case according to Noit, given Le Havre's place as a port city, it would take no more time to bring in the crane and remove the box than it did to place it in the first place - and as an experiment in social organization, "the object was to empty the halls of the buildings to make life more pleasant for the tenants, for the moment it has worked." And if there is something that might mark the experiment at least a temporary success, lending it some of its own gritty authenticity - the faux hall was recently vandalized.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Fear of the Other in Campaign 2008
Maybe it’s just me reading too much into it, but I am currently aghast at the level of fear mongering vis-à-vis the "Other" that going on right now in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Case in point: Mitt Romney’s recent quote, “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”
In this gaffe (or Freudian slip—call it what you like), Romney’s fear of the Other is laid bare. The Democrats—personified by a black man and a woman—are bent on destroying America from the inside (the internal other) while the jihadists target America from the outside (the external other). The irony is that even if this was a mistake (I am sure it was), it is not a departure from the general tone of the Republican discourse as the candidates prepare for January in Iowa.
I listened to Sunday’s Republican debate in its entirety only to hear former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani “softly” threaten Putin with his “big stick” (the phallic undertones need not be explored here) to thunderous applause. This while Ron Paul was booed for suggesting that the PKK terrorism is a Turkish issue and should be left to Ankara to solve (after the Hispanophobe Tancredo eviscerated Speaker Pelosi over the Armenian resolution).
To believe the Republicans, Iran is bent on world domination and capable of projecting its imaginary missiles at Finland (thus the universal approval of magical missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” wherever—or should I say whenever—that is). China and India were both held up as nefarious economic and demographic bogeys lurking on the other side of the globe, but insidiously near in the deterritorialized world of call centers and cheap shipping containers. Even the generally even-handed Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threatened America with the specter of a bunch of “old hippies” (the late 1960s internal other) finding out their drugs are free under “HilaryCare.”
Let’s hope this frightfest is simply part of an “October surprise” by the Republicans, and that after Halloween, the politics of the real rather that politics of the preposterous seeps back in to the Red campaign.
In this gaffe (or Freudian slip—call it what you like), Romney’s fear of the Other is laid bare. The Democrats—personified by a black man and a woman—are bent on destroying America from the inside (the internal other) while the jihadists target America from the outside (the external other). The irony is that even if this was a mistake (I am sure it was), it is not a departure from the general tone of the Republican discourse as the candidates prepare for January in Iowa.
I listened to Sunday’s Republican debate in its entirety only to hear former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani “softly” threaten Putin with his “big stick” (the phallic undertones need not be explored here) to thunderous applause. This while Ron Paul was booed for suggesting that the PKK terrorism is a Turkish issue and should be left to Ankara to solve (after the Hispanophobe Tancredo eviscerated Speaker Pelosi over the Armenian resolution).
To believe the Republicans, Iran is bent on world domination and capable of projecting its imaginary missiles at Finland (thus the universal approval of magical missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” wherever—or should I say whenever—that is). China and India were both held up as nefarious economic and demographic bogeys lurking on the other side of the globe, but insidiously near in the deterritorialized world of call centers and cheap shipping containers. Even the generally even-handed Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threatened America with the specter of a bunch of “old hippies” (the late 1960s internal other) finding out their drugs are free under “HilaryCare.”
Let’s hope this frightfest is simply part of an “October surprise” by the Republicans, and that after Halloween, the politics of the real rather that politics of the preposterous seeps back in to the Red campaign.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Scam Czars to the West: “You are getting what you deserve.”
The NYTimes website has an interesting article—Scam Czars: What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’? (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/weekinreview/21levy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp )
Here are some quotes from that article:
What a “bravo” way of constructing an online nationalism course from a new generation of IT-equipped Russians! Indeed, it is a totally Putin-style “Saying NO to the West!”
Friday, October 19, 2007
from sign and sight
Our negroes, our enemies"
Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic outlines the calamitous relationship of his compatriots to the Albanians.
For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply "our negroes." Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia's arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.
The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian "melting pot." In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito's death the country's diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.
At the top of this vertical, in the far north on the border with Austria, was the economically most advanced republic Slovenia. In a certain sense Slovenia stood for the permanent "high" in what was then the common homeland. You then moved on down through Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia in the centre to Montenegro and Macedonia in the far south, the chronic "low" of our former country. "The further south, the more deplorable" ("Sto juznije to tuznije") was the popular saying used to describe the ladder along which a specifically Yugoslavian brand of racism was always directed at those who were on the next rung down geographically and economically. Hence the Slovenians showed the contempt they felt for the country bumpkins, idlers or failures of the other republics most clearly towards the Croatians; the Croatians for their part passed it on to the Serbs; and the latter, in turn, took pleasure in making fun of the Macedonians or Montenegrins. The Bosnians, on the other hand, as the people who inhabited the centre of the Republic of Yugoslavia, were the object of mockery from all sides.
But right at the very bottom came the Albanians who lived in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Their language wasn't a Slavic language. They were poorer than the rest of us. Their culture was pretty alien. In the motley collection of different kinds of Yugoslavs they, as the southernmost ethnic group, were condemned to play the role of the absolute outsiders.
Anything that the rest of us in former Yugoslavia claimed to know about the Albanians was put together from a hodgepodge of offensive cliches. They were generally referred to derisively as the Siptari or the shiptars. If we didn't hate them openly, it was only because we did not consider them worthy of our hatred. Even at the best of times there was never any dialogue between "them" and "us."
The Kosovo Albanians were for us just a bunch of primitive, at most sometimes comical golliwogs, our Uncle Toms. In other words, they were our negroes. Yet just as the existence of the despised Albanians scarcely penetrated the consciousness of the average Yugoslav of the Tito era, so the casual cultural racism of that time seems, from today's perspective, rather harmless compared with the violent, murderous hatred of the "shiptars" that seized the Serbs following the death of Tito and after the first wave of "unrest" in Kosovo at the end of the twentieth century. This resentment became particularly intense throughout the phase of burgeoning nationalism in all the republics, during the brutal tyranny perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to ruthlessly tear apart the common state. During the 1990s politicians and the media also began using the colloquial and derogatory term "shiptars," a label that increasingly stuck to make them the object of our paranoia. More and more often people began to speak of them as though the only reason they existed was to crush and annihilate "us Serbs".
One of the legends that did the rounds in Milosevic's version of the news was a historical myth that went roughly like this: "Once there were far fewer Albanians than Serbs in Kosovo. But over the years (by means of a miracle that has never been fully explained! V.A.) they came to Kosovo across the Albanian border and just settled here in our country, before our very eyes, without so much as a 'by your leave'." Equipped with what in our eyes were positively animal-like qualities, they developed the collective determination of termites and, what is more, bred like rabbits. Their uncontrollable virility and high birth rates made us shiver, indeed we shuddered with disgust. At the same time the Serbs were constantly being publicly entreated to profess their hatred of the "shiptars." No Serb was considered worth his salt unless he cherished this hatred. Thus official propaganda during the Milosevic era, supported unerringly by the media, declared the "shiptars" to be the Serbs' archetypal enemy; indeed, without this enemy the Serbs' own existence would have been practically unthinkable. For where would Batman be without his Joker? Now the "shiptars" were no longer pathetic Uncle Toms. On the contrary, they had transformed themselves into terrifying, dangerous demons, intractable and persistent in their mission to take over our historic territory, to snatch away from us the Kosovo Polje, the Kosovo Field, "the cradle or our culture," to steal our myths, to rob us of that which belonged to us by "historic right". (More here)
Determined to settle scores with these "shiptars" once and for all, our President Milosevic conceived a fantastic plan. In his murky empire of evil, poverty, ethnic hatred and hyperinflation, the army and the police aided by the mass media were to be allowed to discriminate against and humiliate the Kosovo Albanians without incurring sanctions. The Albanians would be able to be arbitrarily dismissed or arrested, their property plundered, their families and villages destroyed. Absolved of any responsibility and encouraged by popular support, the president for many years painstakingly put his plan into action, bringing violence and destruction first to Kosovo and then to the whole territory of Yugoslavia. Following the Dayton Agreement in December 1995 there was a brief ceasefire, but in 1999 the spiral of violence finally led Milosevic back to where it had all started, back to Kosovo.
Yet Kosovo was also the place that was to seal Milosevic's fate after thirteen years of his destructive rule. When NATO began bombing the main culprit, Serbia-Montenegro, at the end of March 1999, it destroyed some more of the infrastructure and claimed hundreds of civilian victims. Yet what followed was the end of Serbian state power in the province of Kosovo. At the same time the roles of perpetrator and victim were once more reversed in this hapless place. There was an exodus of thousands of Serbs and Roma and a rampage of revenge by the victors; and once again the victims were almost exclusively innocent civilians. The hope of any normality between ordinary Serbs and Albanians, of them being able to live side by side in the foreseeable future, was gone.
Milosevic had played his game so cunningly that only one kind of epilogue was possible: the UN war crimes tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nevertheless, even then, Milosevic managed to escape the place where justice might have been done, if only by suffering a heart attack. By eluding justice he left us with the question of blame. Not least for this reason the citizens of Serbia are burdened with guilt and shame, whether we accept it or not.
A few years ago the Serbian media reported for months on end on mass graves whose dead had been identified by forensic experts as Kosovo Albanians. One of the most horrific images was that of a refrigerated lorry out of which murdered Kosovo Albanian women, children and old people were disposed in Lake Perucac, near the mouth of the river Derventa. On our screens we saw half-decayed, clothed corpses being pulled out of the water, we heard the shocking confession of the driver, who had been told to transport the dead out of Kosovo in order to cover up the crime. At the time a Belgrade television station broadcast an interview with a man bathing untroubled in this beautiful lake from whose green waters the corpses had just been pulled. When the reporter asked whether this bothered him the simpleton stood there shaking his head as the water dripped off him. Blinking innocently and smiling laconically, he looked at the camera and said without turning a hair: "To be honest, I don't believe all that," and dived defiantly back into the water.
The guy is mad, you might think. But actually the opposite is the case. His reaction is absolutely understandable. Serbian citizens have a decade of brainwashing by politicians and the media behind them, a decade of lessons in how continuous lying can eventually make people believe their own lies. The bathing man was simply using that acquired skill.
Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities. It is so new that we don't even have a proper word for it, and those who realize what is happening simply use the English word instead. Denial. This denial, coldness in the face of human suffering, an inability to show the most rudimentary empathy, shows that we as a society are in a no-man's land. Sometimes it seems as if we did not want to escape the maelstrom of the past. The question of the status of Kosovo, and at least as important, of our future relationship with the Kosovo Albanians, are among the most decisive questions of all, and they could be used as a measure of our political maturity. The reasons why we don't take a constructive approach to them are more profound. Today's Serbian society is tired of politics. It is tired of lost wars, exhausted by chronic poverty and the feeling that the Serbs must see themselves either as victims or as the guilty party. It fears change and shirks responsibility.
In other words, events have ensured that our view of the Kosovo Albanians will remain unchanged for a long time to come. To the traditional resentment there has simply been added the subliminal rage of the loser, which is vented in self-pity and may be coupled with the mystical idea of being inherently in the right. Indeed, the unavoidable loss of the former southern Serbian province of Kosovo is in certain circles of our society perceived as tantamount to an apocalypse. Not long ago the centre of Belgrade was plastered with posters designed to fool us: "There is no Serbia without Kosovo!" But whoever says that is lying, and many people fundamentally know this – for despite everything it is becoming increasingly evident that the status of Kosovo is becoming marginal in the everyday life and concerns of the Serbs. In fact many citizens – our young particularly – disappointed by all sides, seem to have decided that they don't believe in anything any more, like that simpleton bathing in the lake.
But what can one expect from a generation that has been raised amid war and destruction, fed with a policy of overt hatred, and that can't get a visa to become acquainted with other countries and cultures? Unfortunately, probably not very much. Our young people have begun to hate again, without inhibitions, with a frivolous delight. Surveys of school students are enough to make your hair stand on end – and they confirm the impression one gains from everyday life. More than 30 percent of the pupils at Serbian middle schools believe that one "should neither become friends with Albanians nor visit them." Almost a third of young people believe that the Chinese – the only relatively large group of foreigners in our country – should have their residence permits removed, even if they obey the law. Every third teenage boy and every second teenage girl is looking down on homosexuals and people infected with HIV.
The thought of the ghastly success with which contemporary Serbian society has deformed the thoughts and emotions of young people makes one shudder. Maybe the solution is simply to wait stoically and be patient. Maybe one only needs to hope that a new generation will grow up under more peaceful and healthier circumstances. Perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children.
*
Vladimir Arsenijevic was born in 1965 in Pula/Croatia. His prize-winning novels have been translated into many languages. He lives in Belgrade.
This article orignally appeared in German in Die Zeit on 20 September, 2007.
Translation: Melanie
Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic outlines the calamitous relationship of his compatriots to the Albanians.
For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply "our negroes." Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia's arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.
The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian "melting pot." In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito's death the country's diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.
At the top of this vertical, in the far north on the border with Austria, was the economically most advanced republic Slovenia. In a certain sense Slovenia stood for the permanent "high" in what was then the common homeland. You then moved on down through Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia in the centre to Montenegro and Macedonia in the far south, the chronic "low" of our former country. "The further south, the more deplorable" ("Sto juznije to tuznije") was the popular saying used to describe the ladder along which a specifically Yugoslavian brand of racism was always directed at those who were on the next rung down geographically and economically. Hence the Slovenians showed the contempt they felt for the country bumpkins, idlers or failures of the other republics most clearly towards the Croatians; the Croatians for their part passed it on to the Serbs; and the latter, in turn, took pleasure in making fun of the Macedonians or Montenegrins. The Bosnians, on the other hand, as the people who inhabited the centre of the Republic of Yugoslavia, were the object of mockery from all sides.
But right at the very bottom came the Albanians who lived in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Their language wasn't a Slavic language. They were poorer than the rest of us. Their culture was pretty alien. In the motley collection of different kinds of Yugoslavs they, as the southernmost ethnic group, were condemned to play the role of the absolute outsiders.
Anything that the rest of us in former Yugoslavia claimed to know about the Albanians was put together from a hodgepodge of offensive cliches. They were generally referred to derisively as the Siptari or the shiptars. If we didn't hate them openly, it was only because we did not consider them worthy of our hatred. Even at the best of times there was never any dialogue between "them" and "us."
The Kosovo Albanians were for us just a bunch of primitive, at most sometimes comical golliwogs, our Uncle Toms. In other words, they were our negroes. Yet just as the existence of the despised Albanians scarcely penetrated the consciousness of the average Yugoslav of the Tito era, so the casual cultural racism of that time seems, from today's perspective, rather harmless compared with the violent, murderous hatred of the "shiptars" that seized the Serbs following the death of Tito and after the first wave of "unrest" in Kosovo at the end of the twentieth century. This resentment became particularly intense throughout the phase of burgeoning nationalism in all the republics, during the brutal tyranny perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to ruthlessly tear apart the common state. During the 1990s politicians and the media also began using the colloquial and derogatory term "shiptars," a label that increasingly stuck to make them the object of our paranoia. More and more often people began to speak of them as though the only reason they existed was to crush and annihilate "us Serbs".
One of the legends that did the rounds in Milosevic's version of the news was a historical myth that went roughly like this: "Once there were far fewer Albanians than Serbs in Kosovo. But over the years (by means of a miracle that has never been fully explained! V.A.) they came to Kosovo across the Albanian border and just settled here in our country, before our very eyes, without so much as a 'by your leave'." Equipped with what in our eyes were positively animal-like qualities, they developed the collective determination of termites and, what is more, bred like rabbits. Their uncontrollable virility and high birth rates made us shiver, indeed we shuddered with disgust. At the same time the Serbs were constantly being publicly entreated to profess their hatred of the "shiptars." No Serb was considered worth his salt unless he cherished this hatred. Thus official propaganda during the Milosevic era, supported unerringly by the media, declared the "shiptars" to be the Serbs' archetypal enemy; indeed, without this enemy the Serbs' own existence would have been practically unthinkable. For where would Batman be without his Joker? Now the "shiptars" were no longer pathetic Uncle Toms. On the contrary, they had transformed themselves into terrifying, dangerous demons, intractable and persistent in their mission to take over our historic territory, to snatch away from us the Kosovo Polje, the Kosovo Field, "the cradle or our culture," to steal our myths, to rob us of that which belonged to us by "historic right". (More here)
Determined to settle scores with these "shiptars" once and for all, our President Milosevic conceived a fantastic plan. In his murky empire of evil, poverty, ethnic hatred and hyperinflation, the army and the police aided by the mass media were to be allowed to discriminate against and humiliate the Kosovo Albanians without incurring sanctions. The Albanians would be able to be arbitrarily dismissed or arrested, their property plundered, their families and villages destroyed. Absolved of any responsibility and encouraged by popular support, the president for many years painstakingly put his plan into action, bringing violence and destruction first to Kosovo and then to the whole territory of Yugoslavia. Following the Dayton Agreement in December 1995 there was a brief ceasefire, but in 1999 the spiral of violence finally led Milosevic back to where it had all started, back to Kosovo.
Yet Kosovo was also the place that was to seal Milosevic's fate after thirteen years of his destructive rule. When NATO began bombing the main culprit, Serbia-Montenegro, at the end of March 1999, it destroyed some more of the infrastructure and claimed hundreds of civilian victims. Yet what followed was the end of Serbian state power in the province of Kosovo. At the same time the roles of perpetrator and victim were once more reversed in this hapless place. There was an exodus of thousands of Serbs and Roma and a rampage of revenge by the victors; and once again the victims were almost exclusively innocent civilians. The hope of any normality between ordinary Serbs and Albanians, of them being able to live side by side in the foreseeable future, was gone.
Milosevic had played his game so cunningly that only one kind of epilogue was possible: the UN war crimes tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nevertheless, even then, Milosevic managed to escape the place where justice might have been done, if only by suffering a heart attack. By eluding justice he left us with the question of blame. Not least for this reason the citizens of Serbia are burdened with guilt and shame, whether we accept it or not.
A few years ago the Serbian media reported for months on end on mass graves whose dead had been identified by forensic experts as Kosovo Albanians. One of the most horrific images was that of a refrigerated lorry out of which murdered Kosovo Albanian women, children and old people were disposed in Lake Perucac, near the mouth of the river Derventa. On our screens we saw half-decayed, clothed corpses being pulled out of the water, we heard the shocking confession of the driver, who had been told to transport the dead out of Kosovo in order to cover up the crime. At the time a Belgrade television station broadcast an interview with a man bathing untroubled in this beautiful lake from whose green waters the corpses had just been pulled. When the reporter asked whether this bothered him the simpleton stood there shaking his head as the water dripped off him. Blinking innocently and smiling laconically, he looked at the camera and said without turning a hair: "To be honest, I don't believe all that," and dived defiantly back into the water.
The guy is mad, you might think. But actually the opposite is the case. His reaction is absolutely understandable. Serbian citizens have a decade of brainwashing by politicians and the media behind them, a decade of lessons in how continuous lying can eventually make people believe their own lies. The bathing man was simply using that acquired skill.
Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities. It is so new that we don't even have a proper word for it, and those who realize what is happening simply use the English word instead. Denial. This denial, coldness in the face of human suffering, an inability to show the most rudimentary empathy, shows that we as a society are in a no-man's land. Sometimes it seems as if we did not want to escape the maelstrom of the past. The question of the status of Kosovo, and at least as important, of our future relationship with the Kosovo Albanians, are among the most decisive questions of all, and they could be used as a measure of our political maturity. The reasons why we don't take a constructive approach to them are more profound. Today's Serbian society is tired of politics. It is tired of lost wars, exhausted by chronic poverty and the feeling that the Serbs must see themselves either as victims or as the guilty party. It fears change and shirks responsibility.
In other words, events have ensured that our view of the Kosovo Albanians will remain unchanged for a long time to come. To the traditional resentment there has simply been added the subliminal rage of the loser, which is vented in self-pity and may be coupled with the mystical idea of being inherently in the right. Indeed, the unavoidable loss of the former southern Serbian province of Kosovo is in certain circles of our society perceived as tantamount to an apocalypse. Not long ago the centre of Belgrade was plastered with posters designed to fool us: "There is no Serbia without Kosovo!" But whoever says that is lying, and many people fundamentally know this – for despite everything it is becoming increasingly evident that the status of Kosovo is becoming marginal in the everyday life and concerns of the Serbs. In fact many citizens – our young particularly – disappointed by all sides, seem to have decided that they don't believe in anything any more, like that simpleton bathing in the lake.
But what can one expect from a generation that has been raised amid war and destruction, fed with a policy of overt hatred, and that can't get a visa to become acquainted with other countries and cultures? Unfortunately, probably not very much. Our young people have begun to hate again, without inhibitions, with a frivolous delight. Surveys of school students are enough to make your hair stand on end – and they confirm the impression one gains from everyday life. More than 30 percent of the pupils at Serbian middle schools believe that one "should neither become friends with Albanians nor visit them." Almost a third of young people believe that the Chinese – the only relatively large group of foreigners in our country – should have their residence permits removed, even if they obey the law. Every third teenage boy and every second teenage girl is looking down on homosexuals and people infected with HIV.
The thought of the ghastly success with which contemporary Serbian society has deformed the thoughts and emotions of young people makes one shudder. Maybe the solution is simply to wait stoically and be patient. Maybe one only needs to hope that a new generation will grow up under more peaceful and healthier circumstances. Perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children.
*
Vladimir Arsenijevic was born in 1965 in Pula/Croatia. His prize-winning novels have been translated into many languages. He lives in Belgrade.
This article orignally appeared in German in Die Zeit on 20 September, 2007.
Translation: Melanie
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Accountability or Royalties
Ricardo Sanchez said a few days ago that the war had been conducted with criminal negligence from its conception to the surge, and that the American people should hold their civilian leaders accountable for their actions. Bravo, Lieutenant General. Of course, Ricardo Sanchez was the military leader of Coalition forces in Iraq in the first years of the invasion, eluded being court-martialed for Abu Ghraib, and is now retired and planning to write a tell-all book. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show juxtaposed the general's "unbelievable progress" comments when he was in charge, with his recent "nightmare-with-no-end-in-sight" statement. The segment was appropriately called "Now You Tell Us."
Sanchez is only the last one in a too long list of shameless has-beens rushing for the publishing house. George Tenet, former chief of the CIA, tried in vain to absolve himself and blame others in his book. When he was an enthusiastic participant, it was all "slam dunk." Now that he's teaching at Georgetown and selling books, he maintains that his bosses manipulated him and the American people. Remember Colin Powell -the Secretary of State who believed Curveball and lied to the world on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly- and his book "Soldier"? General Richard Myers was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005, and now that he's retired claims that the strategy that the United States has adopted in the war on terror is wrong and ineffective. He was supposed to be the top dog, the main military adviser to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. They all had the ear of the emperor, but from their accounts they'd have you think that they were merely government clerks.
And it is not just about praetorian subordination. My favorite intellectual contortionists are the neo-conservatives, like Richard Perle or David Frum, who wrote the Axis of Evil speech. Hans Blix himself went from timid and ambiguous reports and statements when he directed the UN inspections team in Iraq, to blunt and fiery criticism when he became a published author. Plugging his book at an event in New York at the end of 2003, where he was received with standing ovations by an anti-war crowd, the only question he left unanswered was posed by a Syrian that asked: "Why didn't you say all this before?" Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has already had some run-ins with angry Americans at book-signings. Why? He says now that the Iraq war is all about oil, and that Bush's tax cuts are atrocious. When he was running the show, he testified in Congress supporting Bush's economic policy. Even the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times did a one-eighty on their opinion of the war as soon as they found neither WMDs nor smiles and flowers from grateful Iraqis, and went from war cheerleaders to fierce opponents.
In this tragedy, there are two kinds of criminals: those that were wrong, don't admit it, and stay the course, and those that were wrong, didn't say anything when it mattered, and now can't stop chattering to seek absolution and book deals. They have one thing in common: neither the former nor the latter have had the trial they deserve.
Sanchez is only the last one in a too long list of shameless has-beens rushing for the publishing house. George Tenet, former chief of the CIA, tried in vain to absolve himself and blame others in his book. When he was an enthusiastic participant, it was all "slam dunk." Now that he's teaching at Georgetown and selling books, he maintains that his bosses manipulated him and the American people. Remember Colin Powell -the Secretary of State who believed Curveball and lied to the world on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly- and his book "Soldier"? General Richard Myers was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005, and now that he's retired claims that the strategy that the United States has adopted in the war on terror is wrong and ineffective. He was supposed to be the top dog, the main military adviser to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. They all had the ear of the emperor, but from their accounts they'd have you think that they were merely government clerks.
And it is not just about praetorian subordination. My favorite intellectual contortionists are the neo-conservatives, like Richard Perle or David Frum, who wrote the Axis of Evil speech. Hans Blix himself went from timid and ambiguous reports and statements when he directed the UN inspections team in Iraq, to blunt and fiery criticism when he became a published author. Plugging his book at an event in New York at the end of 2003, where he was received with standing ovations by an anti-war crowd, the only question he left unanswered was posed by a Syrian that asked: "Why didn't you say all this before?" Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has already had some run-ins with angry Americans at book-signings. Why? He says now that the Iraq war is all about oil, and that Bush's tax cuts are atrocious. When he was running the show, he testified in Congress supporting Bush's economic policy. Even the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times did a one-eighty on their opinion of the war as soon as they found neither WMDs nor smiles and flowers from grateful Iraqis, and went from war cheerleaders to fierce opponents.
In this tragedy, there are two kinds of criminals: those that were wrong, don't admit it, and stay the course, and those that were wrong, didn't say anything when it mattered, and now can't stop chattering to seek absolution and book deals. They have one thing in common: neither the former nor the latter have had the trial they deserve.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The Politics of Eurovision
This debate is a few months old, but I thought the roster and content of this blog was perfect to revive a topic that in the United States gets the attention that it truly deserves: zero.
Last May, Columbia University's Duncan J. Watts wrote this interesting Op-Ed on political bloc-voting in the annual Eurovision contest. Serbia had just won the contest, receiving most of its votes from Former Yugoslavia republics. And England got trounced, in another supposed demonstration of anti-British sentiment and the buoyancy of ethnonationalism in Europe in the 21st century.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/opinion/22watts.html
I wrote this in response: Mr. Watts is not alone in suggesting a political bias in the Eurovision contest. British and German tabloids also cried foul, and the British Parliament debated (!) this question. They couldn't be more wrong. It is true that voting patterns over the years show some recognizable voting blocs, but this is more due to geographic proximity and cultural affinities -similar languages, similar tastes- than the reflection of political alignments within Europe. There is no anti-Western or anti-British bias. Contrary to Mr. Watt's assertion that "no one votes for Britain," the United Kingdom is the country that has received the most votes overall in the history of this contest. The politics of Eurovision have more to do with other issues, such as the exclusion of Serbia for several years or the reaction in Arab countries to the inclusion of Israel, than with Western European countries having one bad year.
Having said this, did Marija Serifovic ever explain what she meant by giving the three-fingered salute to the cameras when she received 12 points from Bosnia?
Last May, Columbia University's Duncan J. Watts wrote this interesting Op-Ed on political bloc-voting in the annual Eurovision contest. Serbia had just won the contest, receiving most of its votes from Former Yugoslavia republics. And England got trounced, in another supposed demonstration of anti-British sentiment and the buoyancy of ethnonationalism in Europe in the 21st century.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/opinion/22watts.html
I wrote this in response: Mr. Watts is not alone in suggesting a political bias in the Eurovision contest. British and German tabloids also cried foul, and the British Parliament debated (!) this question. They couldn't be more wrong. It is true that voting patterns over the years show some recognizable voting blocs, but this is more due to geographic proximity and cultural affinities -similar languages, similar tastes- than the reflection of political alignments within Europe. There is no anti-Western or anti-British bias. Contrary to Mr. Watt's assertion that "no one votes for Britain," the United Kingdom is the country that has received the most votes overall in the history of this contest. The politics of Eurovision have more to do with other issues, such as the exclusion of Serbia for several years or the reaction in Arab countries to the inclusion of Israel, than with Western European countries having one bad year.
Having said this, did Marija Serifovic ever explain what she meant by giving the three-fingered salute to the cameras when she received 12 points from Bosnia?
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Who is their real target behind their call for boycott Beijing Olympic Games?
I am sick of Beijing’s “friendship” with Khartoum and Yangon. Should Beijing be condemned for these cold-blooded “friendships”? Yes.
But I am also sick of those so-called international human rights activists’ political prejudice and shallowness. Who is the real target behind their call for boycott Beijing Olympic Games? Not Khartoum! Not Yangon!
They naively believe that genocide cannot be stopped in Darfur because Beijing has resisted international pressure to bring peace to Darfur. They believe that the Burmese junta would not have cracked down on the monks’ protests without a tacit signal from Beijing that it would veto any sanctions bill at the UN. They may be naïve, but their governments which back them up are not stupid.
Behind the Western criticisms of Beijing over Khartoum and Yangon, there is a new round of great power politics is unfolding. This time, it is in a different way. Like the “hard” arms race in the Cold War which ended the USSR, the “soft” bullets in such “morals race” (wrapped with human rights banners) can also drag the rising dragon down.
Angela Merkel has met the Dalai Lama in her office. Canada will follow up. Who is next, India, Japan, or even the US? If Yangon collapses, Aung San Su Kyi will drive the Dalai Lama back to his palace in Tibet via the plain of Burma. The 72-year old man doesn’t need climb over Himalaya Mountains.
Excluded from the Western-dominated “legitimate” energy sources, Beijing has to look to those “illegitimate” energy sources. With democratic-styled regime change in the places like Khartoum, Beijing’s “illegitimate” oil supply will be cut off. China’s GDP growth will slow down. In the case of China, a 10% GDP growth is not an economic miracle, but a basic requirement for political stability. Even a 1% drop in GDP growth would create several million new unemployed who would become the driving force for the regime change in China.
The Communist Party of China is only one of many giant monsters in China’s history. This country has always been governed by various authoritarian monsters during its 5,000 year history. If China's communist monster collapses, who will replace it? Who can replace it? Will it ever be replaced?
If China collapses, what then for this world?
But I am also sick of those so-called international human rights activists’ political prejudice and shallowness. Who is the real target behind their call for boycott Beijing Olympic Games? Not Khartoum! Not Yangon!
They naively believe that genocide cannot be stopped in Darfur because Beijing has resisted international pressure to bring peace to Darfur. They believe that the Burmese junta would not have cracked down on the monks’ protests without a tacit signal from Beijing that it would veto any sanctions bill at the UN. They may be naïve, but their governments which back them up are not stupid.
Behind the Western criticisms of Beijing over Khartoum and Yangon, there is a new round of great power politics is unfolding. This time, it is in a different way. Like the “hard” arms race in the Cold War which ended the USSR, the “soft” bullets in such “morals race” (wrapped with human rights banners) can also drag the rising dragon down.
Angela Merkel has met the Dalai Lama in her office. Canada will follow up. Who is next, India, Japan, or even the US? If Yangon collapses, Aung San Su Kyi will drive the Dalai Lama back to his palace in Tibet via the plain of Burma. The 72-year old man doesn’t need climb over Himalaya Mountains.
Excluded from the Western-dominated “legitimate” energy sources, Beijing has to look to those “illegitimate” energy sources. With democratic-styled regime change in the places like Khartoum, Beijing’s “illegitimate” oil supply will be cut off. China’s GDP growth will slow down. In the case of China, a 10% GDP growth is not an economic miracle, but a basic requirement for political stability. Even a 1% drop in GDP growth would create several million new unemployed who would become the driving force for the regime change in China.
The Communist Party of China is only one of many giant monsters in China’s history. This country has always been governed by various authoritarian monsters during its 5,000 year history. If China's communist monster collapses, who will replace it? Who can replace it? Will it ever be replaced?
If China collapses, what then for this world?
Monday, October 1, 2007
The Fourth Wave of Newly Independent States
[Note: This is in part a reply to Miodrag Kapor’s earlier post on Kosovo, but due to its length, I have decided to make it a separate post rather than a comment.]
You are right to worry about the cascade effect of Kosovo’s independence. As we have discussed previously, I believe the province’s independence is a fait accompli and cannot be avoided at this point. While some commentators have said Russia will block it out of ideology and not use it a bargaining chit, I disagree. I have watched the Putin administration closely for almost a decade and have yet to see ideology rear its ugly head. He is a pragmatism to the core and will ultimately sell out the Serbs (an outcome which, I believe, would be in the nation's long-term interests) to get his way with Abkhazia (though I still not see an independent South Ossetia in the cards).
Given this, I believe that the international community needs to begin addressing the implications of the “fourth wave” of newly independent states within and on the borders of the European Union. The first and most important wave (1918-1922) resulted from the breakup of the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Hohenzollern empires after the Great War, creating Cazecholovakia & the Baltics and reviving Poland and Albania. While the second wave (1945-1969) which was associated with decolonization did little to redraw borders in Europe, the loss of colonial possessions did much to change the face of the Continent. The third wave (1989-1993) again remade the map of Eastern Europe, as the federal states of Yugoslavia and the USSR disintegrated. Today, we sit in the liminal space between waves three and four. In addition to Kosovo, Republika Srpska, Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Flanders, Wallonia, Euskadi (Basque Country), Catalunya, Padania, Corsica, and various ethno-republics of the Russian Federation are clamoring for absolute autonomy or outright independence. The devolution of power to regional and ethnic areas which the EU has facilitated over the years is a powerful catalyst for these polities. Kosovo’s independence will encourage them even more.
Inside the European Union (especially within the Euro- and Schengen-zones), granting independence is a bureaucratic nightmare, but will have little effect on peace and stability. Outside its borders, things are much stickier—especially where Russian troops might have a say in territorial transfers. Regardless, the lawless statelets which have proliferated since 1989 are a major problem and must be addressed soon. Forcing breakaway republics to adopt parts of the acquis communautaire could possibly function as tool to reduce crime, trafficking, etc. However, to get to that point, the EU needs a policy. In post-Soviet space, it will be Russia that rewards and punishes behavior, and so the Kremlin will need to do its part as well. The question is: how comfortable is the international community with the fracturing of the current state system? Is a 300-member UN anathema or could it be accommodated?
A unified position is the only way forward. Back in the early 1990s, Bush the Elder told Croatia and Slovenia not to jump ship, but there were back channel signals which contradicted this official position, and, of course, the Germans did not hide their feelings about Croatian and Slovene independence. Currently, such mixed messages again proliferate. As Miodrag pointed out in his earlier post, a common EU position on Kosovo itself is almost unimaginable, much less a concerted agreement on the general trend towards splinter states. This situation is likely to emerge as an important shibboleth in years to come. Angela Merkel has shown an amazing propensity for ostrich-like behavior on tough issues, so don’t look to Germany to provide answers. I suspect it instead be Nicholas Sarkozy that decides the future of the European map.
You are right to worry about the cascade effect of Kosovo’s independence. As we have discussed previously, I believe the province’s independence is a fait accompli and cannot be avoided at this point. While some commentators have said Russia will block it out of ideology and not use it a bargaining chit, I disagree. I have watched the Putin administration closely for almost a decade and have yet to see ideology rear its ugly head. He is a pragmatism to the core and will ultimately sell out the Serbs (an outcome which, I believe, would be in the nation's long-term interests) to get his way with Abkhazia (though I still not see an independent South Ossetia in the cards).
Given this, I believe that the international community needs to begin addressing the implications of the “fourth wave” of newly independent states within and on the borders of the European Union. The first and most important wave (1918-1922) resulted from the breakup of the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Hohenzollern empires after the Great War, creating Cazecholovakia & the Baltics and reviving Poland and Albania. While the second wave (1945-1969) which was associated with decolonization did little to redraw borders in Europe, the loss of colonial possessions did much to change the face of the Continent. The third wave (1989-1993) again remade the map of Eastern Europe, as the federal states of Yugoslavia and the USSR disintegrated. Today, we sit in the liminal space between waves three and four. In addition to Kosovo, Republika Srpska, Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Flanders, Wallonia, Euskadi (Basque Country), Catalunya, Padania, Corsica, and various ethno-republics of the Russian Federation are clamoring for absolute autonomy or outright independence. The devolution of power to regional and ethnic areas which the EU has facilitated over the years is a powerful catalyst for these polities. Kosovo’s independence will encourage them even more.
Inside the European Union (especially within the Euro- and Schengen-zones), granting independence is a bureaucratic nightmare, but will have little effect on peace and stability. Outside its borders, things are much stickier—especially where Russian troops might have a say in territorial transfers. Regardless, the lawless statelets which have proliferated since 1989 are a major problem and must be addressed soon. Forcing breakaway republics to adopt parts of the acquis communautaire could possibly function as tool to reduce crime, trafficking, etc. However, to get to that point, the EU needs a policy. In post-Soviet space, it will be Russia that rewards and punishes behavior, and so the Kremlin will need to do its part as well. The question is: how comfortable is the international community with the fracturing of the current state system? Is a 300-member UN anathema or could it be accommodated?
A unified position is the only way forward. Back in the early 1990s, Bush the Elder told Croatia and Slovenia not to jump ship, but there were back channel signals which contradicted this official position, and, of course, the Germans did not hide their feelings about Croatian and Slovene independence. Currently, such mixed messages again proliferate. As Miodrag pointed out in his earlier post, a common EU position on Kosovo itself is almost unimaginable, much less a concerted agreement on the general trend towards splinter states. This situation is likely to emerge as an important shibboleth in years to come. Angela Merkel has shown an amazing propensity for ostrich-like behavior on tough issues, so don’t look to Germany to provide answers. I suspect it instead be Nicholas Sarkozy that decides the future of the European map.
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