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A L S O+T O D A Y
Banned in Belgrade
T A B L E+T A L K NATO bombs are blasting Yugoslavia. But will the airstrikes be enough to halt Milosevic's ethnic cleansing? Take your place at the round table in the Headlines area of Table Talk
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THE KOSOVO MYTH | PAGE 1, 2, 3
How do you think typical Serbs view the confrontation with NATO now? I see anguish among the urban elites because they feel that they are a part of the West, yet they read the news in which they're always called bloodthirsty barbarians and they cannot reconcile the two. There's a lot of anguish there, especially among the young. I think there has been a frame of looking at the Balkans in particular and maybe at Eastern Europe in general through a certain prism that "others" them -- makes them into something different, more prone to violence and so on. There have been a few excellent studies about it. The most prominent is one by Larry Wolf, who wrote "Inventing Eastern Europe," in which he talks about how the West European Enlightenment invented the whole notion of Eastern Europe because of different cultural standards and different languages that were incomprehensible to the Enlightenment West Europeans, mainly the British and the French and to some extent Germans. The Serbs have the disadvantage of being perceived within this Balkanist, East Europeanist discourse as miniature Russians, because of their Orthodox religion and use of the Cyrillic alphabet and so-called traditional friendship with Russia. I don't think that if you go to Belgrade or to Serbia you would find that sentiment among the general population, especially among the young. Young Serbs are completely Western, as Western as they can be. They look like people on the streets of Milwaukee or Chicago, and they actually would welcome being integrated into Western Europe. What do you think should happen? This is going to sound completely utopian, because it's not going to happen, but the only way to deal with the post-Communist transition in Russia and Eastern Europe was through some sort of Marshall Plan that would not be carried out by the local corrupt elites like it happened in Russia ... but implemented by well-meaning people on the ground like the Peace Corps or people in NGOs [non-government organizations] in the West who would go and work with the local population in implementing some sort of economic reforms and change. I believe that if that was the case, the ethnic tensions would immediately go down. Ethnic tensions flourish in times of economic crisis, and we see that throughout this century. When people don't have resources, they clam in, and they withdraw into some sort of imaginary core of who they are or what their collective identity is and it just takes an irresponsible leader like Milosevic or Tudjman [the president of Croatia] to stir up the hatred and nationalism. And so I would start with that, with some sort of massive economic aid, and then working slowly on building confidence measures and so on. Is it too late for this? I think it's definitely too late for Kosovo. I don't think it can happen now that the hatred between the communities is at such a high level at this point. There is no real claim that the Serbs can make on this region through population anymore. It is obviously Albanian now. The only thing is maybe to grant some sort of cultural autonomy to the Serbs to visit those monuments and churches and monasteries, which are not just Serbian, they're part of the world and European heritage. Those are ancient objects that really speak of the past for the whole continent, and they shouldn't be allowed to just be abandoned. They should be put under the protection of UNESCO or some other world body that will take care of them and the monks and the nuns that are still there. What do you think will happen? There is going to be more and more foreign involvement, and eventually I think there are going to be international troops on the ground, and it will become a protectorate like Bosnia. I think soon this will sort of prove to be the training grounds for the new enlarged NATO. The Poles, the Hungarians and the Czechs will have to sort of prove themselves as being truly Western by participating in Kosovo peacekeeping operations. There also may be the possibility of some sort of partitioning of Kosovo, a Serbian and Albanian part. Right now as we speak I think there are Serbian operations in the north of Kosovo and it looks like the West is looking the other way, so there may have been some secret clauses in the previous Dayton agreement in 1995. You never really know what happens behind closed doors. If you look five to 15 years down the line, here's another really scary scenario: With Russia going down the tubes -- an economic basket case with Yeltsin an alcoholic president, half-dead, being dragged around -- there is a real potential for native homegrown fascism in Russia using the aggressive posturing by NATO and the West -- including in Kosovo, the westernmost point of Eastern Orthodox culture and Christianity -- as a focus. With the nuclear weapons that Russia still possesses, this is a really scary scenario, and I hope it doesn't come to that.
Christopher Ott is a writer in Madison, Wisc. |
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