Due to circumstances, associations and obligations, I have spent the past few days in Belgrade, a city with which I have family, business and friendship ties and which I have always loved, aware of all that it was and is today. And it was and remains the only true metropolis in this area of ours, a mirror of socialist Yugoslavia, a place where you can still get space for action even if you come from other post-Yugoslav countries and do not share the majority opinion there about the past, but also the main center of absolute refusal to face the the past and his own role in the wars of the nineties.
And if it was only about Aleksandar Vučić and his government, things would not look so gloomy, but, unfortunately, a huge part of the society in Serbia is simply not ready to take a look at the nineties and the war crimes that were committed in his name.
Which, again, would not be such a problem if one did not actively work on denying and minimizing them and on additional listening to the public, which is mostly successfully trying to convince that the entire Western world conspired against the Serbs and Serbia. To make things more bizarre, a huge portion of people take this kind of thinking for granted, while the city is full of people from the West who came to two Ramstein concerts and had a good time.
I arrived in Belgrade the day after the resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica was passed, but everything on the city streets, from the inscriptions on the famous tower of Belgrade on the water, through billboards on all sides, to rotating advertisements on the screens, said that "we are not a genocidal people". celebrated Serbia and the Republika Srpska, with thousands of flags in every imaginable place, even on the windows of apartments. And regardless of the fact that not long after my arrival I sat down in Madera and then attended one of the best parties I've ever witnessed, the Great Stories party, where there existed a beautiful parallel universe of metropolitan Belgrade, that in the following days I hung out with dear people from with which I differ in almost nothing, he bought, as always, a handful of new excellent books, it was difficult to escape the impression of a prevailing spite towards the West and a society that generally decided to measure time and events apart from the world and any self-reflection, convinced that it fulfills some historical mission.
The taxi driver who drove me to the airport after a few days, moreover, a man who is clearly against Vučić's government, who talks about Yugoslavia with serious sentiments and who has his closest family in Sarajevo and Zagreb, summed up his position on social rejection of the West in three points that clearly shares: The first is why Serbia is constantly being asked to do something, the second is the NATO bombing in 1999 and the third is the compulsion to go to the West.
To which I told him that it was all legitimate, but that Croatia today is a much richer and more orderly country compared to the time before joining the European Union, but that we do not all have to share the desire for such a way of life. I simply didn't bring up the topic of confrontation, because it wouldn't make much sense.
Which is exactly what happened in Prijedor and is probably still happening as I write this. So, the day before the White Ribbon Day, the official authorities in Prijedor, the site of one of the most monstrous systematic crimes against the non-Serb population, which continued with the hiding of mass graves and their late and accidental discovery, celebrated, with the presence and obvious support of a solid number of citizens, something which they called the Day of Defense of Prijedor from the other two nations.
And that's about all there is to know about dealing with the past. We are indeed faced with it, but it does not happen in the way that the victims, members of non-governmental organizations and independent intellectuals expected, but it takes place in the direct transmission and symbolic revival of exactly what we were expected to face.
Books by Darko Cvijetić and similar authors can help people here, but it will not change anything in terms of politics and life.
Now, is it possible to continue living together even in such circumstances, without excessive emotions? Well, not only can, but must. Because every different choice leads to a new circle of hell and can only end with another layer of trauma and a new status quo.
This probably sounds painful and cynical to many, but there is no other solution. To expect that a society that approves or denies the nineties and the systematic crimes of that era will suddenly see and become better is not only futile but also self-destructive. And Bosnia and Herzegovina as it is, it is not possible to be different. Unfortunately, but it is true.
(Liberation)
Bonus video:
