Bosnia-Herzegovina: If we could just defeat selfishness… (Edin Ramulić)
Croatia: It’s no laughing matter (Aneta Lalić)
Kosovo: Silence as a means of dealing with the past (Qerim Ondozi)
Macedonia: “Poverty is my nationality” (Fllanza Jusufi)
Serbia: I’d burn down the entire village (Katarina Milićević)
Bosnia-Herzegovina: If we could just defeat selfishness…
In 2016 Bosnian-Herzegovinian society was plunged into the deepest crisis since the time when the guns were silenced in October 1995. Announcements about the referendum in Republika Srpska, as well as the increasingly brash verbal threats issued by Serb politicians about the possible secession of that entity from the remainder of the state, practically paralysed the lives of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The immoderate statements of leading Serb and Bosniak politicians, as well as the prominent rise of extremist nationalist groups with warmongering messages in the media and on social networks, caused disquiet and apprehension among the citizens in every corner of the country.
It was evident that the crisis was playing into the hands of ruling parties in both entities and that it formed an integral part of their campaign for the upcoming local elections. The protection of vital national interests following war scares is a tried and tested recipe for diverting the attention of unemployed and impoverished voters from their real living problems. The election campaign is not the only motive. Tensions around the referendum between the political scene in Sarajevo and in Banja Luka served as a smokescreen behind which a new loan of 1.077.030.789 BAM (one billion seventy seven million thirty thousand seven hundred and eighty nine) was negotiated with the IMF. This new loan, just like all those that came before it, will be used to patch up budget gaps, maintain the unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus and buy social peace for the next three years. The deal on the loan was struck at a bar by the two national leaders Milorad Dodik and Bakir Izetbegović. Immediately upon leaving the said bar, they resumed their verbal clashing over the referendum in front of the media, so it is difficult to subdue the impression that this whole performance for the benefit of voters was pre-arranged.
The increase in tensions between Sarajevo and Banja Luka is perhaps currently more advantageous for the leadership of Republika Srpska and the parties that make up the government in that entity, both for the purpose of staying in power and in order to escape responsibility for numerous suspect criminal activities, but the announcement of the Government of the Federation of BiH that it will sell its ownership share in profitable public enterprises should by no means be underestimated. Thus, for example, in these heady days of the election campaign and referendum crises, over 40% of the shares in the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory were sold at a price that goes far below their real value. The sale was conducted practically in secret and under pressure from international financial centres from which Bosnia and Herzegovina had taken out loans. So, the referendum be a means of salvation for politicians in Republika Srpska, but it is currently more profitable for their colleagues and partners in the Federation of BiH.
Increasing national tensions in order to remain in power is a dangerous game in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The world has changed in the meantime. It has become unsafe and threatening for weak and unstable countries. The international community as we knew it no longer exists, we are now in the domain of national interests of world powers, primarily the USA and Russia, as well as leading EU countries and Turkey. In addition, there has been a revival of old appetites from neighbouring countries for the territory of BiH. The fact that we are geographically situated in Europe is no longer any guarantee of special attention and care from anyone in the world. In the event of a conflict, we would be just another crisis point on the globe where the great powers would wage their proxy war from a safe distance. If you have any doubts about this, just ask the desperate columns of refugees seeking shelter from war. In some bizarre sense, we were lucky to have had our war back in the 1990s and not twenty years later. Those who still see the solution to Bosnian-Herzegovinian problems through armed conflict should forget all about trenches, defence and conquest of strategic positions amid Bosnian ravines the way it was done in the 1990s. At that time, we had an arms embargo, international observers and limited NATO action in exceptional circumstances. We also had parts of the country and settlements that could provide relative safety for civilians. In a new war we could easily go down the way of Syria, with different military alliances sending their strategic bombers and long-range missiles every night to all our cities, killing children in both entities, with no end in sight.
For almost two decades, Bosnia and Herzegovina and its citizens were the favourites of the international community. All the positive processes in the country (freedom of movement, property rights, justice reform, war crimes prosecution, etc.) were by and large the result of international initiatives, while local politicians devoted themselves to activities that strengthened their political and economic power (privatisation of public/state property, expanding the bureaucratic apparatus, nationalisation of the education system, etc.), meanwhile hindering and contesting the results of the international community wherever they could, ostensibly all in the interest of protecting territories conquered/retained during the war.
The system of values painstakingly constructed during the two post-war decades collapsed in on itself. The system had been based on the premise that the international community would jump in to help like a caring parent, no matter how irresponsibly we behaved and how constantly we produced conflicts in our common state. That system had as its utopia the promise that all unresolved national issues and all problems of sustenance for the ordinary citizen would be overcome through membership in the European Union.
Up until this year, the domestic politicians could calmly go about their business of selling off the resources of this country and creating their private empires, while offering voters accession to the promised European Union. In February this year, Dragan Čović, at the time the President of the Presidency of BiH, submitted the application for membership to the European Union. Although it was announced as a historic event, to this day there has been no concrete reply from Brussels. In the meantime the European Union was hit by Brexit, with the UK exiting the union and bringing into question its sustainability in the long term. But even if it wasn’t for Brexit, politicians in BiH would still have a harder time getting voters interested in accession to the European Union because the citizens of neighbouring Croatia did not feel any improvement after their country became a Member State.
The problems of the European Union are not a surprise or cause for concern to those managing the flow of funds in BiH and our collective fate. Their positions of power will not be brought into question even if they decide to give up on the “European path”. The real threat comes from the inside.
It is quite certain that this whole radicalisation of relations between the two blocks of nationalist parties, respectively centred in Banja Luka and Sarajevo, is the response of the politicians to the mass protests of workers, the unemployed and dissatisfied citizens in a number of Bosnian-Herzegovinian cities in February 2014. This was, in fact, the only real threat to the enormously enlarged property of the politicians and their prospects of remaining in power in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, it is not the institutions of this country: the justice system, tax administration, law enforcement agencies, but only the dissatisfied people in revolt.
In order to prevent a repetition of the so-called February protests, the ruling politicians chose two strategies. One was to produce fear between the national groups so that no one would dare demand their worker’s or human rights because they would be going up against not just extremist patriotic and nationalist groups, but also a wide front of various national categories, especially those stemming from the war, that would stand up to protect their national institutions and legacies. The real danger of that strategy is if things were to spin out of control and we were to see the reappearance of armed village guards and lumber roadblocks. This, however, might also be part of the plan. At the same time, the authorities could discipline all those who stray from the national patriotic front, arrest human rights activists and all other thinking individuals. Politicians toying with national emotions and the recent creation of an atmosphere of fear causes vast and long-term damage to already started processes of peacebuilding and fostering mutual trust between members of various identity groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Indeed, this damage is the most serious.
The other strategy is to displace all those who “couldn’t make it” abroad in order to decrease the number of dissatisfied citizens on the streets when protests erupt again. That strategy has been very successful and tens of thousands of younger working age people have already left Bosnia and Herzegovina. Besides, big business is not planning of starting production in this country that would require a large labour force. This area has been earmarked for thermal and hydropower plants that require no more than 30 to 50 workers. And there will always be enough wretches to work in the mines, those that do not manage to leave the country or find employment in the public sector, and in the event of scarcity among the domestic labour force, it should be easy to bring in refugees from Syria or economic migrants from India.
The country has suffered a brutal war with far-reaching consequences. To make matters worse, it has once again been brought to the brink of conflict. The majority of young people see no perspective here and want to leave. The education and healthcare systems are collapsing. Economic potentials have been destroyed or sold off. Corruption has found its way into every pore of society. Most of the population barely manages to make ends meet… Where in all this is the responsibility of ordinary people?
The selfishness of ordinary people is the perfect complement to this type of government. Almost no one complains about the new international loans, because most people see a benefit for themselves through payment of pensions, salary bonuses, disability benefits, social assistance benefits or meals at the soup kitchen. The freedom of our unborn children and their grandchildren is being sold into debt slavery to the IMF for the benefit of the current standard of selfish people. Those same people for those same reasons keep their mouths shut and vote for those selling off the resources of this country, irrevocably, once and for all relinquishing at a miserable price both those resources they inherited and those they should be leaving for future generations. Selfish people thus construct or acquiesce to squares and public spaces being occupied by their “eternal” monuments as if future generation won’t need these spaces for their own monuments. They buy flats and offices in the city centre built on what only yesterday used to be parks and children’s playgrounds. They pollute the rivers, create illegal garbage dumps, cause deforestation and kill off game animals, use stone from stećaks[1] and old fortresses for foundations of their new houses, rip out red stars and set up crosses and crescents. Selfish people keep their mouths shut when their children are taught nationalist ditties and slogans in school. They are selfish towards the refugees and are glad to see their columns avoid our state borders. They shrink away from Arabs who have “come for neglected land and children”. In the media, selfish people praise the government and are an important factor for keeping it in power. Selfish people create elites in cultural and intellectual communities and divide the crumbs of public budgets amongst themselves. It is for selfish reasons that they keep their mouths shut when workers in another company are laid off. When the disenfranchised come out to protest, they cheer them on with “likes”. Selfish people do not fight, they sit at home or leave the country in search of a better life. All this selfishness of ordinary people in everyday situations is destroying the country from the inside and making it easy prey for financial predators from the outside.
This summer in Jajce, secondary school pupils took to the streets and managed to secure education together in the same classroom, despite the intentions of the authorities to segregate them. In July, antifascists tried to mark the day of breaking through enemy lines and the Day of the Fighter and to take that space away from the nationalists. In March in Novi, veterans of different armies visited the sites where Serbs and Bosniaks were killed, and for the first time involved religious leaders in this peacebuilding activity. The organisation “Oštra nula” is active in Banja Luka and “Kvart” is active in Prijedor. In May they mark White Armband Day and together with the parents of the killed children of Prijedor demand that a monument commemorating these children is built. In Sarajevo, a plaque commemorating the victims of the war crime at Kazani stood intact for one day. It was set up by Sarajevans and their friends from the initiative “Jer me se tiče”… We didn’t have any of this ten years ago and this is a big reason to be optimistic, to hold out hope for people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, if only we can defeat the selfishness…
Edin Ramulić
[1] medieval tombstones
Croatia: It’s no laughing matter
Since the Republic of Croatia joined the EU and acquittals were handed down at The Hague, Croatia has been sailing on a wave of its own, why not say it, internationally verified innocence, without a thought for the earthly, existential despair of its so beloved Croatian citizens. Even the poor refugees know that no one can start from the beginning in this country, because interpretations of the beginning are usually the most demanding. This is why, with a heavy heart, they start from the end – Zoran Milanović, a man of wasted political charisma, managed to miss a sure thing. After the despair of the six-months-long rule of Tihomir Orešković, after the materialisation of pro-Ustasha aspirations that were twenty years in the making in the person and work of a man of strange diction, Zlatko Hasanbegović[1], after Reiner’s[2] attempt to rename the Parliament into its historical Ustaha-era iteration of the Croatian State Parliament, after seeing Dario Kordić, a convicted war criminal, participate in a “pro-life walk“, after the destruction of almost all of the mechanisms for protecting our frail democracy, Zoran Milanović managed to lose the elections. Using Josipović’s old and ineffective method of “I can go right and mean it”, he missed the final opportunity to redefine the arena of political struggle and encourage the creation of a political climate where social change would be possible.
Instead of at least some form of social democratic government, what we got are new Cyclone-B stars such as Bruna Esih[3]. It is not unimaginable that we will silently and secretly weep for those colourful characters of the right whose political literacy was just enough to make it difficult for them to conceal their true intentions and convictions. As opposed to them, we are now dealing with highly-profiled right-wingers, far more disciplined, that are hard to imagine in Ćorić’s famous metaphor about spring onions and lamb.
The six-months-long awaited sigh of relief was thus left stuck in the disbelief of cultural workers, reporters for print and electronic media, non-governmental organisations, government foundations and all those who felt on their own skin the actions of the Orešković-Petrov-Karamarko government. I have no doubt that those 40000 protesters, who participated in the most epic “queue for the tram” when they came out to Ban Jelačić Square in June to support the continuation of curricular reforms, were left equally flabbergasted[4]. In the company of the intimidated and/or indifferent majority, this was a spectacle of sorts, though only relatively convincing. The six-months-long rule of Karamarko’s HDZ and the shaky MOST coalition finally managed to elicit the long-awaited reaction from the citizenry. And yet, the reaction and rebellion were left without political articulation or outcome. Which is to say that on the left of the political spectrum, there are still quite a few vacant seats, even those so-called coalition love seats, while the melee right of centre is incredible.
And as much as 2015 was not a promising year, 2016 has shown us that there’s always a false bottom. In truly record time, the government of Tihomir Orešković managed to complete the process of de-secularisation of Croatian society and state, whose repercussions are felt with undiminished intensity even after the government was recalled. The Croatian public broadcaster, purged of undesirable reporters, under the leadership of Siniša Kovačić, increasingly follows the life of the Church, as well as opening new media spaces where church dignitaries are generously offered the choice of speaking about the reproductive rights of women, the nature of the Jasenovac camp or perhaps about the mental and physical health of homosexuals. The cumulative effect is difficult to measure, but there should be no doubt about the power of sermon in a society where religious instruction classes for 8th-graders include lessons on how the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was founded by atheists.
The grotesque of the Tent [Šator][5] served as a metaphor this year too, in a small village in Lika called Srb, as performed by Dražen Keleminac, the leader of the Croatian Autochtonous Party of Rights [Autohtona hrvatska stranka prava]. For days, members of the party camped out in front of the Monument to the Uprising[6] frightening the villagers. Their right to a peaceful life and to cherishing their antifascist tradition was ingloriously defended in the last possible moment. Instead of noticing a violation of Art. 325 of the Criminal Code, the Interior Ministry removed the tent and its tenants because they did not have camping permits to set up their tent in a public space. It goes almost without saying that they returned on the Day of the Uprising itself, giddy with Ustasha ditties and an immense love towards Milorad Pupovac.
This year again, there was no shortage of black uniforms, white squares and Ustasha marches for Homeland Thanksgiving Day[7]. Members of the Association “Rafael Vitez Boban”[8] marched in file through Knin, and a similar scenario was repeated a few weeks later in the predominantly Serb populated Donji Lapac. The veterans association on its pilgrimage through Udbina had a particular need, not to say piety, to march through this sleepy town in Ustasha uniforms and under flags proclaiming “Za Dom Spremni”. Going by “better safe than sorry”, the police protected the pilgrims throughout their march.
Irresponsible political statements and silence following threatening protests against Mirjana Rakić (director of the Agency for Electronic Media), unsanctioned hate speech in the media, the overturning of the first instance judgement against Branimir Glavaš[9], Sedlar’s film “Jasenovac – The Truth” with evident negation of the holocaust and genocide, are only some of the regular occurrences that generate the atmosphere of a lynching. The capillary spread of this lynching atmosphere ultimately always manifests itself in a physical attack, such as the one on reporter Ante Tomić or theatre director Oliver Frljić.
As the days go by, it is increasingly difficult to tell news shows from entertainment. The cancellation of one such show, “Montirani proces” [“Show Trial”][10] will remain a constant inspiration to the authors, but also the clearest indicator that we must never laugh at anyone or anything. It’s no laughing matter, as they say.
Aneta Lalić
[1] Zlatko Hasanbegović, a historian of right-wing political leanings whose works are dominated by revisionist interpretations of newer Croatian history, was appointed Minister for Culture in the Croatian government in 2016. Apart from photographs of Hasanbegović when he was young (he was photographed with an Ustaha cap on his head), the biggest tempest was caused by his decision to cut financial support to non-profit media, as well as his decision to dismiss the Chairwoman of the Steering Council of the Jasenovac Memorial, among others.
[2] Željko Rainer, Speaker of the Croatian Parliament during its mandate from 3 December 2015 to 20 June 2016.
[3] Bruna Esih is a scholarly novice at the Ivo Pilar Institute and President of the Croatian Association “Way of the Cross”, as well as a close associate of Zlatko Hasanbegović. She became known to the public as the envoy of the Croatian President at the commemoration in Bleiburg, and as the author of the draft law on vetting. As a candidate on the HDZ list, she was elected to the Croatian Parliament by preferential votes of citizens at the last elections in September 2016.
[4] The initiative Hrvatska može bolje [Croatia can do better], which was supported by some 300 civil society organisations and networks, seven unions and two union federations, organised protests on 1 June 2016 against the abolishment of the long-awaited curricular reforms. In an attempt to disqualify a protest that brought some 40 thousand people to the central square, the ruling parties tried to diminish the number of gathered citizens and say that people were just there “waiting for the tram”.
[5]The “Tent” [“Šator”] denotes a protest of a certain group of veterans in front of the Ministry for Veterans in Savska 66 in Zagreb. Demanding the resignation of the minister in the SDP government, the veterans camped out in front of the Ministry for 555 days. After the parliamentary elections in September 2016 and the victory of HDZ, the “tent” was dismantled, but it remained as a paradigm to express opposition of this veterans population to all social phenomena and laws that deviate from their understanding of how society should be organised.
[6] The Day of Uprising of the people of Croatia was marked in socialist Yugoslavia on 27 July to commemorate the day when, after weeks of being exposed to Ustasha repression, guerilla partisan units and the people of Lika mounted an uprising on 27 July 1941, which then spread to the whole of Lika and Kordun and soon took hold in other parts of Croatia. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, this date was abolished, and replaced by the Day of Antifascist Struggle to commemorate 22 June 1941 when in the forest of Brezovica near Siska, the Sisak Partisan Unit was formed. The uprising of 27 July 1941 has been contested for the past two decades in Croatia in an attempt to characterise it as a crime committed by the Serbs of Lika and Kordun against the Croats.
[7] Victory Day and Homeland Thanksgiving Day and Day of Croatian Defenders is marked on 5 August to commemorate the military Operation Storm when the territory that had been under the control of the Serb Autonomous Province of Krajina was returned to Croatian control. One of the outcomes of the operation was the expulsion of some 200 thousand Croatian Serbs from that territory.
[8] The association and battalion “Rafael Vitez Boban” was established in memory of the Ustasha officer Rafael Boban, the deputy commander of the notorious Ustasha formation called the Black Legion. The Black Legion got its name both for the black uniforms its members wore, and because of their exceptional cruelty towards their victims, primarily civilians.
[9] In 2009, Branimir Glavaš was convicted of a war crime against Serb civilians in Osijek and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
[10] A satirical television show that often found inspiration in the ruling party and members of the government.
Kosovo: Silence as a means of dealing with the past
Whenever we talk about dealing with the past, the only approach we know of involves discussion and elucidation of the past, confronting opposing views, confronting our own views with the facts of events, confronting the views of others with those same facts, an attempt to view matters from our own perspective, the perspective of others, from outside, from within, and so forth.
There are two possible approaches to both dealing with the past and dealing with various persistent problems in need of resolution: one involves active confrontation, the other entails silence. The former is quite well-known, widely used and has had numerous psychological and sociological studies devoted to it, so I will discuss the latter, which has been less popularised and which is based on silence.
Namely, people often use silence to resolve an irresolvable problem. They use silence having exhausted all other arguments of yelling, convincing, confrontation, clashing, arguing, attaching, intellectual and emotional humiliation, trust, distrust. The list goes on. People use silence because they have come to realise that no other means will bring about a solution to the given problem. People use silence when the complexity of the problem convinces them that there is no other approach than to throw up their hands in resignation and turn a new page in the hope that memories of the previous page will not cover each subsequent one to the very end of the book. And so each new page is turned with hope. Because with active confrontation we hope to resolve and not further exacerbate the problem.
Silence is not a popular method because it conceals the aim.
Silence conceals noble causes as much as hidden agendas.
Silence conceals convincing arguments as much as empty phrases.
Silence conceals the most powerful instruments of attack as much as the most sturdy means of self-defence.
Silence is, and is not a metaphor.
I will try not to repeat things that people have stated before me, either publicly or tacitly.
I come from a smallish town in Kosovo where so many things remain unsaid. They remain unsaid in Albanian and in Serbian. They remain unsaid when we talk about grapes and plums, and even more so when we talk about the most recent war in Kosovo.
According to the words of those few who decided not to remain silent, in July 1998, this multinational small town in the south was attacked by guerrilla units of the Kosovo Liberation Army in an attempt to take a strategic area that could serve to establish a stronghold from which to launch more such operations until the final aim is achieved.
According to those who decided not to remain silent, the town was under attack for three consecutive days. Of course, the attackers’ numbers were meagre, they were less well armed and less well provisioned for such an event, which had only just started in a new time and place.
After three or four days, and again according to those who have decided not to remain silent, the soldiers left, escaped, deserted, tactically retreated and so forth, and then it was the turn of the Serbian army and police to attack, and in a very short time, as retribution for previous attacks, they killed a large number of civilians.
Death is absolute silence.
Death is the ultimate anaesthetic, oblivion, a naturally unfathomable domain.
Death is confronting yourself, confronting life, confronting silence.
Death is an endless wail of indescribable pain.
Death is the absurd filled with meaning.
Victims of war are little spoken of in Kosovo. Here I mean the killed civilians, the victims of violence.
Namely, in Kosovo, there is much talk only about the fallen fighters, brave warriors, glorious battles, inglorious battles, the first attack, the second attack, the first killed fighter, the second killed fighters, the first bomb, the second bomb.
But little is said of the death of a single man in Kosovo, about the physical and emotional emptiness left before the intellectual unfathomability of sudden death, the death of a loved one.
The surviving civilians mourn the killed civilians, and then retreat into silence. While surviving soldiers mourn killed soldiers, and then start dealing with the past, the present and the future.
In their dealing, the names and deeds of the soldiers are recorded in books, busts and monuments are erected.
On the other hand, the silence of the former does not utter the names of the killed, and not because they are not worthy of being remembered, recorded in books, inscribed onto busts and memorial plaques, but because the silence that comes after the endless wail of pain that leaves one breathless is an all-consuming silence.
But silence is always the last resort, never the first or second.
Therefore, we should leave in peace those who have decided to remain silent.
We should leave in peace those who have found comfort in silence.
We should leave in peace those to whom we cannot return their missing loved ones.
We should leave them in peace until their silence finally leads to our own.
Qerim Ondozi
Macedonia: “Poverty is my nationality”
Up to a year ago I thought I would never in my life understand why most people choose to walk this earth with their eyes wide closed. How do we not see how day by day, year by year, irresponsible politicians are dragging us further and further into ruination.
Thinking about Macedonia and all the developments of the past 15 years, the only thing I managed to conclude is that we keep living in some sort of conflict. Something keeps happening to keep the conflict alive. In the past year, due to civic strife, mostly along party lines, but also due to protests, Macedonia once again attracted the attention of the media in the region and beyond. Something similar to what happened in 2001, except that this time, as opposed to the war, the motivation for potential conflict was not inter-ethnic.
The political crisis started more than a year ago, after the surveillance scandal. We heard plenty about the involvement of state and party officials in crime and corruption. We listened to them arrange election fraud and many other things, including insulting and humiliating citizens. Due to this situation, a forced agreement was made called the “Pržin agreement” signed by the leaders of the four main parties in the country, two Macedonian and two Albanian, which was supposed to establish preconditions for holding elections in the newly emerged situation. The agreement was not upheld as was foreseen. It seems to me that none of these peace agreements, such as the “Ohrid Peace Agreement”, ever did much good or were of much use. But still, the “Pržin agreement” established a Special Prosecutor whose role was to prosecute organised crime, offences deriving from the contents of the illegal surveillance. This body will investigate the falsification of documents and violation of voting rights, the fixing of elections; it should shed light on the Monstrum case (the murder of five people near Smilkovsko Lake)[1], the case of Martin Neškovski (killed by an officer on duty at the celebration of the election victory of VMRO-DPMNE) and many more cases.
The crisis reached its peak after the mass amnesty granted to politicians found guilty of abuse of authority, which was announced by the President Gjorge Ivanov. The abolition decision was the height of disappointment, it was too much and it made the citizens take to the streets in “disobedience”. The dictatorship of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party starts coming out in various ways, this time through the organisation of counter-protests to which party sympathisers from other cities were brought in on buses. While all of this is going on in the country, the Albanian parties and their sympathisers keep to the side (thereby effectively supporting VMRO-DPMNE) as if this was none of their concern, as if that same Premier was not the Premier of their country too. However, it is clear that this constitutes indirect support to the ruling coalition party, something along the lines of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’.
The intention of the abolition decision was to protect the officials. To prevent the naming of those implicated and holding them accountable for their actions. An attempt was made to prevent the work of the Special Prosecutor, because many charges had been filed against officials from the ruling parties. Both Macedonian and Albanian. The abolition decision included 56 persons, including amnesty for Nikola Gruevski, the leader of the ruling party and former premier of Macedonia, as well as Gordana Jankulovska, minister of interior, who as such had a mandate to fight corruption and crime. The abolition decision certainly confirms suspicions that there were criminal activities in the government.
People took to the streets, raising their voices against injustice, defying those who deprived them of the right to a life of human dignity and pride. The non-governmental organisations were the first to start organising, but were soon joined by various groups of citizens. These were no longer mere protests, but a full-fledged revolution made up of very diverse participants, which is why it was dubbed the “Colourful Revolution”. Citizens’ dissatisfaction grew, and therefore also our numbers in the streets, there were more and more of us each day. At the beginning only in Skopje, but soon in all the other larger cities in the country. I must admit it was a wonderful feeling to be part of that revolution. The “colourful” epithet was made visible by painting the overly expensive monuments built to testify to an ancient Macedonia and baroque façades in motley colours during the protests.
The “disobedient citizens” gathered in front of the Special Prosecutor’s Office and also visited the Office of the President in the centre of Skopje which they painted with eggs and caused more serious damage. They demanded that the President withdraw the abolition decision, which he did after a while thanks to pressures of the European Union and the citizens. The centre of the city, meaning the monuments from the Skopje 2014 project (that are nothing more than indicators of nationalism) were fantastically painted into all colours of the rainbow by the so-called hooligans. After that incident, the police arrested a number of protesters.
The people are still grappling with an uncertainty that has been protracted and are at the same time fatigued by it. It is not clear how we will get ourselves out of this labyrinth that we have been in for a long time, running around in circles. I understand that justice comes at a high price.
The saddest reality is that many citizens have been reduced to abject poverty, which has become a commonality of the various nationalities in the country. That explains the above photo from Skopje with the writing on the wall “Poverty is my nationality”, while a man rummages through garbage. Poverty is the nationality for the people in the country. This photo says a lot about the situation in Macedonia. Hundreds of thousands of good people live in this country, and more and more of the educated and qualified are leaving.
The country recently suffered a natural disaster, a flood in Skopje and Tetovo, with official sources saying 22 people were killed. For many families, the damage was devastating. But this still did not prevent the government from continuing to invest in the Skopje 2014 project, building in the baroque style and planning a panoramic wheel that is to cost 19 million Euros, while having no funds and no solution for families that suffered damage by the flood.
All of this may sound quite dismal, but there is hope for a better tomorrow, a hope that not all is lost because people are waking up and refusing to be taken in by the government’s manipulations so easily. This became apparent after the government’s attempt to destabilise the country with an international problem, the case of the “Divo naselje” in Kumanovo (May 2015)[2], but the people prevented this. The Colourful Revolution also goes to show that people of various backgrounds can come together around the same idea and objective – a better Macedonia for all of us. And what is most important, there are many of us. Not everything is dull and grey, it’s colourful, all the colours for all of us.
Fllanza Jusufi
[1] The massacre at Smilkovski Lake took place on the eve of Easter 2012; the victims were young men Kire Tričkovski, Filip Slavkovski, Cvetančo Acevski and Aleksandar Nakevski, and the fisherman Borče Stevkovski. In the first instance judgement, the Criminal Court in Skopje convicted Alil Demiri, brothers Afrim and Agim Ismailović, Fejzi Aziri, Haki Aziri and Sami Ljuta for the crime of terrorism and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
[2]On 9 May 2015, in a few streets of Divo naselje /Lagja e trimavë[3], a real war was being waged. The police said they had gone on a raid against a larger group of terrorists dug in in a number of houses. The bloody clash that lasted for almost 24 hours left a tragic balance of 22 dead (including 8 police officers) and 37 wounded police officers… (Boro Kitanoski “Macedonia: Së bashku. Заедно.” in CNA, Annual 2015, pp. 128-130.
Serbia: I’d burn down the entire village
A few months ago, Vojislav Šešelj returned to Serbia from the Hague Tribunal[1]. It was just a matter of his former party secretary disbanding the government, and of the party vice-president calling elections, for Šešelj to become a representative in the Parliament of the Republic of Serbia. In the Trial Judgement, Šešelj was acquitted and after 13 years, he returned to Serbia as a “winner”. As someone who “defeated” the Hague Tribunal, that “dungeon for Serbs”.
When in 2003, Šešelj went to the Hague, the Premier of Serbia was Zoran Đinđić. He was killed shortly thereafter. When Šešelj triumphantly returned in 2016, the Premier of Serbia was Aleksandar Vučić, and the President was Tomislav Nikolić, his long-time closest associates who had established their own party in the meantime (in 2008) and were soon winning elections and taking absolute power in Serbia. Thus, their one-time ideological leader and political father[2] returned to an atmosphere that was familiar and conducive to his ideas.
At the time when he was leaving for the Hague, there was hope in Serbia, faith that changes were possible, a vision that something was changing, relief that dictatorial-fascist leaders had been deposed, the idea that “Serbia was on the right path”. He returned to a robbed and miserable country, among people without hope, without faith that any kind of change is possible, among people who have been electing his former party associates at a number of consecutive elections and by an overwhelming majority of votes. Santa Claus himself could not have given Šešelj a better present. And he is not the only one to blame, nor is it all because of the current government in Serbia; this is just a good example of how hope and faith can be illusory, and how Serbia has never left the nationalist matrix, however much it may have sometimes seemed that “it was almost there”. Not quite.
The elections came and went in April this year, it took almost four months to form the new government, but there is no more anticipation of change, of any sort, there is no more faith that changes are possible and no more illusion that “Serbia is on the right path”. Aleksandar Vučić, with his two jerseys and two faces: one for Europe and the world, another for Serbia, is premier once again. At the time when he was attending the official opening of Chapters 23 and 24 for accession to the European Union in Brussels, his party comrades, as close to him as he once was to Šešelj, were opening the exhibition “Uncensored Lies” in the centre of Belgrade where they displayed all the public criticism addressed to Aleksandar Vučić in the past two years. The authors of the criticism, mostly reporters, but also other individuals with no more than a social network account, were marked as “enemies” and the authorities put a cross-hairs on their foreheads.
Independent reporters in Serbia habitually move about with cross-hairs on their foreheads, receiving daily threats. The most recent were sent to Slobodan Georgiev, a reporter for Vreme and BIRN, and Nedim Sejdinović and Dinko Gruhonjić from the Independent Reporters Association of Vojvodina. When the premier calls “scum” anyone who dares to criticise anything from the domain of social life, this means that the doors of violence have been flung open, especially for those few people who have managed to retain some courage and hope. Or at least one of the two people.
I hesitate to mention the opposition, because the opposition to Vučić (with 48.25% of the votes) and SPS with which the government was constituted (10.95%) now also includes Šešelj’s party, which has returned to the Parliament (SRS, 8.10%), and the pro-fascist “Dveri” and DSS (5.04%) and the party of Vučić’s one-time minister Saša Radulović “Dosta je bilo” (6.02%), as well as, on the other side, the Democratic Party (or whatever is left of it, with 6.02%) and the LDP-LSV-SDS coalition (better known as Čeda-Čanak-Tadić, with 5.02%). On the eve of the elections, the united opposition reacted to an attempt at stealing votes, so the fragile democracy in Serbia found itself facing a difficult test: whether to support the principle that the election choice of the citizens is sacrosanct and fight against the stealing of votes, even if that means that a pro-fascist party will be elected into Parliament, or refrain from action, because it would only go to strengthen the already strengthened parties on the margins of what is permissible and individuals on the cusp of imprisonment for their words and actions motivated by nationalist and chauvinistic hatred.
Absolute power has also been won at the local level, which best suits the tabloid which now have an inexhaustible source for various bizarre news items about the goings and doings of local politicians, ranging from serious allegations of sexual harassment, corruption, mobbing, to reports of how some political parvenus give babies dummies encrusted with “Swarovski” crystals or how they manage to summer in luxury resorts around the world on a salary of 400 Euros. This creates the illusion of freedom of speech and the illusion that the government is susceptible to criticism: no one criticises the top or the most powerful, those that are fair game are the small cogs in local government, insignificant and therefore an easy target.
There is never any shortage of the bizarre in the media, but what is conveniently overlooked is the demolition of buildings in Hercegovačka Street, in the Savamala quarter, to make room for the megalomaniac development of the “Belgrade Waterfront”. Because of the illegal demolitions on the eve of the elections, when the police refused to respond to calls from citizens, thousands of people have been protesting in Belgrade for months. Just like in Novi Sad, because of the replacement of the Vojvodina Television editor. However, photos from the protests, the words and messages of the protesters do not make it into the mainstream media, they are not shown on television at all or are alternatively dismissed as a “handful of hirelings”, just as in the late 1990s when the current premier was minister for information.
Since the beginning of the year until mid-September, (at least) 23 women have been killed[3]. They were killed by their partners. Apart from the women victims, there were other victims – their children, current partners, friends. The Vojvodina town of Žitište was the site of a mass shooting where a man killed his ex-wife and another four people, and wounded over 20. Most of the women killed had previously contacted the police and other services that were meant to protect them, but failed to do so. The ombudsperson pointed out the failures of state authorities in 12 cases of murder of women (in a recommendation issued at the end of July when there were 14 murders of women on record; in the meantime, their number has unfortunately increased).
One Pride Parade was organised in Belgrade in June of this year, another will be organised in September. Why two all of a sudden is a question for LGBT organisations, but it is important to note that the June Parade elicited almost no reactions at all. We will see how the September Parade will go, but it seems the authorities have reined in their troopers, and that apart from the Serb Orthodox Church and the likes of Dveri (mentioned above) and the banned organisation Obraz, there is no widespread or violent resistance to the Parade. This is a positive development.
When we take a step back from internal politics in Serbia and glance over the fence – or through the cross-hairs – we can see that relations in the region have never been worse since the cessation of open wartime hostilities. And once again, in his schizophrenic policy where he pretends to be a factor of peace and stability in Brussels and a leader of the Serb nation in Belgrade, Vučić strolls around Kalemegdan and plays chess with Izetbegović, on the one hand, while supporting Dodik and leading him about with the other. Although they did not lend their support to the referendum in Republika Srpska, Both Vučić and Nikolić support Dodik, thereby contributing to the destabilisation of BiH.
Although the Premier of Serbia, Mr Vučić, recently presented the President of Croatia, Ms Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, with a large bouquet of flowers, symbolically on a bridge, as if they were a romantic couple making up after a brief squabble and not heads of state, the relations between Serbia and Croatia are indisputably bad, and the general opinion is that they are the worst they’ve been since the war. The dismal state of affairs suits both parties – the best way to hide your weaknesses and shortcomings is by accusing the other. By heating up the army mess beans that they originally cooked up 25 years ago, both hope only for good election results, because fear, as they have come to understand a long time ago, is the best ruler. While ones are rehabilitating the Ustasha movement and beatifying Stepinac, the others will do the same for Draža Mihailović. And on it goes: not just hoping that your neighbour’s cow drops down dead, but that both the cow and the neighbour drop down dead and that the village burns down with them. But what will you do when the whole village burns down? I don’t mind going down with it, just as long as harm comes to them. Nevermind about the village.
With respect to Kosovo, everything is still shrouded in secrecy: negotiations of some sort are being held in Brussels, something is being said there, official and sparse statements are issued, and then each side, speaking to the press in its own language, speaks of its own victory. And about something it managed to secure despite the resistance. Exactly what that is no one knows. They smile and shake hands, that much we know. That alone makes us hope for better relations, freedom of movement, resolving contested issues… but then, at the beginning of the Olympics, the minister for sports and youth chimes in to call on the athletes of Serbia to step off the pedestal if a representative of Kosovo should be on it. It is particularly interesting that he called on the athletes from Serbia “not to become intimate” with those from Kosovo, so the public had a field day interpreting what “becoming intimate” might mean.
The right is in power almost everywhere in the world – or will be coming to power soon, I fear. And where is the left and is there a left in the world today, or are we all standing somewhere in the middle, waiting for fear to take us all the way to the right? But nevermind about the world.
Katarina Milićević
[1] Leader of the Serbian Radical Party, accused of war crimes before the Hague Tribunal. In 2003, he voluntarily surrendered to the Prosecutor’s Office.
[2] Aleksandar Vučić, when he was a member of SRS: “Everything I know about politics I learned from Vojislav Šešelj.”
[3] Data from 14 September 2016 ; source: “Women against Violence” network.
