June 2, 2008
A Dark Corner of Europe, Part I
“If Yugoslavia was the laboratory of Communism, then Communism would breathe its last dying breath here in Belgrade. And to judge by what [Slobodan] Milosevic was turning into by early 1989, Communism would exit the world stage revealed for what it truly was: fascism, without fascism's ability to make the trains run on time.” - Robert D. Kaplan
“You bombed my country.” These were the nearly first words I heard after clearing passport control on arrival in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, from a taxi driver who flagged me down inside the airport. “Fifteen countries bombed my country.”
I didn't know what to say. Neither did my American friend and traveling companion Sean LaFreniere.
“Why are you here in Serbia?” the driver said.
“We're tourists,” I lied. I didn't want to say I was an American journalist on a trip through the former Yugoslavia with an end destination in Kosovo. Serbia's last war of ethnic-cleansing was fought there, and it only ended when NATO, led by the United States, bombed Belgrade's tyrant Slobodan Milosevic into submission. That was nine years ago, but just three months ago Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. A mob of Serbian nationalists answered by fire-bombing the American embassy. The U.S. responded by evacuating its non-essential employees.
“If people ask what two tourists are doing here,” the driver said, “where you are from, you say you're from Holland.”
From a distance, the latest news out of Belgrade made the place look like a reactionary Middle East capital on a bad day, but this was still Europe. How dangerous could Serbia possibly be? Tensions are higher now than at any time since the 1999 war, but I wasn't going to lie about where I'm from. Whatever ails the country right now, it hardly compares to Iraq.
Sean and I tossed our bags in the trunk of the taxi and collapsed into the back seat. It was midnight and there was no traffic. I figured the ride into town should cost around 20 dollars, and I expected the driver would rip us off and charge something like 40. We had no idea what the exchange rate was, so I just pulled out a wad of bills from an ATM. I knew better than that, but was too exhausted to care. We paid 4000 Serbian dinars, and only later found out that meant 80 dollars for a fifteen minute cab ride.
“I cannot go to America,” our driver said as he hurtled us at top speed down the freeway while driving half in and half out of his lane. “America will not give visa. America closed to us in Serbia.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s probably because of the war. Thank God that's over.” Firebombing our embassy didn't help either, but I wasn't going to antagonize a man who almost certainly wasn't one of the arsonists.
He was a Serb, but he looked like a Turk. Ethnicity in the Balkans, as in the Middle East, has nothing to do with biological characteristics. Expanding and contracting empires of both the East and the West have mixed up the gene pools everywhere in those regions. American-style racial categories make even less sense there than they do in the U.S. An Orthodox Christian in the former Yugoslavia who speaks Serbo-Croatian as a first language is a Serb no matter where his ancestors may have lived hundreds of years ago. That's true whether he attends church or not. Religious belief as such is no more relevant to ethnicity in the Balkans than it is inside Israel. Dark-eyed or dark-skinned Slavs are even more common in Serbia than white-skinned or blue-eyed Arabs in North Africa and the Levant.
Most of the city's hotels are in so-called New Belgrade. They are overpriced, far from the city center, and surrounded by communist-era monstrosity architecture. Downtown is better. It looks and feels like a proper European environment. So instead of staying in a five-star hotel in a communist-era neighborhood, we stayed in a communist-era hotel in a five-star neighborhood.
The Hotel Royal was established in 1886, but you wouldn't know it from the look of the place. It couldn't have been upgraded much, if at all, since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The red carpets were badly stained. Sean kept banging his head on the poorly affixed reading lamp next to his bed. Shower curtains were missing half their rings, and only stretched half-way across the tub in any case. An ankle-busting open drain threatened bare feet at all times. Beds were too hard, too short, and too narrow, yet still the stiff sheets barely fit. The screen on the TV was smaller than the one on my laptop, there was no cable or satellite, and there were only two volume control settings: too quiet to hear, or loud enough to disturb the neighbors even at noon. Towels were hardly more absorbent than rubber sheets. Everyone should stay in a hotel like this once in a while to gain a little appreciation for Motel 6.
We walked the streets of old Belgrade after midnight and searched for whatever cafes or bars were still open. Sean said at once the city reminded him of his trips to cities in Russia, though it's a bit more prosperous and less sketchy.
The karaoke bar on a corner might not have been our first choice during the early evening, but it was one of the few places still open after midnight on a holiday weekend. We stepped inside. Beautiful and fashionably dressed young Serbian women and men sang songs in their native language with their arms around each other, empty shot glasses and crumpled packages of cigarettes before them on the tables. Except for the bartender whom we spoke to in English, no one in the establishment could tell we weren't Serbs. The atmosphere in the bar was one of energetic and joyous camaraderie. I was happy to be there. Serbia didn't feel remotely sinister, and I chuckled to myself as I remembered our taxi driver's warning.
“I could live here,” Sean said. I was tempted to agree as I took a swallow of my locally brewed Serbian beer. Belgrade was my kind of place – intriguing and troubled, yet attractive, cultured, and fun.
Then we found a Turkish-themed bar in a basement, and I reconsidered somewhat.
This place was quiet. Two young men brooded over beers in a corner, and two young women at the bar laughed at the bartender's jokes. The other tables were empty. I was surprised to find an Istanbul-like establishment in a country so violently anti-Islamic, but old Turkish style is warm and sophisticated, and Serbs do have good taste.
“We should order some of their plum brandy,” Sean loudly said as we leaned against the bar.
“You mean slivovitz?” I said.
Everyone heard us, dropped their conversation in mid-sentence, and stared. Their looks weren't hostile, exactly, but they weren't friendly either.
“Can we get some slivovitz?” Sean said to the bartender.
“I'd also like a beer, please,” I said.
The Balkan Stare abated, and the bartender smiled. He seemed happy that we knew of their national drink and wanted to have some. The handful of Serbian patrons switched to talking about us instead of staring at us.
Not until we sat down with our drinks did I remember an obvious and very important fact for the first time since we landed. Americans are not only the ones who bombed Belgrade. American soldiers in Kosovo are currently occupying part of what Serbs insist is their country. Most of Yugoslavia dismembered itself, but from the Serbian point of view, Americans were instrumental in the dismemberment of Serbia, which is something else.
It was a strange twilight zone feeling, and it didn't seem real. The only places I've seen American soldiers are in the U.S. and in Iraq. Europe is often thought of as a post-historical paradise, yet a place that looks like a banged-up version of Vienna if you squint at it hard enough in the dark got what was basically the Saddam Hussein treatment.
I sipped from my shot glass of slivovitz. It tasted of sweet plums and fire, but mostly of fire.
Sean is my oldest friend, and we're accustomed to taking road trips together that our friends and family tend to think are ill-advised. Our most infamous was a trip I wrote about a few years ago that we took on a lark from Istanbul, diagonally across Anatolia in a rented car, and into Iraq. There's no “beating” that, but we've wanted to road-trip across Yugoslavia together ever since Bosnia came apart at the seams. It is one of the most important, and historically violent, civilizational crossroads in the world.
The medieval Kingdom of Serbia lost its sovereignty to the Turks when Tsar Lazar’s army was defeated on the Field of Blackbirds, near the town of Kosovo Polje, in 1389. The tragic dissolution of Serbia, and it annexation by the world of Islam, was deeply traumatizing to the Serbian national psyche. The recent crimes of Slobodan Milosevic and his band of like-minded war criminals shouldn’t obscure that, even though they were not justified by it.
Serbia may be mostly Christian, but it’s no less Eastern than Turkey. (Christianity is itself a Middle Eastern religion by origin.) Serbia did not belong to the Western half of the Roman Empire with Rome as its capital. It belonged, instead, to the Eastern half of the empire whose capital is now Istanbul.
Most of the Balkan Peninsula was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. It did not belong to the West. It was the northern-most region of the political entity that included much of the Arab world, and it was anchored there for longer than the United States has existed as a country. The region of the South Slavs is European by geography and in some ways by culture, but for the last half-millennium much of it has been ruled by Easterners and Muslims more often than not. Belgrade belonged to the same political entity as Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Baghdad.
Serbia did not take part in the Renaissance, which spread from Italy to much of Europe, but not to Ottoman lands.
Serbia was beyond the reach of Napoleon and his code, which strongly influenced the rule of law.
Serbia likewise missed the Western European Enlightenment, subsumed as it was in the world of the East and Islam at the time.
The Ottoman Empire disintegrated at the end of World War I, but many of its unstable former pieces – from Israel and Cyprus to Lebanon and Iraq – are still at war with themselves and with each other. The unraveling of Yugoslavia has more in common with patterns of post-Ottoman crackup elsewhere than many people outside the region have stopped to consider.
The Kurds of Iraq, I discovered, provide a useful and instructive foil for Arabs. So do the Turks, Serbs, Bosnians, and Albanians in that strange region between the Middle East and Western Europe where civilizations overlap in bizarre and often counter-intuitive ways. The former Yugoslavia is not the Middle East, but it’s an eye-opening crossroads where East and West meet and bleed into each other like artifacts in a painting by Salvador Dali.
Sean and I met one of Belgrade's most famous writers, Filip David, at a cafe downtown across the street from a small park. You may know him as the writer of the award-winning film Cabaret Balkan
He wanted to get one thing out of the way before Sean or I asked him anything.
“I must say that I opposed from the first moment the Milosevic regime,” he said, “from the beginning of the 1990s. I was in non-government groups and organizations that were opposed to Milosevic and the nationalistic policies of Serbian power.”
“Did you spend time in prison?” I said.
“No,” he said, “because Milosevic was very clever. He let dissidents stay free so he could always say to people outside Serbia, here is democracy. You could see these small groups, but they were without any real influence. But when he saw that it could be dangerous, he stopped the TV and radio stations. He stopped newspapers, and so on. I did lose my job, though. For 25 years I was the head of the drama department at TV Belgrade.”
TV Belgrade, at the time, was the only Serbian channel. It was Slobodan Milosevic's very own Pravda. Now, though, Serbia has many channels. And even during the Communist era under Josip Broz (Marshall) Tito, Western newspapers and magazines were available.
“The political situation is not okay,” David said. “It has not changed from the time of Milosevic, you know.”
“Really?” I said. I was slightly surprised to hear this, and I'm not sure he's right. Serbia's election a few weeks ago produced a better result than either David or I expected when we met. Boris Tadic's pro-European Democratic Party got less than 50 percent of the vote, but still garnered a bigger share than any of the individual nationalist parties. Serbian Nationalists outnumber internationalists overall, but they're somewhat disorganized and they certainly are not starting wars anymore.
“Milosevic is dead,” David said, “but his ideas and Serbian Nationalism is still very strong.”
That much at least is true. Serbia's full-blown nationalist parties – the Radicals led by Vojislav Šešelj, currently in the dock in the Hague for war crimes and genocide – and Milosevic's old Socialist party, are supported by roughly half the population. A smaller base of support for Vojislav Kostunica's more moderate party, which is still nationalist and anti-European, place Serbia's supporters of Westernization and liberalism in the minority.
The Communist era's Marshall Tito was awfully liberal as far as Marxist dictators go, but Serbia's nationalists are more extreme than any others in Europe. As Paul Berman put it, “the best communism led to the worst post-communism.” The French National Front, led by Jean Marie Le Pen, may wax nostalgic for the extremist actors of yesteryear, but the head of the Radical Party is headed by present day war criminals who plotted and carried out genocide against both Muslims and Catholics.
“What put Yugoslavia together was communism,” David said. “There was an ideological base, there were communist parties in Serbia, Croatia, everywhere. But after the fall of communism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they lost their ideological base. Milosevic was a real communist, but also a pragmatist. He knew what to do to keep his power. At first he was against nationalism.”
“You mean after Tito?” I said.
“After the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said. “But communists in Serbia had to fall also. So very soon Milosevic became a Serbian Nationalist. You must understand that Serbian Nationalism is also a totalitarian ideology.”
“So it's not that hard to go from one totalitarianism to the other,” Sean said.
“He was not really a nationalist,” David said, “but he had to do this to keep his power. The problem with Serbs then was that Serbs controlled the Yugoslav Army. At that moment he went all over Yugoslavia and raised the issue of nationalism. He was sure that because the Serbs in the Yugoslav Army controlled everything, he could control Yugoslavia. And he then began to attack Croatia, Bosnia. The army was already there, everywhere were people opposed to his regime. That was the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia.”
The dénouement was a long one. The end of the end of Yugoslavia only came to pass three months ago when Kosovo declared its independence.
“I'm on the political committee of a small party,” David said, “the Liberal Democratic Party. In the opinion of some people, especially outside Serbia, this is the only party that's based on the real situation. We say Kosovo has separated, it is now a new state, and we should have good relations with them.”
“You recognize this?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “100,000 Serbs still live there, so we have to have good relations with Albanians.” 90 percent of Kosovo's people are ethnic Albanians. “But we're only a minority here in Serbia. Maybe six, seven, or eight percent of people agree with this. The rhetoric here is very high in the media that Kosovo is Serbia. Of course they say they will defend it with diplomacy. We have no strength to fight for it. But who knows, they say. Maybe one day in the future.”
“The people in Kosovo,” David said, “the Albanians don't want to live in Serbia. Before the Milosevic regime we had no connection to Kosovo. They had their own parallel institutions. They were already outside Serbia. I am sure that some of our politicians are happy that it has separated, but officially they speak differently.”
“You mean, privately they're happy?” I said.
“Yes,” David said.
“They've removed the problem,” Sean said. “It's been cut loose.”
“Kosovo was only part of Serbia after the First World War,” David said. “It was not forever even though they say it was forever.”
Many Serbian Nationalists are fixated on the battle near Kosovo Polje when Tsar Lasar's forces were defeated by the Turks on the Field of Blackbirds in 1389. But Kosovo was mostly Albanian then, as it is now.
“And when you have myths,” David continued, “they are based on emotions, not on facts. Hitler has in Mein Kampf one very important sentence. He said his National Socialist movement was not based on facts, but on emotions, and that no facts can destroy it. And if you base your power on emotion, people will stay there and it will be forever. I asked myself, how did things change in Nazi Germany? With a complete catastrophe. We haven't had one. And I don't want one because I live here.”
NATO's bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 was a catastrophe of a sort, but of course it hardly compares to what happened to Germany and Japan in the 1940s.
“I can't say, yes, that's the solution,” David said. “But in some way you must begin from zero.”
A large number of Europeans, contrary to conventional wisdom, have been anti-American for most of America's history. The problem, however, is confined, to an extent, to Western European elitists. Eastern Europe is different, as Donald Rumsfeld bluntly pointed out with his now infamous quip about New Europe and Old. Serbia, though, is different from both. Anti-Americanism runs much deeper there, and it’s partly based on recent and current grievances as well as the usual conspiracy theories and phantasmagoria. It is much more vicious than what you'll find in the cafes of Paris.
“What do most Serbs think of Americans now?” I asked Filip David.
“Very bad!” he said and laughed. “There is very messy propaganda, you know. Here there is no private opinion, only public opinion. During Milosevic they said for four years that there was no alternative to war. And after Dayton, the next day, they said that peace has no alternative. Everyone changed their mind overnight. The influence of the media is very very strong. And now they say Americans are our enemies.”
“They actually use the word enemies?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “You also have some kind of stereotypes. The first is that there is an international conspiracy against Serbia, and that behind that are Americans and Jews with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“Oh, you're kidding,” Sean said. He spent six months in Denmark while I was in Lebanon, and he never heard that kind of thing there.
“Really,” David said. “They say Jews control America.”
Sean couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity.
“And the second,” David said, “is that all independent journalists and non-government members are traitors who are paid by the West. These two stereotypes exist now, in this moment. I am against this, you know, because I am Jewish.”
“Is that a problem for you here?” I said.
“It's an attack on international Jews,” he said, “not Jews here, because, you know, in Serbia there are only 2,000 Jews. A lot of people who attack Jews and are anti-Semites, they have never seen in their lives any Jews. In this moment, we have over 100 anti-Semitic books. A lot of them are reprinted books that were written during the Nazi occupation of Serbia during the Second World War. They are trying to explain how it's possible that Serbia lost all its wars. They are saying that it's an international conspiracy. And people believe it. You know, the bombing of Belgrade. It's true that in the American administration you have lots of Jews. But they are Americans, they act like Americans, not like Jews. I think so.”
“And the honest truth,” Sean said, “is there aren't that many.”
“Most are Christians,” I said.
“Henry Kissinger,” David said. “Hal Holbrook, Wesley Clark.”
“Wesley Clark isn't Jewish,” I said. “He's Christian.”
“He's not a Jew,” Sean said.
General Wesley Clark was NATO's Supreme Allied Commander of Europe when the U.S. went to war against Yugoslavia – which was really just a war against Serbia since what was left of Yugoslavia at the time might be better described as the Serbian Empire. (Yugoslavia was derisively described by many of its citizens as Serboslavia even long before the rise of Milosevic.) It wouldn't be reasonable to expect many Serbs to admire Wesley Clark, but accusing him of being a Jew seemed a bit much.
“Yes,” David said, “but he was born a Jew and adopted by some family. It's not important whether it's true or not. People here say someone is a Jew when they don't like him.”
I decided to fact-check this just in case I was wrong. And according to Wikipedia, Wesley Clark has a Jewish great-grandfather. That doesn't make him Jewish according to Jewish law, but it does make him Jewish according to Hitler's definition and, apparently, according to the Serbian definition as well. When General Clark ran for president in the Democratic primary in 2004, the American media let this factoid languish in relative obscurity because hardly anyone in the United States would find it interesting or relevant.
I assumed it was nonsense because Belgrade's propaganda industry has been manufacturing lies about its enemies for a long time. Republican Senator Bob Dole was widely accused in Serbia of being secretly an Albanian Muslim, for instance. Kosovo's current prime minister Hashim Thaci, who really is a bit sketchy, was recently and absurdly accused of harvesting and selling Serb body parts. When you throw The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the mix, it’s a good idea to fact-check what you hear – which is frankly good advice in the Balkans in general, not just in Serbia.
“Everybody tries to make their identification with Palestine or with Jews to explain what happens here in Serbia,” David said. “People very often can't understand what happens here. We who live here can't always understand. During Tito's regime there wasn't any kind of anti-Semitism. Tito had good relations with Israel. But with the rise of nationalism everywhere we have the rise of anti-Semitism everywhere. In Slovenia they have maybe 50 Jews, but they have problems with anti-Semitism when there are problems with the economy.”
“So basically,” Sean said, “anti-Semitism is used here, right now, in the exact same way it was used in Nazi Germany.”
“That's the problem,” David said.
“What do Serbs think of Israel?” I said.
“It's mixed,” he said. “Sometimes they praise Israel and say we too must defend ourselves with arms. But other times they say We are like Palestinians, and that Israel is an extension of the United States.”
“So sometimes Serbs identify with Palestinians,” I said. That comes across just from walking around. I saw three Serbs wearing Palestinian keffiyehs downtown just that morning. At the same time, Serbia is the most violently anti-Islamic country in Europe.
“But it's also not so simple,” he said, “because Palestinians are Arabs. And they don't like Arabs because Arabs are Muslims. That's why I say there is so much confusion here about political life, cultural life, and economic life. You can be very surprised by what people say here, and the next day they will say the exact opposite.”
Not everyone in Serbia hates Americans, though.
“I supported Americans from the first moment here,” David said. “I mean, you can criticize Bush or some aspects of his politics, but without the United States we couldn't have resolved any of the problems in the former Yugoslavia. Because European countries have no strength. When the United States came, all the problems were resolved. It stopped. It stopped the fight. Yes, the United States is some kind of policeman, but you must have some kind of policeman in the world who is ready to stop, to intervene. We had that kind of situation in the Second World War, too. When Americans came, it was finished.”
“But we're very conflicted about it,” Sean said. “We don't want to be the world's policeman, but we keep having to do it.”
“It would be very dangerous for the entire world if there was complete isolation of America,” David said. “If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”
“You think?” Sean said.
“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can't stop anything.”
“Is there any talk that if you joined the EU that the economy would take off?” Sean said.
“Yes,” David said, “but these are facts. These are facts. People in the Democratic Party are saying so, but others are saying they would rather us be very poor and have our dignity.”
“That's very much like the Arabs,” I said.
“Yes,” David said. “In some ways.”
“I don't mean to be offensive when I say that,” I said.
“If you have no facts, you play on dignity,” David said.
“But you know what?” Sean said. “Cash buys a lot of dignity.”
“Without cash you have no dignity,” David said. “Yes, that's normal. You know, when we were under sanctions we had so much inflation. You can't imagine. If I didn't send a letter to my friends in the morning, in the afternoon it cost in the millions. It was the highest inflation in the world during Milosevic. In shops you couldn't buy anything. They were completely empty. But because we are an agricultural country, we could eat. Pensions were less than one deutschmark per month. Less than one. Money completely lost its value. If I had my pockets full of money, I couldn't even buy cigarettes. Nothing. You can't imagine that kind of situation. It's like living in some absurd galaxy.”
Neither Sean nor I had been to Belgrade before, and Filip David offered to take us on a bit of a walking tour. We set out from our downtown cafe and walked toward Belgrade TV, David's old employer before Milosevic fired him and before the headquarters was bombed by the Americans.
David showed us the Serbian parliament building, orthodox churches, the old Marx and Engels square from the communist days, and other various landmarks. I saw virtually no evidence that Belgrade had ever been bombed. Serbs suffered much more in Croatia, where they were ethnically-cleansed from the Krajina region in one of the most under-reported atrocities of the war.
“During the bombing here,” Sean said, “how bad was it?”
“I have very contradictory feelings,” David said. “On one side, I knew, I was sure, that Milosevic wouldn't resign without bombing. The resignation of Milosevic was a result of the bombing. On the other side, I was with my family here, my boy, my girl, you know, and they were afraid. My son lived 100 meters from Belgrade TV, which was bombed, and I lived 200 meters, and I begged him to stay with me because we knew it would be bombed that night. He said no, that he passed all these buildings that were bombed and he saw that the Americans were very precise.”
“But it's still dangerous,” I said.
“Sometimes they bombed the wrong thing,” he said, “but here in Belgrade they were very precise. It was not the kind of bombing as in the Second World War where they were bombing everything.”
“We will never do that again,” Sean said.
“You could see,” David said, “you could predict, they said what they were going to hit before they hit it. But it became very dangerous because they bombed all the official buildings and then they didn't know what to do next if Milosevic wouldn't resign. But Milosevic stopped at the right time.”
The bombed-out Belgrade TV station building wasn't far from our starting point. It stood out as one of the few remaining demolished buildings from the air campaign. It seems to be left as a showpiece. It's hard to say, though, if this building was left in its condition to wave the bloody shirt against Americans or against the Milosevic regime.
“We predicted it would be bombed because it was a massive propaganda mission,” David said. “And I was very sorry because 16 people who were innocent in that building were killed.”
“People chose to stay in it?” Sean said.
“No,” David said. “It was not by choice. The conclusion was that if people were killed, we would have an argument against the West. The man who was the general director at that moment is in prison because of it, because he gave orders to put people there.”
A memorial to the dead is placed across the street from the vertical rubble. All sixteen names are engraved in the stone. Above the list of names is written one simple question: Why?
But the truth is, everybody knows why. Civilians killed by Americans make for great propaganda. Journalists like Robert Fisk predictably complied and blamed NATO. It didn't matter at the time that Americans hit the building at 2:00 in the morning when no one should have been in there. It occurred to few that Serbian authorities might want to cynically parade the corpses of their own innocents in front of the cameras, though an old Middle East hand like Fisk should have known it was at least possible.
General Manager Dragoljub Milanovic was handed a ten year prison sentence in 2002 for forcing these sixteen employees to remain behind and get killed.
“He knew it would be bombed,” David said. “That's how this government thought.”
There's a lot of that going around. I've seen it in Lebanon, too.
“Hezbollah thinks that way,” I said.
“Yes,” David said. “In some ways.”
It's tempting to think that Serbia has changed, especially now that Milosevic is dead and the pro-European Democratic Party won more votes than the Radicals in the recent election.
“What do people here think of Milosevic now?” I said.
“He isn't so popular now because he lost all the wars,” he said, “not because of his politics. He didn't fulfill what he promised. But all these parties now say what he said about Kosovo, about the United States, about Russia. The rhetoric didn't change. But he lost, and he lost the support of the people because of it...We are afraid of the Radicals because we know what they did. They were in a coalition with Milosevic, you know. They did awful things. Their rhetoric is still war rhetoric.”
“I was very critical of Milosevic,” Radical Party leader Tomislav Nikolic said just a few weeks ago. “He had stopped short all Serbian actions, which benefited our enemies. I would have done many things differently. I would have gone all the way.”
How Nikolic would have gone further than Milosevic, whose ethnic-cleansing campaign turned 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians into refugees, isn't clear. There wasn't much more that could have been done short of defeating the United States and NATO in battle, or killing the Albanians outright so they could never go home.
The Radicals aren't gearing up for yet a fifth Serbian war. They can’t. Nikolic is trying to rhetorically out-Slobo Slobo as a way to make up for his own party’s impotence on the Kosovo question. A huge chunk of Serbia’s population hasn’t moderated their views an iota. “After 11 September 2001 the world seemed to forget about the Balkans,” Asne Seierstad writes in her excellent book With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia
“I feel like we're safe here,” I said to David. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” he said. “Generally. But sometimes you will have somebody say they don't like you if they hear you speak English.”
I'd seen some looks of surprise and the occasional uncomfortable stare, but no one had been verbally rude to either Sean or me yet.
“Our taxi driver from the airport told us not to say we're Americans,” Sean said, “but to say we're from Holland.”
“That seems paranoid,” I said.
“Maybe that was his impression,” David said. “Or maybe he didn't want to say directly that he doesn't like Americans, but in that indirect way he said you are not welcome here. You may meet some people who say, fine, you're Americans, and others who say they hate Americans. But you could say you support the Radicals, that you came here to support Šešelj and Milosevic.”
Sean and I laughed.
“What if we say we support Kosovo?” I said.
“That would be dangerous,” David said.
To be continued...
Coming up: a visit to war-shattered Bosnia, a road trip to Kosovo, Albanians who rescued Jews from the Nazis, activists for the eviction of the United Nations, American soldiers hailed as liberators by Kosovo’s Albanians and as protectors by Kosovo’s Serbs, Israelis who live among Muslims, and victims of the Bin Ladens of the Balkans.
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Posted by Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 12:09 AMEven if there was never a direct flood of Western cultural change washing over Serbia, there was osmotic infiltration. The same kind of osmosis went both ways, of course, but after 1683 it looks like the West came out far ahead of the exchange, if for no other reason that nothing new was coming out of the East.
Serbia was lashed to a rotting corpse after the lifting of the siege of Vienna. The effects of necrotic poisons are what we are seeing in a lot of ways.
The artillery pictured is WWI vintage, not current issue.
Posted by: Patrick S Lasswell
at June 2, 2008 10:11 AM
It's interesting to see that the "Protocols" anti-semitism nonsense is alive and well in this corner of Europe. It's amazing to see how little things have changed.
Michael- do you get the feeling that there is a generational split in attitudes towards Americans? Does one generation appear to hate us more than the other?
Thanks again for your insight.
Posted by: Tman at June 2, 2008 10:35 AM
Patrick: Even if there was never a direct flood of Western cultural change washing over Serbia, there was osmotic infiltration.
Yes, of course. Serbia looks and feels Western to an extent if you don't scratch the surface. And either way it is, of course, European.
Still, Serbia is non-Western even on the surface in ways that are hard to articulate. Perhaps I could figure out why if I spent more time there.
It was startling to go from Serbia to Croatia. Croatia is much more Western, and I was surprised by how in-my-face that abrupt change hit me upon arrival in Dubrovnik. It's hard to articulate why because I spent less than a day in Croatia, but the West is home for me, and I know home when I see it.
The real mind-blowing place in the region is Albania. That country turns just about every assumption about all this stuff on its head.
Tman: do you get the feeling that there is a generational split in attitudes towards Americans? Does one generation appear to hate us more than the other?
I could guess, but I shouldn't because I would only be guessing. The real answer is, I don't know.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 10:43 AM
One very important difference is envy -- is the local dream to do better than a fortunate neighbor? or is the dream that neighbor's prize cow dies?
Great, great stuff. Sounds different than Bratislava, which is more like Croatian Zagreb.
The nationalism is likely to seep away only slowly, as the economy improves and as people travel out and tourists travel in.
How lucky to meet David -- or had you had prior contacts and a plan?
Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at June 2, 2008 10:54 AM
Tom: How lucky to meet David — or had you had prior contacts and a plan?
We had prior arrangements. Sean finagled David's email address from science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling's ex-wife and her current husband, who are from Belgrade.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 10:57 AM
Michael, Thanks for writting an article on Serbia and the Balkans.
In 2006 I went on leave from Iraq and toured around the Balkans, Eastern, and Central Europe. We had to lie to get leave status granted because they heard we were going through Serbia and weren't going to grant it. The only part we were nervous about was the border crossing because we had our military uniforms packed in the back of our rental car in bags; went through without a hitch.
We made it through and made various stops-Belgrade is an interesting city. My partner in crime split and spent a few nights in Serbia, he said he encountered no problems. I took a train through Serbia on my way back to Sofia, Bulgaria. On the train I was in a cabin with a Serb (a sleepy drunk), and a Turkish man who spoke English. The Turk was a police officer who worked investigating war crimes for the UN in Kosovo, the police on the train looked at him and his passport for 20 minutes; mine for around a minute with quizzical looks on their faces because I was American. You could feel the animosity the police had for the man, I felt sorry for him. I asked him how he felt about it and he just brushed it off. The funny thing about this whole situation now, is back when I was traveling through Serbia, the United States was in the process of setting up a Status of Forces Agreement with Serbia-it was to the point that National Guard Units and Regular Army Units were working with the Serb Army in Serbia. I also was able to see various structures that were hit during the 1999 bombing campaign.
The National Guard Unit that I am with now was in Bosnia in from 2003-2004, I asked them if the Problem will ever go away (it was for a paper for school on the very problem you are examining)-one Sgt had a sobering response. He said they gave us their old weapons and hid the good ones from us when we searched, we found caches of good weapons buried in the ground (many mortars, rockets, AKs, etc.) to be used if America left, and one man told him that if or when the Americans leave he would go down and kill his neighbor for raping his sister during the war. How is that for a peaceful resolution to the conflict?
The Balkans is a unique area and is the crossroads between Europe and the Middle East. The music, food, dress, culture, and peoples have much been influenced by Turkey and the Middle East. You are right to draw parallels between Iraq and the Balkans; I found the same things happening somewhat between the two. Cultures, when mixed together, can create tension and warfare. When doing research for the project I found that the reason for the Serbs in Kosovo was because the government (I can’t remember when exactly) pursued a policy of ethnic relocation within Kosovo-like the Chinese did successfully with Tibet. It is sad that myth of Kosovo being Serbia’s homeland has led to so much bloodshed and pain. A good book on the various histories of the Balkan Countries is called: The Balkans: A Post Communist History by Robert Bideleux; Ian Jeffries. They also wrote a book about Eastern Europe, but I have to look at that one. I hope to travel there again and live there someday. I can’t wait to read the next article or articles. With everything happening in the Middle East these days, it is refreshing that someone is covering, “The Dark Corner of Europe”. There is also a documentary on Balkan Soccer fans and their bloody nationalism. I forgot what it was called-it's pretty crazy.
Posted by: josh at June 2, 2008 11:13 AM
Michael, the taxi who took you for €80, is one of the "unofficial" taxis in Belgrade. The official taxis are not allowed to "flagged ... down inside the airport". You can find the official upstairs outside with a little blue sign on top. Trip to the center of town is ~€20.
You should have more pictures of the bombing downtown. There are many more buildings which have not been repaired. Very shocking to see the massive destruction in the middle of a big modern European city.
Posted by: cswilly at June 2, 2008 11:17 AM
cswilly: You should have more pictures of the bombing downtown.
I only saw the one. I know there are others, but I couldn't find them. If I made a big enough point of it, I could have, but I was interested in other things, also, and had a strictly limited amount of time. I spent most of my time on this trip in Kosovo.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 12:01 PM
I was in Belgrade about a year and half ago on business[don't ask]. I got no anti-American vibes at all. Many people spoke English and everyone was quite friendly when I walked into a store or restaurant. I even met a few who were big fans of American football. The food was excellent, quite reminiscent of Turkish food. The women were gorgeous and very tall.
I'm surprised about the anti-semitism that you encountered. There is a large building at the end of the main bridge across the Danube that was built by Israelis on the site of one of the bombed buildings. This was pointed out to me several times but never with any hostility.
My hosts had my driver give me a tour of the city one day. The most shocking thing that I saw was an Army headquarters in a very wealthy residential neighborhood. It had been hit by a JDAM or cruise missile and was nothing but some walls and twisted re-bar. The villas on either side and across the street were completely untouched. There couldn't have been more than 100 feet separation yet they were just fine. It's stunning how precise the weapons are. The notorious Arkin had lived nearby before going to his just reward. Maybe they were looking for him.
Posted by: paul at June 2, 2008 12:52 PM
Sorry Michael, I think your post is misleading, I'm not sure if intentionally so.
In the last year I have been to Belgrade a half dozen times and all over Serbia. The people there overwhelmingly like Americans, I never heard anyone complain "you bombed my country" or even treat me or anyone I know rudely. I also found them to be scrupulously honest, especially about money.
Most Serbs I met thought Milosovic was a jerk and want nothing more than closer ties to the west. They do feel they have been needlessly humiliated by Western Europe and the US, but I find they do not hold it against Americans they meet.
Here are more pictures of the place including the results of our bombing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krlooney/52781065/in/set-1124992/
Overall after visiting Serbia, I find myself much more skeptical of the "official" narrative we get in the media.
Posted by: krell at June 2, 2008 1:06 PM
You laugh away the allegations about the selling of Serb body parts by Hashim Thaçi. But the (Belgian) newspapers I read were pretty serious about those allegations. They wrote it was pretty certain the uçk sold organs of Serb prisoners and that high ranking uçk members like Hashim Thaçi at least should have known about it. Carla Del Ponte also supports these allegations and last April, Human Rights Watch called for an investigation into the matter. That doesn't mean it is true, but at least it seems to be based on more serious indications than mysterious conspiracy theories like that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Posted by: Tijl at June 2, 2008 1:15 PM
Krell: The people there overwhelmingly like Americans, I never heard anyone complain “you bombed my country” or even treat me or anyone I know rudely.
What can I say, Krell? I wrote what I saw and heard. If you didn't hear anyone say "you bombed my country," that's great. I did, instantly upon arrival. He wasn't rude about it, necessarily, he just said it. He was otherwise perfectly pleasant, aside from the fact that he charged me four times too much money. If he was a jerk about it, I wouldn't have gotten into his car.
Yes, people overwhelmingly were friendly in my (brief) experience in Serbia. Only a small number of exceptions, one in a Belgrade church, and one in a village.
Most people are friendly, or at least civil, everywhere in the world. Arabs are quite a lot friendlier than Serbs, but that doesn't mean they aren't often extremely anti-American at the same time. You have to look beyond surface level politeness, which is pleasant and civilized, but not indicative of what people actually think and feel.
Most Serbs I met thought Milosovic was a jerk and want nothing more than closer ties to the west.
Far more Serbs want closer ties to Russia. Just look at the election and polling data. Tadic's pro-Western party got the biggest share of the vote, but still less than 40 percent. All the other parties (except David's tiny party) are anti-American, anti-European, and pro-Russian.
The Serbs you met aren't typical. The Serbs I met aren't typical either. All those I spoke to want closer ties with the West, but they belong to the liberal and cosmopolitan minority faction, and they know it.
I met a Lebanese guy a few years ago who said he thought George W. Bush rigged the election because every single person he met on his vacation to America voted for John Kerry. I don't think I have to explain what the fallacy in his thinking was. I suggest being careful with that when you travel abroad, as well. It's easy to be mislead on this stuff.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 1:21 PM
Tijl: You laugh away the allegations about the selling of Serb body parts by Hashim Thaçi.
Yes, I do. Not because I'm a fan of Thaci (I most certainly am not), but because that accusation doesn't even pass the sniff test. How would he have had the logistical infratstructure and access to sophisticated medical facilities to pull off a stunt like that even if he wanted to?
Look, I met lots of Kosovar Albanians who can't stand the guy, but all of them laugh this one off just as I do. I haven't yet read anything that convinces me, although I obviously haven't read everything. The burden of proof is on the accuser here, not the accused.
I wouldn't believe it if this was said about Milosevic either, and I dislike him a great deal more than I dislike Thaci.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 1:31 PM
Michael,
You apparently haven't been checking eBay's "Serbian Body Parts" market carefully enough. All these years I thought you were practicing responsible journalism and you don't even do a google search that clearly shows a number of the most reputable herbal viagra vendors also do a thriving body part business from the remnants of alien abductions of Serbs.
Seriously, the body part urban legend predicates that people with sufficient money to have that level of surgery accept large numbers of replacement parts from wildly disreputable vendors. I accept that a lot of wealthy people are unwilling to accept the decline of their health and eventual death. I do not believe that the mortality rates disreputable suppliers generate are considered acceptable by wealthy people. People rich enough to organize massive conspiracies do not invest in people slimy enough to steal body parts when their own lives are on the line.
When people have all the money they can spend on medical relief, they come to the US for care, not back-alley chop-shops in the former Soviet Bloc. The business plan of atrocity medical supplies just does not ring true.
Posted by: Patrick S Lasswell at June 2, 2008 3:15 PM
Patrick: When people have all the money they can spend on medical relief, they come to the US for care, not back-alley chop-shops in the former Soviet Bloc.
Indeed.
But some people will believe anything, especially about strange regions of the world like Kosovo where precious little information ever gets out.
You might as well slap "Here There Be Dragons" over Kosovo on the map as far as most of the world is concerned.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 3:21 PM
Michael,
My point was that I spent much more time in Serbia than you and had a completely different experience.
But then I went there with no real pre-conceived notions. I've read other stuff by you that was very one-sided against the Serbs and I am wondering if you saw in Belgrade what you wanted to see.
Here is a proper "Fisking" of your article from a friend that lives in Belgrade.
http://www.limbicnutrition.com/blog/michael-trotten-on-belgrade/
Sorry about the name misspelling, I'm sure my friend was a bit agitated by your commentary.
Posted by: krell at June 2, 2008 5:47 PM
krell: I am wondering if you saw in Belgrade what you wanted to see.
Such as what, exactly? The driver saying "you bombed my country"? I didn't see that because I wanted to see it, I saw it because it happened in front of me. It also happened in front of my traveling companion. He was there, too.
That sort of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with pre-conceived notions.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 5:54 PM
Sorry about the name misspelling, I'm sure my friend was a bit agitated by your commentary
krell - Your friend also says "...thanks to Mr Clinton’s illegal war in support of terrorists and Croatian ethnic cleansers"
Well, hey, you can't get any more unbiased than that.
This statement:
“And when you have myths,” David continued, “they are based on emotions, not on facts. Hitler has in Mein Kampf one very important sentence. He said his National Socialist movement was not based on facts, but on emotions, and that no facts can destroy it. And if you base your power on emotion, people will stay there and it will be forever."
...sums up the mess that results from judging people according to extreme nationalistic or religious tradition. There is no logic in those judgments.
Posted by: maryatexitzero at June 2, 2008 6:56 PM
krell: Here is a proper “Fisking” of your article from a friend that lives in Belgrade.
I'm not really sure what to make of this "fisking."
The tone of what your friend wrote sounds pretty angry, and it reminds me of the kind of chastising Michael gets once in awhile from locals or long-term residents when they feel he's misunderstood their area of the world.
Give him a break. I mean, he's traveling to and writing about many radically different parts of the world. He may not have got the full (or if you like, true) picture of Serbia, but I have no doubt he reported what he saw honestly. If he interpreted what he saw improperly, I'm sure he can accept constructive criticism. Nobody knows everything, after all.
I especially don't think he saw what he "wanted to see." Why? Because there's no reason for him to paint Serbs as the bad guys (unless, I suppose, he's planning to present the Albanians as the moderate-Muslim-pro-American-good guys in his next article). If anything, Mike is biased positively towards the people he meets; he wants to find folks who are sane and pro-American.
Posted by: Edgar at June 2, 2008 8:06 PM
Hi Michael,
My mother wishes she could have met you, but she’ll at least read these articles, which I am sure she will find extremely interesting. I happened to ask her about Belgrade just a few days ago when we were actually talking about you (she has visited the city several times).
Randomly, the first thing she had to say was that cabbies systematically rip you off, and not just as an American, which she obviously isn’t, nor even as an Albanian, nor as a Jew, which she didn’t advertise herself to be, but merely as a foreigner. With that respect, perhaps you shouldn’t take it very personally.
I am curious whether you got ripped off on the ride from Tirana. I have second-handedly read of European journalists specifically saying that Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian taxi drivers ought to take some lessons in common decency from their Albanian counterparts, but perhaps that’s just an Albanian urban legend.
I am curious of what you thought of Albania proper, and I could have only wished to have been there myself to show you around Tirana a bit. Only over the last couple of years have I realized how alien Albania is compared to the average Western scene. Growing up I have taken all its weirdness for granted.
Thank you for articulating a point I keep bringing up in discussions, but which keeps getting dismissed since I am supposedly so obviously biased from being Albanian.
Serbia likewise missed the Western European Enlightenment, subsumed at it was in the world of the East and Islam at the time.
Yes.
Serbia did not take part in the Renaissance, which spread from Italy to much of Europe, but not to Ottoman lands.
And yes.
The same holds true for Albanians, but they had far less to lose by comparison from the non adoption of these classic reformatory ideological measures, because Albanians had few religious flames in their midst, less fanaticism to overcome.
The use of Judeo-Christianity as a proxy for Western Civilization infuriates me even in the subtle context of American politics, but the absurdity of such a stubborn analogy becomes even more evident when applied to a situation such as that of the Serbs versus the Albanians.
It was the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the return to Greek and Roman philosophical roots, which made Western Civilization “Western” at all. Its essence prevailed and persisted despite Christiandom, not because of it.
Serbia has always been and regretfully largely still is a dogmatic ultra chauvinistic collective societal hallucination centered around a delusion of Slavic grandeur, and around universal bitterness with the entire world. Something rotten that way lies, and I hope that they realize soon that nothing good can come out of looking up to Russia.
Anyway, I had no idea that Serbia was still as rotten as David makes it sound. I believe the prevalence of crazy anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. If you track any Serb related video on YouTube, the attitudinal patterns become pretty clear.
Indeed myths are based on emotions, not on facts. And facts never get in the way of people who are motivated by supra rational (read irrational) motives. The fact that their nation is poorer and paralyzed by their obsession with a romanticized fictionalized past, will not get in the way of the Serbs. They need a more urgent reality check, and I can’t think of what, since bombing Belgrade obviously didn’t do the job.
Posted by: medaura at June 2, 2008 8:31 PM
Edgar: The tone of what your friend wrote sounds pretty angry
Yes.
And he would probably be surprised to learn that I agree with some of what he said. He just assumes I don't, he assumes the worst, because he's mad.
I liked Belgrade a lot more than he thinks. I'm sorry that didn't come across, but I'm not writing a guidebook here or trying to sell the place as a hot nightclub destination -- though it is great for that, if that's what you want in a trip to Eastern Europe.
I'm not a fan of Serbian Nationalism -- especially not the war criminals and their supporters -- and why on earth should I be? If my intention was solely to beat up on the Serbs, I would have written a very different article. I know how to wave the bloody shirt, too.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 9:17 PM
Edgar: Because there's no reason for him to paint Serbs as the bad guys (unless, I suppose, he's planning to present the Albanians as the moderate-Muslim-pro-American-good guys in his next article).
The next article isn't about Albanians, but they are moderate Muslims and pro-American. (Most of them are actually not religious at all.)
Anyway, I am not going to paint "Serbs" as the bad guys. Milosevic was a bad guy, as were the other Serbian leaders who massacred people in the Balkans, as were the Croatians, Bosnians, Albanians, and everyone else who killed innocents, burned houses, etc. Serbia produced more war criminals than any other country in the area lately, but none of these peoples are angels. It's a rough part of the world, and it always has been.
I refuse to think of this group or that group per se as The Bad Guys. I am not from the Balkans and am not wrapped up in the ethnic tribalism that still afflicts that region.
I am occasionally accused of being "anti-Shia" when I criticize Hezbollah. Why the hell would I be anti-Shia? What would I care about such categorical thinking? Where would I have learned to have an axe to grind against Shias? I'm not a chauvenist Sunni, for God's sake. I'm an American, and I couldn't give two shits about that kind of crap.
But because I'm American, it means something to me when our flag is flown in one place and burned in another. I won't apologize for that. I'm sure even Dennis Kucinich would rather our flag be respected than burned in other countries.
That doesn't mean I'm going to go hatin' on an entire nation because of the politics of its worst actors. I'd seriously hate Lebanon and Iraq if that were the case, but I think it's pretty obvious by now that I don't.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 9:36 PM
medura,
You piqued my interest so I checked. From the Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia
Belgrade is believed to have been leveled to the ground by 30 different armies in recorded history.
[...]
No less than 17 Roman Emperors were born in Serbia.
They've got imperial deficit disorder, they want to be kings of the world. Since the fall of Rome, they've not had a chance to put an emperor on the throne.
Also, they haven't been razed lately. They might well think that nobody is sufficiently resisting their imperial impulses because so many stones in Belgrad are standing one on top of the other. The picture of devastation of a building isn't just telling the Serbs that people are opposed to them, it is also saying that the opposition is incompetent because so much of the city is left.
Posted by: Patrick S Lasswell at June 2, 2008 10:40 PM
Patrick: They've got imperial deficit disorder
Yes, that is an issue in Serbia, although it's rooted a bit more recently than the Roman Empire. The Serbs lost their imperial kingdom to the Turks in 1389, and many of them are still pissed about it.
Want to know a really creepy Web address?
1389.org.yu
It is exactly what you'd expect that to be.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 2, 2008 10:52 PM
Dear Limbic - I am Michael's travel companion from this trip, Sean LaFreniere. Please be aware that the title of this post is borrowed from myself. A Dark Corner of Europe is taken from my report to him of my time in Cyprus two years ago.
A few years back I was the guest of the rebel government in Northern Cyprus on the anniversary of Turkey's invasion. I shared my time on the island with several Serb journalists (among over 80 nationalities of journalists represented, but no other Americans).
While Michael and I went through our college years with a vague worry of being drafted to go to the Balkans to stop televised, UN overseen murder... I spent part of my grad school years with Serbs who "adopted me" and helped train me in photography and journalism.
At the end of that trip I was to meet Michael in Lebanon... however, the IDF blew up the Beirut runway and I was then informed by Turkish Airlines that I would be rerouted to either Pristina or Tunis. I asked my Serb friends what to do and they replied that Kosovo was "a dark part of Europe". They suggested that I chase the sunlight and relax in beautiful Tunis (about which Michael had also spoken well). So I went "soft" that summer and chose Tunis... and I always wondered if I should have seen Kosovo.
In part, our recent trip to the Balkans by Michael and myself was to redress my oversight, fill in the missing part of the world from our college years, and answer a burning question that I had ever since Cyprus... If the Serbs I met were so kind and educated, so utterly decent, how did the wars of the the 1990's even happen?
After a few days in Belgrade Michael and I had definitely seen "Silicone Valley". We ate dinner at the cafe "Dorian Gray" and then wandered down the lane to find the Hooka Bar, the Karaoke Bar, and a strip of Lebanese-worthy night spots.
In fact, we knew in advance about Belgrade's night life and the "party barges", Lonely Planet has covered the "scene" quite well, so great night life was not noteworthy per se. However, everywhere we went the waiters were very polite and friendly, even after hearing that were Yankees, and even after our embassy was burned. Many happening nightspots let us sit down, sip brandy, and speak English loudly (over the music and conversation) and even oggle the ladies. Never, not once, were we made to feel unwelcome, as Americans, in Belgrade.
However, after several good nights out we were still left perplexed by the question of how such utterly decent people could have engaged in the wars that we knew were just completely awful.
The writer we met, Fllip David, offered one explanation... "When we Serbs are good, we are very good, when we are bad, we are very bad."
And so it seemed, an honest waiter who saved my smokes and lighter was balanced by a taxi driver who robbed us blind, the same waiter who glossed over public opinion of Americans was balanced by a cabbie who advised us to say we were from Holland.
BTW, Michael's portrayal oft the Taxi driver at the airport was dead on... his first words really were "You bombed my country..." It happened just as Michael said. And there really was no other choice of cabbie at midnight at the Belgrade airport (quite small and lonely).
Honestly, we later decided that this fellow had grossly over-reacted, we did not need to be from Holland. On the other hand, we DID have many experiences of the "Balkan stare", people scrutinizing our license plates, and being shaken down for bribes and pay offs. The Balkans may be safe overall, and Belgrade felt extremely safe from pick pockets, but it also felt right on the knife's edge of safety (as much from police as from criminals), which was very similar to my visit to Russia).
As for the military hardware... I was also partly responsible for Michael commenting on the display of guns at the Belgrade citadel... I had previously recounted the Russian war memorial in Moscow, (very Klingon-esque) where I climbed a tank with some children and "invaded Moscow". This park seemed typical of a nation that once (and now again) paraded tanks and nuclear hardware through the streets of the capital (by the way, so did Turkish Cyprus in 2006).
Yes, the US has a few memorials and war museums... the sunken hulk of the USS Arizona and the old aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, in NY City. However, those ships represented the efforts of the United States to liberate the world during WWII and the Cold War. Those ships suffered numerous attacks by Japanese Kamikazes and the deaths of many thousands of US sailors. Those memorials serve to remind Americans of the high cost of freedom and the terrible loss of lives that war brings.
The memorials in Moscow and Belgrade might well be just as cautionary as those in Hawaii and NY. On the other hand... the American memorials are very formal, children are hushed and vets walk through with tears in their eyes, meanwhile the tanks and howitzers in Moscow and Belgrade were crawling with kids (and myself).
The emphasis in Moscow and Belgrade was on the greatness and power of old regimes, not on the 'horrors of war' (as far as we could tell). Perhaps the dark side of war is presumed in Russia and Serbia... but what we saw were weapons used as playthings in an open air park that was the focal point of the daily social promenade - the mood was quite different.
Michael also noted that Arab countries, such as Iraq, also treat their old military hardware as a source of pride and of daily amusement, not as self-critical, naval-gazing such as in America. While Americans today are afraid of their own shadow and the opinion of the vanquished, nations such as China and Russia have no such conflict with their own use of force (and money) to influence the world.
I realize that it can be quite frustrating to have one's adoped home city "reviewed" by a foreign journalist. When a dark side is exposed we want to point out all the good times that we had there ourselves. But Michael is not a travel adviser or an academic researcher... his task is rather unusual and difficult... he is trying to help other Americans, who cannot or would not travel to the "dark corners" of the world, to understand the more subtle and broad nature of these places and their history.
BTW, Michael and I are both well known for NOT having prejudices about people or places. If no one is on hand to defend a point of view either of us will argue on the other side of an issue to make sure that we are coming to an accurate conclusion. Please do not hesitate to engage us if you are truly interested in dialog.
Sincerely, Sean LaFreniere
Posted by: sean at June 3, 2008 12:57 AM
Wow, Sean -- fantastic comment.
Michael, please consider promoting it ("A Dark Corner, 1b"?) to its own post.
The thing is, a foreign visitor to Trinity Church in Chicago would NOT get a good view on America, although it would be a strong representative view of a significant faction.
Americans probably can never understand the "nation state" in the way Europeans do, and thus the difference between patriotism and nationalism.
Also, just as many Austrians nurse memories of the great Habsburg Empire, and many (most?) French are proud of Napolean's Empire, most nationalities want to be part of a "great" country/ empire/ ?Union? The Chinese are showing their desire to show how "great" they are.
Americans seem to take American greatness for granted. Seldom is there serious criticism against America with a full comparison to other countries. I would not be surprised if EVERY country on earth has more of its citizens living in the US, than there are (non-military working) US citizens living in that country.
America, imperfect, is still great. By most accounts the greatest.
But every nationality wants to be great, too. Military victory shows greatness.
One way of getting a lot of that "greatness" feeling is for your team to win -- like the Iraqi Futbal team won last year, and there is some doubt about their playing this year in some controversy I'm not following.
Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at June 3, 2008 3:12 AM
Thanks for your comments Sean. Just to be clear, both myself and Limbic are speaking as Michael Totten fans. Giving people a picture of what has to be some of the most misunderstood places in the world is a real service and damn interesting reading.
That is why it was jarring to read an account so at odds with my own recent experience in the same place. My initial reaction was to start to doubt Michael's credibility in general. As I think about it more it just sounds like you guys had a bad experience getting to your hotel from the airport that seemed to color the whole visit. You should hear my Bucharest story in this regard, yet on balance I'd be eager to go back there as well.
There is plenty to criticize about Serbia, some of which has been chronicled on this thread, but the real unending source of criticism is the Serb's themselves. Their history is "not for the weak of stomach" and the recent war is another in a long list of calamities that Serb's tell me they bring upon themselves.
Sean, your story of the kind and educated Serbs match's my experience and the real story here is the one you posit: how did these things happen?
krl
Posted by: krell at June 3, 2008 5:59 AM
Thanks for another fascinating article, and comments.
The gist of many of these comments, though, leave me with a basic question:
Just how do those Serbs who, on the one hand, wanted Milosovic to just disappear, and, on the other, resent/despise/hate the US/NATO for bombing him out of power, believe that Milosovic would have otherwise relinquished his grip on the Serbian political landscape? How otherwise was he supposed to have been coaxed/convinced/persuaded to stop the concerted campaigns of murder in various regions of the Former Yugoslavia?
(It's not as though he was a committed democrat....)
There seems to be no small contradiction here. (So what else is new, eh?....)
Posted by: Barry Meislin at June 3, 2008 6:18 AM
Very interesting differences in culture with respect to public cooperation / freeloading / punishement.
online.wsj.com/article Science_Journal
Serbia is likely far more Russian than American.
Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at June 3, 2008 8:19 AM
No less than 17 Roman Emperors were born in Serbia.
I doubt that has anything to do with their fallen empire syndrome. Albanians have given at least 13 emperors to Rome, but the average Albanian doesn't even know that, let alone have his/her sense of national self-worth depend on it. Serbs on the other hand, have a saying: wherever there is a Serbian grave, that is Serbian land. What’s with that attitude?
I'm trying to objectively assess what's common between Serbia and Albania, and what the truly relevant particulars are.
Both nations have a poignant inferiority complex. Eastern European countries in general were history's rejects, almost always finding themselves as pawns in bigger international conflicts among super powers, brutalized by their powerful regional neighbors.
This is one of the reasons that Communist self-victimization (the ideological obsession with the exploitation of the proletariat) appealed to Eastern European nations on an intimate level.
This mass-scale self-deprecation is expressed in Albania by overall self bashing and self satire (Albanians' jokes about themselves are often worse than whatever racist joke I have heard in the West). By joking about their perceived backwardness, by acknowledging it, Albanians as individuals feel like they are rising above it. They staple it to the collective, but present company is always excluded. By pointing it out in others, they feel like they are personally absolved from it.
There is both a strong historic sense of national pride in Albania, ironically coupled by general mistrust of Albanians (often to an undeserved degree) and shame over fellow Albanians' reputation or purported actions.
This makes Albanians uniquely ambivalent about their national identity, and also very individualistic as a side effect. The Albanian collective, the popular current, the public opinion, is seen as ignorant and worthy of derision by default, no matter what the issue of the day is.
Albanians don't trust their institutions (and have thus been on the fringes of anarchy for a long while now), don't trust their politicians, don't even trust the new generations. Most Albanians cannot function optimally until they leave Albania and immigrate somewhere they can work in peace and don't have to deal with nonsense.
There is a perceived fall from grace in Albania, but no one can even pinpoint when the good old days even existed. So historic self-deprecation stretches back as far as the eye can see. The psychological way of overcoming it, is to look up to the West, and particularly to America, as a great concept they can be part of if they insinuate themselves vigorously enough on it.
I mean, look at this: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-5478982673332912184
As someone who has lived in Ontario for 4 years, I can assure you that the waiving of American flags is very un-Canadian behavior right there. But the US is the average Albanian’s least-common-denominational aspiration. It’s how they conceive of overcoming their perceived backwardness. Enver Hoxha set things on stone, and it turned out whatever he said was good, was actually the worst, and whatever he said was bad, was actually the best. Albanians see America as the anti evil of their dictatorship, the polar opposite of what they have been through, and toward which they aspire.
There exists Albanian propaganda out there, and there are some Albanian ultra nationalist sentiments especially with respect to Serbia’s and Greece’s territories, but these are extremely isolated, and in large part a simple reaction to the similar aggressive advances put forth by the Greeks and the Serbs regarding Albanian’s territories. Albanians are simply not collectivist enough to create a make-believe alternate reality based on propaganda and revisionism. Plus there is no reason to resort to revisionism when history is actually on their side.
Whereas the Serbs, from my understanding, also suffer from an inferiority complex, but their way of dealing with it is by having something stubborn to prove and thus asserting/restoring their superiority by proving it. Instead of aspiring on an individual basis to some concept/mission of redeeming greatness (like the Albanians look up to the West/America) they generally fall back on collectivist delusions of Slavic Brotherhood (looking up to Russia as part of their Slavic identity for some borrowed “greatness”), they stick to self-victimizing positions which blame their neighbor countries, the West, the Jews, America, the whole world for their own societal failures (Albanians by contrast, seem to like to blame almost exclusively themselves), and plotting for a righteous strike back against the entire world to set things right in the future and restore their respectful place in the world.
The problem is that most Serb’s notion of greatness is very tribal and primitive. It revolves around the ability to dictate military submission to other countries, hence the collective bragging with old military hardware.
The good old days they recollect, were the period during which Slavs were expanding in Europe by killing, raping, assimilating native populations.
I have seen what self-victimization, blaming others for your own failures, passive aggressiveness, and deluded paranoia, can do to someone’s personality. That’s why I am not a Democrat and why I hate Leftist strife. It is simply not healthy and represents one of the darkest sides of human nature.
I don’t know what it will take for Serbs to give up craziness. When everyone around you breathes the same poison throughout their lives, it is hard to develop a perspective on things. Nothing fails like success. The craziest events in history stem from one or more of the participants’ irrational exuberance fueled by past successes. Napoleon’s early successes fed his insane plan of attacking Russia, Japan’s early expansionary uncontested successes in Indochina gave it the bright idea of attacking Pearl Harbor. Rising stock prices fueled by easy money from the Fed fueled the dot com bubble. Sometimes, meeting cold failure in your first attempt at something crazy is the best thing that could happen to you. You give up, pack your bags and go home, and take up something more productive. The thing is that Serbia’s history is so full of crazy enterprises and bitter consequences that the nation seems to have developed a tolerance to the punitive effects from history. Grandiose failure and the romantic attachment to them seem to be part of the national identity, so I don’t know what could possibly serve as a reality check.
Posted by: medaura
at June 3, 2008 9:31 AM
krell: it just sounds like you guys had a bad experience getting to your hotel from the airport that seemed to color the whole visit.
It didn't color the visit. We enjoyed our time in Belgrade. Random friendly encounters with strangers aren't interesting to read about or dramatize, so they didn't get dramatized.
I am accustomed to having a horrible taxi driver experience everywhere I go. I expect it and don't hold it against a place.
As far as the hotel goes, we knew it would be bad before we got there. We wanted it for the price and the location. We thought it was amusing, and my descriptions of it were not meant as a serious complaint, and certainly not as a complaint against the entire country.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 3, 2008 9:37 AM
Patrick,
You piqued my interest too, especially since the math didn't really add up.
No less than 17 Roman Emperors were born in Serbia.
Thinking about it, the Slavs (Serbs included) did not show up in the Balkans until the 6th and 7th centuries A.D
Here is the deceptive list of emperors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Emperors_from_modern_Serbia
Ha! Even Wikipedia is a tool for revisionist idle hands.
Modern day Serbia was part of ancient day Illyria. It was not the Serbs, who were nowhere to be found on the continent until at least 300 years since the death of the last emperor on that list, who gave Rome leaders. It was the Illyrians, aka ancient Albanians.
How was that for deceptive? Wouldn't it make more sense for that article to be named "Roman Emperors of Thraco-Illyrian descent" rather than "Roman Emperors from modern Serbia"?
And this is really nothing. There is so much worse going on in Wikipedia.
They've got imperial deficit disorder, they want to be kings of the world. Since the fall of Rome, they've not had a chance to put an emperor on the throne.
So no, they wish they had ever been kings of the world. Revisionism going backward, and wishful delusional thinking going forward.
at June 3, 2008 11:52 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Emperors#Illyrian_Emperors
Overlap, much?
Not that it is all that important, but I think it is telling.
Posted by: medaura at June 3, 2008 11:58 AM
Michael, sorry for the rat-dropping like consistency of my last comments, but I keep finding interesting little things to add.
Below the list of Illyrian emperors, you see the Tetrarchy and Constantinian dynasty. All the birth places of the emperors, when known, are referenced in their ancient names, today mostly inexistent.
All, that is, except for those born in territories which today fall (or used to: Kosovo/Dardania) within today's Serbia. Those places are called Serbia, as if Serbia was an entity back then.
Talk about need for borrowed "glory"?
Many if not most of those emperors belong in the list of Illyrian emperors: Look up the ancient name of their birthplaces, and they are almost all Illyrian cities.
What is the need for Serbs to pull such stunts on Wikipedia? Why shouldn't these emperors be added to the list of the Illyrian ones, just because those illyrian territories are now part of Serbia?
It's really pathetic.
Posted by: medaura at June 3, 2008 12:12 PM
No need to apologize, Medaura. It's interesting stuff that I didn't know about.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 3, 2008 12:22 PM
Michael, I cannot understand why you have refused publish my comments. It is not as if they were spam or abusive.
After Sean mailed and talked about "dialogue" I thought we were all set for nice discussion.
Oh well.
Posted by: Limbic at June 3, 2008 1:48 PM
Jeez! The one post that gets through is the one moaning about the ones that did not! :-)
Murphy's Law.
Do you have an IP filter? That might explain it as I am posting from a different location now.
Anyway, can you perhaps rescue my other posts from the limbo and authorize them?
Thanks in advance.
Posted by: Limbic at June 3, 2008 1:52 PM
Limbic,
Whoah, I didn't censor yours or anyone else's comments. Occasionally they don't get through for some mysterious reason. I'm sorry about that, but I promise you it isn't on purpose.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 3, 2008 1:56 PM
I think that sometimes comments with too many urls get bounced. I don't think it's possible for me to rescue them. My comments system is flawed, sorry.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 3, 2008 1:57 PM
I was in Belgrade two years ago and I can sympathize with most of what you're saying. I definitely got the impression that they had some disdain with the concept of Americans, but were much more receptive of them on a personal basis. I also found their subliminal Anti-Americanism slightly hypocritical because there are many aspects of their culture that is quite Westernized.
In no part of their culture was it more apparent in the Serbians' love of Basketball. I didn't notice the fact that next to every playground in Belgrade was a full Basketball court because it just felt so akin to an American city. Once I realized that there were more Basketball courts than Soccer fields in Belgrade, I couldn't help but notice that it stuck out from every other city in Europe. I feel like this aspect of their culture is a great example of their confusion about their national identity and their feelings toward America/Europe.
Posted by: Baggs at June 3, 2008 2:07 PM
>> I think that sometimes comments with too many urls get bounced
so that's what happened to my comment ;) ?
Posted by: nameless-fool at June 3, 2008 4:37 PM
You can tell that (average) Serbs are brainwashed based on the
arguments they use in discussion boards. They are almost identical and come in waves, depending on what
was on TV the night before or what their Academy of Arts decided to publich ;):
Serbs always on the right side of history
Serbs resisted the Nazis, everyone else was a Nazi
Serbs fought the Turks, no one else did (oh the irony)
Serbs blah blah blah others = with no culture, barbarians.
Serbs have suffered, everyone had a great life in this millenia, thus we deserve x, y and z.
Regarding the anti-Semitism: The State Dept states the same thing, down to the books, in their 2006 report and mentions this too (google the sentence) :
"Teaching of the Holocaust is incorporated into the Serbian school curriculum, and the role of the Serbian government during that period is also discussed. However, there was a tendency among some commentators to minimize and reinterpret the role of Serbian leaders during the Holocaust, casting them as victims of foreign occupiers when in fact many leaders of that time collaborated with the Nazis and began campaigns against the Jewish population even before the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia.." Serbia also has their own Stormfront section...demand meets supply.
As for the rest: he went, he saw, he wrote. Taking him on trips to show a "different" side beats the purpose, we might as well turn the Serbian TV on. They don''t hate only US, the hate Albanians much much more (long before 1999.) Sesejl advocated throwing Albanians out, giving their houses to Serbs AND infecting Albanians with the AIDS virus as he was campaigning for the parliament. http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=Seselj+aids+virus+Albanian&btnG=Search+Books He won.
His party is the most popular one right now and Velika Sbrja is still their aim. They can spin however they want, but they still consulted Sesejl in Hague last month and "Great Serbia" policy hasn't changed.
No Roman emperor was a Serb, in the land that Serbs live today maybe, but they love to rewrite history. Serb's problem is that they think they're special, they buy their own propaganda that they are great fighters (well, we've seen that without the Russian support) and that they deserve the empire 1389 supposedly destroyed--"unfairly" of course. And, yes, they want to become the Russia of the Balkans. Too bad they keep getting smaller each time they meet armed people :)
Organs: IMO it is mainly to tar with something you cannot disprove, even an exoneration is horrible publicity (imagine "Investigation shows that Albanians did not chop up human beings for to get their livers ") and for domestic consumption, to keep the masses angry and rally. They also included all their enemies there, from Kouchner , to CIA to Nato and every Albanian leader:
"She also said the healthiest of Serbian men up to the age of 45 were taken to army bases in Germany and Italy. She is not sure what exactly happened to them, but she says there are indications they served as guinea pigs. Whoever tried to escape would end up under a knife. Former and current Albanian prime ministers Sali Berisa and Fatos Nano were involved, with the blessing of Bernard Kouchner, French Foreign Affairs Minister and former UNMIK head. Other involved parties included Hashim Thaqi, Halim Omer Osmani and Ramus Haradini – Mitrovic counted. She claimed that politicians, mostly of the Serbian opposition, tried to raise funds to find abducted Serbs in 2001 and 2002 and the money was handed over to a Kosovo Albanian through a CIA colonel. The Albanian was killed in the end."
www-javno--com/en/world/clanak.php?id=144108
Judge for yourself, that's Ponte's source.
(I edited the links for the spam filter)
Posted by: nameless-fool at June 3, 2008 4:39 PM
The accusation that the French foreign minister was also involved in organ harvesting is exactly the kind of propaganda I warned about in the article.
Kouchner founded Doctors Without Borders. The idea that he was involved in organ harvesting from live Serb prisoners is outrageous.
Posted by: Michael J. Totten at June 3, 2008 4:54 PM