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Subject: <nettime> Re: Kosovo
From: michael.benson@pristop.si
Date: 13 Mar 1998 09:43:11 +0100

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Adrienne van Heteren writes:

"I seriously do not understand where the thousands of
demonstrators who were on the streets before, are now. Where are
the angry websites, the netcalls, the chats, the links etc. What
are you all doing now? Is this suddenly only a matter of nice but
marginal groups like Women in Black or the Peace School. Is
Kosovo too far away or too different? Or maybe simply not
important enough?"

I second the question, also seriously, and add another: How
is it that after months of those continuous, telegenic protests,
Milosevic (or should I simply say: that mass murderer) is still in
power in the first place? I think it's unprecedented in modern
history. What was that all about, anyway -- was it just a street
party? A 'lifestyle choice?' How is it possible that half the
'leadership' of these protests ultimately joined forces with
Milosevic, presumably bringing their supporters with them?

I'm sure that the street protesters of Bucharest and Prague,
Warsaw and East Berlin -- people capable of seeing a real
revolution through, people now essentially involved in trying to
build some kind of reasonable representative democracy in states
where the rule of law prevails -- can only shake their heads at the
Belgrade example. It seems that the cynicism and sense of
powerlessness runs so dismally deep in the Serbian body politic that
even in the hour where victory was within their grasp, this so-called
"opposition" called the whole thing off. As in: We were only joking.

It's not very funny, however.

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with
passionate intensity." The ultimate 20th century statement, until
the bitter end.

More than a decade ago, while living in Belgrade, I remember a
species of joke in circulation which revolved around the question
of how best to get rid of the Albanian population in Kosovo. At the
time, I remember thinking that it was probably just the local version
of suburban American gross-out humor. Disgusting, racist, yes, but
(relatively) harmless. It was only later that I realized that one
person's joke can be another's very serious ideological program.

The most charitable explanation of the latest eruption of random
shooting and eye-gouging in Kosovo -- this new harvest of
women and children "caught in the cross-fire", as one particularly
obscene police claim had it last week -- is that it only reconfirms
that Serbia can boast the most manipulable population on earth. (And
it's not as if there aren't plenty of other contenders). Serbian
Television gives new meaning to Deleuze's observation that "language
is a system of orders, not a medium of information." This is true
despite websites, links, chats, mails, etc. -- or rather I should say
it's as true there as anywhere else. (A glance at the poison
circulating in "alt.cult.bosnia herzegovina" a couple years ago was
enough to cure me of any misguided net utopianism.)

As for TV Serbia, one sobbing policeman's widow is seemingly
worth a large pile of (unseen, invisible, civilian) Albanian
bodies. I mean, after all, the Albanians are essentially subhumans,
foreigners, the very definition of the "other", and plus they have
too many kids anyway, don't they? Who let them onto our sacred
soil in the first place?

In case there is any question, it should be made clear that
Kosovo suffers under a repressive system as brutal as apartheid,
with a rigid exclusion of the "inferior" race from local government,
public institutions, and schools. The police are direct instruments
of this repression. One difference with South Africa, however, is
that the Kosovar Albanians actually _had_ self-government as a
semi-autonomous region under the intricate balance of power
arrangements Josip Broz Tito engineered to try to keep Yugoslavia's
ethnic groups more or less satisfied with their respective
places in the scheme of things. It was one of Milosevic's
opening acts -- in fact the moment when he discovered the power-rush
of populist politics -- to begin the process of disrupting this
delicate balance by taking Kosovo's autonomy away. And despite this
outrageous act (which, in a preface to Western appeasement,
was approved by all the other republics of former Yugoslavia),
there's another difference with South Africa. Until very recently,
Kosovars practiced a highly disciplined _non-violent_ resistance. It
was only when certain elements of the Kosovar community realized they
would be excluded from the '95 Dayton Agreement -- something which in
effect meant the international community was abandoning them to their
fate, i.e. domination by trigger-happy Serbian police -- that
advocates of an armed response started to have any support.

For Kosovo the question is how long Belgrade can pretend that a
territory with a 90 percent Albanian population is really part of
Serbia -- despite the medieval Orthodox patriarchates and the
hyper-mythologized, endlessly internalized Serbian defeat by the
Ottoman Turks in Kosovo in 1389. That's 1389! The end result of
this kind of blut und boden retrograde ideological/televisual
programming was clearly visible in Bosnia: simply exterminate
the "Turks" still occupying "Serbian" land (and never mind that in
the end those phantom Turks were harmless cousin Srdjan, the
football player, who a couple years back was eating pork and drinking
slivo companionably with his Serbian relatives. Not to mention
doing his obligatory stint in the Yugoslav Army). The problem is
that those Turks are everywhere; they infest the landscapes of the
mind, they are always and forever intent on Serbian martyrdom.
They're the ongoing, superserviceable bogyman. One day they're
secular Slavic Bosnian 'Muslims', the next they're dirt-poor
Albanians struggling to get by under the most repressive conditions
anywhere in Europe. In the end, surprise surprise, what these
phantoms are good for is keeping Milosevic firmly in power. And if
not Turks, Serbian Television can always draw on its reliable stock
of Nazi conspiracies stemming from contemporary Bonn/Berlin, or
devious Catholic master plans being cooked up by witches and priests
in St. Peters, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

These durable conspiracies would be a harmless enough pathological
pastime for Serbia -- kitschy ghosts from central casting -- if it
wasn't for the body count resulting from the fact that, one day in
the early 90's, Serbia and Montenegro essentially "appropriated" the
entire Yugoslav National Army. (An institution which, whatever one
thinks of it, or of armies in general, had been built up at great
cost over generations by _all_ the republics of the former
Yugoslavia, to defend that non-aligned country from foreign
invasion.)

Without the fireworks only this giant army could provide (meaning the
shelling-to-splinters of Vukovar, the torching of priceless
Dubrovnik, the years of inexorable Sarajevo death-toll, the
Srebrenica massacres, the squalid ethnic ghettos), Serbia's national
pathology might once even have earned some international sympathy.
And I'm not talking about Russia here. It's far too late for that
now, and not only because in its self-destructive course Serbia has
found ample grounds to confirm and re-validate it's martyrdom
complex. It's too late because of the mass executions, the rapes,
and all the rest of the sordid recreational activities which will
stain the name of Serbia for decades to come. By now any possibility
of sympathy from the outside world has been, I think, replaced by a
generalized wish that, if Serbia isn't capable of recognizing and
trying to atone for the crimes that it has committed, or even capable
of deposing the madman most responsible for initiating and
planning those crimes -- well maybe they could simply go away,
please, quietly if possible, and leave everybody, and especially the
long-suffering Kosovars and Bosniaks, alone for a change. Or is this
just more Turkish-German-Vatican propaganda?

One thing I'd like to make clear. When I refer to "the Serbs"
or Serbia here, I'm not talking about the entirety of the Serbian
nation, or demonizing an ethnic group. That would be making
the same mistake that seems to repeat, like endlessly regurgitated
sputum, down through human history. In fact there are many brave
individuals who have shown themselves capable of moral clarity and
tenacious activism in Serbia, and there are many more who "voted with
their feet" at the beginning of the mess, and live now in a kind of
disillusioned diaspora. What I _am_ referring to is a very real fluid
aggregate, a liquid near-majority capable of almost voting
pathological killer Vojslav Seselj into office because Milosevic
didn't finish the job to their satisfaction. This manipulable mass,
in my opinion, has long ago worn out any chance of redemption.
And given Serbia's current behavior and policies, unfortunately this
is what I have to mean when I say Serbia.

Finally, about Milosevic. It's too easy at this stage for the
dominant population of post-Yugoslavia to just blame him, say "he
did it", and walk away. That would be comparable to Communist East
Germany blaming it all on the fascists, saying "after all, we were
the good guys", and not even attempting to deal with the implications
of German war crimes. That was part of the problem I had with those
Belgrade street protests; it was too easy. Still, in the end it
really _is_ all about Milosevic; specifically, his need to stay in
power, and at all costs. From his perspective, since those costs are
payable in human lives, which mean nothing to him, why
would it be a problem to "spend" them as freely as all those
mass-produced Yugoslav dinars instantly devalued by hyperinflation?
If ever there was a case of the ends justifying the means, this is
it. And the result is a shattered generation. If there's any hope
for Serbia, it will begin when a majority of the population
recognizes the principle of the above mechanism, while accepting
their share of the blame.

Nettimers: regarding the above, I'm sorry to go "off-topic"
here, if I did. I think it's because the Kosovars are caught in a
very different net -- the kind that takes no prisoners. We have the
luxury, after all, of simply logging off.

Michael Benson
michael.benson@pristop.si
website: http://lois.kud-fp.si/kinetikon/

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