Political Rant brought to you by a close encounter with yet more people who called me evil
Sometimes I think there is no more accursed nation than the Serbians, because I am tired of being one of the scapegoats for political blinkerism, angst and rage.
What follows down below is political, very passionately so. You may want to skip it if you are a person of a sensitive disposition, or one convinced that the US foreign policy and regard for international law is beyond reproach.
Also if you read this and feel your panties bunching up into a wad, I suggest some deep breathing prior to speech. I will respond to any disagreement voiced as a rational comment but if you're just after insulting or flaming me then I will lose serious respect for you.
In the year of our Lord 1980, I was born in the Republic of Yugoslavia on the geographical territory of Serbia although I've never felt Serbian. There are several reasons for this - partially genetic (after all I was technically 25% Serb and it seemed pointless to base my identity on a mere quarter of my genes).
The majority of my ancestry is a wild and heady mix of European and Eurasian nations, and when they were not getting dispossessed and fleeing their countries of birth as refugees then they were travelling to distant lands and marrying foreigners and bringing more half breed progeny into the world to pollute ethnic pools etc. Mostly, I thank them for it. Mostly I am glad to be dissended from people who were not afraid to travel, to seek new experiences, to discover what lay beyond. Mostly, I am grateful to them for giving me such a rich heritage, so many places that I may call home.
But sometimes, on the days when I am tired of small mindedness, and bullying, and scapegoating and persecution, yes on those days I am irate at my Croatian Jewish grandmother for marrying a Serb and giving me the miserable legacy of a boring nose and a lifelong membership of The Scapegoat Club (I mean think about it- Serbian AND Jewish? Why did nobody think of the children?)
I don't feel Serb just like I don't feel Russian, or Jewish. I still think of myself as Yugoslav. If I have any other ethnic feeling of identity it is with Georgia. I've never thought of myself as Serb.
It seems an alien construct to me, as ludicrous as thinking of myself as English.
I was born in Yugoslavia.
That was my land and I loved it even though I didn't realise that love was there until the land fell apart. I liked being Yugoslav because it was not a nationalist label. It meant simply - the land of Souther Slavs. And I liked that, very much.
To me it was never about nationalist or ethnic markers but Geography. I was a Southern Slav, because that’s where I lived. And the other people who lived in the territory of that land - the Croats, the Bosnians, the Macedonians, the Montenegrans, the Serbs, the Slovenians - they were all my people. We were all Southern Slavs by location. It did not matter that we were different from each other - our diversity was our strength! We had such a golden richness in our differences, in our cultures, in our dialects of the same language.
And that land, it was my land. And the people in it were my brothers and sisters, and our ethnicities - they were not important, and to prove it the people travelled the width and breadth of that land, and they intermarried and befriended each other often because the idea that we all belonged together was much stronger and more significant than blood.
At least, that’s what I like to think.
And it was good that life. Perhaps the idea that held it together was naive, but I believed in what it stood for, and if it was a dream then it was a good dream.
It hurt, of course, when the dream died. When suddenly the differences between us (who was born where to who, what your name was, what your blood was, whether you were 'ours' or 'theirs') became important, as important as living or dying, when before these things had seemed as arbitrary as the colour of your eyes or your hair. It was a terrifying world of that rage and separation. It seemed so senseless. It was senseless.
I can accept that maybe the land had to split, but I still don't understand why there was a war. How we allowed ourselves to have a war. How a war could have happened and how people could bear to do to each other what they did.
I don't understand why Serbs shelled Sarajevo for years. How could they have done that when they had likely danced and drunk and loved or visited someone in its streets? Self-defence is a different thing. When someone is coming at you with a knife, then you react and you keep yourself alive, I see that. But to shell civilians? To bomb civilians, how do you live with that? Truly, if you're a soldier, how do you live with your conscience at the end of the day, to realise that you've just dropped a bomb on innocents? I don't know how Serbs did it in Sarajevo, no more than I understand how Croats did it to Serbs in Krajina while they were fleeing, no more than I understand how Bosnians did it to Serbs in Bosnia, no more than I understand it how the British & Americans did it to Serbs in 1999 and so on and on and on and on and on throughout every war in the history of the world.
To defend and to protect, I understand, but to bomb schools? markets? a civilian passenger train on a bridge? That I don't understand. And it strikes at the core of me. That we can degenerate to such harshness, such brutality, such violence.
And mostly I think all of it, any of it, is inexcusable. I thank God I am not a soldier, I thank God I do not have to be in any army because these are never going to be choices I'm going to have to make. It's other people who have to make those choices, and live with their consequences, and allow me the luxury of never having to live that life.
All I know is: the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Croats, the Macedonians, the Slovenians - they were all my people. And through accident of birth Serbs might be my immediate family, but everyone else they were my family too. And then there was a war. And terrible things happened in that war. Brutal, terrible things. And they were done by everyone. On every side. And they are ALL inexcusable. They are ALL wrong.
I am angry about it all, but what continues to infuriate me is the scapegoating. This idea that problem solving is not about a collective recognition and ownership of the evil perpetuated, and collective understanding of how we can grow from that AND NEVER DO IT AGAIN, because IT WAS A BAD BAD BAD IDEA PEOPLE - but that instead problem solving is about finding whose fault it was. Who started it. And blaming them. And establishing military bases and semi dictatorial 'protectorates' everywhere.
But I don't believe that's right. I don't believe that's how healing works.
And I am still enraged, I am still so angry at that war and what happened in it. At what it did to me and to so many other people. I am enraged that my land is fractured, that my family is torn, and that I can't just go to Bosnia or Croatia, or Slovenia without some degree of caution. The joy and lightheartedness have been stolen from me, and from everyone.
There was a terrible, terrible bloodshed and so many people died and I don't believe that you move on, or that you learn a single fucking thing by making it all the Serbs fault.
Perhaps the Serbs did start. Or maybe it was the Croats. Or perhaps everybody started it. I just wish that was reported too, and not just *blame the Serbs*. And fine, if that's the way people want to play it then ok, blame the *bestiality of the Serbs* as long as you also point out the bestiality of the Croats in Krajina, and the Bosnians in Bosnia.
Nobody mentions the fact either that at the end of the war Serbia bore the brunt of refugees despite being already economically stretched to the limit with sanctions. Nobody mentions what still happens in Croatia. Nobody mentions what is happening in Kosovo now.
That's what strikes at the core of me. That there is never a balanced reporting. Only a continuing demonisation campaign and I am tired of hearing only the one side of the story.
Being a Serb nowadays is fine. In the 21st century we are not the hot young maligned things in the West anymore. There's the Arabs/Muslims/Middle Eastern folk upstaging us now, though I still get my share of hostility and *so you're the bad guys* commentary. And I'm tired of being seen as evil not because of my individual actions, but of how the media has painted all my countrymen.
But being a Serb in the 1990s- that was pure hell. Especially being a Serb in the West (although being a Serb in Croatia was considerably worse). You might as well have said : "Please abuse me, because obviously I am evil and therefore less than human and therefore I deserve anything you would care to dish out at me. Therefore it is all right to spit on me, and degrade me and call me names. It is all right to refuse me visas, and detain me at every border and question me for hours about completely irrelevant pointless things. It is perfectly fine to think I am less worthy. By all means you should point at me, and bully me, and tell me how wrong and bad and evil I am. Because obviously I am evil, because BBC says so - so therefore come on up and stare at me since clearly you will want to know exactly what evil looks like, but please don't sit next to me at the table because you don't want to get too close, you don't actually want to ever treat me like a human or like a friend.
And certainly, never ever EVER show me mercy or pity or kindness. Because if you do that, then it wouldn't be all right to persecute me and bully me. It won't be all right to shove me and throw dirt at me. It won't be all right to have a separate line - just for Serbs- at airports. And it certainly won't be all right to slap down crippling economic sanctions on my country. To prevent Serb sportsmen from competing at sporting events - because obviously they are evil too! They must be being Serb, and it would never do to be seen treating them with dignity or letting them mix with us. Because they are all evildoers, and all must be ruthlessly punished.
Therefore it's also all right to completely disregard the international laws and invade and bomb the fuck out of civilians in a foreign country. And it would never do to feel pity, never never never because then they wouldn't be just "Collateral Damage". Because then if they weren't evil they might deserve some leeway, or some damages, or some reparations.
I hope nobody reading this has to live through what I lived through in that decade, or in 1999. I hope none of you have lived that.
But I did live that. I lived all of it, and I remember. I remember everything. And the thing that gets me the deepest, the most, is HOW BLOODY FUCKING UNFAIR the whole fucking thing was. Continues to be.
How unfair it is that everything is always the Serbs fault and only the Serbs fault. How Serbian war criminals are paraded through the Hague, and how the US kicks up a great big fuss about the ones which are not handed over, and how continuously all people hear about is how those awful Serbs slaughtered those Bosnians, and Albanians and drowned all their little kittens when we don't hear on an equal scale about what was done to the Serbs.
And it eats at me that the other side never get the same treatment.
That US (and on a lesser scale UK) will never answer for war crimes. That an equivalent fuss is not made in dragging Bosnian and Croat war criminals to justice. That people don't talk about how at the time that Balkans was falling apart the West (with Germany at the forefront and USA in the shadows) was really busy fanning those flames.
That it's unfair that nobody ever has to say *sorry* to the Serbs. That a big fuss ISN'T made over how the Croats ethnically cleansed half a million Serbs from Krajina in the last Balkan War (yes indeed, that number is 500,000 but do you recollect reading about it in the papers?) or about the great big concentration camps they had in the Big War before that (the death toll there btw, was at least 200,000).
Similarly, that a big fuss isn't being made about Albanian Terrorism (and the continuing and current slaughter of Serbians and Macedonians), but that it's all right to have Guantanamo Bay.
And I rage about how my pain is invalid because I was on the wrong side. How it was all right to abuse me and my country because we were the bad guys. Because things were portrayed as ONLY our fault.
I don't think Serbs are without blame. I think Serbs did terrible, terrible, terrible things that I never want to justify because I don’t think they can be. I think it’s a wonderful thing that Milosevic is in the Hague and out of our hair.
But I don't think it's all right that no one talks of things done to the Serbs. I don't think it's all right that nobody cares. And I don't think it's all right that mostly when it comes to Western opinion on the Balkans nobody knows what they are talking about.
Because they've never lived there, or never visited, or never bothered to find out. They haven't done their research. They only read the papers. And the sadness that that's all it took to make up people's minds.
And I don't think you should be allowed to bomb a country until your citizens can find it on the map.
I wish everyone would admit they fucked up. I wish everyone would rage and cry and be able to take genuine responsibility and make a genuine apology. I wish we could all move on. I wish we could start to heal and to repair. I wish I didn't have to be just one of the scapegoats anymore. That I no longer have to be part of a mirror for a collective shadow.
That's what I want for Christmas.*
*but will settle for some books
What follows down below is political, very passionately so. You may want to skip it if you are a person of a sensitive disposition, or one convinced that the US foreign policy and regard for international law is beyond reproach.
Also if you read this and feel your panties bunching up into a wad, I suggest some deep breathing prior to speech. I will respond to any disagreement voiced as a rational comment but if you're just after insulting or flaming me then I will lose serious respect for you.
In the year of our Lord 1980, I was born in the Republic of Yugoslavia on the geographical territory of Serbia although I've never felt Serbian. There are several reasons for this - partially genetic (after all I was technically 25% Serb and it seemed pointless to base my identity on a mere quarter of my genes).
The majority of my ancestry is a wild and heady mix of European and Eurasian nations, and when they were not getting dispossessed and fleeing their countries of birth as refugees then they were travelling to distant lands and marrying foreigners and bringing more half breed progeny into the world to pollute ethnic pools etc. Mostly, I thank them for it. Mostly I am glad to be dissended from people who were not afraid to travel, to seek new experiences, to discover what lay beyond. Mostly, I am grateful to them for giving me such a rich heritage, so many places that I may call home.
But sometimes, on the days when I am tired of small mindedness, and bullying, and scapegoating and persecution, yes on those days I am irate at my Croatian Jewish grandmother for marrying a Serb and giving me the miserable legacy of a boring nose and a lifelong membership of The Scapegoat Club (I mean think about it- Serbian AND Jewish? Why did nobody think of the children?)
I don't feel Serb just like I don't feel Russian, or Jewish. I still think of myself as Yugoslav. If I have any other ethnic feeling of identity it is with Georgia. I've never thought of myself as Serb.
It seems an alien construct to me, as ludicrous as thinking of myself as English.
I was born in Yugoslavia.
That was my land and I loved it even though I didn't realise that love was there until the land fell apart. I liked being Yugoslav because it was not a nationalist label. It meant simply - the land of Souther Slavs. And I liked that, very much.
To me it was never about nationalist or ethnic markers but Geography. I was a Southern Slav, because that’s where I lived. And the other people who lived in the territory of that land - the Croats, the Bosnians, the Macedonians, the Montenegrans, the Serbs, the Slovenians - they were all my people. We were all Southern Slavs by location. It did not matter that we were different from each other - our diversity was our strength! We had such a golden richness in our differences, in our cultures, in our dialects of the same language.
And that land, it was my land. And the people in it were my brothers and sisters, and our ethnicities - they were not important, and to prove it the people travelled the width and breadth of that land, and they intermarried and befriended each other often because the idea that we all belonged together was much stronger and more significant than blood.
At least, that’s what I like to think.
And it was good that life. Perhaps the idea that held it together was naive, but I believed in what it stood for, and if it was a dream then it was a good dream.
It hurt, of course, when the dream died. When suddenly the differences between us (who was born where to who, what your name was, what your blood was, whether you were 'ours' or 'theirs') became important, as important as living or dying, when before these things had seemed as arbitrary as the colour of your eyes or your hair. It was a terrifying world of that rage and separation. It seemed so senseless. It was senseless.
I can accept that maybe the land had to split, but I still don't understand why there was a war. How we allowed ourselves to have a war. How a war could have happened and how people could bear to do to each other what they did.
I don't understand why Serbs shelled Sarajevo for years. How could they have done that when they had likely danced and drunk and loved or visited someone in its streets? Self-defence is a different thing. When someone is coming at you with a knife, then you react and you keep yourself alive, I see that. But to shell civilians? To bomb civilians, how do you live with that? Truly, if you're a soldier, how do you live with your conscience at the end of the day, to realise that you've just dropped a bomb on innocents? I don't know how Serbs did it in Sarajevo, no more than I understand how Croats did it to Serbs in Krajina while they were fleeing, no more than I understand how Bosnians did it to Serbs in Bosnia, no more than I understand it how the British & Americans did it to Serbs in 1999 and so on and on and on and on and on throughout every war in the history of the world.
To defend and to protect, I understand, but to bomb schools? markets? a civilian passenger train on a bridge? That I don't understand. And it strikes at the core of me. That we can degenerate to such harshness, such brutality, such violence.
And mostly I think all of it, any of it, is inexcusable. I thank God I am not a soldier, I thank God I do not have to be in any army because these are never going to be choices I'm going to have to make. It's other people who have to make those choices, and live with their consequences, and allow me the luxury of never having to live that life.
All I know is: the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Croats, the Macedonians, the Slovenians - they were all my people. And through accident of birth Serbs might be my immediate family, but everyone else they were my family too. And then there was a war. And terrible things happened in that war. Brutal, terrible things. And they were done by everyone. On every side. And they are ALL inexcusable. They are ALL wrong.
I am angry about it all, but what continues to infuriate me is the scapegoating. This idea that problem solving is not about a collective recognition and ownership of the evil perpetuated, and collective understanding of how we can grow from that AND NEVER DO IT AGAIN, because IT WAS A BAD BAD BAD IDEA PEOPLE - but that instead problem solving is about finding whose fault it was. Who started it. And blaming them. And establishing military bases and semi dictatorial 'protectorates' everywhere.
But I don't believe that's right. I don't believe that's how healing works.
And I am still enraged, I am still so angry at that war and what happened in it. At what it did to me and to so many other people. I am enraged that my land is fractured, that my family is torn, and that I can't just go to Bosnia or Croatia, or Slovenia without some degree of caution. The joy and lightheartedness have been stolen from me, and from everyone.
There was a terrible, terrible bloodshed and so many people died and I don't believe that you move on, or that you learn a single fucking thing by making it all the Serbs fault.
Perhaps the Serbs did start. Or maybe it was the Croats. Or perhaps everybody started it. I just wish that was reported too, and not just *blame the Serbs*. And fine, if that's the way people want to play it then ok, blame the *bestiality of the Serbs* as long as you also point out the bestiality of the Croats in Krajina, and the Bosnians in Bosnia.
Nobody mentions the fact either that at the end of the war Serbia bore the brunt of refugees despite being already economically stretched to the limit with sanctions. Nobody mentions what still happens in Croatia. Nobody mentions what is happening in Kosovo now.
That's what strikes at the core of me. That there is never a balanced reporting. Only a continuing demonisation campaign and I am tired of hearing only the one side of the story.
Being a Serb nowadays is fine. In the 21st century we are not the hot young maligned things in the West anymore. There's the Arabs/Muslims/Middle Eastern folk upstaging us now, though I still get my share of hostility and *so you're the bad guys* commentary. And I'm tired of being seen as evil not because of my individual actions, but of how the media has painted all my countrymen.
But being a Serb in the 1990s- that was pure hell. Especially being a Serb in the West (although being a Serb in Croatia was considerably worse). You might as well have said : "Please abuse me, because obviously I am evil and therefore less than human and therefore I deserve anything you would care to dish out at me. Therefore it is all right to spit on me, and degrade me and call me names. It is all right to refuse me visas, and detain me at every border and question me for hours about completely irrelevant pointless things. It is perfectly fine to think I am less worthy. By all means you should point at me, and bully me, and tell me how wrong and bad and evil I am. Because obviously I am evil, because BBC says so - so therefore come on up and stare at me since clearly you will want to know exactly what evil looks like, but please don't sit next to me at the table because you don't want to get too close, you don't actually want to ever treat me like a human or like a friend.
And certainly, never ever EVER show me mercy or pity or kindness. Because if you do that, then it wouldn't be all right to persecute me and bully me. It won't be all right to shove me and throw dirt at me. It won't be all right to have a separate line - just for Serbs- at airports. And it certainly won't be all right to slap down crippling economic sanctions on my country. To prevent Serb sportsmen from competing at sporting events - because obviously they are evil too! They must be being Serb, and it would never do to be seen treating them with dignity or letting them mix with us. Because they are all evildoers, and all must be ruthlessly punished.
Therefore it's also all right to completely disregard the international laws and invade and bomb the fuck out of civilians in a foreign country. And it would never do to feel pity, never never never because then they wouldn't be just "Collateral Damage". Because then if they weren't evil they might deserve some leeway, or some damages, or some reparations.
I hope nobody reading this has to live through what I lived through in that decade, or in 1999. I hope none of you have lived that.
But I did live that. I lived all of it, and I remember. I remember everything. And the thing that gets me the deepest, the most, is HOW BLOODY FUCKING UNFAIR the whole fucking thing was. Continues to be.
How unfair it is that everything is always the Serbs fault and only the Serbs fault. How Serbian war criminals are paraded through the Hague, and how the US kicks up a great big fuss about the ones which are not handed over, and how continuously all people hear about is how those awful Serbs slaughtered those Bosnians, and Albanians and drowned all their little kittens when we don't hear on an equal scale about what was done to the Serbs.
And it eats at me that the other side never get the same treatment.
That US (and on a lesser scale UK) will never answer for war crimes. That an equivalent fuss is not made in dragging Bosnian and Croat war criminals to justice. That people don't talk about how at the time that Balkans was falling apart the West (with Germany at the forefront and USA in the shadows) was really busy fanning those flames.
That it's unfair that nobody ever has to say *sorry* to the Serbs. That a big fuss ISN'T made over how the Croats ethnically cleansed half a million Serbs from Krajina in the last Balkan War (yes indeed, that number is 500,000 but do you recollect reading about it in the papers?) or about the great big concentration camps they had in the Big War before that (the death toll there btw, was at least 200,000).
Similarly, that a big fuss isn't being made about Albanian Terrorism (and the continuing and current slaughter of Serbians and Macedonians), but that it's all right to have Guantanamo Bay.
And I rage about how my pain is invalid because I was on the wrong side. How it was all right to abuse me and my country because we were the bad guys. Because things were portrayed as ONLY our fault.
I don't think Serbs are without blame. I think Serbs did terrible, terrible, terrible things that I never want to justify because I don’t think they can be. I think it’s a wonderful thing that Milosevic is in the Hague and out of our hair.
But I don't think it's all right that no one talks of things done to the Serbs. I don't think it's all right that nobody cares. And I don't think it's all right that mostly when it comes to Western opinion on the Balkans nobody knows what they are talking about.
Because they've never lived there, or never visited, or never bothered to find out. They haven't done their research. They only read the papers. And the sadness that that's all it took to make up people's minds.
And I don't think you should be allowed to bomb a country until your citizens can find it on the map.
I wish everyone would admit they fucked up. I wish everyone would rage and cry and be able to take genuine responsibility and make a genuine apology. I wish we could all move on. I wish we could start to heal and to repair. I wish I didn't have to be just one of the scapegoats anymore. That I no longer have to be part of a mirror for a collective shadow.
That's what I want for Christmas.*
*but will settle for some books