GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

NIN, Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia, October 7, 1999

Last week the eminent British paper "Daily Telegraph" published an article whose headline said that some "thugs are prepared to create a Serbian state in the Kosovo city" in which many things "already remind one of Serbia: large quantities of pork for sale in the streets, signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, newspapers which arrive from Belgrade and are paid for in dinars". The city in which this Serbian state is going to be created is Kosovska Mitrovica and the Serbs who are preparing to undermine Albanian multiethnic harmony there number less than ten thousand. All of this might be written off as a transparent expression of journalistic stupidity thought up to explain to the public that a multiethnic Kosovo can be achieved only if there are no Serbs at all living there, were it not accompanied by hundreds of statements calling on the Serbs to repent, to do penance and to admit their guilt.

While waiting for hours for dilapidated buses, ferries which transport them to the opposite shore of the river and coupons for electricity which will certainly be available, but not in sufficient quantities for heating, ordinary mortals at every opportunity express something similar to the questions "Where did we go wrong? Are we being punished by God?" Surveys show, however, that they are not prepared to accept the guilt to which they would be sentenced by the Hague, by Washington or by any other place on the planet Earth. They appear prepared to judge themselves but not to allow others to do so.

Morality of Defeat

"It's obvious that the Serbs should ask for forgiveness. Someone will have to say, 'Brothers, it all started in 1918 when we Serbs created Yugoslavia by deceit,'" Bogdan Bogdanovic, a former mayor of Belgrade, promising historian, exile and darling of Belgrade quasiliberal circles, concludes from his apartment in Vienna.

Talk of collective responsibility is relatively unpopular among the ranks of democratic politicians in the West, who will indignantly and between two yawns cite tenets from contemporary humanism and the Renaissance to the effect that a nation can never be guilty: the guilt is always that of the regime which has deceived and manipulated it. But the punch line of the joke is that they have been trying to collectively punish a nation with sanctions lasting many years, while its deceivers and manipulators have been punished with sizable bank accounts on certain European islands, canvasses of Flemish masters and difficult tasks connected with the above-mentioned sanctions.

Ghost of Nazism

Academician Andrej Mitrovic says that there is no official program regarding collective responsibility; however, there is a media campaign which suggests that the nation should be rehabilitated even though such collective education has not been successful in the past. The campaign rests on half-statements that the Serbs have never had a democracy and that their unpleasant, strange mentality is always on a collision path with the trends of the European civilization. Historians, however, say that the concept of mentality is not historically based and that the Serbs, like all other peoples, have under different circumstances shown both their democratic, European face as well as their autistic, xenophobic face. Although proclaimed to be the greatest enemy of the ideal of a multiethnic society, Serbia has curiously remained the only multiethnic society in the Balkans. Accused of expelling and mistreating other nations, the Serbs themselves were exiled in endless columns, paying a tremendous price. But it seems that they have not paid enough.

"The democratic public, the intellectual elite and the media have always sought to transfer responsibility to the regime and to exclude themselves from everything. It is simply shocking that during these ten years we have not succeeded in accurately explaining what everyone else is saying about us, that is, this is where destructive policies towards others, toward everyone who was not of Serbian nationality, originated and were carried out. Consequently, I would not term this a national responsibility but the responsibility of a society," says the director of the Humanitarian Law Center, Natasa Kandic, and adds that confronting criminal acts is critical because ordinary people have a sense of "tremendous anxiety because of everything that is not being said publicly."

"When, in essence, the process of denazification is approached, it becomes a matter of opening the question of responsibility, of confronting others and the consequences of what was done in our name. I see in this, more than anything, the casting off of a tremendous burden," adds Kandic.

Five "D's"

The president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Sonja Biserko, says that the question of crime has thus far only been "shyly mentioned" by the Serbian Orthodox Church and adds that the Serbian nation is faced with a difficult sobering process which is an essential condition for hooking up with Europe. "That sobering process should also be experienced by other Yugoslav nations but the Serbs, as the most numerous people had the primary responsibility and now is the historical moment to confront what has been done," adds Biserko.

"Yellow Wasp"

Former Yugoslav minister of foreign affairs Ilija Djukic believes that the concept of collective responsibility is incompatible with the body of contemporary philosophy and legal regulations and rejects the establishment of "dangerous historical parallels" as distinctly counterproductive. "The creators of such a program should stop and think why the battle against Saddam Hussein has had no effect except to eliminate the opposition in Iraq. Milosevic has been projected as some kind of European Saddam but the Serbs are not Iraqis."

Previously, when demonstrations lasting three months were organized by the democratic opposition and the students in Serbia with a strong, pro-Western message, the "New York Times" managed to find among the students the seeds of nationalism because its journalist [Chris Hedges] saw people in folk costumes in the streets and heard from the demonstration participants the heretical claim that Kosovo should remain a part of Serbia. The Western media were almost completely silent regarding the fact that almost 80 percent of young men did not want to liberate Vukovar, the opposition was authoritatively evaluated to be a pale copy of Milosevic and the other, tolerant Serbia was treated like the mislaid, unpublished work by Thomas Moore [the author of Utopia].

"During the years of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs were the only ones who did not have an alternative national program and so it happened that they went to asleep in one country and woke up in another. Ruptures such as these, objective fears based on history and political disorientation helped the bureaucratic apparatus and nationalistic intelligence to mobilize public opinion and get it moving in the wrong direction. The Western public at that point began to recklessly accuse the Serbs, not their leadership, which only strengthened the story about the anti-Serb sentiment of the Western countries. After everything that has happened, of course, responsibility should be examined; we should admit that we are not angels but we are no devils, either. It is necessary to be extremely cautious because even the question of victims of the Second World War has not been publicly resolved in an accurate manner; the victims were said to have been killed by Fascists but the Serbs in Herzegovina knew exactly who slaughtered half of their families," says Andrej Mitrovic.

Ignoring responsibilities from the Second World War, in which all nations had their patriots and their criminals and proportionally killed and were killed, has led to a new eruption of nationalism for which, certainly, not only television was to blame. Vukovar was liberated amid great media pomp and declarations that the Serbs had finally avenged their fathers, only to have the Croatians, several years later, carry out their own vendetta in Krajina, thus strengthening the impression that the Balkans were only experiencing a brief time-out until the next fight or, in diplomatic terms, until the next regrouping of the world order.

Faculty of Law professor Kosta Cavoski believes that the story about collective responsibility of a nation for something that someone in a position of power has done is in itself characteristic of the tribal period. "In the modern age, guilt must be strictly individual, and the individual can be held responsible only for what he personally has done if there is a cause and effect relationship between his action, inaction and a forbidden consequence".

Flexible Justice

"In my opinion, this is being done in order to justify the aggression of NATO against our country, the massive killing of civilians and the destruction of transportation and economic infrastructure. Behind such a campaign there is also an attempt to avoid the payment of enormous war damages sustained during bombing by transferring the guilt upon the entire Serbian nation. The third reason is only becoming identifiable in view of the suggestion that Kosovo and Metohija might soon be permitted to secede from Serbia and the FRY. The bringing up of the alleged collective responsibility is supposed to convince everyone how the Serbs and the Albanians cannot continue to live together. In the end, the story about denazification is aimed at long-term destruction of national self-consciousness which would create the conditions for some future government, which would emerge after Milosevic's inescapable fall, to question the value of a Serbian nation-state, especially a state whose history hinges on Kosovo," adds Cavoski.

Rule of Disbelief

From the moment when a forgotten general of the Yugoslav Army signed a treaty to end the war in Kumanovo, public opinion in the democratic countries has been seriously considering the question of how to discipline a small, poor country, while a large portion of the mortals in Serbia is prepared to initiate a collective indictment against global collateralists. The enlightened intellectuals and flexible journalists in the West accuse Milosevic of protecting Kosovo using disproportionate force, while his own citizens accuse him of surrendering Kosovo. The debate on what has happened to us and where we went wrong will begin as soon as people have secured food and heating oil for the approaching winter.