Then I promptly - I admit it - forgot about Ceda "Marry Me" Jovanovic and his primal uh-excesses until a few our weeklies brought a sensational discovery to my attention a few days ago: Ceda, they say, prevented civil war in Serbia! If it weren't for Ceda - and this is the chief point - everything would have been shot to shit, the Army and Police would have slaughtered each other, a general national massacre would have ensued, we wouldn't have known who was coming and who was going, Milosevic would have killed either himself or everyone around him, the spark of panic would have been ignited and Serbia would exist no more.
I have no reason to doubt that Ceda was The Star: to spend ten hours or so with Milosevic - after everything else that has happened - without strangling him is a political art built on tolerance and patience, that is, on virtues on which few local politicians can pride themselves. Compliments and thanks regarding the fact that the young Jovanovic saved us from mutual extermination are not in question; the issue is one of media presentation. We had - believe it or not - one magazine comparing Ceda with a guy called John F. Kennedy; a few pages before that, I encountered the spectacular, concerned, motherly question which not even uh-Ceda himself would have been capable of coming up with: "Does Jovanovic know what kind of risk he exposed himself to?"
The answer of NIN's reporter ("He knew; and that feeling was best confirmed by some of his personal bodyguards who did not come along when he headed with Milosevic toward the Central Prison in Bacvanska Street in Belgrade") is only the crowning evidence of the thesis that the Serbian Kennedy was in life-threatening danger: Dedinje being worse than Dallas, a Serb Lee Harvey Oswald who waited to carry out his State Security Service/CIA orders with an uh-bullet for the uh-president and, especially, for the uh-negotiator.
Everyone reading the local Serb weeklies feels the urge to go berserk; you've comprehended, I hope, that the issue isn't Ceda Jovanovic who got us out of shit, the issue is Ceda Jovanovic who is being courted by everyone, who everyone is concerned about, whom everyone is offering favors, whom everyone wants to help - just how are you not going to help someone who prevented the Most Recent Civil War Among Serbs, I ask you?
Generally speaking, "the Milosevic case" not only propelled Ceda into negotiating orbit: our favorite basket case Bane Ivkovic is now a SPS (Socialist Party of Serbia) star; Sinisa Vucinic, the extreme leftist duke, is also a star; Zivorad Igic, who jumped the fence of Milosevic's villa and escorted Mirjana Markovic and Marija Milosevic to Pozarevac, is a star; Slavica Djukic-Dejanovic, who apparently is being nominated for the new secretary general by Sloba from jail, is a star.
Milosevic's arrest - no matter what it looks like to some people - is a media farce; this can be proven by the sole fact that Ceda's interlocutor was not accused for war crimes, murders, destruction, massacres..., everything which represented the final product of his 14 years in power; but, at the same time, the farce has become a spectacle from which some people have derived considerable profit.
I have no reason at all to doubt that Uh-Ceda, a man who found himself on the spot, who did what he was told to do, who took care of the task and then returned to where he was before, has already thought of all of this himself. But what is really funny are the pathetic media stories: the story of Ceda whose last name, in fact, is Kennedy and who protected us from civil war is, in fact, the story of the need to create icons and heroes where there is no place for them.
Incidentally, I know Ceda personally; last year, sometime in winter, I walked with his lonely group of followers through Belgrade as part of the We Walk, Therefore, We Exist campaign; at least that's how I understood it; I even, I'll admit, made a speech in front of that gathering of My Friends, ate their home-baked cookies, hung out with people who didn't see Jovanovic as a Kennedy symbol but as someone stubborn enough to meet the goal of one million days of walks until The Beast Is Gone. What an irony of fate: that Ceda should be the one to bring Milosevic to Justice (there is no justice) is only one piece of the Serb political mosaic but not the crowning proof that Jovanovic has befallen us.
In the entire case - if there is a case - the question is no longer whether Uh-Ceda is the Savior of Serbia or Djindjic's Assistant but the portentous question is who is attempting to conquer media and financial territory using the unfortunate Ceda, courting him to such a degree that Ceda himself must be feeling about ready to throw up. Uh!