by Teofil PANCIC
Up to this point, Konrad's book may seem as an ideal reading material for a "typical" Serb reader of the Milosevic's era who, mentally irradiated by TV Serbia's ghoulish gamma-rays will triumphantly repeat great thoughts of yet another specimen from the menagerie of "friends of the Serb people". But that is a completely wrong interpretation. Konrad does not belong to the circle of producers of this type of literature, nomadic craftsmen who move their wares from one "endangered nation" to another, providing a bit of love and understanding of the Big White Brother, in exchange for a financial compensation or a native woman. In that sense The Yugoslav War is not needed by a "Yugoslav" reader. Konrad writes above all for a Hungarian or western reader, for the public of the countries that participated in the intervention. His motivation is clearly and uncompromisingly stated in the following claim, both simple and common sense, and refreshing for the standards of current politically correct mediocrity: defining himself as a newly minted "NATO-citizen", Konrad actually continues to do what he did during all the previous years - he examines the actions of his government, believing that as a citizen he shares responsibility for them. As his country is a member of a military alliance that has just decided to implement democracy by destroying a nitrogen producing facility in Pancevo (to the joy of millions of thirsty lungs...) or the bridge in Novi Sad, then it is the civic duty of a person participating in the public evaluation of public activities to take a stand. Even if that stand goes against the dominant "humanitarian" rhetoric that has felled many intellectuals just as in the past they succumbed to other ideological molds whose purpose is to hide "banal" unpleasant facts. This century is overflowing with intellectuals who saw themselves as Indomitable Fighters for The Just Cause, who surprisingly easy managed to square their limitless love for The Humanity in General with their lack of concern with the suffering of millions of real persons who, this way or another, ended up on the wrong side of their kitsch-idealism. This way, through radical chic of instant cosmopolitanism as the dominant "state of consciousness" of the wilted flower children we reach selective humanism in, moreover, despised company of nationalists. As the latter only see the suffering of "their" people while the rest can all die as far as they are concerned (did anyone say Sarajevo?), the former are not far from the conviction that the roasting of people in napalm is good for spreading of emancipation and progressive ideas. Of course, provided all of that is happening far away from home. However, Konrad is a too serious and in the best sense of the word "old fashioned" thinker to fall for such paranoid babbling suitable only for late afternoon seminars in "ahistorical" shaded silence of American college campuses; besides as a citizen of Central Europe, the man who was run over by various "salvation" ideologies, Konrad has learned this much: the rhetoric of war can be "bright" and humane, especially if the war is conducted by retired hippies, but its brutal practice, somehow, always falls behind the ideal...
Therefore, defining himself as a "NATO-citizen" and reminding that he himself supported the accession of Hungary to NATO (and hasn't changed his mind in the meantime), Gyergy Konrad gets down to the detailed dissection of reasons, methods, and achievements of a controversial action that was conducted on his behalf as well, although he couldn't do anything to stop it. This way Konrad's activism approaches, for example, that of Harold Pinter, a famous writer who last spring because of his fierce opposition to the NATO strikes became fashionable among the Serb patriotic para-intellectuals who, as usually, failed to understand anything. Because, all that that man did, just like Konrad, was radically different from (in his opinion) wrong, harmful, and even criminal actions of his government (and its allies); therefore, that is exactly what that team of academicians was supposed to do when tanks (adorned with flowers of the Humanoids) headed for Vukovar and Osijek, when Sarajevo was burning and when in Bosnia, Slavonija and Krajina, mildly speaking, a fascist project of mass ethnic cleansing, the project for which the notorious Hague is too lenient a punishment, was implemented. Instead, the gentlemen applauded mass murderers, trying to be their friends and companions, garden gnomes, inspired glorifyers and poetic butlers. Yours truly remained very lonely when in the midst of the bombardment he tried to remind the local, suddenly incredibly insulted and by war endangered Patriots: overwhelming majority of potential public supporters suddenly slipped away to the overpopulated Mouse Hole. Later some of them got out of it (I imagine: "Hello? Is it safe outside?") only, moved by their Correctness, to start lecturing left and right, just like a Japanese teacher distributes slaps.
The writer of The Yugoslav War is very much aware of the characteristics of Milosevic's xenophobic dictatorship, ten-years-long apartheid in Kosovo, cruel revenge against civilian population, mass deportations, persecution and murder; his decided opposition to the bombing campaign does not at any moment tempt him to idealize or at least ignore any for the topic relevant aspect of the sick state of a society that is spreading evil and destruction everywhere around itself, until it spectacularly implodes from all the accumulated evil. Consequently the attempts to use certain parts of Konrad's book for pro-regime propaganda miserable failed. The only part of the book in which Konrad's critical attention surprisingly flags is the introduction, in which the writer briefly explains his views of the roots of the Yugoslav crisis in the nineties. There Konrad allows himself a several "bloopers" on the topic of "arbitrary" borders between republics which were proclaimed for state borders after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Konrad surprisingly easily "absorbs" the favorite ideological mold of the sad Serb nationalists whose main motive is exactly the story about Evil Tito who on his own drew the borders as he saw fit, so that now Serbs are suffering... Konrad naturally knows that all the borders, besides those of island countries, are to some extent "arbitrary" and "artificial" and that the story about "unjust borders" (always, somehow at Our Expense, never at the expense of Others) is an unavoidable obsession and phantasm of all the nationalist cliques in the region, from Hungarian frustration with the Versailles [post WWI], over greater Bulgarian and greater Albanian dreams (and criminal deeds), all the way to "Serbia to Virovitica" and "Croatia to Zemun"... The problem with contemporary Serbs, and now with Albanians as well, is that unlike others they decided to try to implement those sick phantasms, with flames and sword as the only "temporally" and "culturally" appropriate means for the achievement of these archaic ideological constructions. To that extent are "soft" cabinet nationalist wrong when they believe that the "goal" ("national unification") is correct, but that means are "wrong". The "goal" itself contains a genocidal ("cleansing") seed and that is why the goal determines the means.
Besides this peripheral vagueness The Yugoslav War is the work worthy of attention since it warns about the basic, ontological if you prefer, difference between talkative, irresponsible moralism and morality: opting for the latter, but of course not proclaiming himself for an omnipotent moral arbiter, Gyergy Konrad dissects a militant move that was made on his behalf as well as on behalf of every NATO citizen, reminding thus that the word patriotism, if it still has any sense in the contemporary value system, which is questionable, can only survive as the permanent critical re-evaluation of the reasons and consequences of what your government does on your behalf. Everything else is a business alliance of intellectuals with mass murderers, in which the role of intellectuals is to cover and hide the murderers with effective ideological disguise.