While Yuri Gagarin was my heroic rocket into Russia, General Ratko Mladic was my runaway genocidal horse cart into Serbia. I would never compare the two men. I’m just saying it’s sometimes handy to have a focus when entering new territory.
And actually my original entry into Serbia in the late 1990s was via the crazy kinetic music of gypsy brass bands. Guca!But I soon got confused by the discovery that this music – developed and played by Rromani musicians – had evolved into becoming the nationalist soundtrack to the idea of a ‘greater Serbia’. How did that happen? Yes, the war in former Yugoslavia proved to be very confusing. For a while I retreated into being a tourist: enjoying the food, the drink, the dance, the people and the non-war stories. I also enjoyed being asked: ‘Um, you do know that lately we don’t actually get a lot of tourists around here?’ Regardless, ignorance was bliss and I even ended up discovering some lovely and largely forgotten wine regions in Bosnia and Croatia… Yes, it’s vital to remember what happened in Vukovar, but it’s also important to visit a place like nearby Ilok. People are people – and the nice ones are often best enjoyed with a glass of fine wine.
Later, almost 10 years ago, I spent a few months living in Belgrade with my ex-Yugo ex-girlfriend who was working on NIOD’s Srebrenica Report. She was there for Mladic and I was along for the ride. Milosevic had just been arrested two months earlier and so it was hoped that Mladic was soon to follow – or at least that he would want to tell his side of the story of what happened in Srebrenica when the Bosnian Serb troops under his command rounded up and methodically massacred 8000 Moslem men and boys. We ended up staying in Belgrade through 11 September 2001 – witnessing the dawn of the emerging apocalypse in a post-apocalyptic city. It made a deep impression.
My ex-Yugo Ex never did get to talk to Mladic even though he was still being spotted enjoying football matches and restaurants around town (and apparently living – bizarrely – on Yuri Gagarin Boulevard). But we did get to share mixed grill with one of Mladic’s best friends. And while I don’t have the balls to name him by name, I can say with all confidence that this general was a scary little shit – a true mini Mladic, but one who had cut a deal with the International War Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to cover his ass.
Sadly, there is no justice for all. But at least today I can finally update the introduction to my Welcome to Yugoville archive which asked ‘Where’s Mladic?’ The runaway genocidal horse cart is now behind bars a few kilometres up the road in The Hague. Perhaps his presence there will help remind many of the governments of Europe – in particular the Dutch one – that flirting with nationalism/populism is as a dangerous game as it’s always been. Sorry to preach in clichés, but it can really still happen anywhere. That’s what I learned in Serbia – and the rest of former Yugoslavia. People are people. Politicians are politicians. And the damaged are damaged and often dangerous – Mladic being the perfect example. There are always those who are willing to turn the rhetoric of politicians into something bloody. But meanwhile I think I might finally plan a return trip for some crazy ass brass at Guca. Hopefully the people are closer to completely liberating the music back from the politicians. Then we can really eat, drink and dance.
Borka, in particular, has long been a hero of mine ever since I first visited ex-Yugoslavia. As the founder of Belgrade’s Centre for Cultural Decontamination, she has fought the good fight against a steady stream of nationalists, gangsters and populist pricks. The Centre was one of the first places I went when I felt dirty from sitting behind Mira Markovic, wife of Milosevic, on a flight between Amsterdam and Belgrade in 2001.
I went to the awards ceremony in Brussels a couple of weeks ago and certainly had a couple of culturally diverse moments. It was at the Royal Flemish Theater and when we arrived early, my friend and I went to the next-door cafe to kill some time. The waitress refused to talk Dutch with us — which we thought ironic since we were at a Dutch-language theater for an awards ceremony dedicated to cultural diversity.
After the ceremony, I went over to introduce myself to Borka and she greeted me very warmly thanks to some common friends (ah, I do miss the Balkans sometimes…). She asked me if I had ever met Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. I hadn’t so I shook the princess’s hand. Then Borka wanted to introduce me to some Belgrade journalist — “you probably know him, he’s the one that they tried to blow up with not one but two bombs.” But just as I was about to shake his hand, a plate of oysters came by and the crowd — royalty, journalists, etc — swooped in. It was a moment of true diversity. The oysters were dang tasty as well.
What are the chances of getting Belgrade on the EasyJet circuit any time soon? Serbian rock star and public intellectual Vladimir Jeric of Darkwood Dub gives us a tour of the White City and all its shades of grey.
By Steve Korver, 14-12-2006, Amsterdam Weekly.
Belgrade is scenically located at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers where cliffs rise to form the fortress Kalemegdan, the perfect setting to enjoy some ‘liquid of the soul’, slivovic, while the sun sets. The city has been an East-meets-West crossroads for millennia, which made it one of the more cosmopolitan cities in its region. It is also home to the hottest peppers, the meatiest mixed grills and the wickedest Romani brass tunes. The cultural scene is vibrant and fuelled by a large student population. Hell, it’s even home to the Nikola Tesla museum!
‘That’s very romantic of you,’ Vladimir Jeric, AKA Vlidi, says over smokes and coffee; obviously the bespectacled Serbian rock musician and media pundit comes equipped with a good dose of jaded Belgrade humour. He’s in town for this week’s ‘Rough Guide to Belgrade’, hosting a media programme at De Balie and playing with his legendary underground band Darkwood Dub in the Melkweg. However, he’s not much help at providing a nice fluff piece that champions Belgrade as a new central European hotspot: ‘Belgrade is ugly; don’t go for the architecture. I only return for the people.’
Since the civil wars broke up the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Belgrade—the ‘White City’—continues to reflect a full spectrum of greys (but it’s still cooler than Prague).
A distinct marketing problem Belgrade as a brand has been battling a marketing problem ever since Geert Wilders look-a-like Slobodan Milosevic used it as a base for his populist Serbian nationalist agenda. But, even while manipulating elections both directly and through the state-controlled media, he would never win an election in Belgrade itself. The ensuing wars, UN sanctions and NATO bombings created both monetary and cultural poverty. Later hot-housing of gangsters by Milosevic only cemented its status as pariah in Europe. The immediate fall-out was that hundreds of thousands of residents left—thousands came to Amsterdam alone.
Those who stayed—and who did not succumb to drug or alcohol addiction in those dreary times—were forced to be creative. Vlidi stayed. ‘I was just stubborn… What happened cannot be summed up in a few words. The basic info is out there. But who’s to blame? You can interpret much by looking at the groups of people who now own the region: follow the money and the distribution of power. But what happened has not been studied enough. A multi-ethnic nation fell apart—with definite warning signs. I’m still puzzled why the EU isn’t interested in researching these signs, so these things don’t repeat.
‘The increasing influence and power of media were fundamental. Political agendas were channelled through pop culture and media. On that level, it became a battle between “strategic media”, owned by the businesses and government, and “tactical” media, based on ground-up and self-organised networks of resistance. Media was key to the sustainability of the regime at the time, and the same media machine is still being used by the post-5 October [2000, the date Milosevic was ousted] government.’ The former Yugoslavia already had both types of media in place: a state apparatus which governed very much from above—but there was also personal freedom relative to its Eastern Bloc neighbours—that helped create its famed underground music scene and network.
Darkwood Dub formed in 1988 and Vlidi remembers the tail-end of those glory days. ‘Belgrade bands would hold their biggest shows in Zagreb. And vice versa.’ In the 1990s, that network was destroyed by war. The nationalists started exploiting popular music to romanticise both Serbian identity and the gangster lifestyle. It came to be called ‘turbofolk’, though the term was appropriated from Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus, who used it satirically. A merry dance indeed.
Belgrade as export product There was a resistance movement, however. Student group OTPOR did the organising, Radio B92 provided the news and soundtrack and, thanks to modems, Real Audio and server space volunteered by Amsterdam’s own—and then still more hacktivist—XS4ALL, it could continue broadcasting even when Milosevic tried to ban it during the three-month-long student uprising in 1996-7, where between 100,000 and 200,000 people a day stormed the streets to protest and party. But Vlidi believes Wired magazine was premature in describing it as the first ‘Internet Revolution’. After all, in the end, Milosevic ended up consolidating his power, UN sanctions continued and NATO bombing began. It was only in October 2000 that dissident forces, along with a united front of democratic parties and businesses, protested Milosevic’s refusal to accept his election loss.
In the prelude to these elections, Darkwood Dub—if you like the name, you’ll like their music—played 26 Serbian cities to rally disillusioned youth into registering their votes. It worked. ‘October 2000 was great. It was charged with optimism and seen as the long-awaited award. But it was in fact just the beginning—all the structures and most of the people were still in place. Everyone was exhausted already and so disappointment was inevitable.’
But did the revolution succeed? Milosevic did end up at The Hague Tribunal. Student activists were sent off to spread their version of noisy, peaceful and internet- fuelled revolution to Georgia in 2003—where they even used much of the same branding, including OTPOR’s raised fist. This was the same year as pro- Europe and democracy Prime Minister Zoran Dindic was assassinated as a reprisal for his battle against organised crime. His death formed the impetus for mass arrests and finally, the jails were getting full.
‘The revolution was a failure,’ says Vlidi. ‘And one should not export failure. Anyway you cannot just directly cut-and-paste an approach on another situation. In Belgrade, the real gangsters are still in power. They just got rid of the competition. Big business won. Heineken. Tuborg. People are now distracted with loans and mortgages. You can actually say nothing has changed.
‘Belgrade is the largest city in the region. It would be natural if it became a major node for ideas and culture again. We could have caught up much more quickly if we studied other countries in transition. We could have cut and paste what worked there to save time. For instance, Slovenia’s government now runs forty-two per cent of its software on open source Linux operating systems. We could have been inspired by what is going on in Brazil. We needed a culture minister like Gilberto Gil!’
Belgrade today Meanwhile, broadcaster B92 has gone mainstream: the radio plays the Billboard chart, the TV is launching Big Brother. ‘[It] equally aligns videos, silicon tits and deaths in Iraq—you can’t take it seriously,’ says Vlidi.
Meanwhile liberal-intellectual magazine Vreme, another beacon of light in those times, ‘now only speaks to the two hundred people who are mentioned in it’. On Wednesday in De Balie, Vlidi joins a panel that includes the director of B92 and a Vreme columnist. Sparks will fly.
There’s good news, too: underground music scenes from the old republics are reuniting and festivals like Exit attract 150,000 visitors, many from the other former republics. But the political reality remains: in Novi Sad, where Exit takes place, 80% of the population support the Serbian Radical Party, fronted by Vojislav Seselj who said: ‘We will scoop Croat eyeballs out with a rusty spoon’ and who is currently recovering from a hunger strike while awaiting trial in Den Haag.
So, go to Belgrade, but not as a disaster tourist. Otherwise you might as well stay home and read stories about Dutch-Bat’s medals for Srebrenica. But even then, keep a sense of proportion: ‘If you think Dutch politics are going through rough times at the moment, check out Serbia’s,’ says Vlidi. ‘Then take an aspirin.’
Who would have thought it? Within hours of arriving for my first visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina, I was already sitting in a former army barracks in Mostar after spending the morning being driven from Sarajevo through epic mountain landscape, while being chilled to the core with views of what’s locally referred to as ‘convertible villages’ (convertible because all the roofs had proved detachable by bombs), and while listening to The Professor providing a non-stop litany of despair. My Ladyfriend had warned me that he was “completely crazy”. This proved to be an stunning understatement by the next day after we had come close to dying a few times.
But at this point I thought I was just getting educated, and so I looked and listened, trying to get my head around what exactly happened in these parts during the War. Some heavy shit is what happened. And so I felt like inanity personified as I sat in these bullet-pocked army barracks, now reinvented as Mostar University, in front of an American History class of Moslem students while I awaited my turn to pontificate as guest speaker. (I made a mental note not to employ the term “pontificate” with a people who had until very recently had been enemies with the Pope-loving Croats across the river.) I was there because The Professor had decided we would be more educational than him droning from a textbook about the Civil War. I disagreed: mostly because I equate public speaking with the public shitting of my pants. But there I was waiting for my turn to talk – About What? About What? – while the Ladyfriend did her talk.
She had no problem holding their attention. Her native tongue was their native tongue and she spoke of the horrors of Srebrenica – something they could surely relate to as dwellers of a destroyed city – which as a historian she had been researching for the last three years in the hopes of uncovering the facts behind Europe’s worst massacre since World War II: the systematic killing of 8000 Moslem men and boys. She was used to talking to victims, generals and war criminals. Meanwhile I can barely negotiate the voices in my head arguing about, for example, whether my spaghetti sauce needs another twist from the pepper grinder. And while she knows of concentration camps, I just know how to be Camp without concentrating…
So what was I going to talk about? In the midst of the hypnotic hum of Yugo-speak, my bloated brain floated back to what had happened right before the class. The Professor, while driving us around the bomb and bullet pocked campus, had hinted while looking at the direction of my wallet at how a few measly millions could make it all very nice again. I’m sure it could. But while I may obviously be a Canadian middle-class suburban boy born with silver spoon in mouth and horseshoe up ass, it does not mean that I actually have my cash act together on that level. We then walked through the medieval streets of Mostar whose ruins would look romantic if it had been achieved by natural decay and not machine guns.
Via a temporary walkway, we crossed the remains of the famously bombed ancient stone Stari Most (“Old Bridge”). Built in 1566, this Ottoman architectural miracle formed a 20-meter arch with the aid of not cement but lead and eggs. Apparently the general who had destroyed it betrayed an infallible logic: “We will build a nicer, stronger and older one”.
And indeed now seven years later, bridge bits were slowly being brought up one by one from the green depths of the river. Here we also bumped into one of The Professor’s students who attempted to be a tour guide: “I show you the theatre… Oh ah but the theatre is destroyed. So I show you the cemetery… Oh ah but the cemetery is still mined…”
So we all drank coffee instead.
Ah shit: it was now my turn to address the class. They seemed intent and focused – on my Nikes or on what I was about to say, I was not sure. I suppressed the urge to be honest along the lines of “Hi my name is WesternBoy and I am ah oh a complete fucking peckerhead. Oh am I allowed to say ‘fucking’?…Oh and do you need ‘peckerhead’ translated?…”
Instead I ended up improvising a stuttered summary of the “Multiculturalism” I had grown up with in Canada where any fierce nationalism when not diluted by the sheer number of nationalities, was expressed in the voting booths. A student asked how Canadians felt about what happened in the former Yugoslavia and I answered that the vast majority of them were too distracted by the fluffier stuff broadcast on their 1.4 TV sets to have much of an opinion.
With my ordeal over, we began cruising through Bosnia with taped music coming from the car’s speakers. The Professor defined the optimum volume as that point where the “doors are shaking”. He showed equal precision in the tunes he chooses: in Croat sections the doors shook with Serb partisan songs, while in Muslim sections they had shaken with Croat hit parade.
This DJ’ing style proved to be an efficient way of getting pulled over by local police – as was his driving technique of randomly jerking between 40 and 100 kph. Admittedly, this pendulum effect may have been caused by the erratic passion with which he had been telling stories about BASTARDS, FASCISTS and the general assbackwardness of these parts: How the Bosnian people failed by falling for self-serving politicians… How a veterinarian hospital we passed failed when confronted with a dead animal by thinking it first to be a radiation-swollen rat, then as some tiny variety of the dinosaur family, before someone finally recognised it as a skinned fox… How the UN failed because they had not taught the local police how to button their shirts or tighten their belts… By this point, I had begun to respect these scruffy law officers for their ability to sense a lunatic when they saw one coming towards them at 100 kph.
The Professor is bitter. He has had the tragic life. As an ethnic Serb who fought for a united Bosnia, his heart was in the right place. For years in Sarajevo, he had dodged Serb snipers. When not teaching or acting as a ‘negotiator’, he had sorted body parts. When the war ended, he then got fucked over a few more times – most notably when he returned from a short lecture tour of the States to find that his position at the University of Sarajevo had been given to a Moslem. You’d like to cut some slack and you do.
But then at one point – say after a two-day roller coaster ride – you just want to sleep. And by the time we finally re-entered Sarajevo, the only image I could retain was that of a hotel bed. But then an innocent question about the name of a famously destroyed neighbourhood, motivated a careen to the right and wham-bam we were in the charred heart of this very neighbourhood. While I accepted the accompanying rush of emotions as good for my development away from pure peckerhead (variety: spoiled brat Westernboy), I saw no potential in personal growth when he then pointed the car upward towards the midnight mountains surrounding Sarajevo. Oh so this pitch blackness is the Srpska Republic… Oh so from this pitch black point, the nationalist Serbs shelled the city… Oh so that shadow was their headquarters where you, The Professor, had come to ‘negotiate’… By this point, I began to irrationally suspect that The Professor has been filled with bile since birth, and that his Basil Fawlty-esque attempts to ‘negotiate’ a peace was what directly led to the siege of Sarajevo lasting three years instead of three days…
Lady MacBeth of the Balkans versus Boy Peckerhead from Suburbia… I sat behind Mira Markovic flying back to Belgrade after she visited her jailed husband Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague. It was very surreal. And boy, did I fail as a journalist…(And yes, that’s me lurking in the background in this still from a news report.)
By Steve Korver
I. Kitsch Personified
It had already been hypothesised that my JAT flight from Amsterdam to Belgrade was delayed five hours because the wife of Slobodan Milosevic wanted to make one last visiting hour to his jailed ass before her three-day visa ran out. So I had some time to feverishly imagine the possibilities of sharing business class – yes darlings, I was booked business class – with Mira Markovic, Lady MacBeth of the Balkans.
She began as Slobo’s teen queen love, and together they rose to rule Serbia and jumpstart the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. Many Yugos had described her as Evil disguised as a squeaky-voiced kitsch bitch…
So I needed to make a decision. I wondered if I should just go for the Pulitzer and take on a Jeremy Paxman intensity and start quizzing her if she was truly the brains behind the throne. Were the rumours true that she took delight in liquidating political opponents in baths of sulphuric acid? And how, Ms Markovic, did you manage to maintain such a consistent output of bad poetry?
But perhaps I should be more self-serving and see if she could arrange for me a summer as suave gigolo to the lonely wives of incarcerated war criminals? Decisions, decisions.
Naturally this was all fantasy and I knew the only thing I could possibly have the guts for in such a scenario is the pulling of goofy faces – and perhaps the holding up of a “Hi Mom!” sign – whenever I made it into a network camera’s viewfinder. But I did ease some fresh batteries into my recording Walkman in case she did actually show up.
Always comfortable in the realm of fantasy, I was definitively taken aback – my slack jaw dropping down to touch my cramped knees – when WOCKA there she was for real, settling into the seat directly in front of me after being paraded through the plane from the back. I vaguely heard from some snatch of English conversation that this route was taken for “for security reasons” — something I vaguely considered as odd since the “security” had not even bothered with the standard hand luggage scan after the tickets were taken…
But mostly I was in a state of HOLY FUCK as I realised that if I leaned forward pretending to search for the JAT-logo barf bag in the magazine pouch on the back of her seat, then my brain was a mere 20 centimetres from her brain. I cursed the Swiss Army for not having developed a Pocket Brain Scanner. I looked around and noticed that I could see no reflection of my own state of absurdoplexy in our fellow travellers who were mostly impeccably suited biznis men who only seemed united by the fact that there was little to distinguish their chin from their chest. Everyone seemed indifferent.
Mira and the boytoy lawyer that accompanied her both seemed positively jovial as if it was all biznis as usual. Hoping to fade into the background, I started to chain-smoke. (Yes of course you could still smoke on this flight.) After a few drags, I was calm enough to deploy one of my previously plotted fantasy scenarios: armed with the knowledge that Mira was a non-smoker, I began to blow my smoke forward. However, I stopped with this wimpiest of all possible forms of political statements when I noticed that I was getting the most intimidating of stares from a rather large fellow across the aisle who I immediately assumed to be part of her private security detachment. Boy did I feel silly later when I found out that he was a network cameraman.
II. Two Hours Later So there I was in a plane heading to Belgrade sitting directly behind the notoriously insane Mira Markovic who was returning from a short visit to her husband Slobo’s jailed ass. In short: Lady MacBeth of Serbia was in smelling range of Boy Peckerhead from Suburbia. And indeed I did regularly lean forward to check if I could catch a whiff of desperation emanating from beneath her famously black lacquered and obsessively combed hair. But alas I had to turn to other senses since my nose was temporarily fried from the chain-smoking I had undertaken as a futile attempt at political activism. I could still employ my eyes to fetishly follow the groomed trails left by her combing – a ritual so secretive that it is said that not even Slobo is allowed to witness it – while imagining how later I would walk into the airplane’s toilet and catch her in the act. Combus interruptus.
And while it was also remarkably easy for me to hear the easy girlish giggles she was sharing with her studboy lawyer as they leafed through the Belgrade newspapers, my ears were not equipped with the language-converter for me to engage in some real prime eavesdropping. My seat companion was certainly no help. Sure, he was willing in the first two minutes of our conversation to share his life story (how he left Novi Sad 25 years ago to play pro-football in Holland and remained there to build a bizness empire…), the reason for his return to his homeland (to visit his mother’s grave…), and every manner of intimate detail (his wife’s mastectomy of two days previous…). But the second I knew we had a basic bond I whisperingly asked him ‘Whataretheysaying? Whataretheysaying? Whataretheysaying?” He shrugged his shoulders indifferently and suggested that I should concern myself less with such old news as Mira and more with what football matches I should catch while in Belgrade.
This indifference – which was visibly shared by the other passengers – was really beginning to worry me. This could mean that the sea of cameras and journalists I was expecting to be there on our arrival in Belgrade would in fact just be a puddle and hence seriously jeopardise my Fantasy Plan #7a which had me pushing Mira aside and pretending to assume that all the attention was actually for me. I would wave, curtsy, blow kisses, and gush: “Goodness me you darling Balkanites, I’ve heard about how hospitable and welcoming you are but this is really just tooooo much…”. I would then grab the journalists’ notebooks and start autographing them.
As this scenario started to sink into the realm of wishful thinking, my brain started to scramble in the name of damage control. Perhaps if I was lucky then my smoke-damaged nose was unable to pick up the fact that my body was currently busy absorbing the stench of Mira. Crippled with a clinging cloud of hairspray and the sweat of antique sausage, I could then write a story about the kind and inspired folks at Belgrade’s Center for Cultural Decontamination and their noble search for a cleansing product that would purge me of the clinging must of Mira…
III. Two Days Later
DEAR MIRA, You may not remember me but I sat behind you on a JAT flight Amsterdam-Belgrade after you had visited your Slobo’s jailed ass in Den Haag. At the time I marvelled at how close and potentially crushable your fantasy-ridden skull was. But my views have since mellowed and matured thanks to certain citizens of this ex-country you helped destroy who convinced me of your current irrelevance and taught me that it is just too cheap to prey on the weak. This newly attained benevolence has inspired me to send you this thank-you note for the most cultural of evenings I just had. If it was not for you, I would not have struck up a conversation with my seating neighbour on that flight in the hopes that he would whisperingly translate your girlish giggles and conversation for me. But luckily, he did consider it much more relevant to inform me that one of the best Gypsy family bands on the planet played in a Dutch-themed restaurant attached to the football stadium in Novi Sad.
Sweet coincidence had it that my sweet hosts were long befriended with said band and were in fact the only non-Gypsies at the leader’s wedding. I even got some juicy gossip. (For example, that leader’s dad was Marshall Tito’s favourite singer, and that leader’s dad had a mistress who was shot by leader’s mom…).
This whole cosy scenario ensured that when we ended up going there to eat and drink, the band played for hours around, on, and even – when the fiddling leader tripped, fell and rolled – under our table. I was so blown away – with my emotions as raw as my throat which had taken a particularly harsh beating by providing Anglo harmonies to a Romani version of ‘My Way’ – that I was about ready to pay the band the highest form of tribute by committing ‘Beli Bora’: the act, as I understood it, of smashing a glass on the table in front of you and WOCKA bringing my wrists down hard on the shards and rubbing them around.
But I was interrupted: not by my pesky brain suddenly deciding to ruminate about how this Beli Bora ritual may be related to the more happy-go-lucky habit of the Greeks to throw plates – and how the wimpier Greek ritual may be more in keeping with EU membership — but by a friend of the family singing a song of undying love to MY date. It quickly became clear that in order to defend my honour — and oh yeah: hers… — I had to highnoon it with this dude with a duel to the death. But after a tender moment of male bonding with date’s dad as he toured me through the choice of firearms, it all turned out to be just a joke. But hey what did I know? I’ve just seen a couple of Kusturica films and read the sporadic Sunday supplement… Until now that is. I have now been emersed.
But anyway, I merely wrote to thank you for your role in making this most memorable/educational of evenings possible and to recommend this restaurant to you whenever you are in Novi Sad and have a craving for some of that honest Dutch fare that you have been having so much of lately. Tell them Beli the Kid sent you and the jenever will be on the house…
Is this General (ret.) I’m mix-grilling with a war criminal? Or just deeply conflicted? Later, a knowledgeable person erased any sense of “ish” from war criminal-ish. At the same, this knowledgeable person suggested that the General (ret.) was too much of a drunk to deal with the logistics of genocide.
By Steve Korver
Weird story, really… I cruised across Serbia in a ‘devil illegal’ Citroen Duckling to end up having mixed grill with a war criminalish General (retired).
The Ladyfriend had to interview him for a noble, scholarly and responsible cause that alas involves talking to despicable assholes, and I had come along for the ride and to keep our hip young driver friend company. So we drove to an “undisclosed location”. OK, it was actually a quite scenic hunting resort/restaurant in the heart of the once imagined Greater Serbia. Once we entered the folksy establishment, Drivingbuddy and I sat our intimidated asses as far away as possible from where the Ladyfriend was settling down to begin her official business with the obviously dwarfish General (ret.).
A waiter soon comes up to say that it’s “the General’s orders” that I as the non-driver must drink a local rakija (firewater) compliments of the General (ret.). I took this as a cue to also order some coffee and breakfast. The firewater came first and I zhiveli (go cheers) in his direction and say so that only Drivingbuddy can hear me: “Thank you Mister War Criminal”. Hey, it was early and I could still get cheap giggles out of cheap shots. Actually I got a bonafide bellylaugh out of Drivingbuddy so it was worthwhile. Also, as I understood it at that time, the General (ret.) was more on-the-fine-line of war criminaldom. What this fine-line exactly was, I was too tired to care about just yet.
And get this straight: I’ve cuddled with more than enough Balkan men to know the score.
But anyway, as soon as Ladyfriend took a toilet break from her noble endeavours as interviewer, the General (ret.) took the opportunity to come over and introduce himself and insist that I drink another firewater. He had the whole Mladic persona down – but then with an eerie elf-like edge. Our conversation was short since he could only speak basic Rambo English and I have a learning disability with that whole Serbian language thing, but I did find that he was rather quick in getting a tad too homo-erotic with my hair. And get this straight: I’ve cuddled with more than enough Balkan men to know the score. In his defence, my hair was looking particularly enticing that morning, but still the sort of hair twirling he was doing I had only previously experienced accompanied with a post-coital cigarette.
But anyway, the Ladyfriend returns and they get back to business soon enough and I’m left to goose bump my way through the other firewater and revel in the absurdity of the situation. Later as I was fantasizing about raising the absurdity quotient by picking a fight with the General (ret.) under the pretext that he was flirting with Ladyfriend, the waiter comes with another “General’s order” that dictated that we join them. I sit beside Ladyfriend and quickly move closer to her for more of a sense of protection when I notice the girlish nature of his purse – I guess you could have called it a leather satchel.
[With the Ladyfriend being a local, I had already long become comfortable with taking on a more wifey persona. Admittingly, this particular persona got a tad overblown a couple of nights before when we had a dinner with some rather highly statured government folk and I hung with the wives (species: official) and within moments was promising them that I would help break down barriers by joining all their ‘spouse groups’ if I returned to Belgrade for another extended stay…].
But anyway, the General (ret.) took command and ordered mixed grill for us all before proceeding to rave and flail his arms about in a General (ret.) sort of way and occasionally telling the Ladyfriend to translate things for me. First, he demanded to be at our wedding. (Wedding? I must have missed that order but my inner-wifey immediately made a mental note to buy some bridal mags.) He then even offered to supply the honey for the big event. Yes folks, honey was his hobby and protective netting was for blue-helmeted UN wimps. He claimed that getting stung just made you stronger. I slid yet closer to Ladyfriend in case he decided to make me stronger.
His ensuing speech about the arbitrary nature of defining “war criminaldom”, was interrupted with the arrival of cow-sized plates of mixed grill, a meal that can only be considered balanced in a land where sausage is regarded as a vegetable. I had just finished an epic meal to gel my belly together after the firewater, so my appetite was limited. And any saliva I did have turned to paste as I watched the General (ret.) methodically eat – two chews per grenade-sized bite – through his plate meat-type by meat-type.
A tad horrified, I tried to exchange a reassuring glance of ‘holy shit are you checking this out?’ with Drivingbuddy but he was too busy as a Serb wisely obeying the commands of a SerbGeneral (ret.) to notice my twitching entreaties or to worry about the fact that he had just finished eating twice as much as me just moments before. But I did feel proud for getting half-way through my plate, especially since throughout the whole eating process I felt like the bookish Lover in the The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover when he was getting murdered with a broom handle ramming antiquarian paper down his throat.
Naturally, the General (ret.) noticed my leftovers and had to say something along the lines of “maybe I’m an army boy but I was taught to finish what was on my plate”. I then wanted to say that my Mom had taught me the same thing but she had also taught me that there are other food groups than just meat. I wanted to launch into my whole shtick about how NATO should have showered Serbia with dieticians instead of guided missiles. But then I figured he had already long typecast me as a spoiled brat WesternBoy anyway and since that is a role that I’m remarkably comfortable with, I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. And there certainly didn’t seem to be any real love lost since he was now calling me son-in-law and seemed to be still demanding the wedding invitation.
As we were saying our goodbyes that thankfully stopped just short of him slipping me the tongue, some folks stopped to pay the General (ret.) their respect. One turned out to be a nephew of another general currently on trial for war crimes at the Hague Tribunal. Both the General (ret.) and I enjoyed the flash of fear in their eyes as he introduced me as being Dutch. The General (ret.) probably enjoyed it because he is a sadist, and I enjoyed it because I like being regarded, albeit even for a brief moment, as a potential avenging angel of international justice.
The next morning back in Belgrade I told this tale to a knowledgeable sort who erased any sense of “ish” from war criminalish. But at the same, he suggested that the General (ret.) was in fact too much of a drunk to deal with the logistics of genocide. It also turns out that the General (ret.)’s obsession with our wedding was probably just a test to see if we knew anything about his daughter’s wedding of two weeks previous which had as guest of honor another retired general: Mladic, the Most Wanted.
I immediately cancelled my wedding dress fitting I had booked for that afternoon.
The house belonging to Zeljko Raznatovic, the warlord and gangster known as Arkan, is the perfect starting point for an architectural tour that takes in Sci-Fi gas stations, glass-floored tv stations,mobster-built theme parks and hastily constructed refugee housing.
By Steve Korver
A few years ago I yelled Hajde! Hajde! (indispensable Serbian which when yelled loud enough means “Let’s get the %#*& out of here!”) to the only Belgrade cabdriver I could find willing to stop for a flash so I could take a quick snapshot of a pink marbled mansion. This wedding cake of a landmark belonged to a man whose official trade was listed as baker: the warlord/gangster Arkan. As such, it was a house that came with lots of local urban lore: most specifically that there were always scary gangster types on hand to abuse and expose the film of anyone stupid enough to try to take a picture of it. Fortunately for me, it was either their day off or they were too ensconced in their morning coffee and pastries in the ground level bakeshop (or more likely: the taxi driver had judged correctly what would be a VERY safe distance…).
Arkan was living in this monstrous architectural statement that screamed “look at me!” while enjoying the status of being on the top of Interpol’s most wanted list for over a decade. While the building’s colour suggests Miami Beach, its structure suggests a mutant Byzantine dream where the small high windows and rounded cupola tower were meant to mirror the classical Serb architecture of Kosovo’s famed Orthodox monasteries. However as the home to one of the country’s most notorious war criminals, it was more suggestive of a potential centrefold for Better Homicide and Garden magazine. While my resulting photograph was a bit of a disappointment since it made the house look almost tasteful, the adrenaline that was unleashed while taking the photo did jumpstart an obsession for modern Serbian architecture that reflected the legacy of the Milosevic regime.
And indeed, Arkan’s house can be seen as the perfect starting point for an architectural tour that could also aptly include gas stations with Sci-Fi flourishes, mobster-built theme parks and hastily constructed refugee housing.
And now happily such a tour is possible. Snap-happy tourists are now able to leisurely line up the perfect shot of this monument to the distinctive fall of a Serb psychotic (Arkan was shot with 37 close range bullets in a Belgrade hotel lobby during the last days of Milosevic in 2000). During the recent crack-down on organized crime that followed the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003 when thousands were arrested and millions of assets were seized, one of the most hope-inspiring acts of all these many hope-inspiring acts occurred when police raided Arkan’s former home to uncover not only a vast array of arms but also souvenirs from his days as the most feared paramilitary leader during the Yugoslav wars. And as icing on the cake, they arrested the home’s main resident: Arkan’s widow, the Serbian superstar Ceca. Long dubbed “The Madonna of Serbia”, Ceca was the queen of Turbofolk, a banal lyriced fusion of Balkan folk melodies and Western electronic beats usually served with a thick video sauce of breasts, booty, Versace and gangster chic marketing. In this position, Ceca had done much since 1991 when she was voted the country’s “best looking singer”, to romanticize both nationalism and kitsch in general and Arkan in particular. Together they were the sugar and spice of the gangster kitsch culture that came to define Milosevic’s nationalist Serbia.
While undoubtedly too busy with costume-changes to run her late husband’s extensive criminal empire, Ceca did apparently find time to offer refuge and money to her husband’s gangster protégés who made up the upper echelons of the Zemun Clan and allegedly masterminded the Djindjic assassination. Ceca’s arrest is of great symbolic value coming from a country that continued to be force-fed a dense media landscape of nationalist/gangster kitsch even two years after Milosevic was hauled off to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal – an event made possible after a chat between Djindjic and Milorad ‘Legija’ Lukavic, the former Arkan righthand man, who was then still the commander of the “Red Beret” Special Operations Unit (JSO) before shortly after opting for the greater profits of leading the Zemum Clan.
After a 2-year mourning period, Ceca also made time for a comeback in 2002 – looking less attractive and more like a plastic surgery disaster – with a tribute concert to her husband that attracted an audience of nearly 100 000 in the Red Star football stadium across from her mansion. Her new album was greeted by with much fawning from such media outlets as TV Pink and TV Palma which had both been set up by Milosevic cronies to present a banal, sterile yet sexually charged version of the Serbian dream. These oddly propagandistic media myth-makers happily mixed symbols from all times and places as long as they functioned to present Serbs as an oppressed but always striving to be a free and distinct people. While most Serbs – in particular the city dwelling ones who had access to such alternative news sources as radio B92 – have long been painfully aware of the mechanics between kitsch and power under Milosevic, the children who are currently the main viewers of these television stations are not. This perhaps accounts for why 90% of the audience at Ceca’s tribute concert were below 19 years of age…
Kitsch with a Distance…
But I’m not here to cast a disparaging eye on kitsch. As a dweller in the land of wooden shoes and brought up in a land that was the first to market maple syrup art, I’ve always had it pretty sweet. Not only did I have access to jobs that earned me enough money to travel widely, I’ve also had the luxury of judging the countries I visited by their kitsch. After all why should you rip your insides apart with stories of concentration camps when you can concentrate on Camp? It’s really the ultimate in defence mechanisms. However as a connoisseur of sorts, Serbia was the place where I was confronted with a kitsch that often echoed a past that was too scary and recent for me to filter through the rose-tinted glasses of ironic distance. This kitsch was very different than for example India – certainly a kitsch Mecca of sorts – where even when Gods sport bloody skull necklaces they still come across as fairly cute entities.
Of course I have no problem investing in a collector’s edition of stamps depicting crumbled examples of “NATO Aggression” or boxer shorts depicting Bart Simpson in traditional Serbian garb and blowing on a gypsy horn. Hell, I live for that kind of stuff. But Technicolor coffee mugs depicting freely wandering war criminal types crosses some sort of fine-line that I cannot bring myself to cross. How is it possible that ex-General Mladic, sheller of Sarajevo and organizer of the killing of 8000 in Srebrenica, has been reborn as a “100% Serbian” kitsch product? Former Bosnian Serb leader Karadjic, another favourite subject for coffee mugs, is perhaps a case apart. As a bouffant-haired one-string-fiddle-playing monk-impersonating psychiatrist and children’s books author, he’s always betrayed a psychotic kitsch edge. Regardless, these sort of cultural mementoes are just too hot for me to handle – after all, I belong to the school that sees kitsch as something that should enrich lives and not celebrate the destruction of lives.
Kitsch with a Chainsaw…
And for me, Arkan came with yet more of an extra edge – perhaps one similar to the chainsaw edge that he was said to favour during interrogations. While alive, he built a mighty myth around him that was equal doses kitsch and psychosis. And this myth still lingers not only in his protégés of the Zemum Clan who see him as a patriot and themselves as his rightful heirs, but also in Serbia’s depressingly unchanged media landscape that worked long and hard in romanticizing the gangster society that Serbia would eventually become. But for many more, Arkan is one of the scariest faces of the 20th century. His baby face features immediately betrayed his stunted-in-boyhood tastes for parades, guns, forts, military costumes, Hollywood gangster flicks, ceremonial swords and female bodyguards. He put the ethnic in front of cleansing and used his own ethnicity as an excuse for his thirst for money and power. He was in fact ready-made propaganda for Serb enemies and hence was fundamental in leading those unfortunate enough to share his ethnicity to the extremes of global pariahism. In this way, he was just as responsible as Milosevic for the fact that the Serb treasures of Kosovo will now undoubtedly fall into Albanian hands…
His real name was Zeljko Raznatovic, a Montenegrin Serb born in Slovenia (reflecting a typical story of cross pollination in Tito’s Yugoslavia), who began his career at 17 by embarking on a bank robbing, drug smuggling and gun running spree across Europe. After a string of spectacular jail escapes – perhaps aided by the Yugoslav secret police for whom he claimed to provide hitman services for – he eventually settled back down in the implosion that was Yugoslavia of the early 90s and turned to channelling the energy of the hooligan element of the supporters of the Belgrade Red Star football team into a lean mean ethnic cleansing machine named the Tigers. Made up of many who would later graduate to become Serbian secret police members and/or Zemun Clan gangsters, the Tigers built a reputation as a paramilitary unit engaged in massacres, rapes, and other atrocities first in Croatia and then in Bosnia (while Ceca built a reputation at the same time as their khaki hot-panted cheerleader…). Later, on the spoils of looting and smuggling, and his connections with the Albanian mafia, Serb secret police and customs (a web that explains the ready availability in Belgrade of such Albanian export products as marijuana and heroin throughout the Kosovo crisis), Arkan was then able to build himself up to stature of Belgrade businessman, a parliamentarian, and founder and President of the Party of the Serbian Unity – a party used by Milosevic to funnel votes away from an equally rabid nationalist that was proving too ambitious, Voyislav “I will scoop Croat eyeballs out with a rusty spoon” Seselj, who is now currently starring daily in his own brand of TV Pinkesque theatrical television as a defendant at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
Symbol Soup While Arkan’s mansion remains his Reichstag, his wedding with Ceca in 1995 will go down in history as his Goring rally. Witnessed by thousands, it took full advantage of the fact that there were few other glimmers of glamour in this time of war and sanctions. The 140-minute video became a national bestseller and standard repeat fare for such Milosevic state-sponsored TV stations as Pink and Palma. Today, it remains readily available to buy alongside the mugs of Mladic and Karadjic on many Serbian street corners. And for many tomorrows it will certainly provide meat for media analysts since it reflects Arkan’s savvy at playing the symbology game that developed under Milosevic. Of course bad taste is a universal phenomena, but it has rarely been used so efficiently as a basic tool of ruling as it did under the Milosevic regime. Much has been written about how Slobo sponsored kitsch media in general and Turbofolk music in particular to rid the airwaves of musical alternatives (such as those of the country’s long vibrant rock scene that organized the first Belgrade anti-war demonstrations in 1991) and reinforce certain myths of Serbness that were fundamental for his hold on power as a “soft” dictator. Already excellently observed by Serbian anthropologist and media scholar Ivan Colovic, as well as Eric D. Gordy in his truly fascinating The Culture of Power in Serbia, this wedding attempted to represent all things to all (Serb) people. By fusing elements of Serb folklore – in particular those stories that painted the Serbs as valiant victims – with the more romantic Hollywood notions of the gangster lifestyle, barriers that defined the true Serb national identity began to blur. Repeated broadcasting just made it all blurrier. And certainly a decade of UN sanctions also did much to enforce the idea that the only way of getting ahead was an illegal way.
And certainly, very many Belgrade residences belonging to the rich and infamous tell a similar tale. An “Arkantecture Tour” could conveniently point out Byzantine flourishes while telling stories worthy of Scarface and The Godfather that grace, for instance, the sprawling complex – complete with rumoured escape routes – belonging to the Brothers Karic, who amassed a fortune (some of which they allegedly passed on to fund Arkan’s Tigers…) as Milosevic cronies.
Post-Arkantecture?
Perhaps a coincidence but certainly convenient for Arkantecture tourists, the TV Pink headquarters is just around the corner from Arkan’s mansion. This national station was set up by a close associate of Slobo’s wife, Mira Markovic (herself worth an encyclopaedic study on kitsch gone mad), as a regime mouthpiece and the definitive broadcaster of Turbo culture in the country. Even today it continues to broadcast large doses of gangster chic, soft porn, documentaries on Kosovo monasteries, Turbofolk videos and such international mainstays as Friends. Experts have observed that repeated viewing of such imagery seems to induce a weird militant hypnosis in such underdeveloped viewers as children and potential war criminals. Of course if one chooses to ignore the rabidly nationalist subtext, TV Pink can offer hours of quality viewing to those who take ironic delight from the more garish TV broadcasts in the West during the 1970s when American Country & Western performers were at the height of their high hairdo days, and German schlager singers were revolutionizing the wearing of clashing colour combinations.
Like Arkan’s house, the TV Pink headquarters comes equipped with a large litany of local urban lore: that the management were very proud of their glass floors since they allowed them to admire the view up women’s skirts, that it received an architecture award (of dubious merit) in the same week it was revealed that it was illegally built without a building permit… At first glance, this building seems to have little in common with Arkan’s more openly Byzantine-influenced mansion. But they do share a taste for small gun port windows. They are both aggressive to the point of militancy. Their architectural components lack any unifying organic basis (which suggests a runaway materialism…). Perhaps the TV Pink building’s Sci-Fi styling can be seen as an optimistic statement – by those who regarded Serbia’s downfall into a lawless gangster state as a good thing – that yes the future is now and the Serbs are finally a truly free and distinct people. So would this make the TV Pink headquarters a prime example of post-Arkantecture?
The Road to Slobo…
As a reflection of Slobo’s own banality and preference to rule from behind tall and indistinct walls, the nearby Milosevic compound can be easily skipped. To witness the architectural legacy of his regime one must turn to his gangster son Marko who was a true product of the society his father constructed. Arkantecture buffs are hence advised to drive a couple of hours from Belgrade to Pozarevac, the Milosevic family’s hometown. Here one can not only find the tree under which Partisan Teen Queen Mira wrote bad love poetry to Slobo, but also witness a wondrous vision of TurboKitsch in decline – namely, the leftovers of Bambipark, the amusement park that Marko unveiled during the height of the NATO bombing in 1999 as a propagandistic fuck you to the West. Western propaganda proceeded to paint the park as some sort of huge Serbo-Disney that was later ransacked by an angry mob. However today, you can find it at the end of a dusty road: fully intact and nothing really more than a garishly painted playground for children. It’s open daily from 2pm and the admission is now free due to the current vagueness in regards to ownership since Marko fled to Russia in 2000 to escape either arrest or retribution for having organized Arkan’s assassination (in typical gangster fashion, it was widely rumoured that Mira visited Ceca to plead for “no war between our families”).
On the other side of town, Marko’s outdoor disco, Madona (sic), (apparently the superstar was not amused so an “n” was removed) is a tad meatier for the architecturally-inclined: an atrocity of pastel colours whose Byzantine motifs had seemingly been shit upon by an episode of Miami Vice. Other decorations include somewhat eerie mural paintings that pleaded ‘Stop the Violence’ and ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’. While not visibly “ransacked” as reported in the media of NATO member states, its ghost-town vibe seems to suggest that it is closed for a very extended season…
Gas Stations as Arkantecture
The road between Belgrade and Pozarevac is itself notable for the density of brand new – and often betraying a Sci-Fi edge similar to the TV Pink headquarters – but mostly abandoned gas stations. In fact they can be seen throughout Serbia, and can be regarded as surreal landmarks to the uselessness of UN trade sanctions. Gasoline sanctions just allowed sanction-busters like Arkan, the Karic Brothers and the Zemum Clan to have the monopoly on gasoline. These gas stations – mostly constructed in a time when gas was smuggled and sold on street corners from Coke bottles – were generally built by these and other forward thinking mobsters who used their black market profits not only to sponsor extreme nationalist political figures but also to make investments that would help them establish themselves as bona fide businessmen as soon as the sanctions were lifted and Serbians could live happily ever after as free, brave and distinct gangsters…
The Regular Folks
Of course like anywhere in the world, the tastes and ways of the rich and famous trickle down to influence the less rich and famous. The highways and byways of Serbia betray a huge building boom of more modest and humble houses and apartment buildings for the many tens of thousands of Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Like their luxury counterparts, most of these homes have been illegally built without a building permit. Many also betray the influence of the dubious tastes of TV Pink and the gangster elite with a Sci-Fi feature here and a cupola inspired by Kosovo’s monasteries there. As proof of Turbo-media’s influence on contemporary Serbian design and architecture, one of the more popular features of these mushrooming homes is a double half-circle balcony whose Byzantine roots has been obscured by having been renamed Lepa Brena in tribute to the “Dolly Parton of Turbofolk”. Richer refugees have even gone so far to build perfect replicas of ancient Kosovan churches in their neighbourhoods. It’s certainly understandable that refugees have been influenced by the media landscape they have been force-fed. Hell, it’s even perfectly understandable that many of these house’s residents have been radicalised by their life experiences into having a soft spot for nationalism in general and Arkan in particular – not just from the media’s broadcast of myths but also from the fact that while living in their former homes in Croatia and Bosnia, perhaps Arkan was on hand to stand between them and war criminals on the Croatian and Bosnian sides.
Such realizations relativize… These people are the real victims – of both war and the media. Their new homes do not deserve to be tainted with comparisons to the tastes of Arkan, Marko and their ilk. It’s like driving down Germany’s autobahns and merely seeing them as projections of Hitler’s legacy and not as mighty efficient ways of getting around. These houses actually have more in common with the houses found throughout the world – including those belonging to Croat refugees in Croatia where references to Catholic architecture are currently all the rage – whose resident’s are more concerned with surviving day to day than being beacons of good taste (whatever that relative term actually means…). My obsession with Arkan and his crimes against both humanity and good taste had in fact infected how I digested everything that I saw around me while travelling the highways and byways of Serbia. An Arkantecture tour is in fact very similar to those already organized that visit all the major NATO bombing sites: worthy if one sticks to reality (as a reminder of destruction and death…) but dangerous when used as an ideological tool (as a reminder that the world wanted to kill us Serbs but we survived as a free and distinct people…). Additionally, such a glib phrase as “Arkantecture” can even possibly be appropriated by those out to romanticise the gangster lifestyle. After all the term Turbofolk originated from the inspired Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus who used it as a satirical term before having it appropriated by the very folks he was busy despising who fused it to the rest of the symbol soup that was out to proclaim Serbs as a free and distinct people…
Hopefully with the great changes that are finally underway in Serbia, my eyes will soon be inspired to quickly skim over such things as tacky mansions and empty gas stations and instead be drawn to admire the things that have truly endured the millennia of Serbian history: such timeless quality kitsch as the personalized labels on the bottles of home-brewed rakia, heart-shaped cookies glittering with tiny mirrors, flashy golden icon paintings of such saints as Sava and Tito, naive paintings of chaotic village barbeque feasts, Sirogojno sweaters depicting fluorescent nature scenes…
What the country really needs now are the same tours that took place until over a decade ago when the wars and the gangsters so rudely interrupted. Perhaps it’s time to set my sights on writing about the beauty of ancient monasteries, beautiful spas, epic mountains, bucolic country farms, forgotten wine regions, and wiggly rows of plum tree orchards…
Four years after my first visit to Sarajevo, a Dutch-funded project to connect survivors of the Balkans wars by video launches in the former war-torn capital. Some things have changed, some not so much…
By Steve Korver, 14-04-2005, cover feature, Amsterdam Weekly
The first time I was in Sarajevo, four years ago, a man I came to call The Professor treated me to a roller coaster ride through Bosnia’s worst hit areas. He deemed the optimum volume of his car radio as “when the doors started shaking”. This was so that everyone in the vicinity could share the tunes he chose to play. In Croat neighbourhoods the doors shook with Serb partisan songs, while in Muslim sections they shook with the Croat hit parade.
A Serb who had stayed in Sarajevo in the name of a united Bosnia, he had dodged Serb snipers for three years during the siege, only to lose his teaching position to a Muslim once the war was over. So basically he was pissed off at everyone. His DJing style was certainly an efficient way to get frequently pulled over by the local police. So was his driving style, which consisted of jerking erratically between 40 and 100 kph, while screaming stories about ‘bastards, fascists’ and the general assbackwardness of these parts.
‘The Bosnian people failed by falling for self-serving politicians… See that veterinarian hospital? Once they identified a dead animal as a radiation-swollen rat, then as some sort of tiny variety of the dinosaur family, until someone finally recognised it as a skinned fox… The UN failed the most. They couldn’t even teach the local police how to button their shirts or tighten their belts…’ But by then I had come to respect these scruffy law officers for their ability to sense a madman coming straight for them at 40 or 100 kph.
If The Professor was anything to go by, things were still by no means normal in Bosnia, five years after the signing of the Dayton agreement that formally ended (excessive) violence in Bosnia.
This past visit also rated as my second date with my lady friend, herself an (ex-)Yugo. Our ensuing courtship is documented by a series of snapshots showing us in front of bombed-out buildings, crippled bridges, and scenic views overlooking Srebrenica, where around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in the worst single slaughter since World War II.
An inadvertent photo album of love among ruins. We weren’t sick, sick ramptoeristen (“disaster tourists”), though, but victims of circumstance. Her work as a researcher involved interviewing both war criminals and victims. I was just often along as a bit of arm candy.
Return to Sarajevo Our respective roles had only evolved somewhat when we returned to Sarajevo last week to attend the premiere of a remarkable series of documentaries, Videoletters, by Amsterdam film-making couple Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek, who won the Special Prix Europa, International Journalism Prize, and the Human Rights Prize for their 2002 documentary The Making of the Revolution, which covered the last days of the Milosevic regime.
Each episode of Videoletters involves an exchange of letters on video between two friends, colleagues, family members or neighbours from different ethnic groups who lost contact during the war. Most exchanges offer apologies along the likes of ‘I can blame MiloÅ¡evic for his politics, but I can’t blame Milocevic for me not answering your letter.’ Many express regrets, too. ‘Now, everything that happened seems bizarre, laughable, senseless.’ Often the two became reconciled and met up later too. Even now, doing so can be dangerous, since many of them still live in communities where ‘consorting with the enemy’ is still regarded as a crime.
We journeyed down to Sarajevo to celebrate the completion of this 5-year project with around 40 associates, sponsors, friends, journalists, and Dutch civil servants. We even had musical accompaniment in the shape of by Blijburg house band Hotel.
I figured I’d help out by explaining to any fellow travellers who wanted to know that the local swearing traditions don’t centre on diseases, as in Holland, but on the private parts of one’s mother. I could also assist with the pronunciation of such essentials as cevapcici and pivo. I was even willing to hold master classes with my handy colour chart that explains the Balkans’ two basic food groups: rakija and mixed grill.
But I also had selfish motives: I wanted to collect stories about Amsterdammers abroad being peckerheads. I already had plenty with me as the star; but my lady friend, who had hand-held many visiting Dutch academics in her time, had told me a lot of juicy ones that made me suspect there must be even more. My favourite was the one about the posh history professor visiting Srebrenica. ‘Where can I find a good gym?’ he asked. The town did not even have running water.
But this time it was a fairly sensitive bunch travelling to Sarajevo. In fact, the whole trip was very tightly organised. I counted a dizzying array of four different food groups at most meals. And I was also happy to discover that Sarajevo had come a long way in the last four years. Out of the media spotlight and relatively pumped with reconstruction funds, Sarajevo had become a town again that now even non- disaster tourists could love.
But almost the first thing we encountered after leaving the airport was a Technicolor image of that (in)famously smug sense that the Dutch have of themselves that they can fix anything (This is the same presumption that got them into a whole shitload of trouble in Srebrenica. But let’s not speak of collective guilt here…) It turned out that the Netherlands had sponsored the painting of refurbished apartments in the city — but in really garish colours. This in the name of ‘brightening things up’. The residents were less than appreciative.
‘Great. Now we’ll be the first targets when the war starts again.’
Cutting to the chase A friend of mine once referred to Marshall Tito as ‘one funky dude’, a phrase suggesting a relatively benevolent dictator who just happened to love uniforms — and the ladies.
There are probably many reasons for the Balkans wars of the 1990s, but one thing is for sure: Tito managed to die just as he would have had to deal with the economic downslide that came with the fall of the Wall. Before then, the ruler of Yugoslavia had been savvy enough to keep the country out of the Eastern Bloc by playing the USSR and the USA off each other and collecting money from both sides. Yes, funky.
‘Under Tito, we were all Yugoslav,’ observes one of the people in the Videoletters. Dictator or not, he did set up and rule a genuinely multiculti country with a healthy, well-educated and well-travelled urban population.
At his death, microphone politicians sought to fill the void by appealing to rural populations and blaming the other. Milocevic got the ball rolling in Serbia. But Tudjman in Croatia, and Karadzic for the Serbs and Izetbegovic for the Muslims in Bosnia, were all quick to apply similar tactics. It is, unfortunately, a familiar story. (An Amsterdam dinner party with ex-Yugos these days is incomplete without the observation: ‘Isn’t it incredible how Geert Wilders looks exactly like a young pig-faced Milosevic?’)
It was only when the war actually started that things get really confusing. The media — regional, national and international — got involved. Other countries, mostly from the EU, got involved to protect their many vested interests. It was just next door after all, and bizness is bizness. The worst point was probably when Madison Avenue PR companies began representing individual ethnic groups. The Internet was exploited to spread myths. Truth had become fluid; and it wasn’t tasty, like rakija.
By the war’s end in 1995, atrocities had been committed by all sides on such a scale that any finger pointing became irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands were dead and millions had been displaced. (In Amsterdam, the ex-Yugo population is now around 6,000, just a few hundred less than the Indonesians.) The true victims of the war were, as usual, the people who just wanted to get on with their lives without bullshit.
Today the former republics of Yugoslavia are independent states: Serbia & Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only Kosovo is still being disputed. And while now there’s plenty of cross-border bizness relationships, the same can’t be said for personal ones. That’s where Videoletters comes in…
Videoletters: the project
Film-maker Van den Broek explained the initial inspiration. ‘We met Samir, a Muslim living in Sarajevo, who was depressed from the war at having to dodge snipers all the time,’ he said. ‘He was also depressed about not having heard from his best friend, who happened to be a Serb. He was so desperate that he decided to commit suicide. He went up onto his roof to wait for a sniper to kill him. Nothing happened for an hour so he finally gave up. But it turned out that Samir himself had never tried getting in touch with his friend either. This was the seed of the idea.’
Five years later, he and his partner Rejger, whose roots lie in the region, has produced a cathartic 20-part series. It produces tears in the eyes of everyone who sees, it, non-ex-Yugos included. But the project’s real success came last summer, when representatives from all the former republics’ public broadcasting stations — all of them once enthusiastic broadcasters of propaganda — came together in Amsterdam to hash out a deal by which the episodes would be simulcast by all the stations. A booze cruise and a dinner at Panama helped grease the wheels of history. This would be the first time since the war that all ex-Yugoslavs would watch the same show at the same time. And on 7 April this year, the first weekly episode was aired.
A few months later, again in Amsterdam, during the screening of several episodes during IDFA, all the ambassadors from former ex-Yugo countries were left crying and speechless. Yes: politicians rendered speechless. A very positive sign indeed.
A representative of the Dutch Department of Foreign Affairs was also on hand to present a cheque to help take the project to the next level: telephone help lines for traumatized viewers, a website with search engine where people could make contact again, counters all over former Yugoslavia where people can make their own video letters (at no charge), and even buses equipped with computers and webcams that travel to the more isolated spots.
Sarajevo/Amsterdam As a symbol of the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was the perfect setting for the official premier. And in many ways, the city has much in common with Amsterdam. OK, Pim Fortuyn will never compete with Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination triggered World War I. But both cities are cosmopolitan despite their small size, painfully scenic, artily inclined and mellow. There’s even a shared humour based on dark understatement.
As a major crossroads and trading centre, Sarajevo is also very welcoming to visitors. Before the war it rated as the most multicultural city in the region. ‘Forget “Venice of the North”,’ I heard a newly converted fan in the group exclaim. ‘We should start calling Amsterdam “Sarajevo of the North”.’ And certainly these days it’s much easier to recognize it as a cool city again. Every exchange with a local feels like you’ve made a new friend. I only encountered one cabdriver (I remember many more from the last time) who started muttering about ‘what they did to us…’
But I had also grown. I no longer asked who ‘them’ and ‘us’ were.
But it’s still easy to equate Sarajevo with war. The valley is smeared with white patches that mark the clustering of graves. UN troops are still everywhere, keeping the peace and acting as regular customers for the overpriced restaurant sector. Damaged buildings and damaged people are still everywhere too. A car with Serbian license plates will still likely get its windshield smashed. But one attending Dutch baby boomer was quick to observe: ‘A car with German plates in Amsterdam will still get pushed into the canal on Queen’s Day, and that war ended 60 years ago. Reconciliation usually takes generations.’
In Sarajevo, the war hovers over every conversation. As a visitor, you are of course neurotic about coming across as a lucky bastard. The boyfriend of a friend I made last time surprisingly expressed certain nostalgia for the war. ‘People smile less. My friends are working harder, staying home more and watching more TV.’
‘It’s only gonna get worse once you join the EU,’ I replied. ‘Or maybe you and your friends are just getting older and more boring. I know I am.’
He laughed and agreed. So maybe universal processes can still happen when there isn’t a war.
It’s easy to get too optimistic. However it’s a feeling that’s quickly cured once you drive by a ‘Welcome to the Srpska Republic’ sign. The Serbian section of Bosnia is still more of poverty-stricken livewire with a population still very much under the thrall of one of the world’s most wanted war criminals, the one-stringed-lute-plucking freak Karadzic. Reconstruction funds aren’t exactly raining there. The region remains seriously damaged. But there’s still a celebratory mood at Cafe Dayton, where several of the series’ reunifications occur, that not even the obvious security presence can douse.
Van den Broek sees the irony. ‘Now the police are helping us,’ he says. ‘Before, when we got stopped, we’d have to negotiate a price and discuss what exactly we as drivers with foreign licence plates were doing wrong.’
When we returned to Sarajevo, I had the opportunity to enter an iconic building that was once the oldest library of Oriental books. It was torched during the siege, though; some two million irreplaceable books were burned. But I saw its renovation and recent function as unique setting for plays and exhibitions as a positive sign.
Later, I tried to impart this optimism to a NOVA cameraman who also happened to come from Sarajevo. ‘I don’t give a shit about that building,’ he said. ‘I give a shit about those two million books that will never be read again.’
Right. It’s sometimes easy to forget. We returned to our ongoing argument about which is the grimiest bar in Amsterdam.
During a luncheon in a beautiful riverside restaurant — complete with tree growing through the building — I was curious to see what the Dutch ambassador to Bosnia and a high-ranking civil servant from Foreign Affairs would say. But neither had a clue about microphone technique, and so we all heard nothing. This gave me another rush of idealism, oddly enough — for the future of Dutch politics, anyway. No one could accuse these gentlemen of being microphone politicians.
But the real story was occurring away from the podium. The different protagonists from the series were meeting each other, recognizing that they were part of a larger group and one that may very well grow exponentially. Normal people ready to embrace a truly post-war future with their pre-war friends.
It reminded me of what my lady friend’s 93-year-old great uncle once said to us. ‘If there were more stupid people than smart ones, then the world would have ended a long time ago.’ Here was a man who’d managed to witness a wide spectrum of 20th-century disaster and still stay an idealist.
