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Who are the real targets?
by Slavenka Drakulic
Day in day out we watch their photographs on TV and in the newspapers, accompa
nied by reports on how the Serbs are defying the bombing. They stand on bridges
holding hands, or gather on the square in central Belgrade where rock concerts
are held on a daily basis. They have paper targets pinned to their chests. The
word `target' is written in English, for the message is meant for foreigners,
the West, the world that has plotted against them. Identical paper targets are
handed out by their activists to people taking part in demonstrations against
the bombing on the streets of German or Italian towns. Journalists report that
targets are the latest fashion, big ones printed on T-shirts or tiny ones like
badges worn in the buttonhole. In a short space of time the Serbs have imposed
the target as their protective sign, the sign under which united, courageous and
resolute they defy the whole world. By wearing it they are turning themselves
into live targets, thus making it clear to everyone that the NATO bombs are
meant for people, however much Western politicians may claim that this is not
the case. And in order to make things easier for them, they are putting this
sign on themselves so that they can be hit, they, the peaceful and innocent
citizens of a small, unjustly attacked country.
These people are not afraid even to turn their children into live targets. Time
Magazine published a photograph of a little girl in a red jacket holding in her
hand a paper with circles. The little girl had not picked it up by herself,
someone had placed it in her hands. And that someone - her father, mother,
teacher, neighbour - had played with the symbolism of the target in an
extraordinarily cynical way. To put that sign on a child, i.e. in this case a
genuinely innocent human being, while being a citizen of Serbia, means acting
with the utmost cynicism. Everyone still remembers similar photographs from
Sarajevo a few years ago, in which there were children like this little girl
from Belgrade. But those children did not wear targets, they were targets. In
the photographs and pictures we remember, they are dead or wounded, hit by a
sniper or a shell or whatever. Last year CNN showed a documentary about one such
girl who had danced beautifully. In the documentary her mother is showing her
dancing dress, her little bag, her shoes. After Sarajevo, when children really
did represent targets, there is no way any normal person would use a target in
this way. Except, of course, in the system of twisted values and inverted mean
ings that is the autistic Serbian empire. So the spring sun shines in Belgrade,
while the innocent citizen/targets stand listening to the concert, after which
they go home. They have lunch, read the ÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÔ
papers, sleep, watch the news, go to
work, shower, bake cakes. At night they are disturbed by explosions from some
refinery, factory or ministry, by flames that reach the sky, by fear lest the
rockets fall 500 m to the left or right. But unlike the citizens of Sarajevo,
the citizens of Belgrade - despite real accidental victims - are not targets.
They know this and it makes the night bearable, despite the fear. At the same
time a few hundred kilometres away, other citizens of that same state of Serbia
stand in the mud in the rain for days, whether on the border with Macedonia in a
column 25 kilometres long, at the border post of Blace where 50,000 people are
living and dying without food or medical help, or crammed into refugee camps
across the border in Albania. They have no place to go back to, no lunch, no
news, no concert, no native land. Nothing. They do not need a paper target, they
do not need symbols. They know that they are targets, every man, woman, child.
One million Albanians have already been displaced, which is only a nicer word
for ethnic cleansing. But they are - Albanians. They are something different.
`The street concerts [organized
in Serbian cities to protest against NATO bombing] are shameful. Their humanism
would have a stronger claim if the concerts had been organized in protest
against the killing of civilians in Kosova. Not a word of protest against what
is happening there has come, however, from the members of the political
opposition and alleged hu- manists and artists. '
Ferid Muhic, professor of philosophy at the University of Skopje, Feral Tribune
(Split), 19 April 1999
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For, in this order of things in which the Serbs experience themselves as live
targets and in which the target becomes the symbol of a nation's innocence, in
this logical twist it becomes possible to say that the Albanians have deserved
such a fate. Have they supported the UCK terrorists and an independent Kosovo?
Have they called for NATO intervention? Well, here's independence for them,
here's NATO for them... Those almost one million citizens of Serbia driven
from their homes, those more than 50 razed Kosovo villages and who knows how
many killed civilians - all this, in the mind of the person listening to the
concert in central Belgrade, has nothing to do with him, any more than the bomb
ing does. Nor with the citizen of Aleksinac whose house has been hit by acci
dent, or with his wife lying wounded in hospital. They are devastated. Why is
this happening to them? What have they done wrong? They are ordinary people who
do their work, teachers, pensioners, students, not politicians. I don't know why
we're being bombed, says a woman whose house has been destroyed.
And now, most of these same people - these citizens of Serbia who are not
Albanians, for Albanians have long ago been excluded not just from civil but
from human status, and who were not concerned by Sarajevo, or by Srebrenica, or
by Dubrovnik, or by Vukovar, or even by Drenica and RaÑak - they dare to parade
around with targets on their chests. For years they have refused to understand
that they are at war. The war did not concern them, the war was happening some
where else. But now all of a sudden they have become victims, and this is why
they are wearing targets, doubtless quite unaware of the unbearable symbolism of
this idea. Their hands are clean and their consciences at peace, even while
their sons are in Kosovo - defending themselves, of course, from terrorists.
Peaceful citizens protesting under the spring sun, or at night by the light of
burning candles (another perverse symbol of peace), still refusing to understand
that this has been their war ever since 1987, 1991, 1992, however much most of
them may experience themselves as victims and not protagonists.
No one expects these citizens to be happy at the bÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÔ
ombing of their own country.
But the autism they demonstrate is utterly horrible, incomprehensible. Along
with that, to put a target on a child and imagine that in this way you are send
ing a message to the world about your innocence is a grotesque lie. For the
Serbs in Serbia are not the victims - the Albanians are their victims. Their as
tonishing autism is reflected precisely in their refusal to understand this,
even when they are being punished, when they are being bombed. They are still
not asking themselves: what have we done? Have we really gone wrong somewhere?
This absence of any doubt or uncertainty regarding their own actions is astound
ing and terrifying. And the answer they do not want to hear is very simple. Yes,
they the citizens of Serbia alone are for the most part themselves responsible
for the situation in which they find themselves, they alone are responsible for
the bombing, as they are responsible for the sufferings of the Albanian people
and all the sufferings they caused earlier (just as the Croats, by the way, are
responsible for Dretelj and the Krajina). Their responsibility lies in the fact
that for over ten years already, and now through a third war, they have kept in
power one and the same man: Slobodan Milosevic. Their political responsibility
may be somewhat diminished by the given historical circumstances (emergence from
Communism, the lack of any democratic tradition or clear political alternative),
but their moral responsibility is not.
However, most Serbian citizens even today do not connect the bombing with
Milosevic's rule, Milosevic's rule with their responsibility. No government, not
even a dictatorship, can sustain itself without at least the tacit support of
the citizens. Even today, even if they do dare say something against Milosevic,
the Serbian intellectuals and opposition mostly do not mention the Albanians and
their sufferings. They are quite capable of lamenting how the West did not help
them, how nobody understands them, and at the same time ignoring completely the
suffering of their fellow citizens, as if they did not exist. This is why not
one of them can be exempted from responsibility for keeping Milosevic in power,
even if they are unaware of that responsibility. They did not know about the
suffering of the Albanians? They did not hear about it? A real pity. They could
have heard and found out about it, if they had only wanted to. But this time
too, as before, they keep on lying - in unison and as one - to the world's face.
In spite of testimony, reports, recordings - in short, facts. But what is still
more important is that they continue to lie to themselves, living in a closed
system that they have themselves created.
This is why we are witnessing the development in Serbia of two parallel trag
edies. The first is the suffering of the Albanian people, their exodus which
some are already calling a genocide. There is no use now recalling (though it
should not be forgotten either) that their fate has been shared by Croatians and
Bosnians, and by Serbs from the Krajina as well. The second tragedy is the
autism of most of the Serbian people, which is not aware of its political, moral
and historical responsibility. Milosevic will be remembered in history as a
criminal, and perhaps one day he will answer to a tribunal and be punished for
his misdeeds. But most of the Serb people, precisely because they have been
incapable of settling accounts with Milosevic, cannot go down in history simply
as innocent victims of his dictatorship and Western aggression. The targets on
their heroic breasts notwithstanding. So long as most Serbs behave as though
they as citizens are innocent, while only the politicians are guilty - only
Milosevic, or Seselj, or Draskovic - there will be no hope of anything changing.
They will go on being bewildered, lying, and parading before the world in a gro
tesque carnival celebration on the streets of Belgrade. Neither an eventual com
promise leaving Milosevic in power, nor a total defeat anÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÔ
d capitulation, will
have any meaning unless the Serbs realize that the main task falls to them. They
must do what neither the West, nor NATO, nor Soros, nor foreign capital - nobody
at all - can do for them. It is up to them to overthrow not just Milosevic's re
gime, but the blindness, the subservience, the opportunism, the indifference,
the manipulation and the fear upon which that regime rests. In other words, they
must realize that, apart from changing the regime, they have to change them
selves. For a start, by seeing Albanians as people. By one, at least one, of
them having some word to say about the Albanians, taking them into account, see
ing their suffering, feeling compassion for them. Nowhere is there any trace of
such awareness. On the contrary, it is as if there were less of it than ever be
fore. For the moment the target, as a perverted symbol of the Serb state of
mind, is still in the hands of the little girl whom no one is harming anyway.
This article has been translated from Zaginflatch 29, a newsletter published by
the Zagreb Anarchist Movement, 10 April 1999. A slightly shorter revised version
appeared in Feral Tribune (Split), 12 April 1999.
` I do believe that the bombing has reduced the political chances for the lib
eral and pro-Western opposition forces in FRY, but I do not at all agree with
the statement of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights [i.e. that a democratic
and economic transition in Serbia is the only cure for the Kosova problem and
the only hope for achieving stability in the Balkans]. I am afraid that this is
a delusion. We have seen how weak the Serbian opposition has been. Even during
the large-scale demonstrations organized by the Zajedno coalition [in 1996/7],
only a very small part of the political spectrum involved was really democratic
and concerned with human rights. The dominant forces, led by Dindic and
Draskovic, were strongly nationalistic. Today, as we can see, Draskovic has
joined Seselj in Milosevic's government. To believe and to insist that a small
group of Belgrade intellectuals could change the political map of Serbia is
utopian.'
Noel Malcolm, Feral Tribune (Split), 19 April 1999
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