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West fights its own creature
by Slavoj Zizek
Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when Slovenian `secession' triggered a
domino-effect (first Croatia, then Bosnia and Macedonia). It was already at
the moment of Milosevic's constitutional reforms in 1987, which deprived Kosovo
and Vojvodina of their limited autonomy, that the fragile balance on which Yu
goslavia rested was irretrievably disturbed. From that moment onwards, Yu
goslavia continued to live only because it had not yet noticed it was already
dead - it was like the classic cartoon cat that walks over the precipice, floats
in the air, and falls down only when it becomes aware that it has no ground un
der its feet. From Milosevic's seizure of power in Serbia onwards, the only ac
tual chance for Yugoslavia to survive was to reinvent its formula. Either it
would be a Yugoslavia under Serb domination, or there would be some form of
radical decentralization - from a loose confederation to full sovereignty of the
country's units.
* * * * *
Recently, one of the American negotiators said that Milosevic is not just part
of the problem, but rather the problem itself. However, was this not clear from
the very beginning? Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the Western
powers, playing for years into Milosevic's hands: acknowledging him as a key
factor of stability in the region; misreading clear cases of Serbian aggression
as civil or even tribal warfare; initially putting the blame on those who
immediately saw what Milosevic stood for and for that reason desperately wanted
to escape his grasp (see James Baker's public endorsement of a `limited military
intervention' against Slovenian secession); supporting the last Yugoslav prime
minister Ante Markovic whose programme, in an incredible case of political
blindness, was seriously considered as the last chance for a democratic market
oriented unified Yugoslavia; and so on? When the West fights Milosevic, it is
not fighting its enemy, one of the last points of resistance against the lib
eral-democratic New World Order; rather it is fighting its own creature, a mon
ster that grew as a result of the compromises and inconsistencies of Western
policy itself.
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma `To bomb or not to bomb?'
is: not yet enough bombs, and they are too late. Over the past decade, the
West has followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards the Balkans, and the
present bombardment in effect has all the marks of Hamlet's final murderous out
burst, in which a lot of people die unnecessarily (not just the King, his true
target, but also his mother, Laertes, Hamlet himself . . .) bÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÔ
ecause Hamlet has
acted too late, when the proper moment has already been missed. So the West, in
the present intervention which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of
impotent aggressivity without a clear political goal, is now paying the price
for the years of entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic.
With the recent hesitation over a ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian
regime, under the pretext of the war, is launching a final assault on Kosovo and
purging it of most Albanians, cynically accepting the bombing as the price to be
paid. When the Western forces all the time repeat that they are not fighting the
Serbian people, but only their corrupt regime, they rely on the typically lib
eral false premise that the Serbian people are just victims of their evil
leadership personified in Milosevic - that they are manipulated by him. The
painful fact is that Serbian aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the
large majority of the population. No, the Serbs are not passive victims of na
tionalist manipulation; they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be
delivered from the bad nationalist spell. More precisely, the misperception of
the West is double: this notion of the bad leadership manipulating the good peo
ple is accompanied by an apparently contradictory notion according to which
Balkan people are living in the past, fighting old battles anew, perceiving con
temporary situations through old myths. . . One is tempted to say that these two
notions should be precisely reversed : not only are people not `good', since
they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no `old
myths' which we need to study if we are really to understand the situation, just
the present outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs, oppor
tunistically resuscitates old myths.
* * * * *
In Belgrade people are defiantly dancing on the streets, while three hundred
kilometers to the South a genocide of African proportions is taking place. . .
And the West's counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and more openly racist
tone of its reporting: when three American soldiers were taken prisoner, CNN
dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to their predicament (although every
one knew that nothing would happen to them!), and only then reported on tens of
thousands of refugees, torched villages and Prishtina turned into a ghost town.
Where is the much-vaunted Serb `democratic opposition' to protest against this
horror taking place in their own backyard, rather than just against the (till
now at least) relatively low-casualty bombing? In the recent struggle of the
so-called `democratic opposition' in Serbia against the Milosevic regime, the
truly touchy issue is its stance towards Kosovo: so far as this issue is con
cerned, the large majority of the `democratic opposition' unconditionally en
dorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making
compromises with the West and `betraying' Serb national interests in Kosovo. In
the course of the student demonstrations in the winter of 1996, against the fal
sification of the election results by Milosevic's Socialist Party, the Western
media who closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic spirit
in Serbia rarely mentioned the fact that one of the regular slogans of the
demonstrators against the special police forces was `Instead of kicking us, go
to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!'. In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua
non of an authentic political act would thus be to reject unconditionally the
ideological topos of the `Albanian threat to Serbia'.
Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies,
Ljubljana, and one of the best known contemporary Slovenian social theorists:
six of his books have been published in English
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