Caustic comment on Radovan Karadžic by Sarajevo's best-loved Montenegrin resident and poet, written in 1993 during the siege and republished by Dani to mark Karadžic's arrest

The Pale (1) aesthetic is based on three axioms, which Karadžić’s butchers have in mind when they raise three fingers [symbolizing the Holy Trinity in Serb Orthodoxy]. To be sure, one would have to write a lengthy volume to present in detail the literary consequences of these axioms. Thus, for example, when Milan Gvero (2) marched into the Velika Gospojina church last year, saluted the crucified Christ, and heard the liturgy standing to attention with the tips of his fingers on the visor of his general’s cap, then we are dealing with an event that represents a perfect creation of the Pale aesthetic. It would give us great pleasure to dissect this spectacle critically at some length, but we must limit ourselves on this occasion to a most elementary scholarly description of the Holy Trinity built into the foundations of an aesthetic that many serious researchers, domestic as well as foreign, call the aesthetic of the knife.

One should really call it the aesthetic of Dedinje, (3) since its Bosnian architects are as one devoted servants of the aroused madman of the Vasojević tribe [Slobodan Milošević] , who struts around with his chin up in the Mussolini manner and his gaze fixed at an angle over human heads at Heavenly Serbia, which is why he does not feel involved in his own crimes, for he sees them as temporal, like all earthly matters, and thus inessential. It would be impossible to understand what is happening in Bosnia without recalling his famous dictum: ‘We may not be good at working, but we know how to make war.’ I nevertheless remain committed to the Pale adjective, despite this being a question of goods imported from FRY, which (to use an everyday expression) the Pale people respray and sell as their own. It is true that Milošević’s TV, radio and press have over the past three fat years been turning Serbs into machines for killing non-Serbs. But if Karadžić had not laboured so hard to complete his part of the task, the killing of Muslims would have been impossible in practice. Here is an example.

The Serb peasant has from the start been the main bastion of Karadžić’s policy. All Karadžić’s clearly articulated lies, from his arrival in power until today, were designed to appeal primarily to the peasant ear. This is because he knew very well that it would be impossible to wage a war in Bosnia unless he could summon up the serf soul of the Serb peasant. Would it be possible otherwise to persuade a previously sane man to pick up a knife and cut the throat of his neighbour, with whom he has shared traditional hospitality for God knows how long? This is why Karadžić told his rural people: if you remain in Alija’s state, then the land given to you in the first Yugoslavia will be returned to Muslim agas and beys. The peasant, as we know, would kill his own brother for a handful of earth. The barbarity of the current Serb crimes in Bosnia can be explained in part precisely by this peasant greed for land. Is it not the case that, since time immemorial, the cruellest murders were caused by quarrels over boundaries? Ekmečić knew this very well, when he said that the current war in Bosnia is a continuation of the [Serbian] 1804 uprising.(4) This is why Nikola Koljević insists that the parasitic Muslim people are accustomed to living at someone else’s expense.(5) This is why the Karadžić media endlessly repeat: Serb land, Serb land, Serb land. For land is the greatest driving engine of the peasant imagination.(6) Let us return, however, to the Pale aesthetic.

Homer believed that the gods had set off the Trojan War so that poets could sing about it. The siege of Sarajevo is taking place three thousand years after the fall of Troy - leaving aside for the moment other Bosnian cities and taking the capital as the paradigm. What has changed in the meantime? Today the poets are no longer singing about the destruction of Troy, they are actually destroying it. For this is the only war in history that has emerged from the heads of writers. More precisely, this mass murder was initiated and is being conducted by writers with the perseverance and diligence that adorned the greatest tyrants in world history. The Homeric paradox could thus be rephrased: the Bosnians built the capital in order to provide the Pale writers with something to destroy. Ruins today form the main monuments of literary production based on the Pale aesthetic. This is why the first axiom of the Pale aesthetic could be summed up in Todor Dutina’s famous sentence: ‘We may not be good at writing, but we know how to burn libraries.’ (7)

Which refers only in part to Radovan Karadžić. It is widely accepted that this Montenegrin-turned-Serb from Durmitor is not devoid of talent, though I personally would call him very, very, very-talentoid. All his efforts to become a famous poet failed miserably, which was not at all his fault. The Muslims were chiefly responsible for the fact that his poetic voice could not be heard ‘further than the Goat’s Bridge’.(8) This is because Karadžić had unwittingly let it be known in his first book of poetry that his ancestors - ‘the warlords of Drobnjak’ - had caused the death of Smail-Aga Čengić;(9) after which the Muslims had said: ‘OK, buster, no chance of you becoming a famous writer. We shall make you anonymous for the next five hundred years.’ And now, after a full twenty months of destroying Sarajevo, Karadžić has become better known internationally than the Eiffel Tower! You can never keep a true talent down.

There is a Pale proverb that says: ‘Right now, God too is a Serb.’ This pronouncement contains at least two essential assumptions of the Pale aesthetic. The first says that it is most important to know that you are a Serb. Once you have grasped that, there is nothing more to learn. You are left only creative practice in the field, using the knife and the tank. As Milan Gvero would say: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost - fire!’ You are left with nothing else to do but to bombard maternity hospitals. To shell and kill mourners at funerals. To rape seven-year-olds and force hodjas to eat pork. To throw the corpses of butchered Muslims - to which you have previously tied their living children - over the Mehmed-Pasha bridge in Višegrad. They are all vital ways of showing that you are a true Serb writer.

The Pale writer is a Serb for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year. He is a Serb when he writes and when he sneezes, when he is in the assembly or in bed with his wife. The Pale writer, sitting in his Serb chair at his Serb desk, dips his Serb pen in Serb ink and writes on Serb paper about Serb birds that fly in a Serb way into the Serb sky and about Serb fish that swim in the Serb style through Serb waters, while puffing Serb smoke on his Serb pipe and letting it float into the Serb air. This is because the Serb people is the best in the world - full stop. What remains inexplicable is why God, having finally created a Serb in his test tube, went on to create the other 5,000 peoples on earth; for it is as if you started to write in a powerful style, like Njegoš in the first poem of Luča Mikrokozma, only to fall down miserably to the level displayed by Todor Dutina in his book of odes composed to the glory of national heroes - Serb, Muslim and Croat - of the Second World War.

But the Pale proverb that promotes Jehovah into a mighty Serb is by no means original. Which, after all, it does not try to be. This saying is in fact a quotation: around a century and a half ago, a heavy Serb priest wrote the famous verse:

But this is not all. The famous German painter Adolf Hitler in 1938 announced to the world his discovery that God was German by nationality. Karadžić’s insistence that God is of pure Serb blood thus represents a double quotation. Looking for quotations is an essential premise of the current bourgeoning literary activity in Pale. For when he cuts throats, Karadžić is in fact quoting Nikola Kalebić, Pavle Đurišić, Jezdimir Dangić, Father Đujić and many others from the Second World War.(10) Karadžić’s camps quote Majdanek, Gulag, Goli Otok. And, hell, Jasenovac too! For, as Mirko Kovač says, ‘Milošević used the descendants of victims of Ustasha massacres as his butchers.’(11) To recall, only 49 percent of the population of [Ante] Pavelić’s state were Croats. (12) Which was heart-breaking, said Ante, so he decided to turn the Croats into a national majority by means of expulsions, conversions, pits, knives and Jasenovac-type camps. Karadžić is of the same view: although the Serbs are only 32 percent of the population, they nevertheless claim 70 percent of the land. How to make the Serbs a majority in this huge area, Karadžić asked himself. And naturally he recalled Pavelić, and adopted Pavelić’s literary style as the simplest solution.

1. The village of Pale above Sarajevo was the nominal capital of Republika Srpska during the 1992-5 war.

2. Milan Gvero is a retired Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) general, currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian War of 1992-5. He was apparently Ratko Mladić’s favourite chess partner.

3. Dedinje is a leafy suburb of Belgrade where Slobodan Milošević, Dobrica Cosić and other Serbian notables live or lived.

4. Milorad Ekmečić (born 1928) is a Bosnian Serb historian, specialising on nineteenth-century Bosnia. Notable for his great-Serb views, he is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art.

5. Nikola Koljević (1936-1997), who had taught literature at Sarajevo University before the war, was Karadžić’s wartime vice-president of Republika Srpska..

6. For an analysis of Serb nationalism as deriving from identification of land with the ethnos, see Ozren Žunec, Goli život, vol.2., Zagreb 2007.

7. Todor Dutina (1949-2007) was before the war an editor at the Svjetlost publishing house in Sarajevo and a translator of Tolstoy. He was the first director of the ‘Serb News Agency’ set up in wartime Pale, before becoming deputy RS foreign minister in 1993, then being sent to Moscow as RS envoy in 1994. After the war he became Bosnia’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva.

8. Kozija ćuprija: bridge on the river Miljacka, symbolically marking the eastern boundary of Sarajevo.

9. Smail-Aga Čengić (1788-1840) was a local Ottoman commander in Gacko (Herzegovina), who fought against the insurgent forces of the ‘Great Bosnian Rising’. His death in Montenegro was made the subject of a celebrated epic poem by the Croatian poet (and later Ban) Ivan Mažuranić.

10. Notoriously anti-Muslim Chetnik commanders.

11. Mirko Kovač (born 1938) is a Montenegrin/Croat writer who lived for most of his life in Belgrade, but moved to his wife’s home town of Rovinj in Croatia following Milošević’s rise to power in Serbia.

12. Ante Pavelić headed the quisling Ustasha ‘Independent State of Croatia’, which included Bosnia-Herzegovina, during World War II.

Translated from DANI (Sarajevo), 25 July 2008, reproducing a text originally published there in 1993

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