Life in the crime scene

The blood-soaked collapse of Yugoslavia happened during my childhood and adolescence. While Slobodan Milošević, supreme commander of the evil horde, was striving to destroy my country, I was developing both as an individual and as a thinking being. I can say, not just for myself but for all of us born in the 1970s, that our experience of the collapse of Yugoslavia had a decisive influence on us, that it shaped us as people and determined what we have – and will – become. “The breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” may be the commonly used term, but it is not the most accurate one: rather, it was an act of savage, treacherous murder committed from the basest of motives. The date of the crime is generally set at 1991, the year in which Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia and the armed conflicts began.

I lean more towards the view of the lawyer Srđa Popović, probably the wisest interpreter of our horror, who dates the death of Yugoslavia to 28 September 1990, the day on which the Serbian Constitution was adopted, representing to all intents and purposes the secession of Milošević’s republic from the federal state. With this act of law, Serbia declared itself an independent and sovereign state, and from then on no longer respected the legal order of the SFRY. Serbia was de facto the first to break away from Yugoslavia, something that went unnoticed in the general chaos of that turbulent time, masked by Milošević’s propaganda about preserving the federal state, behind which he concealed his plan to wage wars and create a Greater Serbia with himself as absolute ruler.

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Archipelago Yugoslavia

1. The “Better life” that never was (Kosovo)
2. Life in the crime scene (Serbia)
3. The apocalyptic clock ticking inside me (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
4. In Slovenia, we dreamed of democracy and woke up under capitalism
5. I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice (Croatia)
6. The ghost of “Brotherhood and unity” (Macedonia)

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I was 14 years old at that time, and in Year 8 at school. What followed was the total collapse of a world I was only just getting to know, the world of a socialist system that had seemed solid and stable, as though it would last for ever. Everything I had been taught during my eight years in school suddenly did not apply any more, everything was destroyed in fire and blood, and from this fire and blood something new and different was born: something deformed, far, far more terrifying than Dr Frankenstein’s monster. And so, as Radomir Konstantinović used to say, our life with the monster began. And it has continued right up to the present day, for the nationalist monster is still alive and kicking: it has simply retreated to its cave to lick its wounds after multiple defeats in war, awaiting an opportunity for renewed human slaughter. 

Hatred, chauvinism, violence, crimes, concentration camps, genocide, destitution, social disintegration, criminality, national homogenisation, rehabilitation of the Chetniks, bands of volunteer militias, warmongering, bombardments, isolation, sanctions, conspiracy theories, denial of crimes, glorification of mass murderers – this was the environment in which I grew up. But I have no time for self-pity or lamentations about my terrible fate, all-too common traits in this region: I got off lightly. I was in the land of the aggressor, on whose territory no war was waged. I was lucky, unlike many of my peers in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, who suffered because they were not Serbs and whose school friends, neighbours, parents, family and friends were killed.

The search for a rational explanation

Towards the end of his life Srđa Popović wrote in his notebook, “First man lives; later he understands what he has really lived through.” This wise aphorism also applies to me, though with a slight adjustment: first the boy lives; later the man tries to understand what the boy really lived through. Decades of practice have shown the task to be anything but easy. I have read thousands of pages about what befell us, hundreds of excellent texts and analyses, dozens of clever, well researched books that explain almost everything, but still I have the feeling that nothing has become clear. Worse still, I myself have written several thousand pages about the murder of the SFRY, Greater Serbian nationalism, war crimes, denial, the roles played by intellectuals and the church in the nationalist counter-revolution, historical revisionism and dozens of similar subjects, but still I am tormented by the same sense of the incomprehensibility of the horror in which we have continued to exist in the decades since.

I am not the only one who has this sense. I share it with people who have studied our apocalypse far more seriously, thoroughly and knowledgeably than I have. In the summer of 2000, after dozens of interviews and articles and many years in which he had first warned of what would happen and then forensically analysed Serbian society’s descent into evil, Srđa Popović spoke about friends of several decades’ standing who had gone over to the other side, spread hatred and deliberately incited war and violence: “They transformed my understanding of human nature. It became clear that people are capable of unforeseeable metamorphoses, that friendships are fragile, that under certain conditions humans can turn into monsters. I am still trying to understand how that happens. Without success. I know that some of them wanted a quick route to power, some were carried away by cheap applause, some were corrupt, but I still cannot understand this extinguishing of all reason, all honour, all decency, all human compassion.” 

If someone can explain to me what kind of person wakes up one morning in 1992, takes his rifle from its hiding place, hangs the Serbian tricolour with its fourfold “S” above his door, goes to his neighbour’s house, chases him out into the mud, forces him to his knees, pulls out his bayonet and slaughters this human, his neighbour, best man at his wedding, his friend of many years; if someone can explain it to me rationally, break it down into simple parts, then it will be easier for me to live.

Faruk Šehić

Sonja Biserko’s book, Kovanje antijugoslovenske zavere [The Forging of the Anti-Yugoslavian Conspiracy], provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual elite and the Serbian national programme as well as a timeline of events from 1966 to 2006 and hundreds of quotes. After a scholarly and detailed account of the genesis of Greater Serbian nationalism, running to nearly 400 pages, she concludes, “There can be no rational explanation for everything that has happened in Serbia, not just during the last two decades but in the whole of the 20^th century. There is no rational response to the avoidable victims of the wars that were waged in the Balkans in the 20^th century and the years of megalomaniac arrogance.” No matter how thoroughly the evil and its morbid manifestations are studied, and even if rational explanations can be found for each individual act of political and ideological violence, there is always an irrational residue that defies rational categorisation. There always remains an inner disquiet that pounds ceaselessly in our heads, endlessly repeating the same question: how on earth was all this possible?

This is precisely what the character in Faruk Šehić’s short story, Pregaženi čovjek [The Run-Over Man], is talking about when he says, “If someone can explain to me what kind of person wakes up one morning in 1992, takes his rifle from its hiding place, hangs the Serbian tricolour with its fourfold “S” above his door, goes to his neighbour’s house, chases him out into the mud, forces him to his knees, pulls out his bayonet and slaughters this human, his neighbour, best man at his wedding, his friend of many years; if someone can explain it to me rationally, break it down into simple parts, then it will be easier for me to live. I do not believe there is any such answer. Modern science, parapsychology, religion, metempsychosis: nothing and no one has a magic formula to settle this question that we will all carry with us to our graves.”

The encounter with evil

We all experienced what Joseph Brodsky described in his speech at a graduation ceremony at Williams College as “the encounter with evil”. A simple, laconic phrase for something we will spend the rest of our lives trying to comprehend. On another occasion Brodsky described the Stalinist system as an “anthropological catastrophe”, a term that also applies in our case. It would be a candidate as the official designation for our social order, too. I do not live in a democracy or a dictatorship or a stabilocracy – I live in an anthropological catastrophe. Of all the terms to describe this anomic, amorphous order, this syntagma strikes me as the most apt.

When he returned from the Slavonian war zone, drunk and his nerves in shreds, he told the boy how it felt to cleanse an area, throw a bomb into a house and then watch as children’s guts went flying through the air. The boy listened, appalled and disbelieving, unable to get his head around the sudden transformation of this quiet, placid young man with whom, until just yesterday, he had spent afternoons at the chessboard, into something monstrous.

History or some other personified power from the underworld gave my distant predecessor of thirty years ago, that boy who has since vanished, an encounter with evil. Several decades later the man who, as Zbigniew Herbert says of his younger self, “has nothing in common with this boy other than a date of birth and a papillary line”, is trying to translate that juvenile experience into concepts of some kind, to understood what happened, for in the meantime he has acquired an apparatus of knowledge and analysis that was not available to the confused boy.

It is easy to pull apart the nationalist gibberish of a Dobrica Ćosić or Matija Bećković and turn their chauvinist platitudes about “humane resettlement” or “the dearest Serbian word” on their heads, but coming to terms with the experiences of the former boy is hard. For it was neither Ćosić nor Bećković who drew up lists of traitors in December 1990, people who had not voted for Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia: death lists that also included the boy’s parents. It was his neighbours who did that, local collaborators with the UDB secret police, perhaps in return for a decent appanage, but perhaps just voluntarily – the patriotic élan of those years was great and there was no shortage of denunciators, at least.

The young man who had taught the boy chess and shown him the Sicilian Defence, the Italian Game and the Queen’s Gambit joined Vojislav Šeśelj’s volunteers when the war began, and became a pawn in a game in which the powerful were playing with human heads. When he returned from the Slavonian war zone, drunk and his nerves in shreds, he told the boy how it felt to cleanse an area, throw a bomb into a house and then watch as children’s guts went flying through the air. The boy listened, appalled and disbelieving, unable to get his head around the sudden transformation of this quiet, placid young man with whom, until just yesterday, he had spent afternoons at the chessboard, into something monstrous. He had the feeling the chess player must be exaggerating, spinning a yarn. A few months later, the chess player took his own life. He hanged himself from a beam in the attic of the house in which he had been born.

The men who drove him to war are still alive today, healthy, powerful, rich. One of them was until a short time ago a member of parliament, another is a former President of Serbia, a third holds that office today. The man who shares his date of birth and fingerprints with the boy still has books given to him by the chess player on his shelf at home: biographies of the grandmasters and chess champions Anatoly Karpov and José Raúl Capablanca. To this day he does not know whether the chess player was telling the truth or whether he had just been morbidly bragging about invented acts of war. It is hard to believe that someone you grew up with could have become a criminal.

The boy grew up. By the time war broke out in Kosovo, he was a young man. One of the boy’s relatives fought in that war as a junior officer in the Yugoslav army. When he got back, he did not want to talk about his glorious battles. One summer evening, however, the alcohol did its work and the soldier opened the door to his soul a crack. With passionate enthusiasm he declared that there was nothing in the world to compare to the joys of warfare, nothing more beautiful or more thrilling than battle, shooting, confrontation with the enemy. He only regretted that we lived in the modern age, with weapons that demanded distance between the opposing armies: he yearned for the Middle Ages, for the Battle of Kosovo, where they had stood chest to chest with the enemy, with knife, sabre and bare hands. He wished he could get into a time machine, travel to the past and fight the Turks so as to feel the exhilaration of real combat, the greatest pleasure and greatest joy in the world.  

The former boy recalled Dmitri Karamazov, who had peered into similar abysses of the human soul and said, “Man is wide, too wide, indeed. I’d make him narrower.” But since that is an impossible undertaking, the only option left to us is to widen our understanding of human nature. Many years later I read Miloš Crnjankski’s Oklevetani rat [The Maligned War], which contains this line: “But those who have been to war and have lain among the dead know that war is sublime and that there is no higher moment in a man’s life, now or ever, than conscious participation in battle.” This sentence sounded familiar to me, somehow, as though we had met somewhere before.

But those who have been to war and have lain among the dead know that war is sublime and that there is no higher moment in a man’s life, now or ever, than conscious participation in battle.

Miloš Crnjankski

The reckoning

The encounter with radical evil, which destroys everything in its path, inevitably determines our understanding of human nature in our formative years, an understanding with roots in anthropological pessimism. This position has nothing to do with ideological leanings; rather, it has its origin in highly concrete and extremely traumatic experience. With my own eyes I have seen people turn into fiends overnight, decent people, family men, respected citizens who until then would not have hurt a fly thirsting for blood, demanding a final reckoning with the “Ustasha”, the “Balije” and the “Šiptar”, strange entities of whom they only had the haziest notion, since most of them had never actually encountered them in their lives. But this lack of an empirical basis did not prevent them from demanding the extermination of other human beings simply because Milošević’s furious propaganda had defined them as enemies.

There is no absurdity that people will not believe if some authority repeats it often enough. For instance, they tell you cool as a cucumber that Serbia is not at war, while simultaneously sending your neighbours and family to the front. Or that what happened in Srebrenica was not genocide, just a case of retaliation against soldiers, even though they have seen the footage on TV of the Scorpion paramilitaries killing and bestially abusing children in Potočari. We were in the power of what Nadezhda Mandelstam described as “people who have consciously renounced goodness and wholeheartedly set out to inflame the most monstrous instincts in themselves and their compatriots.” It became clear that it does not take much to stir these instincts into life: they are thin-skinned forces of the soul that react sensitively to the most delicate stimulus of an agitating authorial pen.

I have seen the human race at its worst, distorted by hatred, murderous and evil, vicious and vile. I do not want to generalise, but I cannot distance myself from conclusions formed from living in a society that willingly put itself on the path to ruin and collapse, as though the whole community had resolved to commit suicide and to take everyone in their vicinity with them. These conclusions are devastating, it is hard to live with them, but they need to be recorded in writing. Humans are neither rational nor humane, humans are totally delusional, distorted, crude, evil and vile. There is no cruelty, no viciousness, no torment, no abuse, nothing that one human being would not do to another, for no reason at all other than that he can. If our childhood and adolescence in the anthropological catastrophe have taught us anything at all, then it is that humans are fundamentally wicked. Exactly the same conclusion was reached by Joseph Brodsky, who also grew up and lived in the social system described above, until they drove him out.

At first glance, this devastating conclusion may seem fatalistic, in the spirit of anthropological pessimism, but that is just an illusion. For human beings are not fundamentally evil by nature, but only because they have freely chosen to unleash their monstrous instincts. If we accept the insight that humans are fundamentally wicked, capable of the most extreme evil, we can build something on that. This acceptance could be the first step on the path towards Serbian awareness, for example, towards confrontation with the crimes committed in our name. The belief that we are potential criminals is closer to the truth, more humble and less dangerous than the belief that we are celestial angels.  

In the former case we can build a society on the understanding that we need to protect others from our own wickedness. This is surely the basis of every legal system. What else are laws for? In the opposite case, where we think of ourselves as exalted beings, supermen, members of a celestial people ­– we know only too well where that leads. To violence, crime, genocide and fascism. This is the only lesson I can draw from the all-encompassing collapse, the only ray of hope in the accumulated darkness. Perhaps it is a good thing that the boy has vanished without trace, since it means I cannot tell him what insights I have acquired, what his harrowing experience has brought me to. Knowing him, he would only wave all this away contemptuously, dismissing my reflections as the false comfort of a middle-aged man trying to make a pact with the world. If my unreliable memory does not deceive me, he was fiercely opposed to any form of collaboration with the sullen structure of the universe.

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This article is part of the Archipelago Yugoslavia project by Traduki. It is published in collaboration with the S. Fischer Stiftung.

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