A Hero Returns to Belgrade
- By Pedja Jurišić
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterful film, The Act of Killing, perpetrators are invited to re-imagine their role in Indonesian anti-communist massacres in the mid-1960s. The killers, having fashioned themselves after gangsters from American films, are eager to relive the glory years. Speaking freely about their crimes, they reenact the killings before the cameras, acting out their roles as executioners and writing scenes in which victims thank the killers for sending them to heaven. This is no reckoning with the difficult past, but the celebration of a bloody triumph.
The force and horror of such a project is, of course, only possible within a broader moral framework, a national ideology and culture of impunity, which fails to condemn some five hundred thousand murders that took place and instead exalts those responsible. Anwar Congo and the other perpetrators in the film see themselves as national heroes because broader Indonesian society has affirmed them as such.
The Act of Killing shocks our sensibilities, but we don’t have to look far to see how our collective conscience is shaped by self-justifying narratives—and their omissions. Setting aside widespread popular ignorance of American support of and complicity with Suharto’s regime, and scores of other such instances during the Cold War, one need only consider the stories we buy en masse today. In the span of two weekends, American Sniper has grossed more than $200 million the box office. Meanwhile, from 24 to Zero Dark Thirty to Redeployment, the people most affected by American wars abroad have been invariably represented as minor characters, if not outright enemies of freedom.
These “minor” characters—the civilian victims of American torture, war crimes and drone strikes—are doubly diminished: both by the broader political narrative that dwarfs the significance of their lives and losses, and in comparison to the explored humanity of the American protagonist, presented as flawed but fundamentally good and, at any rate, one of “us.”
On a recent visit to Belgrade, my first in over twenty years, I had a unique opportunity to glimpse how Serbian society has interpreted the trauma of its own recent past. (For Serbs, I should add, I am a similarly minor character in their national story, a Bosnian refugee who, on my last visit to Belgrade in 1992, caught a bus for Macedonia, fleeing south with my mother and brother.)
The present occasion was made unique by the simultaneous return of a major protagonist in recent Serbian history—Vojislav Šešelj, the founder and president of the Serbian Radical Party, a notorious figure from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, who was days earlier granted a conditional release from his war crimes trial in order to receive cancer treatment.
The spectacle of Šešelj’s return followed on the heels of a few weeks hot with nationalist overtones. First, a football match between Serbia and Albania burst into chaos when a drone with a map of Greater Albania descended into the field of play. An official diplomatic visit from Tirana to Belgrade, the first in almost seventy years, was postponed as a result. Three weeks later, when the Albanian prime minister finally arrived, he urged Serbia to accept the “undeniable” reality of Kosovo’s independence.
Now the Duke, as Šešelj was dubbed on the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, was coming home after 11 years of detention in The Hague. With one of the judges removed for alleged bias, the marathon proceedings have been delayed until at least June. Šešelj and his supporters have wasted no time in declaring victory. “I promised I would beat the Hague Tribunal and I did, even though the fight took longer than I expected,” Šešelj said.
Vojislav Šešelj has never been shy about his ambitions. At the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest Ph.D holder in the former Yugoslavia, writing his dissertation on the essence of militarism and fascism. In his later political career, he fortified his expertise in both subjects, advocating a Great Serbia that encompassed every Serb in the region, and organizing paramilitary troops to realize this nationalist fantasy.
On Valentine’s Day in 2003, in response to his decade of laying waste to the Balkans, the ICTY indicted Šešelj—charging him with persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, extermination, murder, imprisonment, torture, cruel treatment, deportation, forcible transfer, wanton destruction of villages, and more. The appendices of the indictment list the names of 339 victims in Croatia and Bosnia, concluding with one “Unidentified Boy”.
Not surprisingly, Šešelj has rejected the standing of The Hague court to try him, famously telling the presiding judge that he only has the right to suck the defendant’s dick. This is but one of his many colorful episodes, which include the beating of a lawyer after a television appearance, pulling a pistol on a crowd of student demonstrators, publishing the names of witnesses scheduled to testify against him, and expressing personal joy at the 2003 assassination of the charismatic and liberal Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Đinđić. Regretting nothing, Šešelj has reaffirmed this statement in recent days, and issued other remarks that drew the condemnation of victims’ rights groups and the European Parliament.
Before the wars, throughout them, and to this day, Šešelj has portrayed himself as a folk hero, a proud nationalist beholden to no one but the honor of the Serbian nation, and a good portion of the Serbian public has viewed him so.
In five of the seven parliamentary elections from 1992 to 2008, support for the Serbian Radical Party counted more than a million ballots, between 22% and 30% of the popular vote. Šešelj and Slobodan Milošević worked hand in hand until Šešelj perceived a retreat in Milošević’s commitment to the idea of a Great Serbia. Jailed twice after their break, Šešelj rejoined Milošević’s government a few years later, as the Kosovo issue and yet another war moved to the political foreground in the late 1990s.
In 2008, with Šešelj languishing in The Hague, about a quarter of parliamentarians within the Serbian Radical Party absconded towards the future. Moderating their politics and assuming a pro-EU stance, they founded the Serbian Progressive Party. Six years later, the new party now dominates the political landscape in Serbia, after winning an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections last March.
By contrast, support for the Serbian Radical Party seemingly vanished in a single night. With the votes counted and the depth of the implosion sinking in, “I thought I was going to die, truly,” Šešelj has said. Denouncing the current prime minister and president as traitors—and taunting them as his “colleagues in war crimes and accomplices in crimes against humanity”—he has dedicated his return to resuscitating his political party.
And so, on November 12th, 2014, the Duke returned to Belgrade. Several hundred people greeted him at the airport and a mere three thousand turned out for a rally later in the week, “wearing Chetnik (Serb nationalist) insignia, and carrying flags with the images of Šešelj, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serbian WWI hero Živojin Mišić,” BIRN reported.
To my surprise, the merits of Great Serbia were still being debated on the TV news shows. One politician pressed his radical counterpart to be clear with the Serbian people on just how far he proposes to extend Serbia, and by what means he proposes to do so. At Šešelj’s rally, a newscaster put it to a supporter: will Greater Serbia include Split, Croatia? Though such an outcome is in fact about as likely as, say, the annexation of Vienna, the smiling man is confident. ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘and soon.’
More seriously, a host interrogated the lead prosecutor on the apparent anti-Serb bias of the Hague tribunal, while two academics offered their opinions of Šešelj’s return and the prospects of his political party. In a word or two, they were instructed to answer, is he a villain or victim? Both, the sage heads nodded.
A new report by the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade still finds a persistent and widespread bias in media reporting of war crimes. Analyzing coverage in five daily papers, it finds an atmosphere akin to a “conspiracy of silence,” with coverage of crimes, criminals, and the courts being driven and shaped by the ethnicity of the accused. “The relativization of guilt and responsibility, the de-contextualization and fragmentation of the past, the minimization of crimes and dehumanization of victims,” the report says, “are the essential characteristics of media reporting on domestic investigations of war crimes.”
Indeed, the popular narrative in Serbia remains proud and self-pitying, focused on the 1999 bombing of Belgrade by NATO forces and the perception of a disproportionate focus on crimes committed by Serbs.
A few years ago, I attended a talk by Srdja Popović, the democratic activist and media darling, famous for his role in Otpor, the non-violent youth movement that played a significant part in dislodging Slobodan Milošević from power. Mr. Popović shared with us many thoughts about the prospects and strategies of non-violent democratic movements but had zero interest in talking about the past.
“Everyone wants to talk about genocide,” I remember him saying in response to a question in that direction. “Well, we in Serbia had a genocide, too. One hundred thousand people left the country and aren’t coming back.” In truth, the figure is likely higher, perhaps three times as large by some estimates, but I note that the number Popović cites is roughly equal to the number of dead in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as if the only point was to draw a parallel where none exists. The message, in any case, was to just move on.
For what it’s worth, Šešelj’s ambitions for the future appear no different from the past. “I’m continuing from where I left off, full steam ahead,” he told journalists on the flight to Belgrade.
His stubborn defiance of international condemnation, the symbolic triumph of his return from the investigation into his own and state crimes, and the vision a vast and glorious Serb nation remains rhetorically and emotionally potent. Politically, it is implausible. While the conspiracy of silence may yet widen and go on for generations, the borders of today’s Serbia seem firmly set.
Forward-looking politicians recognize these walls and won’t beat their heads against them. Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić and President Tomislav Nikolić, former understudies of Šešelj himself, are today looking west. The normalization of relations with Kosovo has begun, via an agreement brokered by the European Union; now cooperation on border management is in talks.
In the same way that opportune politicians like Milošević once abandoned communism for ethno-nationalism, Vučić, Nikolić and others are abandoning ethno-nationalism for the prospects of European accession. The pivot may be politically motivated or a result of self-reflection, as Vučić in particular has been eager to portray it, while playing a somewhat clumsy dance between the West and Russia. For this reason, Šešelj’s return has proven rather uncomfortable and ill timed. Unwilling to disavow the man and his politics, and offend his own nationalist constituency, Vučić has meekly welcomed his former benefactor back, wished him good health, and tried to ignore him.
Like some large, bloodthirsty mosquito, Šešelj has never been an easy man to ignore. His view of himself as the savior of the nation is still reflected in the eyes of many Serbs. But his great and expansive nationalist project, imagined and embodied by his own person, is today a vestige of the past. (“Look,” said the graffiti on a building in my hometown, “Our Great Serbia, small like a Nokia.”) Moreover, though Šešelj is committed to derailing the westward-bound train, most of his countrymen look to Brussels, not Moscow, as their destination of choice.
One longs to be able to say that these facts speak to a widespread rejection of Serbian ethno-nationalism, an acceptance of historical record with regard to the Great Serbia project, and recognition of its human costs. And it is tempting to think that these things simply take time, and in another twenty, fifty, or one hundred years, Serbia will have come to terms with the magnitude of its state-sanctioned crimes.
Such reckoning doesn’t happen overnight, and Oppenheimer’s film also shows us that it does not follow as a matter of course. The Indonesian case today may be an outlier, but it is not an exception. Decent people everywhere have their Vojislav Šešeljs, their Anwar Congos, their Dick Cheneys. Though national narratives will portray them in patriotic colors, for the countless victims, the question is whether their multitudes will be represented in the first paragraph of the great man’s obituary, or if they will be buried further down.
Pedja Jurišić lives in Copenhagen. His critique of Téa Obreht's award-winning novel The Tiger's Wife can also be found on the MR blog.
