ichael . benson on Tue, 6 Apr 1999 01:24:06 +0000 |
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Syndicate: The 'loathsome couple' |
The infuriating thing about the double-bind situation in which the Serbs find themselves -- infuriating no doubt also to more than a few Serbs -- is that once again Slobodan Milosevic wins, even as the Yugoslavia which he's leading to ever greater ruin loses. We have seen this before, with the eviction of the Croatian Serbs, the eventual settlement in Bosnia, and the return of hard-won, ruined Vukovar to the Croats. Each of these losses sent a new wave of refugees rolling towards Belgrade. And each of them, paradoxically, strengthened Milosevic -- in the short term, anyway. Now, with the stakes higher than ever before, and with the full weight of the most powerful military in the world arrayed "against" Milosevic (but actually, in critical ways, unwittingly *for* him -- as we'll see), and with the medieval heartlands of the Serbian nation in question, the magnitude of his victory in Serbia's defeat could be -- may very well be -- that much greater. It appears virtually impossible to oppose Milosevic in Serbia today. It appears that the army is once again under his undisputed control -- something which was not a given as recently as three years ago. Montenegro may now suffer a military take-over, returning it to the unambiguous control of Belgrade; and alternative media figures and dissident professors and intellectuals are evidently on the run, sometimes trying to avoid being forced into uniforms as cannon fodder. More than that, there is the inevitable unity resulting from the appearance of an actual -- not just a perceived -- external adversary. Obviously this card is the same one Milosevic has played many a time before, but never with as much success as now, since before this the conjured-up adversary was usually much weaker than Serbia. Or at least initially so, as with Croatia in the early 90's. Frequently blind, for whatever reasons, to the nature and true extent of the crimes committed under the direction of Belgrade, both for the last decade and now in Kosovo; or if not blind, then ready to come up with *more* extreme ones allegedly committed by their adversaries; understandably angry at the fears and discomforts of spending nights in bomb shelters (sensations familiar to an entire generation of Croats and Bosniaks -- those lucky enough to still be alive I mean), the Serbian people are exactly on-track. By this I mean they're experiencing *exactly* the radical sense of victimization that Milosevic and his closest collaborator and strategist, Mirjana Markovic -- and their ubiquitous mass-media machinery -- have been implanting and reinforcing during the last decade. In other words, they are locked firmly within the Milosevic/Markovic narrative. More than ever before, they are subjects to their dramaturgy. Having made the political calculation to sacrifice the bulk of his army and national infrastructure in exchange for one more stage (the last?) in that populist booster-rocket which he launched exactly in Kosovo more than a decade ago, Milosevic once again places the Serbs in the position of rocket fuel, lit on fire to keep all systems "go" for he and Markovic. As they had already made abundantly clear well *before* the vacillating Western powers finally found the backbone to move from its (increasingly scorned) threats to actual force, this 'loathsome couple' has never had any interest or priority other than their continued stranglehold on Serbian politics. No sacrifice was too great, as long as that aim was achieved and maintained. Abandon the Serbs in their ancestral lands in Croatia, after triggering, arming, and fuelling their rebellion again Zagreb in 1991? No problem, as long as that defeat was their victory. Agree to the provisions of a Dayton agreement widely viewed as a sell-out by ultra-nationalist Bosnian Serbs -- and this after a blood-letting the likes of which Europe hadn't seen since Hitler and Stalin? No problem, as long as that defeat was their victory. Hand an utterly shattered Vukovar back to Croatia, after reducing it to a cinder in order to "liberate" it in 1991? No problem, as long as that defeat was their victory. Of course, the salient question is: how did this husband-and- wife team get away with converting such obvious defeats for their (only putative) Greater Serbia project into their own personal victories? How could the Serbian people have functioned as such putty in their hands? Why did the people permit it, rather than demanding their heads on a platter? And -- one of the biggest mysteries of all -- how is it that it somehow managed to escape the attention of the Serbian nation that this string of defeats wouldn't have happened had Milosevic not started the conflicts that led to them in the first place? For the answer, you have to circle back in the narrative, arriving once more at the starting point, maybe recognizing it for the first time. In this case, Kosovo, where Serbia was defeated by the Ottomans exactly 610 years ago, where Milosevic first found his voice a decade ago, and where all hell is breaking loose now (*not* by coincidence). Steering a course back to there -- like the military jets high over Ljubljana that I can hear, literally, as I write this -- is only following the path taken by Milosevic, and thus of course by Serbia. From, and to, Kosovo. To, and from Kosovo. Round and round that merry-go-round where history doesn't repeat itself so much as it rhymes. Kosovo. The sense of persecution, victimization, and historical victory-in-defeat that functions as one of the cornerstones of Serbian identity wouldn't be too different from many such national mythologies, among many such small and mid-sized nations (who, after all, generally *did* experience more than their fair share of historical tragedies) -- if it hadn't been relentlessly repeated, reinforced, augmented and underlined by the totalitarian powers of a mass media under Milosevic control. *That's* the crucial difference. Milosevic may be content to lose most of his army and much vital infrastructure, but he wouldn't be nearly as sanguine about losing TV Serbia. That's for sure. To dare to mention this victimization 'cliche' about Serbia is to be scorned in e-mail flames, as I discovered recently. I'm told that it's a useless generalization. But the core of my thesis is that it's exactly this syndrome that is the ultimate key to the almost alchemical transformation of Serbia's defeats into Milosovic's (and his strategist Markovic's) victories. During the last thirteen days, with exactly that sense of victimization radically (re)confirmed in what only *appears* to the vast majority of the Serbs to be a completely *unambiguous* way by NATO bombs, it's especially important to call a spade a spade, or rather, a syndrome a syndrome. And a syndrome can apply to enough of the critical mass of a nation to -- well, *to apply to that nation.* If the Serbs are victims and not just victimizers, something which I think is self-evidently true, what they're victims *of* is a collossal con game played at their expense, and to the direct benefit of their ruling couple. Unfortunately, it appears as though this ultimate gamble by Milosevic and Markovic to turn an Iraq-against-the-world style confrontation into their personal victory is practically fool-proof -- in the short term, anyway. It's no coincidence that the only guy on TV during this whole mess who looks supremely self-confident, and who even appears to be *enjoying* himself, is Slobodan Milosevic. (Well, why not? we know his record, after all.) The double bind which the Serbs find themselves entwined in is revealed in the fact that, no matter what now happens (i.e., Serbia keeps control of an ethnically-cleansed Kosovo, or Serbia is evicted from an ethnically-cleansed Kosovo), the 'loathsome couple', Milosevic and Markovic, win. Look at the alternatives. A Serbian defeat would create yet more populist anger -- their proven political fuel. A Serbian victory, on the other hand, would be won at such an expense -- and with such a reinforcement of Serbia's pariah status internationally -- that it would have the same net effect. (Apart from cementing Milosevic's stature as one of the greatest heroes in Serbian history, that is.) In either case, in any case, it needs to be said that Milosevic and Markovic, nominal nationalists, have absolutely no concern for the fate, prosperity, territorial integrity, etc., etc. of the Serbian people. This is all rhetoric, entirely irrelevant except to the extent that it provides a spur to manipulate their constituency. Whatever concern for the people of Yugoslavia that Milosevic and Markovic *do* have is akin to the type of concern that parasites display towards their hosts. The people, after all, are the medium which they rely on for their own nourishment, glory, and career advancement. The understandable confusion and resentment so evident in many of the painful e-mails from a Serbia under NATO attack function as yet more dismal proof of the success of their efforts. Were it not for the fate of the Kosovars -- which justifies the NATO attacks, in my view, beyond reasonable doubt -- that rain of "smart" bombs would also function as proof of the cooperation of the Western powers in the Milosevic/Markovic strategy. This last point needs to be expanded on. We've seen Milosevic keep the western powers dancing to his 'turbo-folk' tune for ten years now. For most of that time, appeasement shaded well into collaboration. The creepy part of my thesis is the suggestion that NATO -- even while engaged in a massive aerial assault of Yugoslavia, even with plenty of justification provided by the state-sponsored barbarism taking place in Kosovo -- is still doing the Kolo to his gusli. But let it not be said that this last part of that dance was easy to achieve for Milosevic. It's *not* so easy to get the full attention of NATO, and harder still to actually arrange for an expensive, politically risky war with that organization. It takes a lot of persistant, dogged hard work. In this case, it took Milosevic and Markovic a full decade of steady blood-shed. An effort yielding a resume that even the great criminals of history might envy. So where does that leave us? With the remote hope that the Yugoslav people would, by some miracle, snap out of their role as pawns of Milosevic and Markovic. Unfortunately, after such a skillful social engineering effort as they (and by extension, *their* victims) have been, well, the victims of during the decade since Serbian media fell under total Milosevic control, that appears to be a very distant possibility. *Especially* with the rain of NATO bombs serving to point at yet another external enemy being used to unite the population around their King and Queen, that very same pair who somehow always manage to win while their side loses in the game they themselves have initiated. And any hope that the Serbian people would "snap out of it" has to be informed by the fact that the disaster of Kosovo, and the reaction of the majority of the Serbs to the NATO bombardment, only underlines that what we're dealing with here is an extremely sophisticated and complicated form of denial on the part of a nation which has not managed to recognize the nature of its own manipulation, and remove its manipulators from their positions as rulers. Even if you don't believe in collective responsibility, I would suggest that this denial contains a psychological syndrome in which the protagonists of crimes -- the *victimizers* -- refuse to concede that status (and therefore their own collusion in their own degradation). Instead they repeat, mantra-like, the implanted story of their own victimization. It's a repetition so pervasive that, as we've seen, it can even take place while the shelling of Sarajevo commences, or while upwards of two million Kosovars are being forced from their homes. Unfortunately, the fact of the NATO assault, whatever it may eventually achieve (and I for one hope it will allow the Kosovars to return to the land they've lived in for 500 years), could well lock that denial definitively into place. A kind of coffin nail, sealing the lid on Serbia's collective psyche. If so, it's really the ultimate master-stroke by the most accomplished pair of evil-geniuses in late-20th century history. Who wins? Milosevic and Markovic. Who loses? The Serbian people -- now completely unable to deny the clear evidence of their own victim status. Not to mention, of course, the Kosovars, and before them the Bosniaks, and earlier still the Croats, and maybe upcoming the Sandzak Moslems, or who knows, there's a large Hungarian minority in Vojvodina, etc., etc., ad infinitum nauseum. Whatever works. So how long can the Milosevic/Markovic winning streak last? Well, as we've already seen, TOO DAMN LONG. But even Kasparov was finally defeated by Big Blue. If Serbia's rulers remind me of cartoonist Edwin Gorey's 'The Loathsome Couple', others have compared them to that other scintillating pair, the Macbeths. Readers of the play will remember that in the end, Birnam Wood finally *did* come to Dunsinane Castle -- just as the spirit predicted. But it took a while. Michael Benson <michael.benson@pristop.si> <http://www.ljudmila.org/kinetikon/> ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- information: http://www.v2.nl/east/ mail archive: http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/current/ to unsubscribe send a message to <syndicate-request@aec.at> with the message in the body: unsubscribe your@email.adress