Meanwhile Radovan Karadžić can stroll peacefully in his Hugo Boss suits into the Hague courtroom. His work is done.
A procession of collective shame
The job of the Hague judges is to prove individual guilt in the war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and they, the judges, will be the first, I presume, not to agree with the emotional and hazy thesis of collective guilt. It seems, however, that the mere trial of war criminals does not have the power to bring about a real catharsis or to set in motion real social changes. For without the admission of collective responsibility there can be no successful de-Nazification. For many citizens of the former Yugoslavia, regardless of the actual scale of their responsibility and guilt in the recent war — which, we emphasize, is not equal or the same — those who are to blame for everything are always the others: for the Croats it is the Serbs, for the Serbs the Muslims, the Kosovo Albanians, the Croats, the whole world. . All of them blame the communists, Tito, and the Partisans for everything. And then the “Americans,” the “Russians,” “Jews,” “Europe,” “the world,” unfavorable stars, destiny. All, without distinction, insist on interpreting the events — which they themselves initiated, which they failed to prevent, or in which they themselves took part — as natural catastrophes in which they are exclusively the victims. In that sense Karadžić’s schizophrenic fragmentation — into a gusle-player, a psychiatrist, would-be footballer, ecologist, police informer, Chetnik, murderer, politician, would-be Nobel Prizewinner, thief, poet, tutti-frutti guru, Orthodox mystic, into Radovan Karadžić and Dragan David Dabić—is a typical local sickness, the result of a general social lie, a profound moral and mental disturbance, a madness which their milieu continues persistently to treat as though it were normal.
There is a hope that, with the arrest of Karadžić, by contrast with the messages of the young mutants, the war will finally end. There is a childish hope that we will one day come across the following little newspaper announcement: On the 21st of July 2018—the day of the arrest of the criminal Radovan Karadžić, sentenced to a hundred years in prison for genocide in Bosnia, in the Montenegrin town of Meljina, which is known for its traditional festival of gusle-playing — there took place a “procession of collective shame,” consisting of 141 old men. The old men had false beards and false white hair gathered on the crowns of their heads in pigtails, and they exposed themselves voluntarily to being spat at by the crowd, which this year had gathered in large numbers in order to participate in the ritual of repentance. In this ritual “the old men” (every year there are new volunteers — everyone has the right to participate in the ritual only once, so that all interested volunteers can have their turn) express their awareness of the crimes committed, of the fact that these crimes were committed in their name, with their full knowledge or even their participation, they confess their responsibility for their crimes and apologize wholeheartedly to their victims.
July 2008
A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE
1. Without Anesthesia
I met Ryszard Kapuściński in Berlin in 1994; he was there on the same scholarship as me. Kapuściński asked me why I had left Croatia, and to avoid telling my story, I spluttered out. .
“Do you remember the Andrzej Wajda film Without Anesthesia? The one about the journalist, you know, foreign newspapers stop arriving at his office, and then one thing leads to another, and he loses his job, his wife, everything. .?”
The thing was, I could only vaguely remember the film, and I already regretted such a clumsily chosen example.
“I remember,” said Kapuściński. “I was the journalist.”
2. The Professor Thumbs His Ears
It’s an icy January in Amsterdam, unusual for the wet Dutch winters. In the warmth of my writing room, I perform my morning ritual — flicking through the online newspapers, Croatian ones among them. My eye lingers on a particular photograph: an old man with a naughty-little-boy expression on his face, looking straight at the reader, and “thumbing his ears.” To thumb your nose at someone, you put your thumb on the tip of your nose and wiggle your fingers. Thumbing your ears is the same, but you use both hands; thumbs in your ears, you wiggle your fingers like a monkey. Both gestures are infantile and mocking, on a par with poking your tongue out at someone. Both went out of fashion years ago.
I know the smile. The smile signals that the smiler is conscious of having “misbehaved” (maybe he’s lied, stolen, cheated, hit someone, tripped someone up, or even “broken wind” in someone’s presence), but he still tries to mollify the victim. The smiler doesn’t consider his smile an apology, but rather a victory. Hence the cheeky shine in his eyes. It’s not the smile of the culpable, but of the self-assured master of the situation; it’s the smile of the putative servant who is in fact served by others. It’s the smile of the swindler giving you the finger, his hands buried in his pockets.