Nema Jugoslavia

There is this simpleton called Ivan, lost in the underground labyrinth somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. He asks his way to Yugoslavia and this soldier answers him: Nema Jugoslavia!

For citizens of former Yugoslavia who proclaimed themselves as Yugoslavs, that line from Emir Kusturica's great film Underground, must have been the harshest yet most true.
It does not exist anymore. But unlike the history of Czechoslovakia (another defunct country), the Yugoslav curtain fall was tragic and shameful. No need to go over the story again, also because I have realised that there is more than one story, and the more you listen to stories, the more you become confused, considering the different interpretations given - according to who is telling the story.

This summer I visited two former Yugoslav republics: Croatia and Slovenia. Slovenia, considered by many as the most interesting and dynamic country to join the EU last May, may have already shed away the memories of a previous era. May have. I walked many times through Trubarjeva Cesta - the road taking you right in the heart of Ljubljana - where I could see many graffiti praising Tito and damning the EU as a capitalist dictatorial system. But that could well be interpreted as nostalgia, a psycho-social phenomenon sweeping through most former-communist countries. Talk of the former country hardly ever crops up. After all, Slovenes fought no war except for ten days, and they emerged victorious. And now they have even joined the EU.

With Croats the story is totally different. Should the subject of war be brought about, you are bound to listen many hate stories. They simply hate the Serbs for 'what they have done to us'. What struck me most was that whatever story you hear, Croats never seem to admit any wrong doings. Obviously I am generalising. Obviously I am expressing the impressions I had. And it is also very obvious that not all Croats are like that. Take Slavenka Draculic for instance. In her last book, And They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Drakulic analyses the psyches of the main actors who perpetrated the Yugoslav tragedy, now standing trial at ICTY. And there have been Croats among these butchers. And Slavenka writes about these too. Some Croats don't like Slavenka, considering her as some kind of traitor of her country.

I was sharing a room in a hotel during a conference held in a Croatian village with a Croat; an extremely intelligent young man some years younger than me. He lived through the war and was even conscripted. Knowing his open mindedness and lack of nationalist fervour, one night I asked him point blank what exactly led to the Mostar events. It was the very night the legendary bridge was re-inaugurated. I saw a face going blank and his only answer was: "I simply don't know."

While I'm writing this, the people of Bosnia Hercegovina are going to the polls to elect new municipal governments. These are the first local elections to be organised entirely by Bosnian authorities since the war ended in 1995. Only yesterday, however, the BBC reported a very sad incident. Bosnian Serbs, hundreds of them, prevented Muslim women from placing a memorial plaque on a building which during the war was used as a rape camp. Riot police had to intervene as some 200 Bosnian Serbs pelted the Muslim women with eggs and stones. The women, some of whom where rape victims themselves, had to place the plaque somewhere else. Symbolically it was yet another Bosniak defeat.

While writing this with a heavy heart, I remind myself of Svetlana Broz's book Good People in Evil Time. Svetlana Broz, one of Josip Broz Tito's grandchildren, who among other activities presides over the Sarajevo branch of the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide, reproduces a large number of verbatim interviews with Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks who during the madness of the 'ethnic conflict' sweeping through former Yugoslavia, were helped by their 'enemies', making the point that the ethnic conflict was far from a 'popular' phenomenon. Some touching, others dramatic, these testimonies give the reader a ray of hope that not all human beings are evil.

But still, last Thursday Muslim women were pelted with eggs and stones for trying to keep their history alive.