Proud of nothing

My city burns once again and my people are angry. Nobody listens yet everyone has an opinion. I am struggling to write a commentary on Sunday’s events without falling into the black or white trap, into being perceived as a supporter of one or the other. As I watched my city being demolished once again, I kept thinking about the rent seeking economy this country has been for the past 20 years. Promises were made when Milosevic’s regime fell down, of which not many were fulfilled. Income inequalities grew to the extent of severe for a former socialist country with a very egalitarian belief system, and our educational system collapsed. Since year 2000, the ordinary citizen became, or has continued to be (which ever way you prefer to look at it) the underdog, a hostage to criminal gangs and business tycoons, who finance political parties, who in turn help them to make their money and share the pie with them. The citizen has become acquiescent, too afraid or too disappointed to use the institutional means to fight for his rights. He is also disillusioned by the lack of opportunity to work. Serbia currently has the highest unemployment rate of all times, and youth unemployment levels almost hit 50%. If the citizen tries to protect his rights, he gets harassed, threatened and intimidated, or in the best case scenario, ignored. And this is everywhere he goes, from an abusive employer who does not pay for his overtime (because he has a monopoly, so the citizen has no other job to move to), to going out to a night club, where one can only get a table if they are a drug dealer, a war criminal, a tycoon or all of those combined. Plus the citizen has to be affiliated to a political party if his head is to stay above the water. So for a while, the citizen lives with his head down or as we like to say “without stirring the waves”. And he keeps wondering for how long he will let this anger and fear to accumulate as he feels like a sea before the storm.

Two scary and immature images stick to my mind. The first one of thousands of well organised teenage boys, or should I call them child soldiers, fiercely attacking the police forces, as they try to push them out, and block them from attacking the participants of the gay parade. Ironically enough, once the parade ended, the violence culminated. The other image I have is of the parade itself, with the Minister for Minority Rights stating “We won”, which kind or reminded me of Milosevic’s statement after the end of the NATO bombing, when nobody ever asked him whom exactly we beat, how much the so-called victory cost this city and was it worth it. I also felt like they were parading on a different planet, proclaiming victory of human rights and organising a party, a party, I repeat, not a human rights protest, while half of the city was burning. It was quite surreal. Not to mention the statement by the Minister of Police, who saw police intervention as necessary because they could not allow the important international guests, such as the EU Ambassador to Serbia, get injured. Not the gays, the international guests, I underline! While this was happening, I wondered about the citizen’s basic human right to walk the streets freely, to stop being a hostage of both domestic and international political deals and manipulated armies of people who always talk and never listen.

Although nothing can justify Sunday’s violence, I can understand the motives of those delinquents, and I am positive its roots had little to do with homophobia. We saw everything from crowd induced peer pressure and survival of the fittest mentality, the adrenaline rush they get out of rioting, to the inarticulate and confusing goals they were proclaiming. However, just because these goals are not well articulated, it does not mean that we can afford to completely ignore them. Don’t such hierarchically strict and pre-historically organised movements always develop in failed states, and Serbia is a failed state in many ways? Not to mention their frustration with the authorities, and the fact that these youth gangs, and other criminal organisations were used to topple Milosevic’s regime, following which the government has been trying to get rid of them, instead of giving them what they expected – a share of the pie (this is essentially why our Prime Minister was assassinated). You know, Taliban style, you need them to fight off the Russians, but they don’t just evaporate afterwards and leave you to loot the country on your own.

However, I am more amazed at the fact that many people were standing around and supporting this violence. This is what worries me the most. Does this not show that while the ordinary citizen was too afraid to join (either not drugged enough, or too rational to want to end up in prison), he was also very aggressive, if passively, which is a method of expressing aggression we have mastered as a nation. And while you cannot blame anyone for wanting to transform this failed rent seeking economy we are forced to live in into something else, I wonder about the need for violence. Milosevic would have never fallen through peaceful means; we tried too many times and failed. NATO claimed they could not sort out Kosovo without the bombs. During the 1990s, the police used to beat us, the citizens. During the 2000’s, it is the citizens that beat up the police and fellow citizens. We have too many examples from our recent history that have thought us that only violence works.

So, what I saw on Sunday was provokers and retaliators, of which neither had the right to act so immature nor do what they did to this city. The discourse of victory of human rights was very manipulative in its own right, and it felt like the whole manifestation was organised to once more portray Serbs as a nation of atrocious lunatics. Isn’t the whole discourse of human rights in contradiction with itself: freedom of expression, yet respect for everyone’s human rights, respect for private property, yet equal division of resources, etc, etc. And I wonder about the motives of those who perceive themselves as the good guys, while their discourse dismisses a predominant part of the population as idiots, hating their own country and nation in the process. If only they could be part of the European Union, things would be great, there is no such thing as the far right there. Oh no, it’s only the Serbs that are so primitive and not cool at all. To make the irony worse, hatred is generated on both sides and similar vocabulary is used, there are the winners and the losers, there are the idiots and the sick in the head and finally, the fighters for justice.

Although I am a fierce opponent of conspiracy theories, observing media reports, I cannot escape the impression of an orchestrated farce, where everyone was assigned a role in advance, and where the government exactly knew what was going to happen and what sort of an image we will send out to the world. For one, look at the mobile mammograph, which stood in one of the central squares in Belgrade, with a huge sign B92 across it. Thugs threw stones at it, broke some windows, and this largely had to do with their hatred for the B92 TV station, which they feel is anti-Serb and portrays their organisations in a bad light. I am positive that 16 years olds who skip school a lot and go to football matches to fight have no clue what a mammograph is. I had no idea until breast check-ups became my own reality. Although only windows were broken, and nothing actually happened to the equipment, B92 started spinning the wheel, by saying how nothing was sacred to them, not even the lives and health of their sisters, mothers and girlfriends. Although many learned people have pointed to the fact that TV was most of the times better at consequences than causes, I am worried that such a spin, where media tries to portray these youth offenders as complete agnostics, and where they underestimate their guiding ideological stance can be very dangerous.

I am not attempting to justify these thugs, or paint a grim image of poor youths who cannot stand oppression any further, so they rebel by beating up police and destroying the city. However, I can freely call this rent seeking environment we have been living in for the past 20 years as structural violence against the citizen. Structural violence is defined as systematic ways in which a social structure prevents people from meeting their basic needs and entitlements, which results in poorer health and a shorter life span. So, according to this definition, acts of violence are committed against the citizen on a daily basis. So the citizen accumulates humiliation and anger, and eventually becomes aggressive and violent himself. I remembered a sentence from Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”: “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” To be honest, I would not remember this statement had my former professor from the LSE, David Keen, not called one of his articles about origins of violence in Sierra Leone this way. He suggests that violence is often a product of human emotions, such as shame, anger and fear. Along those lines, he warns how dangerous it is to observe violence as purely criminal and self-interested, and that its pure condemnation can be useless, or even counterproductive. He draws attention to the psychological functions of violence, for example, the immediate sensation of power it offers to the generally disempowered and the reversal of perceived injustice that violence seems to offer. Finally, he suggests that in a system where some people are labelled as less human, they may end up behaving in a less human way. Also, since the violent also seek recognition and importance, the more you alienate them, the more you condemn them and not listen to them, the more they turn against you.

Finally, let’s go back to the inarticulate ideology of opponents of the gay parade. The thugs want to protect family values, but so does the passive aggressive citizen. Why should freedom of rights for homosexuals endanger families, one may ask? Well, our society has deteriorated so much morally and so many human rights are abused on a daily basis, that many children grow up in dysfunctional families, mostly due to economic deprivation; our president does not speak to his wife, and has a reputation of a Latino lover/sex maniac, and according to a large scale survey published this spring, a large portion of the male population between 20 and 30 years of age believe that it is justifiable to beat up women. So, instead of taking responsibility of family preservation into your own hands, which is the harder path, you blame a minority group instead, since they are always the easiest target, the elusive enemy you need to get rid of in order to survive. Obvious, would you not agree? People are angry and they need to direct this anger at someone. They direct it at their families, children, subordinates, and whoever may be weaker. Therefore, I saw the 6,000 thugs as a metaphor, a sponge which has sucked in the aggression of the entire nation, and is fierce enough to make it physical.

So, to me, the Sunday’s conflict portrayed an interesting interaction between the disempowered and those who have their human rights abused by the disempowered. Would you not call such irony a “lose-lose” game? And this game is certainly not endemic to Serbia, the thin line between the perpetrator and the victim runs global, whether we like to admit it or not.