For the life of me, I cannot understand why the Kosovars would choose a cold, blustery day in February declare independence. Bets I can tell, there’s no significance to the date. Why not, then, declare during the spring? Better dancing weather, for sure.
I don’t fully understand Serbians either, but I have spent some time there, and spent some time with real live Serbs. Living in their home, cooking and eating meals with them, learning to make Turkish coffee.
Many of the Serbs I go to know were exceedingly friendly to me, particularly after discovering that I wasn’t American. The American led bombing of Beograd had happened only five years earlier. The wounds were fresh, like open scabs throughout the city core. A constant reminder of what is universally referred to as the “NATO Aggression“. The empty shells of buildings, like the Federal police headquarters below, sort of stick out. And I think they explain a lot as well.
Depending on which history you subscribe to, the NATO bombing of Serbia was either an unprovoked intrusion into internal affairs by outsiders, or else a righteous lever to oust Slobodan Milošević and stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. It is truly a long and muddled history, spanning centuries. To make a quick and unequivocal declaration that one side or the other side was in entirely in the right is simply ignorant. A million Kosovars displaced by the Serbs, assasinations by the KLA.
But there are no moral equivalencies here. The secessionist movement began with peaceful and nonviolent action. Provocative, yes, but essentially peaceful. The Serbs, with a long and violent history of warfare, would never let a province go its own way. Especially not Kosovo, where a battle six hundred years ago, against the Ottomans, forged the Serbian nation.
Even if they got their asses kicked.
My friend Jovica repeatedly called that time “the insanity”. He was one Serb who had an educated, liberal, and well founded notion of Serbia’s place in the world. And of the wrongs Serbia had perpetuated upon her neighbours and her own people. Back in 2004, Kosovo was a UN protectorate, but he saw the writing on the wall, and knew that the province, that really was the heart and soul (along with Vojvodina) of the nation, would eventually be taken away. When I pressed him further, he admitted that Serbia would get what she deserved.
In my very limited experience with the region, travelling between Beograd and Novi Sad, I couldn’t help but to come to the conclusion that Serbs simply just don’t get it. They don’t understand why they were attacked by NATO. Why the world seems to be picking on them. The link between the extreme Serb nationalism of Tadić, and the very real oppression of the predominantly Muslim population of Kosovo. It is a place unlike any other I’ve travelled to. Militaristic, with a not-so-refined culture of violence simmering just below the surface, but ready to boil over at the slightest provocation.
Kosovo today declared independence from Serbia. It tried to make it so in 1992, and organized a referendum in which 80% participated, and 95% voted in favour. This time, with wider European Union and American support, it seems a little surer. It will become Europe’s 49th country.
Today they played the Ode to Joy, from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Coincidentally, it is also the EU’s anthem. I can’t help but to think that Serbia deserves what’s happening to her.
(Please do take a look at some of my travel photos, posted on the Serbian Photoset, over on Flickr.)