It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans. With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists. But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make like rational politicians. Tomislav Nikolic, leader of the Radical Party and strongman-in-waiting, popped up the Financial Times yesterday, promising not to “jeopardise foreign direct investment”.
But to see just how rank the hypocrisy can get, take a look at the new edition of Foreign Affairs, which contains a glossy advertorial section on “Serbia’s Eurovision”(the Song Contest will be held in Belgrade on 24 May – like everyone else, I’m very much in awe of the French entry, but that’s not the point right now).
Although this appears to be from the pro-liberal camp, its first paragraph left my blood running pretty cold. Here are the first three sentences:
The 1990s were a difficult decade for Serbia and the Balkan region in general.
Well, yes. Nearly 150,000 people were killed in a series of brutal wars. “Difficult” would seem to be a rather mild adjective. Why not “tricky”?
Despite never having been part of the Warsaw Pact, following the fall of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia rapidly broke up into separate regions declaring independence, causing cultural and religious clashes that finally degraded into the Yugoslav wars.
This overlooks the considerable evidence that “cultural and religious” differences were exploited by the Yugoslav/Serb leadership in a very deliberate fashion, even if the Western media were gulled into writing about “ancient hatreds”. But, fear not, “Serbia’s Eurovision” isn’t scared to tell harsh truths:
In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic and his controversial stand on several issues, including the opposition to the call for independence by Kosovo . . . led to UN sanctions.
Controversial? Controversial? This was a leader who even Mr Nikolic calls “criminal”, who was indicted for war crimes, and historians have shown to be the architect of the strategy that involved ethnic cleansing and Srebrenica. Yes, that might have initiated just a little bit of controversy here and there.
It is natural for liberal Serbs to want to move on from the past – and to avoid being defined by a tyrant who was, after all, overthrown by people power on the streets of Belgrade. I have total admiration for those who protested, and for those who have exhausted themselves trying to get Serbia back on its feet since.
But total denial is not a policy. This sort of prose must surely ring hollow with anyone with even the faintest memory of the 1990s – and it effectively validates the revanchist attitudes of the nationalists. Serbia should not be expected to engage in constant self-flagellation, but nor can it become a “normal” state if it buries its history in euphemisms in this fashion.
