Skunk at a garden party

Matija Beckovic, generally acclaimed as Serbia's greatest living poet has an impeccable ability to express the national feeling. I noticed this recently in his new poem America, published in a Belgrade daily newspaper on May 1. In this poem I recognise my own father and his whole generation, children of the pre-World War II Belgrade middle class, who optimistically relied on America after the war. Some of these people like him escaped or emigrated or married American women. His sister, though, remained in Belgrade, but studied English and worked in the US embassy for thirty years.

But if we were not allowed to go to America,

They couldn't ban America

From coming to us.

America may arrive one day in the form of political emancipation, but in the meantime it has already arrived in the form of culture. (Americans can get an idea of the atmosphere in the Belgrade of the fifties if they see the eighties movies Dancing on the Water or Hey, Babu Riba)

When the wall finally fell, Beckovic writes, the hopes and expectations of pro-American Serbs began to vanish, a process which culminated in the present bombing.

And America has faded into the past

Destroyed by the Berlin Wall

Disappeared with Communism.

This feeling now describes not only my father's generation, but my own as well. Young people, born in the sixties and seventies who took to the streets in 1991, 1992 and in the winter of 1996 to 1997 in mass support for democracy in Serbia, carried US flags, sang American songs and sent appeals and news to their American colleagues through the Internet. Aware of the limitations and internal divisions of their own movement, they were nevertheless terribly disappointed in the minimal American interest in and support for their efforts.

Today, the very same students who supported democracy are in depression, wasting their creative energy and technical knowledge in protest and informing the world about the Nato bombing of their country. The lack of mutual understanding between Americans and Serbs is great and getting greater. They speak to each other rather than listening. Beckovic describes one barrier concisely in a poem as a "new" American "password": we are not interested in the past.

So when Serbs talk about mediaeval monasteries, the Americans laugh at them, alleging that Serbs live in the remote past. When Serbs talk about their suffering on the side of the Allies in both world wars, they are accused of attempting to justify the present crimes of their countrymen. But Americans are interested in the past, of course, and they are able to use it in order to make a political point. It is depressing to find oneself caught between crude comparisons of Clinton and Hitler in Belgrade and crude comparisons of Milosevic and Hitler in Washington. I would like to be able to declare a moratorium on all analogies with World War II. In the present general desperation, I am looking for a glimpse of hope. Serb intellectuals have called on the people not to turn away from Western values in their disappointment and anger at Western governments. Every day artists and educated people demonstrate Serbia's place in European culture. The highly-reputed writer Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic, in an interview, remarks that she was inspired by the war to re-read Montaigne, the French sixteenth-century essayist "who thought that the greatest hero is the one who manages to deal with his own inclination to inflict harm on others." All sides should note this message.

The sincerity and humanistic scepticism of Montaigne's "Essays" - partly written in reaction to the religious wars of his time - could be a welcome antidote for the pretentious moralising on all sides which have made up a large part of the rhetoric of this war. I am also encouraged by the number of educated people and artists in Europe and the USA who have openly spoken against the bombing. This could lead - after the exactment, no doubt, of a terrible and unnecessary price - to a new empathy between Serbia and "the West", to sincere and lasting efforts at cultural understanding. Perhaps Europe and the USA would realise that the isolation of Serbia is a counterproductive policy, a self-fulfilling prophecy which can only encourage the self-isolation and xenophobia already encouraged by the current authorities. An anecdote from my own field of history comes to mind. Not so long ago, a highly regarded American historian of European diplomacy was invited to Belgrade to attend a symposium on Eastern issues. A Serb undergraduate student told me that the historian had presumed that the conference would praise the Serbian role in European politics, a view with which he did not agree, so he had decided not to participate because he didn't want to be "a skunk at a garden party".

Would this historian have been "a skunk at a garden party"? Probably. However his absence, and his reason for his absence, seems like a lost chance to build bridges, the bridges which were destroyed long before the Danube began flowing above, instead of under, the Zezelj Bridge?

Bridges are of course made to facilitate transport in both directions. Serbs should open themselves to the criticism of well-intentioned Westerners and to appreciate what is best in Western civilisation. Both Americans and Western Europeans should overcome the superficial stereotypes of Serbian history and culture, and the Balkans as general, which is often looked at not as, so to speak, the backyard of Europe, but the wrong side of the road.

Dusan Djordjevic,

The author is a candidate for a PhD in history at Stanford University, California.

DANAS

Just an impulse away

The phone rings, interrupting a long period of boredom. The line is excellent. I can hear very will indeed for such a distance. I think, she's calling from New York, we laugh a little at first, recall some old stories. We try very hard to avoid The Topic, but it eventually imposes itself. How is it? She asks me. So-so. I say. Words are stupid: what can I tell her. If I was frank, if I didn't find it senseless, I would be capable of transmitting the war right into my friend's apartment, a cosy flat on Broadway, if only I didn't find the very thought soporific. I've got a slight headache, I say. Why, she asks again. Why? Because my high-rise is shaking, something is breaking, people from the apartments around me are running out into the hallway and yelling, then an abrupt silence reigns again in Vidikovac, everyone is returning to their apartments. I convince a woman I don't know with children that one of our planes has just broken the sound barrier and that it is nothing. Everybody's been watching the news all day and everybody has a hunch about Something. Before several more explosions finally ruin the hot evening I am strangled by a dangerous fear and a sudden nauseous knowledge - the war. Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, other images mix in, they run faster: as we sit outside the cafe in Njegoseva Street a strong explosion is heard. We run inside; everybody thinks: this is it: we're finished, then we go out again a few minutes later; the streets and buildings are dark in the night. Is it possible that Belgrade's lights have gone down in just one day? Is it possible that the bombing is happening again? The bus crosses the bridge at 2.00 pm early in the war and the passengers who still have some reason to travel ask in the morning: what was destroyed last night? And more: the first rubble nearby, missile trails in the sky and the roar of planes, the fear related to them, legs and hands shaking involuntarily; is so cold while the bombs are falling; wondering; telephones working, taxis working, the night-time horror is washing the days away in a cafe, with cappuccino.

And suddenly the siren begins howling. What is perhaps the loudest siren in town stifles the sound in the telephone receiver. "What.. what is that?" is disappearing, while I hardly hear it at all. The living room with a view on Broadway is at that very moment overwhelmed with horror. It's good, I think, sixty seconds of a continuous howling sound has saved from a Herculean task.

Branimir Gajic