Going Native

As I said in a previous posting, learning the Serbian language is not enough to gain an understanding of the Serbs. Indeed, before one can even attempt to comprehend what makes the Serbs tick, it is important to develop at least a cursory understanding of the Serbian interpretations of Balkan history.

There is a Russian proverb that goes something like “if you keep one eye on the past then you’re blind in one eye. But if you don’t keep any eyes on the past then you’re simply blind”. Serbian people are not blind: here history is of paramount importance. And no matter how much the international community attempts to trivialise the importance of the history of this area, one gets the impression that history will remain a determining factor for a long time to come.

It wasn’t long after I arrived here that I first heard the tales of Nemanja and Barbarossa, Dušan’s Empire, Lazar’s last stand in Kosovo, Karadjordj’s uprising, Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand, etc, etc, etc.

It wasn’t long after that that I heard those same stories a second time, a third time and a fourth time; from different angles, with differing, contrasting and often contradictory accounts. It was then that I came to the conclusion that, no matter how much ‘we’ avoid paying much attention to history, the Serbs (and maybe the other nations of the Balkans, though I wouldn’t know about that) are a gnat’s tail short of being obsessed with history.

I duly studied the Serbian interpretations of all that has happened here since the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires both took the rather colonial and decidedly catastrophic step of declaring the entire Western Balkans an imperial chess board for over half a century – interpretations that differ even among Serbs: some insist that Ottoman rule here was an occupation, whilst a minority refer to it as being Serbo-Ottoman (Serbistan) co-rule.

I’m not going to get into this too deeply, but I am going to address the issue of Serbian nationalism (an extremely divisive issue) and how history has shaped it.

Serbian nationalism, it seems to me, was born out of the country’s occupation by the Ottoman Empire. The Medieval Turks – depicted as veritable demonic warriors of Hell in the ‘Western’ Europe of the time – exerted their military might over Serbia and Serbs from the late 14th century to the earlier 20th century. During that time the Serbs shrank in number: many of their people were slaughtered, many fled to Christian lands, many converted to Islam, many assumed new nationalities in the countries of the region and the only ones who remained here where those who were too damn stubborn to give up the ghost. These ‘radicals’ were determined to keep the idea of Serbia alive. They refused to back down to the empires and fought what would probably be described today as a guerrilla insurgency war for more than five centuries, on and off. Indeed, if it weren’t for Serb nationalist patriotism then the Serbs would have ceased to be; they would just be another extinct nation of Europe.

This Serbian radical nationalism was not merely good for the Serbs, it was also good for a Europe that was living in fear of the possibility of a full scale Muslim invasion: as long as the Serbs kept fighting, the Ottoman could not consolidate their foothold and move West. The Western Powers were, of course, well aware of this. So much so that they openly encouraged Serbian nationalism and countries like Austria and Poland, under the sponsorship of the Pope!!!, encouraged the Serbs to rebel against the Ottoman, financing Serb insurgencies.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. Yugoslavia is collapsing and Serbia is just one of four rival factions fighting a bloody civil war on the territory of the Western Balkans. The West, after a thousand years supporting Serb radical nationalism, suddenly turns around and says “actually, you have to become liberal now. Thanks for the radicalism that kept the Muslims at bay for all those centuries, but now we have to show that we’re not anti-Muslim by supporting Bosnia’s Muslims and you’ll have to learn overnight to be tolerant”.

So now Serbia has an identity crisis and, according to a highly judgemental ‘international community’, only the Serbs are to blame.

The fact that this irritates me leads me to believe that I’ve probably ‘gone native’.

I am undeniably pro-Serb. It annoys me that the Serbs have taken the place of the medieval Turks as the so-called butchers of the Balkans; branded as ruthless ethnic cleansers despite the fact that the only country of the former Yugoslavia that actually succeeded in ethnically cleansing its territory was Croatia (Croatian population statistics courtesy of the CIA World Factbook: Croat 89.6%, Serb 4.5%, other 5.9%), when it expelled more than 200,000 Serbs from their traditional homeland in Croatia just days before the Dayton Agreement sealed the fate of the nation.

It irritates me that the U.S. and pals completely ignore the fact that Kosovo is undeniably a sovereign province of Serbia, and are determined to grant the local Albanian immigrants independence simply because they had a richer, more successful lobby in Washington.

It gets on my nerves that the Serbo-Croat language has spawned numerous bastard languages that should never have been recognised internationally. And it really gets on my nerves that the Serbs are blamed for all the wars of the 1990s, belying the fact that civil wars are always six of one and half-a-dozen of the other (Milošević, Tudjman and Izetbegovic were all equally to blame for inciting racial hatred among the peoples of Yugoslavia).

It’s when I get on this very high horse and rant and rave about Serbia that I really worry that I’ve gone native.

Have a lost my identity? Have I created a monster of myself? Am I Hull’s Dr. Jekylić?