U Hag, u Hag, boingboing

Jasmina Tesanovic Belgrade May 3, 2006 General Ratko
Mladic, the world's most famous living war criminal,
has not been arrested today. The president of the war
tribunal in Hague, Carla del Ponte announced today
that Serbia is in the dog house again: negotiations
with European Union again suspended, US monetary help
too...and many other repressive measures to follow,
called the invisible wall of sanctions. Carla del
Ponte said angrily: President Kostunica deceived me,
only a month ago he said they were closing in with the
operation.... Mladic is hiding in Belgrade, moving from
one flat to another, helped by the locals. President
Kostunica in return read a short notice for his people,
not much really, except that he did his very best,
which is next to nothing. A Swiss radio broadcast is
interviewing me: how do I feel about Carla's harsh
statement against Serbia? Great, I say. She could do
better, and this is not her first time. But who cares,
what practical difference does it make if Mladic is
hiding in Serbia, or in Switzerland or Moscow, or
anywhere on the globe? Interpol exists. The secret
police have gone anywhere, hit-men are everywhere...
One minister of the current government did resign, the
only one to speak of responsibility and credibility.
I am not a politician, judge or police officer, yet I
feel more responsibility than some of these people,
regarding this issue, which is once again turning the
wheel of history backwards. Thanks to this failure,
our children will grow in a xenophobic, homophobic,
nationalist clerical society. One day they will justly
get rid of us, their parents, for being so useless.
An old mythological ritual in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part
of the country where my father comes from, is the
performance of "lapot." Lapot is the execution of a
useless member of society with his own consent. The
executioner and the feeble victim would climb to the
top of a mountain, some isolated place with a nice
view. Then a loaf of round bread would be placed on
the head of the old man or woman. With one deft stroke
of an axe, the head would be sent off rolling down the
hill together with the breadloaf. The remaining part
of the body would be buried with all due honors.
Mladic will never give himself in, he is a soldier.
He will commit suicide first, says my father. He is
not a soldier, he is a war criminal. How can one
appeal to his "sense of duty" as President Kostunica
does, asking him to turn himself in? Well, if Mladic
kills himself, does that end the issue? asks my father
again. Sure it would. Well, why doesn't he, then...
There were times when people in this region committed
suicide for much less than genocide, for a minor
public shame like bankruptcy. When my grandfather
went broke, my grandmother had a hard time convincing
him to ignore the social pressure to kill himself.
Mladic's daughter committed suicide in the very heyday
of his war career. Many guesses why she did that: some
nationalists even blamed the press for writing things
about Mladic that his family could not bear. How easy
it is to imagine being the niece of Hitler, the wife
of Stalin, the daughter of Mladic: German women,
Russian women, and Serbian women today. The women who
refuse to perish of their shame become the rubble
women, those who clean the history of crime.