This is my second time in Belgrade, meeting and talking to people about politics (comes with the job). Most people I have talked to are passionate about politics and try to explain how it works in Serbia. They also expect that outsiders will not understand much about it. But with the risk of sounding like an outsider who doesn’t understand, I dare to say that it is not so difficult. There are radicals, socialists who are not socialists, democrats who are very pro-European etc. A lot of people in Serbia are European sceptic, but name one country in Europe where that is not the case. At least here they have just cause.
Naturally, I know and understand that we cannot compare Serbia’s recent history with any other country in Europe. My point is more that this country is far less exotic then it is pictured by Western media and perhaps by the Serbs that I talk to. Those Serbs seem to me just like liberal intellectuals in the Netherlands, who cannot stop wondering why on earth there are so many crazy, tradition hugging, identity seeking Dutch fools willing to vote for Geert Wilders and Rita Verdonk. Worse, they even like Frans Bauer.
The Wilders and Bauer fans are more alien to me, than the Serbians I meet and talk to here. My guess it is the same for them. They understand me better than their fellow countrymen who vote for Vojislav Seselj, currently serving time in The Hague for committed war crimes. Worse are in this case people who vote for the old party of Milosevic, the socialist party.
Despite the historic differences and sensitivities, the sentiments behind those votes not so strange or unique this day and age of renewed nationalism all over Europe and especially in a time when people seem to suffer from a complete lack of faith in existing political leaders and institutions. For the programme series Domino Kosovo, about the meaning of borders and regions around the world that might follow Kosovo in becoming independence, I wondered whether the Balkan of the nineties will prove to be not the ghost of the past, but that of the future. I do not mean that we will go to war over Flanders anytime soon, but the fact that Geert Wilders has proposed a greater Netherlands including Flanders, is telling.
In my opinion we should inform people here in Serbia about Europe debates elsewhere, discourses on immigration, integration of minorities and the rise of nationalism. I hope we can make some contribution by showing the Netherlands/ Amsterdam and that people will think either of themselves as less strange or think about us as completely nuts (which they do anyway considering what they believe is our obsession with the little, fat man, aka he who must not be named, aka Mladic).
There is one thing though in which Serbia is completely different in comparison to the Netherlands, according to me. On Monday evening there was a presentation of work in progress for the Subjective Atlas of Serbia; a project of Annelys de Vet. She asked Serbian artists and art students to make a contribution for them representing Serbia according to them. See www.subjectiveatlasofserbia.info. One of the artists said that he wanted to show “the obsession of Serbia with history” by making a map that highlighted all the streets and areas in Belgrade with a historic date as a name. That obsession, that is something that the Dutch do not have.
Yes, there is an influx of historical television programmes and a hype of canon building in the Netherlands, but that is more a symptom of our identity problems, while here it might the problem.
The Dutch eurosceptic electorate and Mladic will surely be topics in the debate Saturday afternoon at 13.00 in Dom Omladine. I will also show work of the Subjective Atlas of Serbia in the background during the debate and ask a couple of the artists to give a short explanation.
Posted by Wilbur Perlot
1 Comment
November 26, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Good piece!