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Serbia's summons

By Nenad Pejic
February 25, 2008

People who follow events in the Balkans closely all sooner or later ask themselves the same question: When will these people who have found reasons to fight through all of history finally put a stop to it and move on?

Many in the former Yugoslavia like to joke that while all the region's ethnic groups are watching the same historical movie, they each entered the cinema at a different time. The story is the same, the consequences are the same — it's just the various victories and defeats, heroes and traitors, that keep changing.

The organized protest rally in Belgrade Thursday started peacefully, but ended with violence. The United Nations Security Council condemned what it called "mob" assaults on foreign embassies in the Serbian capital, the most serious of which was the setting fire to the U.S. Embassy by protesters angry at Washington's support for Kosovo independence.

The Security Council welcomed steps by Belgrade authorities to restore order, but the White House said Serbian police had not done enough. Serbian President Boris Tadic appealed to citizens to stop the attacks, but Alexander Vucic, general secretary of Serbia's dominant Radical Party, sent a somewhat different message: "This is a lesson for all those who have been provoking Serbs on a daily basis. They are as guilty as those who took part in the violence."

Such sentiments are hardly limited to the Radicals. A day before the rallies, Infrastructure Minister Velimir Ilic, who heads the New Serbia Party, appeared to encourage crowd violence, saying breaking windows was part of the democratic process. "To aim a stone at the American Embassy — well, that happens all over the place," Mr. Ilic said. "It looks like it isn't bullying to claim a piece of a country's territory, but it is bullying to throw a stone at an embassy window."

Another minister defended Tuesday's destruction of a Kosovo border post as the "normal reaction of angry citizens." Serbian television has filled the airwaves with stories of Kosovo Serbs living in a virtual "prison." Actors at the Thursday rally gave emotional readings from poetry that aimed somewhere between the heart and the jugular. "Those who oppose us have scurried back to their mouse holes," one said.

Nonetheless, Serbian officials professed surprise when Thursday's rally turned violent, and were far from prepared to protect the city's foreign embassies from attack, sending out only small police units.

Similar scenarios can be expected to play out on a smaller scale as protests continue in the days ahead in other Serbian cities and Serbian diaspora communities around the world. In the end, they'll accomplish nothing more than spreading hatred and intolerance. It's alarmingly reminiscent of the time 20 years ago, when Slobodan Milosevic used similar tools to secure his rise to power. That period ended with destabilization, wars, and newly independent states. Serbia moved from defeat to defeat — a fact deftly cushioned by the rhetoric of authorities and state-controlled media. Even today, many in Serbia still blame the leadership not for starting the wars but for losing them.

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