The Serbs will blame us - and they'll have
a point
By Boris Johnson in Belgrade
Serbs talking again as Russia agrees UN terms for pull-out
SO we won. We blitzed the Serbs so thoroughly and with such abandon that
today I walk the streets of Belgrade the bashful citizen of a victor nation.
While the talks were going on at the Macedonian border, we gave the
Pancevo oil plant another going-over, killing a father and his two-year-old
son. Last night, I was watching an awesomely violent film starring John
Travolta on the hotel television, while the ack-ack was erupting in orange
flashes outside and the petroleum was going up like white sheet lightning, and,
after going to the window a few times, I just gave up and watched John
Travolta blowing up planes, and boats, on the ground that it was somehow
more plausible.
Yes, as this column has predicted from the very outset, Tony Blair ends up
covered with glory, the laurels on his brow, his feet dripping with the slobber
of his media admirers. It cannot be long before we have some carefully
choreographed visit by the Prime Minister to Kosovo to escort a weeping
Albanian family back to their homestead - and the Serbs will fight and lose
their last great battle of the media war.
Appalling things will be found to have taken place in Kosovo. And the Serbs
will have no defence. If their troops and police carried out a fraction of the
killings, burnings and rapes of which they are accused, then Nato's war, even
its barmy conduct of the war, will seem to be justified a hundredfold.
The crackpot raids on sanatoriums and old folks' homes, the bombing of
trains and bridges, all will be eclipsed, forgotten. The public will be queasily
grateful to have ended up so crushingly in the right, and will turn their thoughts
to the excitement of the Royal wedding.
Some of us might say that the pogroms would not have taken place if Nato
(and, in particular, Madeleine Albright) had not been so foolish as to launch
unsupported air strikes, which meant first clearing Kosovo of media and
monitors. But we who enter such protests will be accused of casuistry, and, in
any case, it won't get the Serbs off the hook.
It will be no use them saying that they individually had no part in it, or that it
was all the fault of Vojislav Seselj, the grass-chewing ultra-nationalist who
urged Serbs to kick out the Kosovars as soon as the bombing started; and no
doubt plenty of Albanians will be produced in the next few weeks, who will
testify that it was Nato bombing that drove them from their homes.
That won't wash, either. Belgrade will ask us to lament the fate of the
190,000 Serbs in Kosovo, who will shortly be purged in reciprocal violence
from the Kosovo Liberation Army, the extremely nasty terrorists supported
by Nato.
If there was any justice, we should care about these Serbs in Kosovo, as
passionately as we have cared about the ethnic Albanians. Many of them will
be utterly innocent of crimes against their Albanian neighbours. But in so far as
we give them a thought, we in the West will stretch, yawn and say they had it
coming.
The very word Serb has become a kind of synonym for violence or racist
intolerance. You say Serb, close your eyes, and you see a tattooed,
close-cropped figure in combat fatigues and dark glasses, swigging slivovitz
and waving his AK47. We all know that the stereotype is unfair, that the
Serbs can be gentle, peace-loving, donnish types of the kind you see in
Belgrade's squares, tugging their beards over chess. Having been here for two
weeks, and having endlessly consulted Vokspopovic, the Serb in the street, I
can testify to his great natural politeness. Only one man has shouted about the
bombing, and that was immediately after his roof was blown off. Call me a
dupe, but I seem to like most of the Serbs I have met, and feel sorry for them.
To explain how things have gone so badly for this people, so that they are not
only losers, but also villains, you have to look at a toxic confluence of factors.
There is a natural tendency to racism all over the Balkans, where people are
instantly categorised according to their grouping. In Serbia, that hidden poison
has been potentiated by the manipulation of Slobodan Milosevic.
As soon as Yugoslavia began to break up - an event he had himself
precipitated - he began to whip up fear that they would lose out. They did.
They lost in Slovenia, in Croatia and in Bosnia, they lost Sarajevo to the
Muslims and, as they indefatigably point out, more than a quarter of a million
of them were "ethnically cleansed". They also did terrible things. They
massacred Muslims and Croats. But the beauty of Milosevic's
state-controlled media was that these atrocities could be minimised along with
the sense of guilt, and Serb paranoia could be fed by the rich sequence of
defeats.
The more they lose, the more nationalist they become. The Democratic party,
no doubt one of those Serbian opposition parties that Robin Cook fondly
hopes will one day force Slobba from power, has described its policy
towards Muslims as "castration" and even Vuk Draskovic, on his day, can
spout the rhetoric of nationalism.
Now Milosevic has completed the programme of defeat. He has almost
certainly lost Kosovo, in the sense that there seems little he can now do to
protect the Kosovo Serbs; and instead of blaming Milosevic, the Serbs will
blame Nato. Instead of blaming their leader for their country's ruin, they will
blame the West; and since Nato blundered into the air war, without thinking it
through - how long it would take and the suffering it would involve - they have
a point.
It would be nice to think that Nato will be rewarded by pushing Milosevic
from power. In reality, we may all have played a part in his elaborate game of
bolstering resentment, paranoia and nationalism. In five, 10 years, Kosovo
and its holy places could be the sundered homeland, the instant claptrap of
anyone seeking to arouse irredentist fervour.
The Nato bombing may have been in some instances a disguised blessing, in
the cruel sense that antiquated factories such as Zastava can now be rebuilt
from scratch. But what will your average Serb see in that? Nothing but a
Western plot to seize the best of their economy. And who will profit from the
forthcoming deals to rebuild the place? Milosevic, of course, and his Socialist
cronies.
Nato's problem in Yugoslavia has been fighting not just nationalism, but a
manipulative brand of socialist quasi-tyranny; and you can't get rid of the one
without first getting rid of the other. If anyone should hang their heads, it is
those in the West who, for the past 10 years, have connived at keeping
Slobba in power.
telegraph.co.uk |
