Anastasia Mironova “We are tired of hitting each other’s heads for public amusement” Why Belgrade is the danger of revolution, Kosovo is the massacre 06/01/2023, 08:00

When I was just 21, I flew to conquer London. And he fell in love almost instantly. Serbian. He had a traditional name – Ivan. After two or three random meetings at a restaurant where I worked part-time after school, Ivan asked me out. We met in the evening at a bar on the banks of the Thames. After chatting for a while, we decided to go for a walk. Then he went to pay for his dinner. Then he disappeared. A few minutes later, two men sat next to me, introduced themselves, showed their laminated IDs, and said that my friend was allegedly Radovan Karadzic’s nephew and a wanted Serbian field commander. Ivan was loaded into a car and taken away. I’ve never heard of it anywhere else. Besides the fact that some nephews, especially fifteen-year-old commanders, fought near Karadzic: Ivan was twenty-six years old in 2006.

In our hometown of Tyumen, of course, I knew Serbia. I watched the news about the events in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the 2000s, our city became interested in Yugoslav cinema. We learned about the Yugoslav civil war from the tapes of Kusturica and Dragoevich. We saw the movie “No Man’s Land” about a Bosnian soldier who was mined under Danis Tanovich, and nobody needed him, except for a serbian soldier who happened to be nearby.

All this was then perceived as an element of culture. The phrase “civil war” filled us with horror. We knew this from Soviet history textbooks: red terror, white terror, barge attendants, bread and glass. Fear. It is something that a person should not live at all, but to survive.

In the 1990s, civil war was especially feared. Because everywhere we were told: the main thing was that there was no civil war. Yeltsin was pardoned for his drunken antics, waste of industry, and disarmament of the army. “I wish the second civilian wasn’t there.” My generation was the first to learn history from new post-Soviet textbooks, whose authors felt it was necessary to scare us with communists so that the blood in the children’s veins would freeze. On television there were endless programs about the victims of Bolshevism, war communism, Stalinism … The civil war seemed to us much worse than the nuclear one. For some reason, we did not see Chechnya as a civil war, there was no such attitude in society. I saw the conflicts in Georgia as a child, but they are almost not remembered.

But then, the thought that the same civil war had been going on for many years somewhere in Europe came as a surprise. I personally perceived the news from Yugoslavia as news from hell. And the movies were scary. So when I met a living person who survived the civil war in Europe right before our eyes, I was deeply surprised.

Those three evenings we spent talking with Serbian Ivan impressed me a lot. It was from him that I first learned that the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia perceived the events of the 1990s as a full-blown civil war. Not ethnic cleansing, not rebellion, but civil war. And American intervention is like an intervention. Same word from textbooks. I don’t know if today’s schoolchildren teach the events of a hundred years ago in such detail, but we did. And when I first heard about the intervention in the Yugoslav conflict, I immediately remembered the Entente and the landing of the British in the Baltic Sea.

Then, for the first time, I felt a deep sense of resentment from Ivan the Serb, who was soon taken in an unknown direction by MI5 officers, for not being allowed to understand by Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Croats. they came out on their own. I also met Albanians. And not only in Western Europe, but also in the Balkans. They have always felt a common pain with the Serbs: the experience of interference. These peoples were ready to cut each other to death, but, remembering the intervention of NATO, they united among themselves.

Later, I visited the former Yugoslavia more than once, and I remember that in the 2000s, Bosnians negatively evaluated NATO’s involvement in the conflict: NATO destroyed Serb positions during Operation Deliberate Force in 1995, destroyed Sarajevo and inflicted great damage on Bosnia. . And in 1999 Kosovo suffered almost more from the bombing than Belgrade: Serbs were driven from there. For nearly 25 years, Kosovo and Metohija have not been able to recover. The area has become a European black hole, center of kidnappings, synthetic drugs and fake vodka.

Serbian Ivan’s mother died of melanoma in England in the early 2000s. I observed myself for a long time in Belgrade, when they advised me to take it, I postponed it. And then there was no time for bombings, refugees, a new life, a mole for several years. When he was reborn, no one cared about his mistress.

I heard the same story from Albanians. Due to the weather vane and groundwater runoff, parts of Kosovo and Albania were damaged by more uranium bombing than Serbian territory. Many villages lost their hospitals. Kosovars died from depleted uranium and so on. And Serbs were dying in Kosovo – Kosovars refused to treat them. There is a movie “The Father”, which tells how our obstetrician-gynecologist operated on such Serbs. He has saved hundreds of lives, adopted hundreds of children. In reality, the doctor’s name is Alexei Ilyin. He also did me a cesarean section. Petersburg in 2015. How close and how connected everything turned out: my life (and I was dying) and my child’s life were saved by a doctor trained in bombing victims in Yugoslavia.

In 2007, I saw something wonderful at a party: a Serb and a Kosovar Albanian beat up a Pole after they found out he was working as a cook for KFOR, a Kosovo peacekeeping unit.

But because national dignity is superior to national interests. The intervention offended this dignity.

“We wanted to solve it ourselves” – I heard very bitter words not only from Serbs, but also from Albanians and Bosnians.

During the trial of Milosevic, not all Albanians bragged: those who understood that the moment was humiliating for the whole region also spoke. All of them were once a great country, and it turns out that it is possible to behave in this way. When Radovan Karadzic was tried, Bosnians watched the broadcast of the meeting and almost cried. No, they did not pity Karadzic, but were perceived as part of a common history that was abused with impunity … If Kosovo asked NATO for help, then the Bosniaks did not ask for help in the meantime. And they know very well that they are good too. And most importantly, they understand that for the Americans and their conditional “Western partners” they are no different from the Serbs, they all look the same, and everyone looks like little people who can and can be bombed with impunity. He helped without asking.

In 1995 the “auxiliaries” made more than 3,200 attack sorties, almost all of which hit Bosnia and Herzegovina’s infrastructure. I was in Belgrade when the Radovan Karadzic case was opened. Serbs were not the only ones watching the broadcast from the courtroom on the street. Everyone was upset, first of all, for the honor of their once common homeland. Everyone understood that both Karadzic and dozens of Serbian officers were extradited by the ICTY in exchange for humiliating promises of financial aid and European integration. Before that, the Serbs had to extradite Slobodan Milosevic. The condition for funding the country to survive the bombings was Milosevic’s arrest before April 1, 2001. It is the same Milosevic who gave up power the day before as a result of a bulldozer revolution: perhaps the first in a similar series of events where an opposition presidential candidate took people out on the streets by declaring that he did not agree with the election results. Milosevic then feared a new war and surrendered. The new government arrested him hours before the ultimatum expired.

As a result, he was given pennies and Serbia is still negotiating for European integration. It has already lost interest in the European Union for 22 years: now only 37% of the population supports the idea.

But they will not let him refuse, and this is disturbing: they paid a huge price, one might say, forcing the trampled and bombed country to crawl on its stomach for the idea of ​​Europe. Even at the height of European sentiment, the support of the Western route and entry to the EU by just over half of Serbs is doubly humiliating.

Today, Serbia is a model of trampled dignity. Firstly, ethnic conflicts were provoked in the country. Note that the same Mujahideen who were in Afghanistan and Chechnya earlier fought for the Bosniaks. “Western partners”, who dragged the state into a civil war, carried out two bloody intimidation operations with bombs against it. In September 2000, the Belgrade District Court sentenced NATO leaders and some generals to heavy sentences for committing crimes against Serbia. Three days later, pro-Western politicians took the crowd to the streets and drove Milosevic away, six months later he sold the former president of Serbia for the money of the same Clinton, Chirac and Blair, and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Humiliation upon humiliation. It’s just that this country is trying to solve its own problems just because it’s getting its problems on its knees and stuffing it up its nose. Whether free movement, mutual recognition of license plates or agreements on economic relations, different “partners” emerge and conflict begins to escalate.

You know, I’ve had time to study this region a bit and I can say with great certainty that Serbia and Kosovo are tired of confrontation and they are not afraid to strengthen rapprochement. But here they are again being pushed head-to-head.

There are countries that currently sit in two and three seats. Why is it a pun, we all know these countries well. There is also a country that has been without a chair for 20 years. In half squat. This is Serbia. She doesn’t want to go to the West, she’s never been there, she can’t forgive insults, especially since no one has ever apologized to her even after Carla Del Ponte’s statements about the falsification of ICTY materials. But Serbia is the same, like a dog in a noose, dragged by the same helpers into a bright future.

The country is humiliated, bombed, forced to repent, extradited its citizens, alms are given but not paid until the end, they call Europe but they do not let it in. A small country in the heart of Europe that has survived many civil wars and a series of insults in less than 30 years. Serbia seems to be in trouble again today. He was offered to join the CSTO in 1999, but Serbia thought for a long time. Six months later, Russia had to save him for the first time without any CSTO. Today, the country is again hearing talk about the need to urgently and finally return to Russia, but also to China. Because there seems to be a new bulldozer revolution in Belgrade, a new massacre in Kosovo. Only Russia is no longer dependent on younger brothers. Do you know what the Serbs write about? NATO is taking advantage of Russia’s preoccupation to crush Serbia. Why the West is doing this, why they hug the Serbs so much is not understood? It was bombed, crushed, humiliated, deceived by entering the European Union.

Serbs and Kosovars are tired of hitting each other on the head to entertain the public. Both Albanians and Bosnians have already realized that no one cares about them. As in “No Man’s Land”: a living Bosniak lies on a mine, with a Serb standing over him. UN peacekeepers arrived, groaned and went for tea. This film won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. It has to do with the fact that the Yugoslav peoples in reality needed no one but each other, therefore they had to make a decision only of their own free will: where the soul lies, then you have to choose. Because those who lay mines under them and bombard them with uranium will do nothing.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.