Fatherland Going to the Pits

Every day NATO bombs destroy something in this country, and some buildings several times even.  The alliance confirms such destruction in Mafia-like fashion.  Reduced to rubble as they are, they are shot in the head.  The extent of the suffering which has resulted from the fact that 500,000 people have been left without a job can only be imagined.  Just as with bodily wounds, this only really begins to hurt once the bleeding stops.  I recently heard a brief comment which is eloquent enough to be a graffiti: whoever lives through this - will get fucked.  Desperate news is merely multiplying: our fatherland is goings to the pits.

Admittedly selfishness is one of those human qualities which can cloud one's general view of things.  Somehow during wartime it comes naturally, regardless of what patriotic verses might have to say on the matter.  The fear for one's life and fear for the future focus man's attention to the details of the bigger picture: I'm still alive, my close one's are still alive, my bridge has not been destroyed, the factory I work in has not been destroyed, there are towns where it's a lot worse than where I am...  However the sum total of the details of destruction will only present itself before the eyes of the people once this wrath of God passes, once the bleeding stops.

The list of infrastructures and capital buildings which have been destroyed in this country is lengthy, while the reading of this inventory, putting aside banal economic statistics, will reveal to us one extremely human dimension of all that destruction: our fatherland is being destroyed.  All those hydroelectric plants, bridges, highway overpasses, railway lines, factories, all of them are the product of the sweat and labour of the pre-Milosevic Serbia, and the reading out loud of the inventory of everything which was worth destroying in this land will draw attention to a paradox of which we were all too much aware, although it was never possible to see it so clearly in such brutal light: in a full decade in power this regime has not managed to erect anything worthy of a military target.  The only exception is the bridge near Ostruznica in the Belgrade part of the highway junction, a bridge which was recently bombed.  But even that bridge proves the basic rule: it was never open for traffic and people remember it only from its pre-election, festive opening which we saw replayed on state television countless times, while the actual practical use of this bridge was equivalent to the famous "high speed railways" - i.e. no actual use whatsoever.

Whatever anyone of us might think about the enthusiasm of the fathers of the children who are now ruling this country, regardless of the way we might interpret that enthusiasm, whatever standards we choose to apply to the beauty of all that industry, its usefulness, productiveness and economic value, all these accomplishments were works of construction, that is to say of essentially positive enthusiasm and political optimism.  Even the inheritance left to us by our grandfathers has not gone unscathed, like the monumental state factory in Kragujevac, the modern Zastava.  But a glance at the lengthy list of everything being destroyed now in Serbia will not reveal anything which has been erected by the present regime, a regime which promised so much the renewal of Serbia.

The results of a policy can be assessed in different ways: by the extent of rights of the individual and the society at large, by the degree of contentment among individuals and the collective, by accomplished freedoms, by the standard of living of citizens and the community, by the level of literacy and general education, by the quality of health care, by national dignity, by the nature of the relations with "the rest of the world" and by a thousand other ways.  However, in the same way that entire epochs are marked by construction feats, in that same way the worth and value of a political regime is marked even in the collective, national memory by the degree to which it erected and opened ways toward a better life.  The present regime was preoccupied by different types of projects which wasted human energy and enthusiasm, money and the people's strength, producing ultimately the porcupine effect - energy which in a given biochemical process results in one's quails stiffening as part of a desperate defence mechanism.  Now the whole of Serbia is finding itself is this unenviable position: stiff and desperate.  Serbia is trying to save its head and is ready to believe how one day, when all this blows over, she will build all this anew, which is something that these people who did not manage to build anything are trying to convince us of - in earnest.  But Ladies and Gentlemen, do take the time to question the Serbian farmer, that same farmer who will soon be joined by the destroyed working class of Serbia, is he more glad to get a new field or to keep that which his father left him, and would he at all get a new field if he proved himself incapable of maintaining the one he already had?

Dragoljub Zarkovic