The Barbarians Have Won

by Aleksandar Ciric

Like it or not, Europe will enter 1992 united. Yugoslavia, however, won't. With the historic simplification it would be easy to say that a united Europe represents the first real victory of those barbarians who had, fifteen centuries ago, destroyed the Roman Empire with the sole ambition to later reconstruct it.

The statistical data inform us that the there are 23 million people living in the Balkans today who were the citizens of Yugoslavia for different reasons, not least because the country they were born in carries that name. They were condemned either by the European or the domestic barbarians to live in an archipelago which is getting ever smaller. The "chopped up" parts of Yugoslavia may be our only hope: when the size of each of the "autonomous regions" is reduced to suit the individual, may be we will get the chance to be human again.