The Keepers of the Fortress

This week everybody in Serbia must have heard what the Chancellor of Belgrade University thinks of Soros. All carried his statement in the regime daily Borba that Soros must be stopped, that his aid must be turned down and that he must be prevented from "getting into schools and the University." This same paper has dealt with subject on several occasions. After the Chancellor, the director of the Serbian Clinical Center bragged that he had turned down all humanitarian aid offered by the Soros Foundation and prevented him from "infiltrating" into Serbia's health institutions. Soros is not going to educate our children and help heal the sick. Soros is the man who signed the appeal for an intervention against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's gunmen, a long time before Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic discovered that Sarajevo was being shelled, and decided that he had always been in favor of peace. Does he think that he can help the people and be against the regime? Doesn't he know that the Serbs don't make such differences? Until he learns this, let him see what he's going to do with his money and who he's going to give it to. This terrible revenge will reach its apogee when television remembers to show some dying patient who refuses to take medicine from Soros. Best of all a child: so small and already prepared to suffer a sacrifice for the Serbian cause.

We all know that the roads in one's career here can be incomprehensible and paradoxical, but I refuse to believe that someone who has reached the position of Chancellor or head of a clinic can really be a complete and utter idiot. Such people have to be average professionals at least, which means that they follow a certain logic, and hide this capability purposely when higher interests demand it. And for some reason higher interests here never require that fools look intelligent, but always the other way round.

That is why we are dealing with a false debate, in which, because of the founded assumption that the public is gullible, a man must answer false arguments seriously. The campaign in the daily Borba grows and flowers; the directors of Belgrade high schools have appeared and they claim that Soros is creating janissaries out of our children and the CIA is at the back of it all. A young League of Communists - Movement for Yugoslavia (SKPJ) official said that the matter concerned a political-espionage organization. He's the only one I believe to be saying what he thinks, since his hard-line party sincerely nurtures a famous history of unmasking foreign agents.

However, it is not clear why all this paranoid cacophony all of a sudden, when Milosevic is trying to break out of the international quarantine. It can't be that someone in Borba, which just has an empty building, believes that Soros has lured away the people and is now seeking revenge. The SKPJ would not protest against presents in medicine and humanitarian aid, regardless of where they might come from. Soros is now what UNRA was a long time ago, and the Communists at the time never thought of returning the packages or making the people vomit up the American cheddar cheese they had eaten. But, it is quite another thing if some unreliable children can go abroad and get educated. If the SKPJ has launched the campaign against Soros then this could be the reason, because this party firmly counts on youth and the future, and fears that the naive kids might even like what they find in the outside world. They could be impressed by the notorious false glitter and illusion of freedom and wealth, and then they won't be able to admire domestic misery sincerely any more.

However, I don't think that the SKPJ is the only guilty party here. But, let's answer a reasonable question: why should anyone give us anything? Isn't that suspect? Can a private businessman spend millions of dollars here without any special interest? In this respect we must trust in the efficiency of the competent services which have had sufficient time so far to discover and prove espionage and a special war, and who would certainly not balk from announcing them. No, the answer is much more simple and not at all secret, and the story could turn out to be instructive, and isn't all that long.

April is the month when tax returns are filled out in America. There is probably no country in the world where the people don't find it so hard to give to the state as in America, where they are always asking themselves if they really need the state all that much. The question of how the taxpayers' money is spent is a very serious issue, and one that the citizens follow avidly. That is why in America, money which you have given for some general cause can be deducted from your tax returns. Some wealthy men like to decide for themselves where this surplus money, which the state takes, will go, and they found foundations or build schools and hospitals which then get named after them. This is the source of all this philanthropy.

George Soros left Hungary a long time ago, and was educated in London where he remembered Carl Popper's theory of an open society, and after accumulating his wealth in America, he decided to help the opening up of Eastern Europe. In America this was regarded as a rather eccentric idea and that he was throwing millions of dollars down the drain. Accusations made here against Soros can be heard in Eastern Europe too, but now the ideological paranoiacs are mostly in the opposition. But to get back home. Let Soros worry about how he is going to fill in his tax returns if his foundation here is prevented from carrying out its activities. Let's take it that in all this, the medicine, aid to culture, education and media are not the most important thing. What is particularly morbid about the action "Don't give your child to Soros" is that it proves how strong primitive backwardness is here, and how quickly is renews, this panic fear and shame of foreign countries, against which walls of stupidity and ignorance are raised. It seems that the prevailing belief is that only this can preserve our national identity - as if it consists only of stupidity and ignorance.

If Milosevic has realized that he no longer needs the war and sanctions have lost their charm, it is obvious that he and his regime are still infinitely far from the rest of the world. Even if they wish to remove some diplomatic, financial and economic obstacles, they are still horrified of any free exchange and communication. Serbia is defined as a fortress in a hostile surrounding and it is defending itself with all means from increasingly cunning and subtle attacks from outside, which have taken the form of medicine and humanitarian aid. In the final run, the war is the result of such an atmosphere and awareness, and while this lasts, it can always be renewed.

An enormous effort has been made to remove all that looked foreign from these parts. Nationalists and communists have cooperated in achieving this goal. Anything that was any good didn't have a chance of passing though this double check. It turns out that Serbia is what you get when you remove the rest of the world. Those who resembled others in some way have left, withdrawn, retired or are silent. The emptiness which has been left is first being filled by cheap imitators, who can easily gratify the hunger for something different. We will call the world and it will inevitably start coming back, but in the order in which one comes to a wild country: first the adventurers and the traders, and whoever lives long enough, will be able to see how far we've gone.