The Necrophiliac Regime

We are discussing the topic of health and politics with PhD. Vuk Stambolovic from the School of Medicine in Belgrade, the author of five books in the area of medicine and a member of the editorial staff of the prestigious British magazine "Social Science & Medicine", which is the most quoted in the world of health.

Following the news that the tranquilizer Bensedin is the most sought-after medicine in the pharmacies it may be concluded that the half of Serbia is depressed. During the conference on refugee problems held in Sombor it was reported that the suicide rate among the refugees is reaching alarming levels. What is the picture of the health of the nation?

The death rate is yet to be counted. Within biological systems it is lag-effect, so the current situation is in the greatest part resulting from the entire range of cumulative causes. Life can not advance in rot, and the key cause of what is currently happening is the process of rotting. The current necrophiliac regime led the country into the war and we are facing the consequences: not only economic and material depression in its wider sense, but also psychological depression. Over the last few years we have noted serious psycho-social regression because in the previous system, which I don't know how to name, we had some basis of a modern society, the beginning of organized institutions, and then this country has swept into a society where human relations are not regulated through institutions but biologically, through the survival of the fittest, as in any territory controlled by the Mafia.

Various "forgotten illnesses" have emerged...

First of all there's tuberculosis, then polio, and various infectious diseases. We are faced to a much greater extent with the whole specter of chronic diseases: from mental illnesses to cardiac and vascular, because the population is under long-lasting chronic stress.

What are the children mostly effected by?

The difficult situation of their parents with all of their tensions is automatically conveyed to the children. The children have a much more intense reaction and they are more subtly sensing what is happening to the parents, so they are under twofold stress - they react to both the mother's and the father's situation. And today in this country practically all of us are under stress. The misery is progressive and it lasts too long: poverty brings poor nutrition, worse conditions of housing, tensions have increased and aggression is horizontal (we are in conflict with our environment, members of the family, friends, colleagues), and it is not directed vertically, upon the layers that brought us here.

How would you describe the health policy of our government?

A health policy does not exist. The regime cares only about the groups that are important for maintaining the power. Its attitude towards the citizens is as if they were "planetary bacilli", which was also Hitler's stance on the human race. Life is really worthless here. It is not obvious only from the fact that people are killing each other in the streets in broad daylight, but also by those who die in the hospitals. I don't know what the is situation today, but a few days ago some hospitals in the Clinical Center had no elementary means for operations so they had to stop working.

Professor Field says that he could forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union based on a simple equation: he possessed the exact statistical data and he knew well the mechanisms ruling in that country. Do we have any official data?

No. The managers of all health institutions are the people from the system who either through their silence or by concealing information create a false image of the society we live in. The managers in many ministries and health institutions are the people of the apparatus: their mental picture is such that they do not dare speak against the system. They are characterized by the mentality of the prostitute - they are with everyone, but mostly with those who can pay the most, and it is the government, of course. Among the people in the health-care business there is no professional honesty. Honest professionals are scarce.

Are the assertions that the teaching staff is not selected on the basis of expertise but on political correctness true, and that the very enlistment in SPS or JUL launches their academic career?

The situation has never been worse. At the School of Medicine in Belgrade, in the English language teaching department, social medicine is taught by a person who does not speak English and has an interpreter to assist him. However, he is JUL's speaker for health care.

Health care is on the very verge of collapse, and at the same time, the regime media have been persuading us that we are almost in the world's top locations for heart implants, transsexual surgeries and so on.

It makes no sense that health care can function in an environment that lacks some basic means - like anesthetics and physiological solutions, due to which people die of the most banal things - to give enormous funds for those Potemkin villages such as the Cardiac-vascular hospital in Dedinje, the powerful technological base in the children's hospital in Tirsova Street or the Institute for Oncology... This high-tech medicine eats up enormous funds and takes on a comical form. The policy led by our government does not make effort to give any rational explanation for its irrational behavior. The only answer to all criticism is: "So, what?"

Four months of protests was a kind of healing for many people. Hope emerged...

That which is produced by current politics is the rotten society on its way to commit collective suicide, but not like those 29. Here we are speaking about hundreds and thousands of slow, premature deaths. During the protest strolls an explosion of life occurred - hope emerged that Serbia will pull out of the depression. This is the endeavor of life for self-preservation. The explosion of life was brought about by the people who have disassociated themselves from the forms that glorified war and necrophiliac values which led to it. These people rebelled against the elite, not only the political elite, but also against the scientific, cultural and clerical ones that drew us into the war. Let us hope that life will flourish again. But this hope is fragile. The politics which brought the war upon us is still in power. This necrophiliac regime is at war with the world and is losing it, but has no intention to let go. If these politics continue, the entire country will join the tail of the Halley-Bopp comet, but without the spaceship.