Homeland

I will never be able to understand why journalists believe that the Serbian government is any stupider than the Serbian citizens. They are constantly pointing towards government officials, asking them where the money from the sale of the Serbian telecom company has gone, i.e. why those funds weren't deposited in the country at a local bank. Even those who ask these questions, if they have any funds at all, do not keep them in local banks, just as Milutin Mrkonjic, the CIP director and the government stronghold during all the pre-election promises ("fast railroad tracks"), didn't keep his here. His 160.000 German marks were recently stolen from his bedroom by some thieves. Others place as much trust in the local banks as he had, the others being the so-called average citizens, including the Serbian government, who, as can be logically deduced, knows best what the situation in the Serbian banks is.

Here people are divided into the following categories: those who have limited funds hide them in their knickers, and those who have huge sums deposit them in a Cypriot bank. Mrkonjic is no exception, since his 160 thousand marks mean as much to him personally as 1600 marks do to others who hide them in their drawers. So much for the institutions of the system, while banks are without a doubt, one of the fundamental institutions of modern days.

Our tragedy lays in the fact that all our institution are the same as our banks, that is, that we have as much trust in the courts, television, parliament and others as we have for the banks. Which is why hardly anyone is prepared to entrust their own fate and their own money to those institutions. When Milosevic called upon us in his swearing-in speech to do all that we can for our homeland, our logical reasoning makes us think - what has the homeland done for us? When minister Milan Beko states that money lies within the domestic banking system, meaning that it is deposited in an international account which is exclusively accessible to the Serbian government, then he is the first to express a healthy amount of skepticism towards the values of the domestic institutions. That should be viewed in a positive manner as rational behavior. However isn't it also hypocritical to demand of the citizens trust what the government refuses to?