Oscars

In the race for awards, the film Titanic got 11 Oscars, while Vojislav Seselj got 15.  He missed the award for best directing because someone else was busy thinking up the conflict and resolution to the Serbian vaudeville of constituting the government, but he got many awards for secondary roles, special effects and, especially, for tone.  In this way the Radicals outdid Ben-Hur, believing, with reason, that the main reward is yet to come - that is to say, that this is not the best they can do.  The jury was very well disposed to the Radicals, or, more likely, were at a loss for what to do: in any case, there isn’t a Radical whose name I heard who has not become a minister, and there are even those Radical ministers of whom I never heard until the main “casting director”, Mirko Marjanovic, did not announce them to the public.

I have equal disdain for crime movies and films for which I already know the ending.  Friends tell me to go see the film Titanic, as it is not quite so simple: a ship did sink, but at the bottom there is a love story, and it is not known who perishes... In the Serbian political “Titanic” there is no love story, it seems to me, and it is certain who will perish.  Thus, you see, sometimes parallels assert themselves.

This issue of VREME deals extensively with events surrounding the governments of three states for which it would be advisable to adapt to transitions: it deals with the governments of Serbia, Russia and China.  If we say that the story of Russia is not entirely certain, and that a lot depends on Yeltsin’s unpredictable personality - even though chances are small that Russia would swerve from the course of reform - things with China and Serbia are quite certain.  Dzu Rongdji, the new Chinese Premier, is a personality on which world analysts agree in their assessments as being the right man in the right place, at the right time, while there isn’t an analyst who would not say for Seselj’s impressive entrance into the Serbian government that he is the wrong man at the wrong place, at a bad time.  The confirmation for such a thesis is given by a comparative analysis of priorities of the new Serbian government and political potentials for realizing such priorities.  In Mirko Markovic’s expose, the Government swears by the Dayton Agreement, by good relations with neighbors... while half the ministers in that same government declare that in Dayton, Serbian interests were betrayed and that neighbors do not exist.  Evidently, the Socialists sought rescue from the disaster of new elections in the manufacture of a kind of political schizophrenia which is setting Serbia further and further apart from the rest of the rational world.   This ship is hollow, and it is not necessary, in the interest of dramatic effects, for it to crash into an iceberg.