A thousand words to Dobrica Cosic

I was looking at and listening to your address to Montenegro's chiefs. It was around midnight and tiding freshness streamed in making me think clearer, so I told my dog: what this man speaks in Nightmare land's Southwest is tantamount to what his hired contractor spoke about these days in its Southeast.

To me, Sir, you looked like a conceited scenarist taking over the direction in his last-minute effort to save the show.

And you were dealing with the dark aims of the sanctions, the mysterious resumption of World War Two, the World's stage-managed invasion of "Tiny Serbia" hated primeval by all and one, of course, who take the powers of disguised communists only as a pretext for their obscure and perilous aims. Yet they will have to lift the sanctions once they realize the sanctions do not pay, and Our Truth will certainly find its way to the stubborn foreign mind.

I used to believe, Sir, that foolishness like this may only come from court philosophers, petty servants of the regime and mercenary writers.

An electronic camera is a wicked gadget. Its close-up may reveal things undreamed-of by your industrious minister of information. Its cool sight focused on your face veiled in huge heavy glasses to show us a long-developed and irreversible delirium. I have always shrunk from people wearing heavy glasses; it is a thick-lensed wall that separates these people from realities, shutting them into a domain of slanted and self-sufficient phantasms.

And there was the murmur of your voice. You were confident that you were entitled to define the misfortune of this nation by quoting yourself in a tired but know-it-all manner. For a moment you appeared to be after some perverted charm that was arising from the grandeur of popular misfortune. But, Honorable Sir, there is no grandeur in this misfortune. There is only the size of the misfortune.

I wonder, Sir, do you have any idea at all about the true proportions of this misfortune? As Dr. Pupovac has recently estimated, for under one-third of all Serbs in Krajina to be able to play "The State," the other third had to become refugees for life, and the last third shuddered and stayed cowered. The dead are not to be counted in. After all, they are dead for themselves. The same ominous One-Third Regularity is now at work in Bosnia, but its effects are tenfold. One-third of Bosnia's population fled from the map-drawing obsessions of a maddened doctor for the mad, from a Shakespearean scholar who learnt nothing from Shakespeare, and from a belligerent old woman.

You, Mr. Cosic, and he who is, according to you, "Serbia's greatest politician next to Nikola Pasic," have slandered this nation for a long time, ridiculing its myths. You have turned people into haughty conquistadors, forcing them to take up all military hardware of former Yugoslavia and setting them on their neighbors. The neighbors who might be selfish, perhaps treacherous, perhaps ready to play tricks, perhaps disliking us, perhaps with evil intentions, but certainly not so evil themselves that they had to be attacked by fire and sword, with guns of all caliber's, napalm, aircraft and "sow bombs." You will never be forgiven for this "sow bomb" in any history homework. Dirty campaigns will never change to grandiose triumphs.

It may perhaps happen, as you may wish for, that the world will accept your campaigns as a fait accompli. But look at the map of that wished-for and enlarged State: does it not resemble an ugly insect with long, hairy legs? And each of the legs had cost scores of thousands lives. "Tiny Serbia" might be enlarged, but people in it would feel cramped. What will be the feelings with which people will wake up in this country created by killing those who had been neighbors until yesterday and by carrying out the horrifying E.C. (short for ethnic cleansing). Turbines on the Drina river, they say, have these days been mincing human bodies for the "streams of history" to be "streamlined" still further.

Never, literally never, will we be able to find a sufficient number of right words so that we, the inhabitants of a filthy chimerical realm, could reveal -- for tomorrow's inhabitants of a dumb made-up historical realm -- all the horror of an insane plan that leers at butchered throats, crippled children, and endless columns of those alive, the columns of people crying and carrying bundles while rushing out of the range of the "current historical mainstream."

Nationalism is the last resort of the worthless.

Every individual of Serb nationality, if at all normal, must, deep within his self, renounce being a Serb your style. Today already, those are many who are trying to be Serbs "in a different key." Our fellow tribesmen will tomorrow (and long after) speak about their national feelings with inevitable humor. That will mark only the beginning of a different Serbia. Only heels believe they may profit by a fact stated in their birth certificate. Only super-heels could have reassured the smaller-scale heels (present in every nation) that a birth certificate can supersede a master's license, a university diploma, talents and performance.

This nation, let us hope, will be able to muster up sufficient strength to dump away in history all those who have made its past trite, its present ghastly and its future shameful.