The Third Man In Belgrade

If the standards of the ruling monster patriotism are applied, then one of the greatest ``fighters for the Serbian cause'' Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic can certainly fit into the category of dubious patriots, if not that of authentic traitors. After several days of denial, in the letter he sent to United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali last week Karadzic made a humble admission that the Serbs had shelled the UNPROFOR headquarters in Sarajevo, although by mistake. This provoked severe reaction in the world and once again brought Pale close to the real possibility of bombardement. Just before Karadzic as the Supreme Commander admitted shelling and promised that irresponsible officers would be arrested, Assistant Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army Headquarters Major General Milan Gvero stated, without blinking his eye, that this latest case like the previous ones represented an already ``proven scenario.'' General Gvero asserted that on the eve of important peace talks the Muslim side always stages something or kills its own people, which it later ascribes to the Serb side.

Leader of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) Vojislav Seselj, the man who has for a while now held the title of a supreme arbiter of reason, patriotism, honesty and the like in all Serbian lands, went much further than General Gvero. A day before Radovan Karadzic admitted that his soldiers fired on the UNPROFOR command, at the press conference Seselj claimed with the air of usual self-confidence that he had ``a reliable information'' that the shelling of UNPROFOR was contrived by the CIA and the people from the United Nations, as agreed with the Muslim side, in order to weaken the Serb negotiating position in Geneva. ``I haven't got a proof, but I do have a reliable information,'' said Seselj, uttering a characteristic sentence which has always had a stronger impact in this region than any concrete proofs.

In the country of a total eclipse of information where the messages of Serb enemies lurking in every particle of air are tattooed into the brains of the common folk through the TV screens every evening, a reference to a ``reliable'' information about a new planetary conspiracy against the Serbs cannot do any harm, not even to the one who is so obviously and so speedily caught lying. But, why would it cause harm when most of those who are exposing themselves to an unprecedented media radiation every night are convinced that the Serbs in this just war that was ``imposed on them'' cannot possibly hurt anyone, not even by accident. The Institute for Social Sciences in Belgrade has recently conducted an opinion poll whose results show that the current Serbian policy and the media have produced worrisome xenophobia in Serbia. Namely, about 75 per cent of those polled believe that only the Serbs, Russians and Greeks are honest peoples against the whole world and insisted that there is a conspiracy against the Serbs. The number of those who believe that the break-up of the former Yugoslavia occurred because of the interests of the ``Comintern'' which no longer exists is probably as high. Or of those who explain it by the fact that the Vatican wants to get access to the warm seas at any cost. No one can dissuade these people that we do not have nuclear arms, that we cannot fire on Rome, London or even Washington for that matter with special rockets unknown to the rest of the world, that one Awax surveillance plane did not explode in the skies over Serbia, that we do not have ``MIG-21...''

When it comes to the shelling of UNPROFOR in Sarajevo, Seselj did not have anything to lose by ``leaping before he looked'' as he usual does and by inventing ``a reliable information.'' However, Radovan Karadzic did lose a lot this time in the eyes of this people, not because his forces attacked UNPROFOR but because he admitted it. The thing is that the others attack as well, but they keep their mouths shut. To admit to Boutros Boutros Ghali and to Clinton that UNPROFOR did not shell itself according to the Muslim recipe and that it was us who did it as the heat and brandy got to them represents the worst form of treason and destruction of the angelic image of the Serbs in this war. If one scratched below the surface, he could come across a reliable information that Karadzic himself has started to plot with the CIA and to bend under various pressures, which is to say that he gave up on ``the Serbian cause, freedom and faith on the cold Geneva lake.'' One more mistake of this kind could soon open a complete ``Karadzic Dossier.''

In ``The Third Man,'' the book by Graham Greene, which deals with the atmosphere in the postwar Vienna divided into the occupied zones the main character says ``one's dossier is never quite complete.'' ``One case is never truly completed, not even after a century, when all the participants are dead,'' he adds. Many interesting parallels can be drawn between Vienna from ``The Third Man'' and Belgrade of today. Everybody in Greene's novel was involved in some kind of racketeering, whose organisation perfectly resembled a totalitarian party--numerous small racketeers had a clear conscience because they worked for their superiors and big bosses. In Vienna, just as in Belgrade today, many people vanish without a trace and dossiers spring up, the only difference is that in Vienna it is penicillin which was in short supply as compared to oil and hard currencies which are lacking in Belgrade.

Belgrade of today, where bombing is a word most frequently uttered over the past months, is actually bombed every day by various explosives and cocktails of truths, semi-truths and lies about the people and events. In the overall chaos it has become very difficult to separate an information from a misinformation, a secret from an imputation, or to establish what is coming from the police kitchens and what from the amateurish ``reliable sources,'' and in what cases the two are working together. The only thing which is certain is that the dirtiest blows in politics, as in water-polo, are delivered under the water, and as such cannot be seen.

The inflation of everything, and especially of money, has created boundless room for various irrationalities. Every rumour is taken as a ``change of some truth'' at least. Prevailing poverty has given birth to a need for informer's ways. Every neighbour who is seen with two bags of washing powder, ten kilos of sugar or a canister of petrol becomes a potential member of some invisible black-market ``penicillin circle'' as in ``The Third Man.'' It might happen soon that the powerful and numerous Serbian police asks the citizens to temporarily suspend their informing as they are unable to process all reports.

In the country where ``reliable reports'' abound, many things on which our lives are directly dependent remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps, he who has learned from his ``reliable sources'' what the CIA and UNPROFOR are plotting together with the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo could help us find out how much money is printed in Yugoslavia, what private firms are using it for their needs or could solve the enigma why the street dealers get to see new bank notes sooner than the unlucky governor.

``I have no proof, but I claim'' is what has become a motto of our time, while the dossiers which have filled the pages of newspapers for months now have become the most common genre. Every day party policemen and informers feed the journalists with new proofs about the persons for whom a political death is planned. A number of cases, which are bound to figure prominently in the upcoming weeks, were prepared according to the same principle in various kitchens over the last few days. President of Serb Krajina Goran Hadzic was accused of being a common war profiteer who took the fuel from the Krajina tanks and stuffed his pockets. Defending himself from such accusations, Hadzic simultaneously opened the case of Rade Leskovac, leader of the Radicals from Krajina, who was accused of being Tudjman's man and of having financially supported the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

A direct conflict between two parties, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) and the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), over who will be in power in Serb Krajina seems not to be the only reason behind this clash of Hadzic and Leskovac. It seems that the lords of this war have started to fight for control of different markets once the shooting, mass destruction and killing is over. As someone has already noted, the time has come that payments in a share of power and honour be made to numerous ``patriots.'' There is no sufficient evidence for this assertion, but ``those well informed'' say that, as in the book, members of various secret circles who deal with oil and patriotism, the most competitive goods in this region, will soon start to emerge from the sewers and settle their accounts.