The Defeat of Serbia

The talk with VREME, which took place several hours later in a depressive atmosphere at the independent radio station B 92 where Djilas is an editor, showed with what kind of feelings this student of aircraft mechanics at the Faculty of engineering is leaving politics.

After the students' protest, one of your professors, Bogdan Bogdanovic, forecast that they would drive you all away from here, one by one. Has your "parallel Serbia" been defeated?

Serbia as a whole has been defeated. The results of the elections are a defeat for our entire country. The option which, according to my opinion, leads to a catastrophe, has been chosen. However, what we did can never be defeated. We did it with our heart. Something like that happens once in a lifetime and some never experience anything like it. I said yesterday that history would show that we were right, only then it will be too late for many of us. It will never be too late for them, because it is all the same to them...

Frankly speaking, the students behaved like some kind of teachers. However, no one learned anything from that, neither the authorities whom you addressed directly, nor the opposition to which you sent messages in an indirect way.

We really did address the authorities directly and the opposition indirectly. The authorities didn't grant any of our requests. On the other hand, it is only the authorities that learned a lesson from the whole story, they introduced young people into their ranks. The opposition learned absolutely nothing, it did not manage to include young people in its ranks, it remained as it was before, disunited and with its oscillations.

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Some say that the hatred the society is showing towards the young generation is a sign that it is sick.

I would not generalize. Not all old people are against changes, just all not all the young are for them... The young have lived less in this system, they are less indoctrinated, their heads have not been filled so much, they bent less, which the older people had to do for years.

You said that isolation also strengthens the existing authorities, that it is destroying the society...

We will create an enormous gap between the world and ourselves which we will not be able to bridge. This is what the authorities do not understand.

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The greatest interference is when someone concludes that we can live with the sanctions, that is, without computers, which largely determines the level of scientific development. Many are leaving the country because of this...

The best are leaving. One should take a look at who is standing in the lines in front of embassies. These are highly educated people, and without them there is no possibility of the country getting out of the crisis. An old piece of information says that a quarter of the graduate students of the Faculty of electrical engineering go abroad; under the present circumstances they now account for one half, and there is the danger of this figure becoming three quarters. What an expense! We will create a gap which we will not be able to bridge. On the other hand, why should a young person stay here and work for one hundred Deutsche marks. I have nothing to reproach these people for. The head of a mental institution recently said about his patients: "They are not 'lunatics', they just have different standards than we do. If there were more of them, we would be the 'lunatics'". At these elections there were more of them than us. We do not consider normal for people who have brought about war, refugees and poverty to stay where they are. For the citizens of Serbia, this is normal. There are more of them. In this whole story, the only question is how we will be closed - with or without inverted commas. The thing is that we have no future in this country. There will be a new conflict, perhaps in Kosovo, because the Albanian side will also believe that it can get its state through war. Another negative selection will take place in that war, young people will get killed, others will disappear, run away from here, so that after the war, the authorities will once again have the advantage since those who vote for them will not be the victims, it will be those who are against them.

Let us be honest, the students' protest also burst like a soap bubble. How do you explain that unbelievable bad form. Almost nothing was left after the protest, the written slogans were taken off the walls, no organization outlived it. As is the tradition, some memories will remain...

There are people who are trying to form a students' organization which would be called the Students' parliament. I will never understand why those people who rallied at the time were not ready to form an organization. I know that the state largely contributed to that by infiltrating some of its people to break it all up from the inside.

Will you continue to deal with politics?

Well, not now... But I don't know whether I will deal with it in the future... I don't see how I could deal with politics in a way that would be useful for anyone.