April 20th, 1999

Live targets

    Day by day we watch their images on TV and in papers, accompanied by the news of how Serbs challenge the bombing. They stand on the bridges and hold each other's hands, or gather on a mid-Belgrade square where daily rock concerts are held. On their chests, there is a paper target attached. The word "target" is written in English, because the message is addressing the foreigners, the West, the world which plotted against them. Just the same paper targets are what their activists hand to people who take part in anti-bombing protests on the streets of German or Italian cities. The reporters tell that the targets are fashionable, big ones printed on T-shirts or quite small badge-like ones to pin into a collar. In a short time the Serbs have imposed the target as their trademark, a mark under which they unitedly, bravely and decisively stand against all the world. Wearing it, they turn themselves into live targets and acknowledge everyone that the NATO bombs are made for people, no matter how much may the western politicians say that it's not the case. And here, to make their job easier, they put that sign on themselves so let them shoot them, the peaceful and innocent citizens of a small, unjustly attacked country.

    Those people are not afraid of turning their children into live targets.

    The Time magazine has published a picture of a little girl in red jacket, holding the paper with circles in her hand. The girl didn't take it by herself; someone put it in her hands. That someone, her father, mother, teacher, neighbor, has played with the symbolic of the target in an extraordina rily cynical way. Putting that sign on a child, therefore, in this case, a really innocent human being, while being a citizen of Serbia, means behaving extremely cynically. Everybody still remembers similar pictures from Sarajevo a couple of years ago, showing children just like the Belgrade little girl. But those children wear no target, they are a target. On the photographs and pictures we remember they are dead or wounded, hit by sniper or grenade, whatever. CNN had ran a documentary last year about such a girl who was wonderfully dancing. In the film, her mother shows her dancing garment, bag, her shoes. After Sarajevo, when children were targets, it is not possible for any sane person to use the target this way. Except in the obviously disturbed system of values and perverted meanings, in the autistic empire of Serbia.

    And so, the spring Sun shines over Belgrade as innocent target-citizens stand and listen to a concert, then they go home. Have a lunch, read newspapers , shower, bake cakes. During the nights, they are disturbed by explosions of some refinery, factory or ministry, flames rising to the sky and fear that the bombs may fall five hundred meters to the left or right. But, to differ from the citizens of Sarajevo, the citizens of Belgrade, despite accidental casualties, are not a target. They know it, and it makes the night sufferable, in spite of the fear. At the same time, few hundreds of kilometers away, some other citizens of the same state of Serbia, stand for days in mud, on the rain. Be it on the Macedonian border, at Blace crossing where 50,000 people live and die without food and medical aid in a 25 kilometer long column, or crammed in refugee camps across the Albanian border. They have nowhere to return to, no lunch, no news, no concert, no homeland. Nothing. They don't need the paper target, they need no symbols. They know they are the targets, each man, woman, child. A million of Kosovo Albanians are already displaced, which is just a finer word for ethnical cleansing.

    But they are - Albanians. They are something else. Namely, in this order of things in which the Serbs experience themselves as live targets and in which the target becomes a symbol of one nation's innocence - in that logical turnover it becomes possible to say that the Albanians have deserved such a destiny. Did they support the KLA terrorists and independent Kosovo? Did they call for a NATO intervention? Well there's their independence, there's their NATO... These, almost a million of, citizens of Serbia driven out of their homes, more than fifty destroyed villages of Kosovo, unknown number of killed civilians - in the perception of a man who listens to a concert in the middle of Belgrade all of that has nothing to do with himself, just as much as the bombing has none. Just as it has nothing with a citizen of Aleksinac, whose house was accidentally hit, nor with his wife who is lying in hospital, wounded. They are desperate. Why is that happening to them? What have they done wrong? They are ordinary people, working on their jobs, teachers, retired, students and no politicians. I don't know why do they bomb us, says a woman whose house was ruined. And now the same citizens of Serbia who are not Albanians, for the Albanians were long ago excluded not only from the citizen, but also from human status - the same people who were not concerned with neither Sarajevo, nor Srebrenica, nor Dubrovnik nor Vukovar, not even Drenica or Racak - they dare parade with target on their breast. For years they refused to understand they are in a war. War was none of their business, war was somewhere else. But suddenly they became victims and that's why they wear targets, probably completely unaware of the unbearable symbolic of the idea. Their hands are clean and their conscience appeased, even while their sons are on Kosovo, defending themselves against terrorists, of course.

    Peaceful citizens who protest in the spring sun or in the evening, in the candlelight (another perverted peace symbol) still refuse to understand that this is their war, it was as early as 1987, 1991, 1992, no matter how they they experience themselves as victims and not actors. Nobody expects these citizens to rejoice over the bombing of their own country. But, the autism they demonstrate is completely horrible, uncomprehendable. To add, putting a target on a child and imagining that it's the way to send the world a message of your innocence is a grotesque lie. Their fascinating autism is reflected directly in their refusing to understand it even now when they are punished, when they are bombed. They still ask themselves: what have we done? Did we maybe still do something wrong somewhere? This complete lack of doubt, of any questioning of their own deeds is amazing and terrifying. The answer they don't want to hear is quite simple. Yes, they, citizens of Serbia are responsible themselves f or the situation they found themselves in, they are responsible themselves for the bombing, just as they are responsible for the tragedy of Albanians and all the tragedies they caused before (just as, by the way, the Croats are responsible for Dretelj and Krajina). Their responsibility consists of keeping, for ten years and three wars now, one and the same man in power, Slobodan Milosevic. This political responsibility is somewhat decreased by political circumstances (exit from communism, lack of democratic tradition and clear political alternatives) but the moral responsibility remains. Still, Serbian citizens as of today's day don't connect the bombing with the rule of Milosevic, nor his rule with their own responsibility. No rule, not even a dictatorship, can stay without, at least silent, support of the citizens.

    Even as of today's day, even when they dare say something against Milosevic, the Serb intellectuals don't mention the Albanians and their tragedies. They are capable of lamenting over getting no help from the West, of nobody understanding them, while at the same time they ignore the suffering of their fellow citizens, as if they didn't exist. Therefore not one of them can be relieved the responsibility for keeping Milosevic in power, even if they weren't aware the responsibility. They didn't know the Albanians were suffering? They didn't hear? That's too bad. They could both hear and know if they only wanted. But this time too, just like before, they univocally and homogeneously continue to lie into the world's face. In spite of witnessings, reports, footage - in brief, facts. It is more important, meanwhile, that they stop lying to themselves, living in a closed system they created themselves.

    So we are witnessing of two parallel tragedies progressing in Serbia. First one is the suffering of Albanian people, their exodus, that some already call genocide. Reminding that their destiny is shared by Croats and Bosnians (and the Krajina Serbs as well) doesn't help. The other tragedy is the autism of the Serbian people, who are not aware of their political, moral and historical responsibility. But the Serbian people, just because it didn't know how to come to a showdown with Milosevic, can not enter history just as an innocent victim of his dictatorship and the aggression of the West.

    In vain are the targets on their heroic breasts. For as long as the Serbs behave as if they are innocent as citizens, and only the politicians are guilty, only Milosevic, or Seselj or Draskovic - there's no hope for any change. They'll just keep wandering, lying and parading for the world to see, in a grotesque carnival party on the streets of Belgrade. Neither eventual compromise which would leave Milosevic in power, nor a complete defeat and capitulation have no importance, unless the Serbs understand that the main part of the work to be done is left to themselves. They must do what the West can't do for them, nor can NATO, nor Soros, nor foreign loans, nor just anybody else. It's theirs to put down not only the regime of Milosevic, but also the blindedness, obedience, opportunism, indolence, manipulation and fear the system is based on. Therefore, they must understand that aside from change of power, they must change themselves. For starters, in a way to see humans in Albanians, to take them into account, to see their suffering, to have pity on them. There's no trace of such consciousness. Moreover, it seems it's scarcer than ever. For now, the target is the perverted symbol of the state of Serbian mind, still in the hands of the little girl, who is, by the way, not targeted by anyone.

Slavenka Drakulic
famous Croatian dissident