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nika_829 мая 2023 г.Every time I see a photo of Mira Marković, Slobodan Milošević’s wife, or her image on a TV screen, I feel the urge to tell her that her hair and her dresses are so hopelessly unfashionable that she must do something about them. Not that I am myself a fashion slave. But she looks so far from stylish or even tasteful.
1145- nika_829 мая 2023 г.
What I missed in these biographies of Milošević was the other side of him, his private face. It seemed his biographers could touch only his surface, the shell, not the essence of the man.
1162 - nika_829 мая 2023 г.Читать далее
I read four biographies of Slobodan Milošević and the diary of his wife, Mira Marković, in the hope of understanding the motives of the man. But every new biography added to my disappointment. The books by Dusko Doder, Florance Hartmann, Slavoljub Djukić, and Vidosav Stefanović focus on just one or two aspects of him: his climb to the presidency and his role in the war. They are political biographies. Still, from time to time there emerges a shrewd, merciless, unsentimental Communist Party bureaucrat who is, above all, an opportunist.
1148 - nika_829 мая 2023 г.
Most probably, what Milošević believed was that he could control the power of nationalism and manipulate it for his own benefit. He was a skillful demagogue riding on the patriotic feelings of others. The paradox of Milošević is that he was neither a Communist nor a nationalist but an opportunist capable of using any ideology that would help him to remain in power. Opportunism might be his most important characteristic. If it was nationalism that would keep him in power, so be it.
1145 - nika_829 мая 2023 г.Читать далее
It is easy to think that people in Yugoslavia would be happy to finally get rid of a dictator, which Tito, no doubt, was. But they were not happy. When he eventually died, they were surprised and devastated. I remember men and women crying in the streets for days after his death, wandering around like lost children. His death was a major catastrophe, like an earthquake or a flood. There was a feeling of a terrible loss, of fear of what would happen now, a prevailing atmosphere of despair . . . It was easy for Slobodan Milošević to fill that emotional hunger.
1143 - nika_83 мая 2023 г.
The extermination of Jews also began with small steps. Little things, such as not being allowed to buy flowers in a local shop, have your hair cut at the hairdresser, or ride a streetcar, eventually led them to the gas chamber.
1189 - nika_82 мая 2023 г.
Now I realize how much we are all poisoned by the trials depicted in television shows and Hollywood movies, with their rapid exchanges of arguments between good-looking lawyers in expensive suits. In The Hague there is no such drama. The drama here is that everything really happened: there were real deaths, real victims, and real murderers. Real blood. The drama is that there can be no escape from that reality.
1158 - nika_810 июня 2023 г.Читать далее
Goran Jelisić grew up in a working-class family in the small town of Bijeljina, which was about 40 percent Muslim. His mother worked, so he was raised by his grandmother. He grew up on a street where Serbs and Muslims lived together, and many friends of his family were Muslims. They played together, went together to school, to bars, to soccer games. He did not pay any attention to their Muslim nationality, nor did they to his Serbian one. He was never heard to utter an offensive word about anyone.
1044 - nika_86 июня 2023 г.
Serbs also have problems with the truth. In their eyes, they, the Serbs, are the biggest victims of both Milošević and NATO. Indeed, the Serbian society has suffered severe consequences—from embargoes to NATO bombing—as a result of the wars it waged against its neighbors, but the whole truth about what happened has not yet surfaced or become part of the public debate.
1051 - nika_81 июня 2023 г.Читать далее
Only now can I understand how easy it is to start a war in the absence of facts. War does not come from nowhere; I saw in Yugoslavia that it must be prepared. It is easy for political leaders to use images like the ones that I remember, to use people’s emotional memory and build hatred upon it. Because in totalitarian societies, where there is no true history, each person has in his own memory a collection of such images, and it becomes dangerous if he has nothing more than that. Political leaders can appeal to these images, mix them with popular mythology, and stir emotions by repeating propaganda endlessly on television.
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