The cult of the superman

Will Milosevic’s death signal the end of an era of vendetta and nationalism?

Mehru Jaffer Vienna

Slobodan Milosevic is dead!
Long live vendettas and war?
So it seems, as nationalist passions, panic and paranoia continue to cushion life. Despite all our progress there seems to be no cure for fear that fans the fire of uncertainty in our midst faster than the HIV virus and makes many more similar to Milosevic indulge in dangerous dreams.

Today television reports of the funeral of Milosevic mingle with a host of images from Pamela Rooks’ film A Train to Pakistan, Hotel Rwanda and Crash, the year’s top film at the Oscars, with accounts by historians of women dressed in rags and with pails, moving rubble soon after the second world war in Germany when rations were down to 900 calories a day throughout 1945.

Headlines of Sunni aggression fades into Shia anger in Iraq. The harassment of Arab populations mostly by Slav Jews in the Middle East pans to Arab annoyance with the Persian point of view and to young Turks who turn their back on Europe in search of their Central Asian roots in the former republics of Soviet Russia? Christians are reported to kill Muslims and Muslims Christians in Nigeria, most recently, over a god who has been pleading since eternity with human beings to live in peace and unity with each other.

Not wanting to be left behind in a world that crowns competition at the cost of cooperation Indians arm themselves with a nuclear arsenal that promises to make the Mahabharata look like peanuts after it is all over.

I first heard of Milosevic in 1987 while researching for a feature for the BBC.

Misha Glenny, the BBC’s World Service Central European correspondent was based in Vienna and described Milosevic as a bright, young but eerily cold banker. Milosevic had become increasingly popular with the Serbian League of Communists in a Yugoslavia that was disintegrating in the absence of a leader who could convince the Yugoslavs that it was possible for all of them to live together in one country.

Milosevic chose to console insecure populations staring into an uncertain future by pointing out to the “other” as the cause of all their woes. He openly appealed to nationalist sentiments to war for Greater Serbia, forcing other provinces of Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Macedonian to do the same. He opened old wounds and allowed fresh blood to spill over a country that should have been looking forward, like most of us, to a little more peace and prosperity in the new millennium.

Instead hostilities of the past were dug up, of times, when Croats and Serbs had fought wars over the superiority of their respective language, that is as similar to each other as Urdu is to Hindi, except the Croats use the Latin script and Serbs the Cyrillic. Tito’s secularism was expected to blur many such differences between Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and the Muslims who are either ethnic Croats or Serbs. Instead Bosnia was bombed and punished in the Balkan war of the 1990s because, it seems, it was so charmingly cosmopolitan.

By 1988 Milosevic was a cult figure amongst a people desperately in need of a superman although none of his ideas to boost the economy did any good.

Milosevic continued to pose as if he was born to undo historical wrongs and to transform Serbia, former Yugoslavia’s largest republic, into an independent island flowing in milk and honey.

“Using most of the organs of power at his disposal he risked awakening a slumbering giant and orchestrated a campaign of mass rallies at which the symbolism of both Serbian and Yugoslav communism was fused with the icons of Serbian nationalism and the Orthodox Church to form a weird ideological alloy,” writes Glenny in The Rebirth of History.

And the Albanian community in Kosovo, the poorest part of the Balkans became the ultimate scapegoat. Nearly 1.5 million people were displaced including Serbs and 250,000 killed in the Balkans war.

“This is time for both closure and commencement in Serbia: closure of an era rooted in myth, victimhood and maudlin self-pity, and a long overdue commencement of Serbia’s coming to terms with its own past and the bloody role its politicians and generals played in fomenting war. Now, more than ever, Serbia can, indeed must, finally break free of Slobodan Milosevic’s dark legacy, so that the country can take its rightful place in Europe,” feels Adam LeBor, author of Milosevic: A Biography.

Hope all those other Milosevic, still alive all over the world, are listening?