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Title: A War Nearby
Author: Lope Vargas
Date: 1999
Language: en
Topics: Diavolo in corpo, war, history
Source: Retrieved on June 17, 2012 from http://feartosleep.espivblogs.net/2012/06/16/a-war-nearby-by-lope-vargas-diavolo-in-corpo/

Lope Vargas

A War Nearby

In the years that followed the decomposition of the bureaucratic regimes

of eastern Europe, several “eulogizers” of our civilization coined the

description of the latest collective illusion to mark Western life. That

description—and who remembers anything else?—was the end of History. Not

just the victory of liberal capitalism over state capitalism, wrongly

called communism, but the idea that a world definitively pacified, a

world forgetful of past horrors, wars and massacres, would be born from

this victory. A happy world, perhaps just a bit boring, the planetary

advent of civilization after centuries of blood. This idea has

experienced alternating destinies for some time, to the detriment of

those few who still see the horror precisely in this civilization and

those many who have seen the daily horror of civilization tattoo itself

forever on their skin. While the more ingenuous among the parties

interested in the maintenance of the world order slept tranquilly on the

end of History,a not very small part of those who wanted to put history

back in motion slept just as placidly.

Most untimely descendents of positivism, the latter were still convinced

at bottom of the inevitability of civil progress. One still had to

struggle hard to change the world, but the opponent wasn’t as

bloodthirsty as it once was: several insurmountable limits of

correctness, if not humanity, had been set. And the worst beasts of the

past, those hidden in the corner of the consciousness of every one of

us—and not only in that of our adversary—promised not to reappear

anymore. The exploiters, civil; the exploited, irreproachable. But a

single word was sufficient to mark the funeral rites of these two brief

modern illusions. Try saying “Bosnia”, and everything that one believed

to be buried forever reappears beyond the hedge of our gardens. Bosnia

is the measure of how much blood capital demands, while it tells us

again what we did not want to know: whether History advances or has

stopped, we still live on the edge of horror.

HOW FAR IS YUGOSLAVIA?

As was predictable, after Bosnia, Kosovo followed, and maybe after

Kosovo, Macedonia will follow, in a tight sequence of massacres that

will make us wring our hands. From Sarajevo on, those who have been

responsible for the Yugoslav carnage have sought to hide their role in

the events; time after time, they have unloaded all guilt on the

bloodthirsty Balkan commanders, and now they have successfully defined

the NATO bombing as humanitarian intervention. On the other hand

however, everyone has sought a safe port against the storm of their

conscience, and all this shouting of “No to the war!” until one is

exhausted has only served to hide powerlessness in the face of such

frighteningly close and incomprehensible events. In search of any

certainty, so many have given heed to the orphans of Viet Nam and

Nicaragua, that they came to depict the Serbs as a small nation under

attack, determined to defend what is left of socialism with gun in hand.

From this one gets the unpresentable anti-imperialist slogans on the

walls and the posthumous elegies to Tito. Others have invoked diplomacy

and politics, that is to say, war by other means. Still others have

thought to escape from the horrors by taking refuge in the churches to

pray to the god in whose name the worst misdeeds have been committed.

These positions are not only the fruit of the fertile encounter between

stalinism and christianity; they are ways like others of keeping

Yugoslavia distant from our homes.

From the moment it began, our paid interpreters and commentators on

international politics have been revealing the particular reasons for

the latest Yugoslav war and for the western intervention. The elements

of the conflict—geopolitical and economic—have been patiently

enumerated. No one has been forced by counter-information to uncover

hidden and decisive truth. Everything is said about this war except the

essential, that which no further list of data can succeed in telling us.

If we want to try to achieve an understanding of the gangrene spreading

throughout the Balkans in recent years, we should not lose sight of the

social question: the history, on the one hand, of those who try to

accumulate wealth and power without many scruples and, on the other

hand, those who suffer conditions of life that are imposed on them and

at times try to rebel. The recent history of Yugoslavia creates a new

awareness. The clash that is born from social division does not

necessarily lead toward new and free worlds. Neither through the

superimposition of small changes which mold reality little by little in

the image of our dreams nor through the accumulation of the conditions

that will determine a definitive future explosion of the reality that

displeases us. The unfolding of this clash can only provoke those social

breaks in which everything finally becomes possible. And this everything

includes freedom, but also the worst of oppressions. It is only in light

of the social question that the ensemble of data that they have spewed

in our face about the current Balkan war can assume a certain,

frightening, coherence. If there is social division here as there is in

Yugoslavia; if the specific forms that the social struggle has assumed

in Yugoslavia was determined largely by necessities ripened in our

West—then we are already at war…yes, we, as well. And if this is not

enough for us, we would do well to be aware that nothing guarantees that

the mechanisms that drive so many Yugoslav exploited to participate in

this horror could not appear tomorrow precisely in the heart of our

civilized world. Now, Yugoslavia is not so far away.

THE BALKANS ON A CARD

Heading in the opposite direction to that taken by Theseus, in the end,

we follow the thread of social struggle to the center of the Balkan

labyrinth in order to get to know the Minotaur. Outside the labyrinth is

the Europe of the beginning of the 20^(th) century, the totality of

interests that outlined the present border of Albania in 1912 and led to

the organization of the territorial power that would take the name of

Yugoslavia around the Serbian state at the end of the first world war.

The Balkans never underwent that long historical process characteristic

of western Europe through which the borders of different kingdoms came

to approximately coincide with the idea of as many nations. The very

idea of a national state only appeared a short time ago in this

peninsula, which had been subdivided between the Hapsburg and Ottoman

empires until recently. Thus, the territory of the old Yugoslav

federation was actually the area in the Balkans where several different

populations mingled in the era of the great empires. Macedonians,

Bulgarians, Albanians, Croatians, Serbians and others populated this

region without giving it any national homogeneity. Just as the Italian

Renaissance carried in itself the prospects for the social changes that

rendered it possible, so the struggle of the Balkan populations against

Austrian and Turkish domination had social characteristics. But not

solely. If in western Europe the concept of the nation now rests on the

continuity of a power over a given territory, in the Balkans the

mythological element prevails: the darkness of foreign domination and

suffering followed a supposed “age of gold”, giving a mystical, almost

messianic, significance to the redemption of each ethnicity. Every

single national mythology has survived the collapse of two great

Empires, being exalted or repressed from time to time according to the

interests of different western powers that have sought to control the

region.

The Albanian national identity experienced a formidable thrust beginning

in 1910—when the Italian and Austrian chancelleries began to construct

an Albanian state under their protection in order guarantee their

hegemony over the Adriatic. It reached its peak with the annexation of

Kosovo, Cianaria and some Bulgarian territories—the great Albania—under

the guidance of the fascists of Galeazzo Ciano.

The Yugoslav political borders, like those of much of eastern Europe,

have the particularity of not having been outlined as a consequence of

conflicts between the different states that compose the Balkans, but

rather of being imposed according to the power relations between the

victors of the two world wars. Thus, these borders express the

successive balances between various powers and are meaningful only as

long as these balances last. The foundation of Yugoslavia does not

spring directly from the demands made along these lines by different

minority strata of the Slav populations of the Balkans—demands that were

expressed in the efforts to give body to a Serbo-Croatian literary

language among other things. Above all, it responds to two vital needs

of the victors of the first world war. First, that of creating a

sufficiently solid state around the Serb realm by adding the Slav

regions confiscated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to it in order to

make it into a barrier to German expansionism toward the Mediterranean.

And, equally important, that of insuring an allied military presence in

the heart of the Balkans that would be in a position to give some

stability to the entire region. These same strategic options were

retained at the end of the second world war with the supplementary

guarantee of a prospect for internal stability that was much more

convincing than in the past, thanks to the federal organization of the

new state. Besides, for the first time in the brief history of

Yugoslavia, a real and powerful popular outburst identified its

interests with those of the state. To the nationalist mythologies

already present in the area, an artificial one was added—that of

Yugoslavia. If the previous mythologies brought their force to past

struggles against the Turks and the Austrians, this new one caused the

populations to participate together in a single national consciousness

through the founding myth of resistance to fascism and the war of

liberation from the Germans, creating a patriotic ideology that had not

existed until that time.

IMAGES FROM THE LABYRINTH

Here we are then before the entrance of a labyrinth in which the paths

of the social clash and those of nationalism run parallel. Hundreds of

years of suffering for the exploited of the Balkans are re-elaborated in

favor of the ruling classes who present themselves as heirs of the

heroes of past struggles, under the watchful eyes of the western

chancelleries and the Comintern. Nationalist discourse is used

permanently in Albania like it is in Yugoslavia in order to maintain a

minimal level of social cohesion, and as soon as any turbulence appears

on the horizon, the ethnic myths are expanded to the point of

exasperation. The regime of Enver Hoxha, more backward and less flexible

than that of Tito, would come to build a good part of its stability on a

permanent anti-Yugoslav and anti-Greek mobilization. Hoxha re-elaborates

and updates the traditional Albanian codes; he presents himself as

continuing the work of Scanderbeg, “father of the fatherland” of

Albania, and tries to substitute the cult of “Albaniety” for the three

religions present in the territory—orthodoxy, catholicism and islam. The

supposed ethnic primacy of the Albanians as the only people in a

position to establish communism is combined with the myth of proletarian

internationalism. Even the vicissitudes of international politics are

read through the filter of an ethnic standard. For example, the break

with Moscow after Stalin’s death is explained in terms of the character

of the Slavic people who supposedly lean intrinsically toward despotism

and barbarism. Then, after the break between Tito and Hoxha in 1948, the

heart of the nationalist discourse becomes the “liberation” of Kosovo

where the Albanian population has to live together with Slavs who are

inevitably barbarians.

If the Albanian bureaucracy entrusted its stability to this ceaseless

cultural and ideological nationalist production—as well as fierce

repression and a few social concessions—for forty years, the bureaucracy

that ruled Yugoslavia would combine a federalist discourse with the

nationalist one.

The “miracle” of Tito, praised so highly by the stalinists of our day,

consists of developing bureaucracies from ethnic foundations for every

Yugoslav region in perpetual rivalry among themselves and in presenting

himself as the only figure in a position to make them live together.

Behind the official federalist ideology derived from the Resistance, the

ensemble of national particularisms has been meticulously cultivated and

the very threat of nationalist explosion used as an element of stability

by the regime. Few political regimes in the world can boast of an

attention to the question of “cultural liberties” and “respect for

minorities” equal to that of the Yugoslav regime. All of the ethnicities

present in Yugoslavia received instruction in their own language, read

their own newspapers and watched their own television channels. All

official documents were translated into the main languages. In this way,

the national problem became an integral part of the mode of social

division and management of the Yugoslav system. However, the technique

of fomenting nationalisms in order to strengthen the Federation could

not be applied in Kosovo. Since the idea of a Balkan federation that

would have included the Albania of Hoxha was tabled by force of

circumstances, granting Kosovo the status of a republic would have meant

facilitating the expansionist goals of Tirana. Thus, in flagrant

contradiction with the official federalist ideology, Kosovo has remained

a mere territory of Serbia for forty years. This choice found

justification in the Serbian nationalist mythology that sees Albanians

as traitors in the struggle against the Turks and Kosovo as the cradle

of the nation. The concessions and revocations of autonomous status to

Kosovo have, therefore, been conditioned on the varying necessity of

Belgrade to blow on the nationalist fire in order to reunite the Serbian

population.

Thus, while the Croatian, Slovenian and Serbian nationalist ideologies

were supported more or less openly by the bureaucrats of the League of

Yugoslav Communists, that of Kosovo was reinforced under the table in

part by the government of Tirana. The Kosovo Liberation Army itself was

born through the fusion of several old clandestine Enverist groups, and

the entire history of Kosovar independence ideology becomes entwined

with the designs for a great Albania advanced by still more recent

Albanian governments, in particular that of Sali Berisha.

We advance into the labyrinth and already the presence of the Minotaur

is impending. We will meet it shortly when class hatred reaches its peak

and is exchanged much too quickly for its contrary, ethnic hatred, and

when this precarious balance among the Balkan nationalist ideologies is

dissolved. There is no precise turning point in this Balkan history of

ours. A series of converging processes of a varying nature exists,

causing explosions that in themselves could open the door to some new

scenario.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STATE

During the 1980’s the federal structure of the Yugoslavian state

demonstrated that it was no longer in a position to control the social

situation. The international organizations bound the granting of

loans—without which the Yugoslav economy would suffocate—to the

application of the prescription for reorganization formulated by the

International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the attempts to restructure the

heavy industrial sectors of the economy met with an ever-rising wave

ever resistance among the exploited, and long strikes followed one after

another in all parts of the federation. Thus the Yugoslav bureaucracy

began to lose all international credibility, because it was unable to

efficiently reorganize the economy. In the face of this breakdown of the

economic machinery, the interests of various bureaucratic factions

suddenly came into competition, due to major imbalances existing in the

industrial development of the federation. Slovenia and Croatia—both

relatively industrialized and modern—opposed the more backwards

republics of the south. The wealthier republics, at that time, were

bound to the others by ties of obligatory solidarity that were realized

through the financing of consistent federal funds.

Up to that time, as we have seen, the bureaucracy put forth a double

discourse, superimposing the official cult of federalism and Yugoslav

unity onto a constant call to national identity. At this point, however,

the federalist discourse ceased to be useful or meaningful since, in

order to survive, each republic had to renegotiate the bonds of

solidarity that tied it to the others. In order to accomplish this,

there was no alternative but nationalism to mobilize the population,

convincing it that its troubles were caused by the rival republics. The

discourse in fashion among the bureaucrats of each republic became, in

summary: “Workers, we are with you and against the others!” Obviously,

the Slovenian and Croatian bureaucrats added that the economic

scarcities of this period were due to the excessive amount of federal

funds confiscated by the backward Serbia. On the other hand, the Serbian

bureaucrats tried to convince the exploited of their republic that all

responsibility lay with the Croatians and Slovenians.

These maneuvers are not new in Yugoslav history, but in the past they

have never brought about decisive transformations, always being

successful at reestablishing the social discipline necessary for making

the economic machinery start again after a period of negotiation and a

few reciprocal concessions. The ruling groups that managed this process

during the ‘80’s did not realize quickly enough that international

economic pressures left only a minimal margin for maneuvering in order

to renegotiate a new internal balance. At a certain point, no one was

able to concede anything any more. Besides, Tito had left a series of

decision making procedures as an inheritance that were sufficiently

complex that they prevented each regional interest from imposing itself

through institutional tools. Thus the struggles of the exploited were

able to break each attempt to put the economy back in motion and the

harmony of the federation was reduced to impotence.

THE EXPLOITED IN THE DESERT

Throughout the 1980’s, the discourse on which the Yugoslavian

bureaucracies based their power progressively lost credibility.

As we have seen, the system of values that held the country together was

crushed by its own contradictions. The unitary mythology born from the

Resistance crumbled under the renewed weight of nationalist propagandas,

and its official heir, the armed forces, lined up openly behind the

Serbian faction of the central power. Attempts at economic restructuring

placed those few “securities” that had been offered to the exploited

during the last forty years into crisis, goading them into struggle. One

is not dealing with a mere social or economic involution; an entire

world is collapsing.

Thus, social tension continues to grow, but those who are struggling no

longer has anything to which to cling. The memory of the façade of

“proletarian internationalism” imposed by the bureaucrats for forty

years stands in the way of the idea that the exploited of different

nationalities could achieve solidarity among themselves against the

common masters. It is the very awareness that common masters exist that

is weak. The enemy is not located with clarity.

In this situation the use of nationalism assumes a new importance.

Embellishing the interests of every faction of the Yugoslavian

bureaucracy with those of past history, all the sleeping grudges of

Balkan history are awakened. The exploited much too consistently react

to the collapse of the certainties of the past by clinging to the last

of these, nationalist propaganda, rediscovering values to share and

masters to obey; discovering a community and a history of which they can

feel a part and for which they can spend the enormous energies

accumulated over so many years.

During these same years, a process similar to the one in Yugoslavia was

set in motion in Albania. Here we can see the moves that were able to

influence the situation in Kosovo that is so very interesting in this

sense.

With the death of Enver Hoxha, the Albanian leaders found themselves

facing a series of thorny problems. Since the time of the rupture with

Beijing, the country lived in almost absolute isolation. As we have seen

this isolation found a justification in Albanian particularism, but with

the passing of years it finally led to the irreversible freezing of the

entire industrial apparatus. The enormous installations that were

imported first from the Soviet Union and then from China—already

obsolete due to a lack of maintenance and spare parts—spin uselessly.

Inside the factories, the workers continue to work in order to produce

nothing, and the regime cannot afford dismissal, because one of its

boasts is still that of full employment. In order to survive, the only

passable road that presents itself to Ramiz Alia, Hoxha’s protégé is to

place industrial restructuring together with a complete turnaround in

relations with foreign powers. For a certain period, Albanian propaganda

has to tune down the nationalistic melodies in order to be able to

reopen relations with bordering nations, particularly with Serbia.

Thus, in the second half of the 1980’s, the Kosovar problem, around

which the Albanian collective identity had been constructed, suddenly

became a mere internal Yugoslav question. Meanwhile, the prospects of

economic liberalization opened by the Alia regime caused the enmity

toward the west to collapse in the Albanian imaginary. Hoxha’s heir

himself is, thus, the one to undermine the ideological basis of a regime

that until then had tried to construct its identity completely in the

negative, claiming to be surrounded by Slav “barbarism” on the one side

and western “immorality” on the other.

In a matter of a few years, the Albanian exploited find themselves in a

vast desert. No economic securities—not even the miseries of the past—no

collective values exist to reassure them anymore; the only time they can

still comprehend is that of the Kanan, the codes of the ancient clannish

structures. Insurrections without leaders or demands follow one after

the other, culminating in the uprising of 1997 and the subsequent

western intervention that returned Albania to its old status as an

Italian protectorate. The person who succeeded in controlling the

situation for a short time before the arrival of the Italian military

was Hoxha’s former doctor, Sali Berisha.

His government, which was swept away by the insurrection of 1997,

rebuilt a system of strong values for the Albanians, reelaborating those

of the past in positive and in negative, blending Kanan, nationalism,

vicious economic liberalization and violent “anti-communism”. This is

how the “liberation” of the Kosovar cousins would become a national

problem, how a good part of the arms pillaged from the barracks during

the insurrection would end up in the hands of the KLA and how the north

of Albania would be transformed into the logistic base for anti-Serbian

independence guerrillas.

And here we are, at last, at the center of the labyrinth. On the one

hand, we have the unknown, all the immense possibilities opened by a

situation in which no certainties or values suffocate the exploited

anymore, in which an entire world seems to need just one last push to

collapse. On the other hand, there is the Minotaur bellowing from its

throat. It is a monster that the world has known much too well, which is

called ethnic war in the Balkans today. For capital, first the threat of

war and later war itself are emergency tools for reestablishing social

peace. When it can no longer produce any certainties, all that is left

for it to do is ride some Minotaur. It’s not a matter of returning to a

past that was worse, as we may have believed. The new Balkan wars are a

sign of modernity. This friendship between capital and the monster is

not a great discovery. And us? We try to keep quiet for a moment, to act

in such a way that the words that may possibly have been with us for our

entire life do not continue to delude us. No peaceful and orderly

revolution announces itself on the horizon, no sun of the future rising;

when all the checks collapse, when collective myths and certainties have

no more place in the heart of the exploited, when accumulated rancor

explodes, nothing an be guaranteed anymore. And this can only frighten

us, timid civilized beings that we are. Perhaps we are more fearful of

that lack of guarantees than of the Minotaur. So then, which do we,

ourselves, choose? When Yugoslavia arrives on our shores, are we really

certain that we will face this fear at last, or will we, like the

Yugoslavs, find the terrible embrace of the Minotaur in the passageway

sweet?

THE FLOOD

The river of social struggle, that of the bankruptcy of two states and

that of the collapse of every value have already mixed their waters.

Only one stream is missing in order for these rivers to merge and

transform this flood into a bloodbath; it will arrive from the West.

The crisis of the Yugoslav state in the 1980’s coincided with the

necessity of rearranging the European balance. The existence of

Yugoslavia itself no longer responded to the interests of the powers

that had favored its constitution. German expansionism toward the

Mediterranean, now being carried out in the context of the united

Europe, no longer needs to be blocked. The federal system shows itself

to be unable to guarantee the functioning of Yugoslav commerce any more

and runs the risk of social explosion much too close to the tranquil

western shores. Necessarily, the European Economic Community (EEC) has

to promote the creation of new state entities that could replace the now

useless Federation, marking the passage that opened from the internal

Yugoslav crisis—a crisis studded with threats, repression and police

extortion—to the military crisis. Up until a few weeks before Slovenia’s

declaration of independence, in fact, the threat of secession was

considered an extreme means of pressure more than a real possibility in

the nationalist game of prominence carried out by the Yugoslav

bureaucracy. But the guarantee to recognize this new state—agreed to

more or less discreetly by the EEC—permitted the military solution and,

in the end, imposed it. At that time, the European union seized the

occasion to officially confirm that the union of Slovenia and Croatia

into one state in order to control German expansion toward the

Mediterranean was historically superceded, granting to Germany what it

had not been able to conquer in two world wars.

The behavior adopted by the “Community of Nations” during the conflicts

in the former Yugoslavia is understood starting from the coherence of

its actions and not as a function of the contradictory positions put

forth in order to serve as a screen. Contrary to the claims of those who

try to lend credence to the crocodile tears spilled regularly in public,

this behavior is quite far from lacking objectives. The military drift

that followed from Slovenia’s declaration of independence and still

continues today was inevitable from the perspective of Western power

since, with the exception of Slovenia, there are no borders that can be

determined on a national basis. Therefore, it is impossible to build a

new state without resorting to ethnic cleansing, and it was this

international strategy that actually outlined the necessity for it. The

images of this flood are today’s history.

All the evidence for this Western strategy can be found in the case of

Bosnia. Ever since the first Vance-Owen plan, the pseudo-response to the

Bosnian crisis has not been based on the historical reality of this

region, but on an ideological reality created artificially by the clash

of bureaucratic interests. This is how the partition of this territory

between the three nationalist currents that have blown it to bits was

determined. The reorganization of Bosnia hides the double objective of

the division of the zones of influence in the former Yugoslavia and the

reorganization of the Balkans. The policy of the great powers favored

the deportation of populations which served to reduce the breadth of the

social contradictions that the new regional powers would have had to

face and, thus, the risks of the extension of the Balkan conflict beyond

the borders of the former Yugoslavia. There is not a chance that the

great powers would have been accused of openly of favoring the Serbian

armed forces in besieged Sarajevo. The only real efforts of the West at

this time were those of secret diplomacy, pledged to mitigate the

tensions between Serbia, Macedonia and their five neighbors (Hungary,

Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania) at all costs.

From this point on, all the international initiatives would ineptly

pursue three objectives, independently of the internal contradictions of

the West. First, they would organize a security zone between the former

Yugoslavia and the borders of Western Europe. This role of buffer-state

is assigned to Slovenia, the internal conditions of which lend

themselves perfectly to this function: it is an industrialized and

westernized region that is ethnically coherent and small enough that the

volume of investment necessary for maintaining its stability is

relatively modest. The other two objectives are verified by the effort

to subdivide Yugoslavia around two entities that seem to have the broad

shoulders necessary for this task. Control of the Adriatic coast and the

Adriatic-European axis is entrusted to Croatia, control of the Balkans

to Serbia.

With the Bosnian problem temporarily suppressed, it was possible to

contain that of Macedonia, repress those of Vojvodina and Montenegro and

militarily liquidate the problem of Krajina during these years. If

Croatia was able to keep its promises to the West, this was not possible

for Serbia as was made clear in the past few years. The original point

of explosion in the old Yugoslav federalist ideology has come back on

the scene with all its drama, revealing how poorly considered the

Western choice to entrust the control of the Balkans to Milosevic was.

The latest war, which saw the entire West engaged against Serbia,

pursued the objective of pushing out an old ally who proved to be

completely untrustworthy, while still attempting to preserve the

territorial integrity of the country in order to avoid extending the

conflict to the neighboring regions: Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and

Greece. Up to now no one has actually recognized the right of the

Kosovar Albanians to self-determination, and the Rambouillet accords

have indicated the mere autonomy of this region as the only feasible

solution. The West used the two factions of the Kosovar independence

movement, Rugova’s group and the KLA, in turn in anti-Serb functions

without ever underwriting their more or less obvious political project

of the great Albania. The Kosovar population itself was used as a

logistical element in the conflict.

The only significant about-face in Western strategy that distinguished

this latest war was the desire to no longer delegate control of the

Balkans to anyone. For now, the armies of NATO will manage it directly

until new, capable and reliable allies can be found in Belgrade or

elsewhere.

THE FAILED SOCIAL TEMPEST

Crossroads for a thousand different civilizations, the Balkans possess

an enormous cultural wealth, traditions that come together and mix. This

is one of the reasons for their instability. They present a field for

maneuvering favorable to the promotion of greedy politicians, but as the

history of the last hundred years shows, they or simply an insoluble

puzzle for every state that wants to assert its power here. The

economic, social and cultural processes experienced in Yugoslavia and

Albania over the last twenty years are common, to a lesser degree, to

all parts of the Balkans and to that immense and desolate land that is

today’s Russia.

In the Balkans, the Minotaur has been called ethnic war. In the Arab

world, its strict parent gallops, the religious integralism that has

found its best pastures in Algeria. But this does not mark a return to

the past with its murmuring; it was ridden in on a form most modern—that

of capital. And when our turn comes, what will our Minotaur be?

Cruel smirk of history, the monster has always taken root in the speech

of the exploited—whom it transforms into executioners—while the

exploiters merely use it as an approved political weapon with an

awareness that is more terrifying than the slaughters themselves. A

correspondent of the BBC furnishes an eloquent example of this in his

book, reporting a conversation between the Serbian general Mladic and

the Croatian Minister of the Interior: agreeing on the return of the

bodies of soldiers killed in the name of ethnic hatred that they

themselves fomented, the two exchanged the most sincere wishes for their

respective families. In the years to come, when they have found an

acceptable balance, the representatives of the former Yugoslav

bureaucracy will be good friends once more. On the other hand, the

exploited will continue to hate each other, to feel the breath of the

beast in the air. It is no longer a question of knowing whether History

has come to an end or continues to march on. We must know how to read

the questions that events raise even when they mix dreams and nightmares

together. Meanwhile, the Yugoslav history of the past twenty years is

the history of a failed social tempest, of a potential revolt that

mutated into a horrible gangrenous sore. It is the very energy that

could have sustained the conflict opened between the exploited and the

exploiters that has been kept busy on the worst war fronts. The

protagonists of social struggle have become the laborers of the terror.

Of course, sooner or later, the threads of social conflict will retie

themselves, and ethnic hatred will cease to play the lead role in the

Balkan tragedy. But from our side, how many will still have bloodstained

hands? So goodbye forever to tranquil sleep.