Response to "The cult of Putin in Serbia reflects a nation that has still not dealt with its past"
Unfortunately, Tomislav Marković’s article has only been the latest in the long series of articles in the Guardian that convey the image of Serbia and the Serbs as an ahistorical cultural and social pathology that merits “diagnosis”; not understanding.
The context needed to comprehend the dominant Serbian position on the war in Ukraine has nothing to do with Sputnik, RT or any other channel of Russian influence. Their influence in Serbia is minuscule. Here, the experience makes the difference.
Serbian attitudes towards the war in Ukraine have been shaped by history, including the way NATO’s war on the “small” Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999 had been justified and explained away. For example, people in Serbia were told, by the Guardian among others, that they had brought bombing on themselves. It is not fair to blame us for learning that lesson and believing that the Ukrainians might have made a similar mistake.
Also, people here tend to be highly suspicious of narratives paddled by the Western media. For example, although NATO’s war on Serbia was officially launched to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, “to reduce the capability of Serb forces to... order ethnic cleansing”, it actually triggered it. The response was promptly turned into the cause and rationale for the NATO aggression changed to “stopping ethnic cleansing”.
Finally, there are many pasts in the Balkans that have not been dealt with. In the early 1990s’ Slobodan Milosevic was very successful in making Serbs deal with one of these pasts – the WW2 slaughter of Serbs in the so-called Independent State of Croatia that included most of today’s Bosnia. One problem with the Guardian’s coverage is that it portrays the Serbs in a way that is reminiscent of how Milosević’s media framed Croats and Muslims. Enemy sometimes hides in the mirror.
Zoran Ćirjaković, Belgrade
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