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  The  Capital of Serbs 
    
    
    
   

  Last november 4th, in Budapest, I was taking the shabby mini-van that daily waits for its Serbian passengers, one kilometre away from the airport – because not only no European plane can land in Belgrade, but the Serb buses don’t have the right to serve Hungarian airports too.. 
  During the 6 hour-journey, from Budapest to Belgrade, one has the leisure to share, on more than one account, the unhappyness of the Serbs. One shares their humiliations at the Hungarian customs and at the Yugoslav one, one shares their fatigue, one shares the conversations, and one discovers in vivo what one, alas, already knows too well. 

  People in the the mini-van don’t come to Belgrade for tourism. On the outward journey, the person I was speaking to most of the time was a Serb emigrate who came and take care of his father, who was seriously ill, in a country whose medical situation is deplorable. On my way back, I was with a lady, that had come to Belgrade to bury her mother.. 

  To the young French man in the mini-van, they talk about the war, the Albanians, the poverty, the blocade, western medias’ lies, the dead-end of the Serb interior politics, about the winter that comes close and during which the weakest will die. 

  One hears what one already knows, and what one will hear again in Belgrade – all those tragical realities, which have strangely become indifferent common places in the West : that Serbia has become the poorest country of Europe and, most of all, a country with no future. 

  But one learns even more. The Serbs can tell you that they used to be rich, in bygone days, fifteen years ago. They say to you that, in the past, the Hungarian customers didn’t scornfully throw there passports on tables, at the time when the Magyar bourgeoisie used to do her shopping in Belgrade. That was the time when Yugoslavia, opened to the West, was a wealthy island surrounded by a very poor Soviet block. When you arrive in Belgrade at night, you just can see a city which looks almost normal. But old Belgradese explain to you that it is not lit up any more like it used to be, and that it has become gloomy. They show you the quarter of the railway station where all kinds of traffics occur. They talk about the Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia, and now from Kosovo, who are crammed into the surburbs without material resources. 

  They tell you about Belgrade of yesterday that was like Paris : a wealthy and carefree, roisterer and even arrogant city, with its typical accent (and, all along my staying, I met Belgradese bourgeois who desperately try to perpetuate that light way of living, despite all). 

  The drama of the Serbs is not only poverty, it is the spiral of decay or, as sociologists would put it : the loss of capital. From many points of view, the Yugoslavia of Tito made the others envious : a real prosperity cumulated with a social cohesion, peculiar to « socialist » societies (free health system, lower unequalities of wage, possibilities of social promotion for the poor), effective educative structures, high-level universities. 

  You can still perceive that in the way of living of people and in their mental categories, especially the middle class people that I was with. They don’t bring themselves to admit they’re poor, and they can even less bring themselves to admit that, while they inherit, through family background and social structures of the titoist period, appreciable intellectual, material and social capital, though they have the assets to hope for promotion in Serbia, and even in the whole Europe, the horizon is getting more and more narrow. 

  In a way, we can say that the Serbs’ capital, though it benefited from the « enlightened » policy of Tito, had already been reduced and downgraded as soon as the end of the years 1970. The policy of the Marshal that granted thousands of priviledges to the ethnical minorities of the country, cut back the material and symbolical ressources of the Serb majority (as they explained to me in the mini-van : « the Serbs paid for the Hungarians and the Albanians to have social welfare, autonomous television, grant-aided newspapers, but we the Serbs were granted nothing »). This first cut and downgrading of the Serb capital, cumulated to physical violence against Serbs in regions like Kosovo, were the ferment of the first Serb nationalism on which Milosevic built his carreer. Well, the word « nationalism », used by western medias with polemical sense, is maybe a bit too harsh. We’d better talk about an attempt to reconstitute an identitary pride, a kind of will to recover possession of various elements, various forms of capital in order to reorganize them and revalue them. 

  That’s how I analyse, for example, the Report of the Serb academy of History, and the suppression of the autonomy granted to Kosovo. 

  It was not an ethnical nationalism in a country where so many Serbs are of mixed blood (Jews, Croatians, Hungarians etc) and where great number of minorities, often persecuted in neighbour countries, live together. And nothing allows us to consider that the situation would have degenerated that way if the West hadn’t so furiously backed the irredentist movements inspired by xenophobia in Croatia. 

  During the years 1990s, the mobilization of world (Western) capital, both financial and symbolical capital, especially through mediatic slandering, had the effect of accelerating the process of downgrading of the Serb capital, and gave it a dramatic dimension. The serb capital was materially strangled (through the blockade), symbolically demonized , and physically destroyed in many cases. As far as physical destruction is concerned, the first victims were Serbs out of Serbia – those of Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. The process of destruction found its end this year 1999, after the bombings of the allied forces in the very core of the Holy of Holies, carefree Belgrade. Unless the West really wants more : the civil war in Belgrade, an option openly backed by the former US-embassador in Croatia, Mr Galbraith. 

  The spiral of drop in status of financial, intellecual and social capital is something moving and pathetic. Amongst the worst-offs, it expresses itself through reflexes of violence : military and paramilitary forces whose crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo are perhaps too famous now. Amongst the best-offs, it was a reflex of escape. A great number of Serb graduated found refuge in Western Europe where they worked on tasks that didn’t correspond to their qualifications – the equivalence of diplomas is not acknowledged. Those who stayed in Belgrade find the evasions they can. I was told for example that many young bourgeois start studies of art, in a country that, yet, doesn’t have a dinar to grant to creation. 

  Amongst the Serbs remain the characteristics of those who still handle a capital of which they want to save tiny bits. Especially intellectual capital. Many books are sold in the streets of Belgrade and people despise the Americans only because they don’t respect culture. 

  And, as amongst all people who have some capital, one can feel amongst the Serbs that big misunderstanding of the people who don’t have. 

  The conflict with Albanians comes from that. Beyond the cultural legacy, and that Turkish past that doesn’t want to settle, omnipresent in Belgrade, and to which Albanians are indentified, there is that relationship between the dominating who loses his capital, and the dominated that wants to purchase it. A complex relationship that we must not analyse in manichean terms. 

  In Belgrade, people tell you that the Muslim Albanians are like the Arabs in the French surburbs and that we, the French, will have the same problem  as the Serbs have with the Albanians. That kind of analyse, in term of « clash of civilizations » like Huntington would say, and that French right wing essayists like general Gallois support too, reflects one thing only  the similarity of the situation between the Serbs of Yugoslavia and the French people who live in the poor surburbs of big cities – former dominating group whose prerogatives decline and that doesn’t understand any more the other social groups it is supposed to live with. 

  The Serb emigrated I was talking to in the bus – a physician in Belgrade that became aide of veterinary in Paris – lived in the north east of the French capital and could identify perfectly his position vis-à-vis the Arabs who live in his quarter and the one of the Serbs with the Albanians. he talked about them with the same words : « I pay taxes for them, and them, they abuse  the welfare, they don’t want to be like me, they don’t even want to speak my language, they could find a job like I did, but they make no effort. » 

  It’s the traditional discourse of the man who, though he’s poor, has kept something from his initial capital (his intellectual education, his culture, the way he perceives his potential role in society) and who doesn’t understand the position of the dominated, that who has, and always had, less than him. 

  The Serbs tell a thousand of anecdots about the tribal and medieval way of life of the Albanians, about their lack of culture, their lazyness, their taste for easy money, which explains the existence of Albanians mafias around Europe. Probably they are not wrong : we can suppose that dominated have not incorporated a culture of work and respect of the rules – that previously requires some kind of education. We can see that in various other social contexts. And, by the way, we can notice that the Serb, as their capital dwindles, are loosing their culture of labor and respect of the rules too. 

  What is strange in this affair, is the fact that the Western countries, that own a dominating capital in every domain, played the dominated card, taking the risk that those dominated might backfire on them – like Afghan mudjahidins did and milicians of the KLA have started to do against the UN mission in Kosovo. 

  The Western countries were, so to speak, socially in their role when, at the beginning of the years 1990s, they backed a people that owned a capital which was superior or equal to that of the Serbs – the Croats. The logic of alliances lead them to support –lately, a long time after the Dayton Agreement – a people that is socially dominated – the Albanians – against a people that, actually, looked much more like them and always nourished a privileged cultural exchange with them : the Serbs. 

  That game on reversed front is not to soothe the anguishes of the Serbs who feel themselves, as it were, orphan vis-à-vis the Western culture that used to cherish them. It is certainly not casual if, to express their disarray, they are still led to use Western symbols : in the streets of Belgrade, shops sell postcards that parody the first page of the album of comics of Asterix. The whole Europe is occupied by the US legions, those postcards say, and only the Serb village resists against invaders. 

  It will resist as long as it has some capital in reserve… And it will both resist the brutality of the USA and the temptation of despair and extremism inside its fronteers. But we can ask ourselves which kind of forms that resistance can have when a winter of material privation and human distress will have happened above all previously described. It’s high time that we support those who resist the logics of the worst, mentionned by the « European Appeal for a fair peace in the Balkans » signed by various intellectuals around Pierre Bourdieu and Noam Chomsky last may 17 th,  to prevent this logic from becoming a reality and that we help, for good, those who still have enough capital, strength, and courage, to prevent Serbia of becoming the Iraq of Europe. 
    
    
    
    

  Frédéric Delorca 

  17 th november 1999