From: josip@src.umd.edu (Josip Loncaric)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia
Subject: Re: Poor Innocent Nazi Serbs
Date: 4 Sep 92 15:27:28 GMT
Organization: Systems Research Center, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park

In article <1992Sep4.001904.23696@athena.mit.edu> dmatic@athena.mit.edu (Davor Matic) writes:
>	The State Department said that according to Red Cross officials, of 
>the 11,704 prisoners registered in 19 detention centers they have been
>permitted to visit in Bosnia, 9,848 are held by Serbian forces, 902 by
>Muslim forces and 954 by Croatian forces.
>	``Information we have obtained from visits to detention centers from
>interviews with former detainees and from representatives of
>international organizations and the media lead to the conclusion that
>there is a pattern of serious and ongoing human rights abuses in many of
>the detention centers, particularly in those operated by Serbian forces,
>'' department spokesman Joe Snyder said.
>	Snyder said there are reports of beatings, sexual abuse and even
>executions in those centers. He said many of these reports were
>credible.  
>        But all this is understandable, because the whole world is united
>against poor Serbs, and they have to fight back.  Since the first contact
>between the Serbs and the world is their neighbours, they have to take it 
>out on them.  So they are not Nazi, they are absolutely innocent and only
>defending themselves from the rest of the world.  They don't wanna live with
>anybody else, and they will soon get what they are asking for.  They will 
>be all alone and totally isolated.  Maybe then they will start focusing their
>creative energy against each other.  Possibly, in fifty years, there will be 
>none of them left on the face of this planet...
>
>

Perhaps some Belgrade sources can help us understand Serbs:

  "...[In Belgrade, people are amazingly indifferent to this catastrophe]...
    We are talking about a text-book example of denial as a defence mechanism,
  which in this case has turned into a mass phenomenon.  People do not want
  to believe in what is happening to them or to analyse the circumstances
  they find themselves in, trying all the time instead to live in their
  ever-shrinking oasis of deceptive peace and order.  They pretend nothing
  terrible is going on, as if everything bad will disappear or at least
  become less real. 
    ... the holders of power are helping people create and maintain
  pseudo-reality.  One cannot overstate the power of the long-term work of
  the key media, whose distorted information has in fact created this
  non-existent reality. ...
    But the biggest taboo of all with regard to the sanctions is the question
  of what the world is actually asking Serbia and Montenegro to do. ...
  Incredible as it may seem, many people in Serbia believe that a whole
  series of conspiracies -- uncovered by allegedly famous world scientists
  and analysed in detail in books and TV programmes -- has been revealed in
  the last three or four years.  Some of the most frequently mentioned
  conspiracies concern the Comintern and the Vatican, Free Masons, muslims,
  nations which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire, countries defeated
  in World War Two, the US as promoter of the 'New World Order'.  Conspiracies
  against Serbs as 'the oldest' or the 'holiest' nation look like explanations,
  but they actually serve to cover up real events and augment the feeling
  of unreality. ..."

(Dragan Popadic, an assistant professor of psychology at Belgrade University,
provides the above explanation of low intensity of reaction in Belgrade to
the war only 100 kilometers away.  See "East European Reporter", pp 60-61,
July-August 1992.)

This refusal to face reality is combined with increased support for
militant neo-fascists in Belgrade:

  "...While small parties have kept on losing voters, the biggest breakthrough
  has been made by the new Serbian Radical Party (SRP) ot militant nationalist
  Vojislav Seselj.  The SRP has in fact become the strongest party in
  Belgrade, but because it is tacitly supported by the regime it cannot be
  considered a real opposition party. ..."

(Writes Slobodan Antonic, a political scientist and a researcher at the
Belgrade Institute for Political Studies.  See the same issue of EER, p. 63.
His data is for March 1992.)


Josip