I FEEL ASHAMED OF MY PEOPLE

by Bora Cosic (Serbian writer)

L'Espresso, 6 May 1999

According to the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, the people of Belgrade have regressed to the level of children, or rather of naughty children.

Personally I have a better opinion of children. They are proud, and have a special kind of nobility. Children, for example, are very selective, they don't let just anyone approach and seduce them.

The people who are now taking part in the demonstrations in the squares and on the bridges of Belgrade do not have this child-like nobility, and their anger at the bombs has no relation with the naughtiness of children. There is nothing easier than burning another country's flag or destroying the effigy of a foreign leader. This is the sort of ethnological reaction that Lévi-Strauss would have compared to the behaviour of natives towards the spirit of an enemy tribe or of an evil divinity who threatens them.

For a time my people loved freedom and showed that they were mature. But even in their maturity they were voluble. The Serbian people are proud of everything, even of the very pride they nurture in the depth of their souls. Everyone should be proud of his own soul. But how can we not offend this great gift if we, the Serbs, act in a soulless, cruel way towards a whole people, the Albanians in Kosovo? My fellow countrymen do not want to hear about this population which is being destroyed. They do not realise that in this way they are destroying their own dignity. This is not a case of child-like behaviour. The people of Serbia, now used as a shield by their dictator, should worry first of all about the weak, desperate members of an entire population in the south of Yugoslavia which has been deported from its own land. They should be ashamed of those crowded, miserable refugee camps which are now the home, or rather the children's room of the Albanian people of Kosovo. People who can only hope in an imaginary

father in heaven.

The people supporting Milosevic in Belgrade are blind. They do not realise that that are now faced with a war set into motion from their own city, eight years ago. And if they are now protecting strategic army installations with their own bodies, they forget that this is the same army which has systematically destroyed and murdered for many years in their own country. This army has committed acts of aggression, like the Germany army at the time of Hitler in Europe. In the name of the Yugoslavian flag, one piece of the country after another has been conquered and then destroyed.

Later, like at Stalingrad, the aggressors themselves have withdrawn from one defeat to another (in Croatia and Bosnia) to the ever-receding borders of Yugoslavia. Now the war has knocked at the door of my home city, just as it once broke out in Berlin.