Introduction
1.) The Nature Of Simple Life
In The Balkans
2.) Battering As A Way Of
Life
3.) Sexual Abuse
4.) Traditional Life: Combination
Of Channeled Rage And Love
5.) Two Case Studies
6.) Some Current Data On Child
Abuse
7.) The Death Of The Patriarch
And The Dissolution Of
The Yugoslav Zadruga
8.) Serbia And The Feelings
Of Victimization
9.) War Fantasy And Trial
Action
~ Citations
Under
the title Les Belles Images, a famous French lady whose childhood
had been that of "une jeune fille rangee," offered some
well-intentioned advice for the sad state of humanity. As a means
to over-come alienation she proposed that "people ought to content
themselves with a minimum standard of living, as some of the very
poor communities still do, in Sardinia and Greece, for instance, where
technology has not penetrated nor money corrupted. There people know
a harsh happiness, because certain values are preserved, values that
are truly human values - - dignity, brotherhood, generosity, which
give life a unique flavor. . . when did this decline start? On the
day when priority was given to science Instead of wisdom, to utility
instead of beauty. With the Renaissance, with rationalism, capitalism,
scientism. ... Only a moral revolution, not a social, political, or
technical one, can lead man to the truth he has lost."(1)
Far away from Paris, a man born and raised in such
a community was appalled by her simplicity and blindness: "I
do not know what Madame de Beauvoir's "minimum standard of living"
is, but I suspect It is a little more than what she Is idealizing
in "some of the very poor communities." Life in Sardinia
may look "harshly happy" to Parisian left- and right-wing
intellectual cliques, but I know from my own Montenegro, In spite
of the "values preserved" there, "values that are truly
human," just what life has been like-a life of hunger, hatred,
and death."(2)
Milovan DjIlas manifested more than his fair share
of devotion to similar values, and he not only made verbal suggestions
but was responsible for many violent acts to improve the sad state
of humanity and save it from alienation. But, as he grew older, he
repented and tried to put on paper "what really happened."
Among his many subjects was the story of his people, his family and
his own childhood. This is what he remembered:
Everything is at war with everything else: men against
men, men against beasts, beasts against beasts. And children against
children, always. And parents with children. The guerillas fight
the Austrians, and the latter persecute and oppress the people.
The spirits strive with humans, and humans with the spirits. The
strife is ceaseless, between heaven and earth. And Mother beats
us. If she cannot catch us during the day, she beats us when we
are asleep. The switch cuts into the flesh, and one sleeps on. And
when we awaken, she demands our promise that we will never again
do what we did. Or else the beating is continued.
It would be easy to promise that we would not do
what we did if only we could feel truly guilty for what we did.
But since we do not feel guilty it Is better to lose some sleep
and endure the beat-ing to the end.
Certainly strife is one side of life. But there
comes a time when only strife is the order of the day, as though
there were nothing else in life.(3)
Harsh as this may seem, there was more than constant
battering and eternal wan what was even more terrifying was the overwhelming
presence of evil forces: "Nevertheless, with us children our
greatest fear was not of men, of brigands, or of Austrians. That fear
became mixed with another-the fear of nocturnal apparitions, of evil
spirits who were everywhere and could appear at any time, "(4)
turning life Into hell.
1.) THE NATURE OF SIMPLE LIFE IN
THE BALKANS
There is a rich choice of testimonies one could use
to discredit Simone de Beauvoir's or anyone else's belief that simple
life equals harsh happiness and true human values. One of them was
written by a miserable young man who wanted to become a hero and chose
the most prominent target, Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria,
thus triggering the First World War Gavrilo Princip, who was born
In Bosnia (in 1894), remembered his home as a place of constant terror
and anxiety: "The wet logs on the open fire gave the only light
to the closely packed peasants and their wives, wrapped in thick smoke.
If I tried to penetrate the curtain of smoke, the most I could see
were the eyes of the human beings, numerous) sad and glaring with
some kind of fluid light coming from nowhere. Some kind of reproach,
even threat, radiated from them, and many times since then they have
awakened me from my dreams. "(5)
Or another example, involving an encounter of an old
man and a young woman, running away from home: "Come and sit
down! Move closer! Don't be scared! You must have been raised by a
stepmother-you seem to be frightened of everything." Her unspoken
answer: "It was not a stepmother, but her own mother, but she
is frightened nevertheless. There is always some trick hidden underneath
everything, however safe it may seem."(6)
What these cases have in common is the type of childhood
they assume. As I have shown in my earlier articles(7), the writers
were born into a culture of common or joint families, known as zadrugas,
as the basic family unit. These communal families, characteristic
throughout all of former Yugoslavia, except Slovenia, differ significantly
from the conjugal families which we are familiar with In most of Europe;
they Involved several biological families living and working together,
with men never leaving their native homes and with the eldest man
functioning as the leading authority. Predominant features of this
type of family life were therefore enormous resistance to change and
fear of innovation. With no private property and no emancipation as
we know it - the original meaning of emancipare being the
freeing from parental authority - that is a child's gain-ing maturity,
adult status and Independence through acquiring property, a home of
his or her own, the choice of job and life style, all this was quite
different from the state of things In Western nations. In the zadruga
culture people could be extravagantly generous and kind, sharing everything
with a perfect stranger, but, on the other hand, extremely harsh,
brutal and aggressive. In short, as portrayed in the works of many
foreign travelers, they offered the bewildering contrast of vast loneliness,
of cruelty and indifference to human life, but of indifference to
possessions, too, with gusts of personal warmth, generosity and outstanding
dignity unlike anything one could experience In Western Europe.(8)
In view of the present war (and many previous ones)
It seems Im-portant to stress the harshness not "a harsh happiness,"
but the harsh cruelty, ruthlessness and brutality of this life. It
meant a life of constant warfare, was often described as l'heroic"
by most of the scholars, and has only recently been far more accurately
defined as a life that produced "delegate killers.'(19) Its women
were expected to bear In silence extreme oppression, humiliation and
violence.
Children born In these families were subjected to
harsh treatment even before they were born, as pregnancy was not treated
as a partic-ularly sensitive period In women's lives, and they therefore
tended to conceal It pretending they were as strong as ever. It meant
a very hard, hazardous childbirth, as women often gave birth alone,
without assistance, professional or unprofessional, mostly outside
their homes. Their babies were ritually and repeatedly cleansed In
cold water, again mostly outside, swaddled, subjected to various protective
treatments against evil spirits, mostly harmful, and severely punished
throughout babyhood and childhood. In short, it was a crowded life
of neglect, battering, tenor and the absence of almost all signs of
affection. it was also a life of widespread and routine sexual abuse.
Psychohistorically speaking, it was a combination of Infanticidal
and ambivalent modes of childrearing. if at the turn of the century
In most parts of Europe parents insisted on discipline, order, cleanliness,
ambition (and achieved these with Increasingly less severe methods),
the opposite was true for the simple life in the so-called zadrugas
of the Balkans.
But maybe a simple description of a house can serve
as the best way of illustrating the nature of this simple life. I
have chosen an account provided by a historian who was raised in a
zadruga in Bosnia-Herzegovina In the period after the First World
War.
"The middle room had a small hearth with an outlet
for smoke. The fire was built rarely. Most of the family slept In
this room. Sleeping space was reserved for the senior members of the
family, married couples, and their small children. The rest of the
floor space was not assigned, each person trying to occupy the most
desirable spot for the night's rest. To sleep with as many as a dozen
persons of different age and sex on the floor in a small, crowded
room Is quite an experience. The guest room had a small heating stove,
but the fire was made rarely, usually on festive occasions when guests
stayed over night. Uncle Rade, the head of the house, his wife, my
Aunt Pava, slept in the room, which was the only part of the house
that was finished.
The house was poorly furnished. The room had a small
wooden table with two benches, two or three stools, and a single Iron
bed, the only bed in the house, which Uncle Rade had commandeered
for himself. Someone liberated the bed from the military barracks
in Bileca after the collapse of Austria-Hungary In 1918. Elsewhere
in the house were a few simple stools, two foot-high circular tables
(sinija), one or two wooden boxes, and for storage purposes two large
elliptical wicker baskets plastered with cow dung. There were no curtains,
draperies
or rugs. The bedding was simple and consisted of heavy
goat-hair blankets called guber. There were no bedsheets and only
a couple of crude pillows in the house. One slept on a guber. covered
himself with another guber; and improvised a pillow from his own clothing.
When we were all together, food was generally eaten
off the sinija in shifts. The spoons were wooden but there were not
enough of them, and at mealtime after each swallow one was obliged
to pass the spoon to his neighbor. The house had fewer than half a
dozen simple metallic forks, and no table knives at all. We ate from
a single large wooden or metallic bowl. This shortage of eating implements
and dishes reflects a curious self-effacing attitude. It was certainly
no major task to carve additional spoons. Materials were plentiful,
and the peasant was skilled in wood-carving. Peasants In Bileca Rudine
are talented masons and stonecutters and built beautiful public buildings
for wages, but never built comfortable and finished homes for themselves
... Not until the late thirties did the family at long last obtain
a sufficient number of wooden and metallic eating implements, a concession
to urban influence.
Our zadruga home was disorderly and crowded. The sanitary
conditions were appalling. We had no toilets and no washing and bathing
facilities. The water In the cistern was polluted, and the dishes
were never thoroughly washed. The animals moved in and out of the
house, leaving their droppings. Swarms of flies were everywhere. The
house was Infested with fleas, bedbugs, and lice."(10)
But this article will mostly concentrate on battering
and sexual abuse before moving on to the Issue of the present war
in the former Yugoslavia. what I Intend or hope to show is the most
striking connection between traumatic childhood and war, or, to put
It differently, how some childrearing practices directly produce "heroes,"
not only delegate killers, but delegate tormentors, avengers and rapists.
2.) BATTERING AS A WAY OF LIFE
Students of traditional family life often overlook
some important features of child-rearing practices, considered vital
by the historians of childhood, but beating is not one of them. This
is more than true of scholarly work on the South Slav type of common
family or zadruga. On the whole It makes no attempt to hide the fact
that punishment was very often used in child-rearing, mostly In the
form of beating. The survey of 300 Yugoslav villages and their domestic
lives, carried out SO to 60 years ago by Vera Stein Erlich showed
that "in none of the Yugoslav regions Is there a negative attitude
toward the use of a stick, and nowhere can one find consistent unity
of theory and practice in favor of upbringing without punishment."(11)
Some of the answers the author received:
"Girls are struck even up to their twentieth
year, and boys up to fifteen, for from that age one has to reckon
with the dignity of a youth. In olden days there were soldiers of
sixteen, and to strike a soldier would have been the greatest of
insults."
"They say: 'We beat small boys most' and: 'A
girl feels shame, a boy fear' Children are as a rule beaten up to
puberty. It Is rarely anybody brings up a child without punishment.
Of certain children people think It born kindly so It must be treated
kindly. A child defends itself from its mother, less from its father.
Then the mother says: My switch broke. It is rare for a child to
attack its parents. Where the switch of parent or teacher strikes,
they say that dzehemen (hell) will not catch fire."
"As a rule children are kept severely. There
are cases of children not even daring to utter a word In the father's
presence,. Regarding punishment, they mostly stick to corporal punishment.
The peasants do not like gentle upbringing. They want obedience
without a word."
"Swish away, sir, if the bones are mine, the
flesh is yours. That is Invariably what I have been told throughout
my career as a teacher here. They are critical of my gentle methods,
and any failure In school is ascribed to this."
"They beat girls longer, that Is, keep an eye
on them, parents beating them them till they are married, when the
husbands takes over. Boys are beaten till their fifteenth year.
Boys knock their mothers about as soon as they are over IS That
Is common, In self-defense. There Is no toleration whatsoever for
gentle up-bringing, everything being brought back to the justifying
phrase:
The stick came out of Paradise. "(12)
The same was true of the husband-wife relationship,
leading Erlich to the conclusion there was "a great deal of cruelty
to all the weaker members of the family." Wives were regularly
beaten by their husbands and their fathers-in-law, as well as other
members of the zadruga, verbally abused-the range of curses and obscenities
in the Serbocroat language is quite awesome and severely punished
for any signs of dis-obedience, often with serious consequences.
The brutality of the domestic atmosphere can be seen
in numerous Serbocroat folk sayings and proverbs, with hatred and
fear the dominant words or underlying emotions, for instance: "Trust
neither dog, horse or woman," "Boast about the quality of
the wheat when it's in your barn and your wife when she's in her grave"
or "Fear tends the goats," which was explained by Vuk Karadzic
(in 1836) as: "He who fears the master does the work, for there
is nothing without fear "(13) One could add an interesting result
of a recent survey of Serb fiddles on children and childhood: the
most frequent definition for a child is slave. (14)
To make a long and ugly story short: In the traditional
life of the zadruga, a man was simply not considered a true man if
he refrained from violent behavior and a strict regime was followed
to make men of boys. To show affection and gentleness was to be soft-something
no man could afford to be. The past tense can easily be replaced for
the present perfect tense, as this attitude seems to be as true as
ever.
There are different opinions as to how this violent
way of life changed over time, with some scholars claiming that things
gradually improved and others suggesting that the settled patriarchal
way of life was more peaceful and that aggressiveness intensified
only during the dissolution and decay of the zadruga style of life.
Erlich found out that the degree of violence slowly increased going
from northwest to the southeast, being by far the greatest In the
families of Serbs and Montenegrins.(15) Anyway, the firm, unchanged
basis seems to be strong pressure to avoid expressing feelings, particularly
on the part of men, of affection, vulnerability or dependency; coupled
with strong pressure to express feelings of force, rage and dominance
against commonly understood legitimate targets.
What seems beyond doubt is that on the eve of the
Second World War domestic life was extremely harsh and brutal in most
of Yugoslavia (with the exception of Slovenia). while In most of Europe
children were taught that violence was bad unless it was officially
licensed - as in war - this was not so in the Balkans. And the war
itself made the situation far worse. The same male Ideal - a real
man as a fighter, strong, merciless etc. - is openly cherished in
most of contemporary ex-Yugoslavia.(16)
3.) SEXUAL ABUSE
In great contrast to physical violence, where there
is an abundance of evidence, students of the region rarely pay any
attention to various forms of sexual abuse, such as molestation, violence
in the marital relationship, rape within or outside the home, by relations
or strangers, Child abuse, sodomy and the like. They either neglect
it completely or else they openly claim and praise "the strict
morality" of traditional life, which was supposedly corrupted
only with the advent of the "modern way of life" and its
corrosive influence.(17)
At best, the emerging picture of the marital relationship
suggests a life of cold, unemotional bonds, with husbands demanding
sex and wives giving in or enduring it. There are also many signs
of great brutality, or, to put it differently, signs of sadistic traits
on the husband's part and a masochistic attitude on the part of the
wife. Men who were expected to beat and mistreat their wives to prove
their masculinity were not very much different when sex was concerned.
At worst, women were severely abused by other members of the extended
family, by outside figures of authority, and tortured in the process.
If they somehow found themselves unprotected-pregnant out of wedlock,
widowed, already raped, driven out of their families, emotionally
disturbed, handicapped or whatever-they were subjected to random violence,
often In the form of gang rape.
One of the female teachers contributing to Erlich's
survey, described the following case as typical of the Serbian peasants
of Bosnia:
Her husband was rough even in his most intimate
demands, and for those days rather lascivious. She is of rather
a cold temperament, so in intimate matters they did not quite fit
each other. For this reason this contact, she says, was revolting
and afforded her no great enjoyment. Yet she did not dare avoid
a single one of her husband's demands, but humbly suffered them
all. Often she would remain awake at night, weeping, while her husband,
satisfied, long since snored. This was the general attitude of husband
to wife-never to reveal himself anywhere as tender or sensitive,
for he would be made mock of.(18)
Some other contributors to the same survey revealed
similar traits, that is marriage as a lifelong sequence of forced
sex or, simply, rapes. But some went further:
There are numerous cases of the brother-in-law raping
the young wife, the father-in-law his daughter-in-law; in short,
every man lives with any woman... This village lives a life which
is incredible; nobody would imagine it."
In fact it was not only imagined but described as
well. Eruch received some reports on places - in Croatia, Bosnia and
Serbia - where sexual morals sank catastrophically low, with widespread
adultery, prostitution and blackmailed sexual affairs, sometimes,
under pressure, with police officers. These keep a log of the number
of women they take, and are not choosy, and have reached the record
number of 1500, a man of thirty-eight or forty being especially eager
to collect affairs during his last years of service. "(20)
Still, what the survey covered was mostly sexual affairs
between consenting (or submitting) adults, however violent they were.
It was left to writers of fiction to put into words what scholars
neglected or tried to deny, giving us the chance to look into the
true nature of traditional life.
The story of literature (and art in general) under
socialism is a story of major conflicts-socialism or communism being
an Ideology which strongly believed in all sorts of repression, including
the repression of freedom of emotions, words, thoughts; among the
prime targets were feelings of loneliness, anxiety, despair, in fact
everything that was labeled pessimism. But Serbocroat literature was
very good at rebelling against the authorities. The sixties in particular
were a turning-point, with the growing emergence of works trying to
translate the silent screams into literature. A powerful stream of
pictures of life as bleak as it could be gushed out. Together with
a new wave of cinema, aptly called "the black wave," there
started an avalanche of literary works - short stories, novels, plays,
half-fictional half-journalistic pieces - where the long repressed
and denied truth finally came into the open.
Some of them covered the 19th century, some the first
half of the 20th, some periods of (one of many) wars, others the post-war,
peaceful years, but most of them told horrible stories of bitter hatred
and appalling violence. In fact, reading them one cannot escape the
impression that the authors were engaged In a virtual competition
to shock and out-shock one another. If some older writers only hinted
or obeyed standard rules of refined literature,(21) the generation
born around 1930 decided to tell It all and to be as blunt and defiant
- often vulgar, too - as hell.(22)
Their stories, mostly autobiographical behind the
smoke-screen of fiction, revealed a life of extreme physical, verbal
and sexual abuse, of systematic and random violence, of incest (13)
between all possible pairs of relatives), sexual abuse of boys, girls
and animals. They include ordinary rapes, gang rapes, rapes with various
instruments and weapons - all of it accompanied with a rich variety
of torture, humiliation and mutilation. Some of It happened under
the protective cover of home or darkness, some of it in public; in
the middle of villages, squares, meadows or crowded cafes, as a public
spectacle, with children among the audience.
In short, the traditional life in Serbia, Croatia,
Bosnia, Montenegro, as portrayed in fiction (and on stage and film),
can be described as life of enormous hatred, vindictiveness and cruelty,
with sexual expressions of aggression a common component. The traditional
Balkan man rapes for power, he is extremely insecure and the best
way he can find to make himself feel better and in control is to get
drunk and violent, to make others feel even worse, to humiliate, to
degrade, to inflict as much pain as possible. This makes him gain
some self-respect and at the same time makes him respected in the
eyes of other; less daring and violent men. As women are treated with
a mixture of reverence and resentment, to conquer them is accompanied
with an appropriately mixed response: the conqueror is a criminal
and a hero at the same time; he Is hated with awesome respect. Sexual
triumphs in var-ious forms produce tremendous guilt and pride at the
same time.
Thus, one of the heroes of a typical short story "was
adored by the workers. They were proud of him although he, apparently,
furrowed through their beds, polluting with the stench of his stable-smelling
body the guts of their wives and daughters." He was "our
man", "healthy and unspoiled," proving it Continuously
by taking "just about every one of them, from cleaning women
to little girls."(23)
The most Outspoken of these novels was written by
Petar Saric under the title The Master is Coming Tomorrow.(24) It
Is a portrait of traditional, patriarchal tyranny and submissiveness,
a tale of sexual exploitations as exercises of raw power. The clan
(or brotherhood) it portrays was born In Incest between a brother
and sister; and a few centuries later the incestuous bond between
the head of the clan and his sister is still its dominant secret,
although the Master is more or less impotent. The novel proceeds through
scenes of jealousy, hatred and aggression toward the final murder
of the Master. Its women closely eye the young boys and seduce them
as soon as they are "ripe" (i.e. In puberty), giving them
up only when the boys get married. A man of fifty who has a subnormal
son, wants him to marry a girl of fifteen, but their marriage is to
be a formality, as he wants her for himself, to bear him a new, healthy
son.
In every generation of this clan there is a boy who
suffers "the family Sickness", i.e., severe nightmares and
a sort of epilepsy. The description of the latest case: It started
when the boy was a tiny baby, with convulsions, screams, crying, Vomiting.
It was immediately recognized by everyone. The baby started to turn
over; on his stomach, burrowing his face into the straw in the cradle.
His mother allowed him to do so, but the grandmother was strongly
against it: "Turn him back! He must lie on his back, even if
he dies!" In short, "they all wanted to help him and it
did not occur to them he might be defending himself from them."
As narrated by the boy when he has reached his early
teens, the treatment looks like this:
Father pours water on me, he reaches with his wet
hand into my armpits and my crotch, where I sweat the most. At the
beginning, he had great trouble, he did not know how to wake me
up. How did he ever think of reaching between my legs with his wet
hand, how did he find out this helps me best?(25)
As with every other kind of violence, sexual aggression
greatly increases during times of war; particularly at the beginning
and the end of wars - again, as recorded in some memoirs and contemporary
Serbocroat fiction (there are no statistical data available). In times
of chaos and Insecurity, with no firm authority, the latent frustrations
and hatreds explode into a devastating, massive outburst, orgies of
plunder; murders and rapes.(26)
For instance, when the Austrian army started to pull
out of Montenegro in 1918, "there It was as though some fury,
a great fire, suddenly seized an entire region. All rose up - young
and old, women and even children - to pillage the Moslems In the Sanzak.
Even men who were not ever easily misled, who had lived In righteousness
and meekness all their days, now lost their heads ... There was something
else in all this, too, something even deeper and more lasting, a kind
of perverted vow, some deep inner pleasure." Women who went with
foreigners were targets of the worst brutalities.(27)
4.) TRADITIONAL LIFE:
COMBINATION OF CHANNELED RAGE AND LOVE
An excellent example of how people manage to find
a tolerable way through such abusive experiences can be found in the
culture of the Serbs, meaning the population of Serbia, Montenegro,
parts of Croatia and Bosnia. They have organized their lives around
a great national trauma, the battle of Kosovo, which took place in
1389, when the Serbs were defeated by the Turks. What followed was
a gradual occupation, lasting for several centuries. What followed
as well was an elaborate creative process, devoted to the creation
of legend and mythology.
After the defeat and occupation, there gradually emerged
a flood of epic poetry, born out of despair and frantic need for an
appropriate survival strategy which put the blame on fate and treason.
The heroes were transformed into martyrs and the defeat mysteriously,
was turned into moral victory, thus helping the Serbs to Survive:
"Adversity was only to be a trial through which the Serbs had
to pass in order to come to better days. Hence the day of the national
disaster became, strange as it may seem, the national festival. To
avenge Kosovo became the one as-piration of a subdued nation."(28)
Thus, a permanent, legitimate and noble target for violence was produced:
to fight the Turks became a national obsession, a perfect outlet for
pent-up feelings, aggressiveness, rage. The ability to fight became
the greatest possible virtue, the standard for any appreciation of
man's morality and performance of his sa-cred duty. This spellbinding
mythology, which was half chanted half recited by guslari, coupled
with centuries of action, provided a perfect combination of rage and
love-rage against the enemies, love for the motherland (particularly
Kosovo, the cradle of the Serb nation, the most sacred place). Most
of their epic poetry celebrated something like an appetite for sacrificial
self-immolation In glorious wars.
The power of this mythology oscillated through different
historical periods, being particularly strong in times of great distress.
It helped people to endure and offered a structured way of life, turning
it Into a series of continuing battles, struggles, confrontations,
rebellions, plundering expeditions and challenges. Heroic life means
perpetual war; not only an unconscious but also conscious cult of
aggression. "Two or three perfectly definite ideas are instilled
into every Serb from the moment of his birth," wrote Jovan Cvijic,
one of the best authorities, himself a Serb.(29) "He learns to
wish for personal freedom and self-government and for the freedom
of all the Serbian lands, which, he knows from ballads and traditions,
were once part of his own coun-try... It is his duty to free them
with his own blood by perpetual acts of heroism and by ceaseless sacrifices
... The whole Dinaric area has certainly produced some exceptionally
heroic men, but It Is the Dinaric Serbs who attain the highest degree
of heroism.../They/ are warlike and have been engaged in warfare incessantly
ever since Kosovo... Some of them are, as just as God, but others
can hate with a consuming pas-sion and a violence that reaches a white
heat. It is the latter who are the chief bearers of the Dinaric war-cry
of holy vengeance. Some of them put their strength to evil uses; but
the chief vent for It up to the present has been the Serbian idea
of nationality, and many of them have already given their lives for
it without the smallest hesitation."
"If one studies these violent types," Cvijic
continued, "one finds in every single one an alteration of a
very active period with one In which they are completely passive and
exhausted. The latter periods may actually wreck an important undertaking
if a great deal depends upon the individual concerned. They seem to
sleep like Kraljevic Marko, the national hero, and everything must
wait until they wake. After a very progressive period comes a break
with the result that the historical development of the inhabitants
of this area goes in a zig-zag line... A general lack of sense of
proportion in both good and bad circumstances seems to be a feature
of the lively temperament. Hope and despair are both excessive...
When things are going badly, the Dinaric peoples behave in an even
more characteristic way than when they go well. At the first mischance
they are assailed with an indefinite hesitation of spirit which gradually
becomes 'frenzied; opposers and grumblers come forward, and at this
point they may say and do anything. This critical stage steadily develops
into panic, with the well-known features of panic that are common
to all nations. "(30)
There are numerous accounts of this particular heroic
similar defense lines, so that whole districts of Bosnia and Herzegovina
constituted military units to ward off the Austrians (or Europeans),
while most of Montenegro and Serbia spent centuries in constant rebellions
against the Ottomans, with military units following the rules of kinship
bonds.
This had a profound impact on the life of these regions.
First warfare affects women and men, but in a different way. To begin
with, warfare is of course the most obvious human activity where women
definitely cannot compete with men. Constant fighting gives men a
distinct role and power base, it offers abundant opportunity for heroism.
On the other hand, wars severely diminish the opportunity for home-making,
agriculture and other more or less feminine activities and centered
on home, privacy, prosperity. The result is therefore not only that
victors tend to kill the men and enslave women (sexual exploitation
being an important element); It means as well that men tend to die
glorious deaths and women tend to end degraded and enslaved.
When life means constant warfare, women not only do
the usual women's work, they do men's work as well and have to show
a man's courage. To make love and not to make war Is considered an
outrage. To cultivate the land, to engage In craft, trade or money-making
Is looked upon with contempt, It is something the Gypsies, the Jews,
the Greeks or other degenerate foreigners do. To improve the home,
to make life easier and more comfortable seems equally beside the
point and even ridiculous:
Heroism and heroic actions are the main thread of
their existence and colour their whole life," Cvijic tried
to explain. "The moment a child leaves the cradle he begins
to run after glory and fame, and their great desire is to belong
to a heroic family. Everything in life is secondary to heroic ambition,
and the Montenegrins are as greedy of heroism as a miser is of his
money. They are so sensitive about their pride and their honour
that they are apt to lose their heads over trifling matters. Life
without honour is absolutely worthless to them, because honour is
the mainspring of humani-ty. ... Everything Is sacrificed to pride
and heroism. They not only die light-heartedly, but laugh while
they are dying. Women have strangled their children in order that
they may not betray the army by their crying and expose it to shameful
destruction.(34)
One of the most notable consequences of major peace,
which came to the region with the end of the First World War; with
the legitimate outlet for rage gone, and the love for the motherland
somehow empty and without gratification, was a great surge of domestic
and general violence. Thus the end of the First World War proved disastrous
in Montenegro, although the people were finally united with the rest
of their South Slav brothers:
Men became bad, rotten, unwilling to give one another
air to breathe. Bestiality and scandal at home, In the village,
quickly crowded out of the mind the national tragedy. These vices
were our own, Montenegrin and domestic... Uncle Lazar was particu-larly
tireless In committing every evil thing against his family... He
seemed hardly able to wait to take out his wrath on someone. He
cursed and beat his wife. Rosa's weeping (his daughter) enraged
him even more. He took her black braids, caught them in the door;
and then began to trample on her... Uncle Mirko was even worse,
though mostly against himself. He beat his daughters, long married,
and drove them through the village. One of them, who took after
his evil nature the most, taunted him at the edge of the village
to come to her; lift his whiskers, and kiss her shameful parts,
and she bawled It out without mincing words.(35)
It should therefore come as no surprise that women
In labour were seldom allowed to give birth under their home roofs
in such a culture or that they could be ridiculed and even stoned
while they stumbled through the village, searching for a safe delivering
place - by boys practicing their first acts of heroism. (36)
I do not wish to suggest, as these quotes might imply,
dealing mostly with Serbs and Montenegrins, that there was no violence
in the rest of Yugoslavia, either during wars or in domestic life.
Still, there does seem to have been far less. One of the best arguments
is provided by Serbs and Montenegrins themselves, as they do not see
it as a fault but, on the contrary, as a source of pride. During most
of Yugoslav history, the recent collapse included, their fighting
ability and heroic history has served as the best proof of their virility
and superiority, providing them with the Opportunity to show a certain
amount of contempt for the Croats and Moslems, not to mention the
Slovenes, who could not compete at all in this regard.
The same attitude can be found in many foreigners
as well, as they were often quite fascinated by this heroic race of
the Balkans. Rebecca West, for instance, was Overwhelmed by it, devoting
hundreds of pages to it, passing in barely hidden scorn over "the
sensible and unexcitable people of Slovenia" and in open contempt
over the rich and orderly villages of the German settlers. And her
husband joined in enthusiastically: "Observe that in Bosnia the
Slavs choked the Turk with cream, they glutted him with their wholesale
conversions... But the Serbs fought the Turks, and then they fought
them, and then they fought them."(37)
This fighting spirit or distinct Inclination toward
violent behavior has been observed even in families that emigrated
and found themselves far from their usual belligerent culture. To
give an example: "This family was as unusual a group of people
as this town has ever seen," said a woman from Illinois, USA,
of her childhood friend of Serbocroat stock, now a film star. "It
was unusual mainly for its fighting.... He and his older brother and
three younger sisters terrorized the neighborhood. Their mother did
not believe In discipline, so she would just retreat to the kitchen
and turn up the radio while they fought. They fought about anything,
really... Mealtimes invariably developed into screaming matches escalating
to food-fights, then Malkovich and his elder brother Danny would start
chasing each other round the house, arming themselves with butchers'
knives and pokers, anything we could find. Danny, he claims, was the
inspiration for every sociopath he's ever played.... So It was a warring
family, but It was also a very dose one. There were no repressed angers
or Simmering resentments, because everyone was letting It all hang
out at all times." (38)
Finally, at least a few words on the Second World
War are due. In great contrast to what happened In occupied Western
Europe, the war in Eastern Europe was actually several wars in one,
It was in every possible sense of the word a total war; as all sorts
of civil or internal wars were waged at the same time. It was particularly
vicious in Yugoslavia, most of all in its central parts Croatia, Bosnia,
Serbia, Montenegro. Among Its many appalling results was a total devastation
of childhood, something like a massive plunge into the middle ages.
After two decades of great endeavors to improve the living conditions,
medical service and education, everything crumbled down in a new explosion
of hatred. In searching for the roots of the present conflict in Yugoslavia
and finding them in childhood experiences, we are not dealing with
childhood as such, but with wartime childhood. Its far-reaching consequences
simply cannot be overestimated. Childhood history in Yugoslavia is
a horrible, extremely painful subject, but to understand the present
fury we need to complicate our knowledge with additional horrors of
the Second World War. All the leaders in the present fighting were
deeply affected by massive traumatic experiences of wartime life and
death. The more or less conventional devastation that the occupying
armies brought was compounded by a sort of dark age horror; with eye-gougings,
mutilations, butcherings and rapes. If the Germans mostly used firearms
and other high-technology means to conquer the stubborn country, its
inhabitants often preferred knives, axes and similar traditional weapons.
5.) TWO CASE STUDIES
Momo Kaporwas born In 1937 in Sarajevo, the
only son of a fairly well-off parents. The Second World War shattered
his childhood. When he was four and a halt a bomb destroyed their
house, killing his mother; while the little boy, close to asphyxiation,
was pulled from among the ruins and from under his mother's crushed
body. He spent the rest of the war with various people, amid the many
atrocities that gradually devastated his home town and the whole country.
After the war he moved to Belgrade, lived in desolate poverty, but
managed to get a good education, finishing at the college of art.
Eventually he developed Into an accomplished painter; writer and TV
personality, becoming a best selling author; celebrity, charmer; lady's
man, In short, one of the most popular personalities In the country,
famous for his wit and charm.(39)
Ten years ago, he started to evolve into a Serbian
nationalist, which brought him Into some conflict with the authorities.
This only intensified his attitude; his love-hate relationship towards
his native Sarajevo and its people became more and more pronounced.
Finally his childhood terror totally prevailed, turning him into one
of the leading Serbian war-mongers, advocating violence to prevent
the Moslem gangs from butchering the Serbs, ridiculing any attempts
of peaceful solution etc.(40)
Kapor has never said much about the details of his
early years, stressing only their horror and loneliness. Ruins, devastation,
loss of home, search for love, violence, corpses, will to survive
these are the most frequent words he offers when asked about it. He
was far more eloquent when describing his post-war years, spent in
institutions and summer camps for orphans. These were organized on
a quasi-military basis, Soviet style, as established by Makarenko,
who was very popular at the time.(41) There, from eight to ten years
old, he started to learn how to get on, how to charm his way with
smiles and compliance, pleasing everybody-he managed this extremely
well-while secretly dreaming of revenge. Here are some passages from
his autobiographical novel The Provincial,(42) where a middle-aged,
successful man meets his ten-year-old self and commits suicide in
despair:
"Now and then he was patted on the head and praised,
just when he was silently plotting one of his many vendettas. Nobody
can be as vicious as an angry child, deeply convinced of the justification
of his hatred. H. was pitiless. There was no understanding In him,
out of which a little goodness could have sprung in his desperate
and there-fore prematurely hardened heart... One cannot expect mercy
from a boy of ten, who has seen houses being demolished and people
hanged, a boy who has tried to survive evil as best he could!"
During his many "Interrogations" and punishments,
meant to "re-educate him," the boy resorts to two survival
strategies. One is a calculated development of boyish charm and friendly
manner; the second is the creation of a secret world. He used to "escape
into one of his secret passages, thinking of some other matters, but
maintaining a pleasant face, calculated only not to annoy the educators.
But underneath his apologetic face there was hidden the untamed stubbornness
of a young beast, which cannot be pushed Into a cage or tamed and
made to retrieve the thrown stick. If forced to, he brought it back
smiling, but his provocative smile (which made the staff furious)
was announcing that one day, when he had the chance, the stick In
his hands would be the weapon of revenge. "(43)
And so the boy, "thrown Into the hell of orphanages,
boarding houses, camps and re-education, utterly lonely among people
and children", is sustained by his drive for success and revenge.
Some day, "he will scatter his tormentors, punish them, doing
everything possible to settle accounts for the hell he had to endure."
But his own private hell Is not the only subject of his revengeful
dreams. His fantasies involve the ancient battle of Kosovo as well:
to introduce modern weapons into the battlefield of 1389, to destroy
the Turks and to change the course of history-this would bring him
fame, making a hero out of "nothing and nobody. (44)
As the adult hero comes to recognize the utter superficiality
of his life and success, approaching suicidal despair, he manages
to send a message to his own home address: "I do not know how
to return from 1947. Please, I urgently need help!" Finally,
in a scene reminiscent of Lord of the Flies by William Golding, he
is attacked by a gang of boys, his childish self among them, and is
driven Into the sea.(45)
During the last years, Momo Kapor has lost most of
his urbane polish, turned into one of the leading Belgrade figures
of revenge, writ-ing and speaking profusely, using almost exclusively
apocalyptic, sadistic and masochistic language to express his inner
devastated self. He seems to be finally turning into reality his childhood
fantasies of revenge without mercy -- against all the hostile world,
but particularly against his native town of Sarajevo.(46)
The second case I wish to present involves
a younger man.
Jovan Radulovic was born in 1951, in a very backward
village near Knin in Croatia, the mountainous area between the sea
and Bosnia, a region famous for Its swagger and aggresslon.(47) In
1980 he published a book of short stories Golubnjaca.(48) The stories,
a record of the physical and mental suffering of his childhood, were
soon turned Into a play. The production (first staged In Serbia, as
Radulovic Is a Serb) caused a tremendous sensation; it is no exaggeration
td say it was one of the most important events In the history of post-Tito
Yugoslavia and Its vi-olent disintegration. The play was put on stage,
then banned, causing violent polemics, utterly damned and praised
at the same time, turning an unknown author into an instant celebrity.(49)
Seven years later; in summer 1990, the Knin Krajlna staged an armed
rebellion against Croatia, proclaiming its autonomous status, i.e.
its secession from Croatia, thus triggering the present war In Yugoslavia.
Jovan Radulovic was among Its leaders, becoming its secretary of foreign
affairs.
The main reason for the uproar was political and Ideological.
First of all, its author touched on a forbidden topic. Golubnjaca
Is an enormous karst pit, full of corpses; the Croat (fascist) ustashi
used it to dump the bodies of Serbs, slaughtered or alive, during
the Second World War. in describing the life of a village, whose people
refuse to forget it, Radulovic' broke one of the basic laws of Yugoslav
brotherhood: the devastation of war was to be constantly remembered,
but without mentioning clearly who murdered whom. Secondly, the play
was considered far too coarse, not "true to life," not acknowledging
progress, again a political offence. But in spite of the widespread
debates, the crucial topic was never touched, let alone discussed,
namely the horror of child abuse on a horrendous scale.
Golubnjaca portrays village life in 1960/61, with
two boys of nine and ten as protagonists, in a succession of brutal
scenes. The boys torture animals - sheep, goats, dogs, donkeys, even
a newborn lamb - and kill them; the bees are simply smashed, while
a very tough donkey (who is sentenced to death because he turns out
to be impotent) 'is quite a problem. When a grown man is unable to
finish him oft the boys volunteer to do it; they put a stick of explosive
into his anus, but as he is still alive after the explosion, though
badly wounded, they push some additional explosive down his throat.
In scenes of perpetual violence, with beating, thrashing,
stoning, pelting with dung, shouting obscenities, everybody tortures
everybody. Men are threatening to kill their wives, grandparents,
children, neighbors, and the boys repeatedly threaten to kill the
parents and other children, using a gun, explosives, a knife, a hand
grenade. The more violent boy keeps announcing he will take his own
life, too, Is several times on the verge of either murder or suicide
and finally blows him-self out of existence with a hand grenade.
Most of the scenes mix verbal and physical violence
with sexual ag-gressiveness, combining lust with pain and involving
adults, children and animals. Both boys are sexually exploited and
encouraged to sexually abuse the girls of their own age. In one scene
the first boy is invited to his (male) teacher's room, undressed,
bathed and taken to bed; we are made to understand it was neither
the first nor the last such incident. In another scene, the second
boy is ordered to drop his pants by his grandfather; who insist on
checking how the boy's penis is growing. The boy's response shows
this is a routine practice, as he demands to be paid before obliging.
His friend arrives, declines to undress and there is much coarse boasting
about the size of male organs. The grandfather enquires about the
development of their friend, a girl of ten, the look of her private
parts, the pubic hair; insisting the girl is mature enough to be taken.
The boys knock him down and try to check the old man's crotch. In
the next scene, they try to rape the girl.
All these goes on in the shadow of the Second World
War (referring mainly to the civil war between the Serbs and the Croats),
with people remembering the slaughters, rapes and mutilations, the
pit being in the prime position at the center of the action and gradually
becoming the focus of their lives.
As I have already said, the debate concentrated on
the issues of artistic freedom, on the advisability of evoking the
horrors of the civil war among the Serbs and the Croats, and on the
possibility of future revenge. This was mainly due to the final scene,
the boy's apocalyptic vision in which the pit opens and all its dead
inhabitants come out, in a gruesome procession of corpses that include
the goat the boy has killed (for being too sexually aggressive in
attacking his flock!), plus a young girl, dressed in a folk costume,
Serbian of course, who was butchered by the Croats. what nobody dared
to touch was the confession of a much - abused man who had the courage
to speak out, producing a horrible book and play, although hardly
a work of art.
Once again, It was found much easier to make a political scandal and
to use an enormous amount of words to condemn a person for his ideological
wrongdoing, while remaining silent about the much more painful subject.
Nobody paid any attention to the problem of emotionally disturbed
children, let alone severely abused ones, to the reality of childhood
in at least the backward parts of the country, to the possible wrong
doings of parents, grandparents, teachers in general, or to the author's
credibility and his particular experiences. Nobody wanted to know
anything of child abuse and Its effects. The author himself joined
the game of hide and seek, pulling back from the painful subject,
choosing to be a martyr for the Serbian cause and a victim of national
trauma rather than the victim of his own parents and relatives.
The case of Jovan Radulovic deserves this much coverage,
as it shows so well some of the crucial problems of abused children.
This battered and sexually exploited boy was obviously Intelligent
and among the mistreatments he was spared was the fate of an inarticulate
boy, closed up in silence. He was sent to school, had a good educa-tion
- he has a university degree in literature - and found the courage
to scream out his pain. If most abused children tend to take on their
own shoulders the burden of badness, clinging to the image of loving
and nurturing parents (caught In poverty, which alleviates their guilt,
in his case), he managed to present his case in a rather even - handed
way - his public was left to choose who was the more to blame. But
when he met with public outcry of a political nature, a perfect solution
was offered, not available to the majority of abused children. He
was literally pushed again into denying and repressing his private
hell, and given the chance to become a public martyr and hero. His
guilt (or his parents' guilt) was forgotten, obliterated. His private
life and Its horrible nature were he'd aside. Instead, his personal
hell was turned to marvelous advantage, his trauma was modified into
a national trauma and used to constitute the new life of his people.
All of a sudden, there was no necessity for repression
and Isolation, for denial and amnesia. He was offered the chance to
enjoy public adoration on a vast scale, his secret need for revenge
was given the opportunity to become a loud cry for public revenge.
His dirty, guilt-ridden traumas were spelled out and forgotten at
the same time, replaced by something far more important and given
a decent name at last!
The real enemy was found and spelled out, the Croats,
the ustashi, and, let us not forget, there were quite a lot of solid
facts behind this amazing metamorphosis of a private hell into a public
hell of victimization.(50) Anyway, the emotional life of a large number
of Serbs was ready for this type of abused child as a hero. History
was once again used to hide the dirty details of child abuse and assault,
of rapes, incest, sodomy etc. what has come to be known as soul murder
was turned into a soul resurrection for the entire Serb nation.
6.) SOME CURRENT DATA ON CHILD ABUSE
To balance this fictional account which may seem inadmissible
evidence to many readers, some facts on the subject of violence and
sexual aggressiveness are necessary. Unfortunately, statistical evidence
and scholarly research on a national scale are not available and there
are no reliable stud-ies covering larger areas, let alone different
ethnic groups. what can be found are several minor studies. I shall
briefly show some of the results.
To begin with, in many parts of former Yugoslavia
domestic life seems to be violent, meaning that beating children and
wives is quite common. Among the six republics that used to constitute
Yugoslavia, Slovenla alone recognized rape between spouses as rape
- an offense that can be taken to court (not that many wives do it).
Some data on Croatia: An SOS service for battered
wives was estab-lished a few years ago and has had a lot of work.
Of all the complaints just 6% reported sexual aggression, but the
picture is utterly wrong, as the majority of women never thought of
admitting it or even calling a forced intercourse a rape. A detailed
study for 1988 found out that 93% cases of beating ended in forcible
intercourse.
A similar research in Belgrade, Serbia, found out
that in 30% of battered cases, reported to the SOS Center, women were
terrorized with threats of murder as well (to stab, strangle, butcher
them); 49% admitted they were victims of violent behavior every day;
74% of cases included child battering as well. In most cases the source
of violence was the husband, but 10% of women were mistreated by their
sons, and 6% by their fathers - usually in combination with husbands.
The Belgrade study concluded that in at least 25% of cases mistreatment
was so bad it constituted extreme danger for women's lives.
Both studies reveal the long reaching effects of traditional
life, meaning the life style characteristic of zadrugas. To endure
violent behavior is still considered moral obligation on the part
of women; they are often maltreated by their husbands, sons and fathers
at the same time, and they tend to avoid divorce out of fear of their
father's and brother's opinion.(51)
The same pattern of continuity of traditional family
life seems to be true of some other aspects of abuse. For instance,
between 1978-1988 the Forensic psychiatry center In Zagreb, Croatia,
was asked for the evaluation of 170 cases of crimes of "degradation
and immorality", among them 30 cases of incest (involving 40
victims). Among these 30 cases 6 involved sons raping their mothers.
And two additional cases involved young men of 22 raping their grandmothers,
aged 67 and 77; one was murdered as well, while the other committed
suicide.(52) This reveals an unusually high degree of hostility towards
the older and the eldest generation of female relatives.
7.) THE DEATH OF THE PATRIARCH AND
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE YUGOSLAV ZADRUGA
The zadruga type of life was the unconscious model
for the organization of the Yugoslav federal state; its development
as well as its final dissolution reveal most of the positive and negative
aspects of this type of common life. It was set up and run according
to the value system of collec-tivism, egalitarianism, solidarity-everyone
was expected to contribute according to his abilities, each received
(approximately) according to its needs. There was, of course, a certain
amount of democracy, but it was mostly a fake democracy - the Communist
Party was on the top, Tito was Its head, supreme authority and master-for-life.
Although on the surface it looked quite appealing, something like
a display of "harsh happiness", there was much repression
and violence underneath.
when the great patriarch died In 1980, the picture
of nice simple life slowly revealed severe flaws. To begin with, the
idealized brotherhood and unity, Its dominant slogan, showed some
signs of actual sibling rivalry, even hostility. Before the death
of the patriarch, taskmaster and judge, such feelings were not acknowledged,
and if they occasionally were, the patriarch dealt with them in his
resolute, often brutal way. The brothers were never allowed to voice
their resentments and problems, let alone to learn to negotiate them.
Anyway, the entire institution "discouraged the expression of
individual wishes," indeed, the repression of individualism was
so severe as to be "incomprehensible to individualists in the
West," as Erlich put it to describe the zadruga life.(53) Still,
enormous differences persisted, and they increasingly showed when
the issue of economic and political reforms became unavoidable. The
ideas on how to organize life in the future, how to change it - if
at all - followed the differences in childrearing and family backgrounds,
Including vast differences in infant mortality,(54) as well as recent
experiences of punishment for willful behavior.(55) In fact, the development
of post-Tito Yugoslavia provides a dramatic picture of a zadruga at
its worst its utter inability to face the demands of modern way of
life, as well as its members' feelings of being lost when the old
man is gone: He was strict, severe and brutal, but what do we do now?
Of course the common house was fairly bad, but it was so cozy and
safe, it offered such comfort! what we have now is messy freedom,
jealous and hateful brothers, full of envy and greed.
Let me picture some responses to the situation and
Its challenges. Slovenia, who never knew the zadruga type of life
and was very un-happy with this style of brotherhood, started to behave
as a naughty girl, getting closer and closer to the role of family
delinquent. She has always seen her position in the psychodynamics
of the Yugoslav family in a feminine way: playing a little girl in
need of protection, a young maid seeking the haven of marriage, an
exploited and battered wife. But during the eighties she started to
behave as an increasingly liberated adolescent, openly defying the
patriarchal regime with various proposals for democratization.(55)
Serbia, on the other hand, relied primarily on the role of the elder
brother, whose authority should be recognized by younger brothers,
not to mention the sisters. This primacy was to be tacitly understood,
but If not, force was considered a legitimate solution. For many years,
Croatia played only a minor role In family quarrels, due largely to
the painful experiences of 1971, when It was ruthlessly punished for
the attempt to modernize the interpersonal relationship within the
Yugoslav family, not to mention bad memories of World War II misdeeds.(56)
And Bosnia? This was the case of very undeveloped sense of Identity
and individuality. To the last days of peace (March 1992), Bosnia
strongly believed in the brotherhood, the common table - even if meant
constant bickering over too few available spoons - the hostile but
safe atmosphere of the crowded common home and patriarchal regime.
The first shots were actually fired into a large crowd of protesters
in the middle of Sarajevo, with people carry-ing the pictures of long
dead Tito, still seen as the nurturing, potent father, shouting slogans
on brotherhood, unity, communism, Yugoslavia for ever.
During the past years an enormous amount of books
and articles was published on the subject, and I will not repeat their
descriptions and explanations on what seems to have happened. Let
me rather state that from 1981 onwards a crisis started to develop
and in the atmosphere of slowly growing freedom the voices of misery
- previously repressed - came to the surface.(57) The key words and
feelings were: loss of father & home & love, danger, dying,
suffocating, pain, betrayal, hunger, abuse, dismemberment, cradle,
help!
In 1983 I started to collect visual material-political
cartoons, magazine covers, illustrations - trying to analyze the fantasies
going on in Yugoslavia, being at the same time deeply disturbed by
them and in a growing rebellious mood. In 1984 I sent a large package
to Lloyd deMause and his Institute for Psychohistory, and he passed
them on to a psychiatrist, Casper Schmidt so instead of my lay (and
partial) opinions I prefer to quote him:
I was shocked and horrified to see so much cruelty,
and especially the Intensity of the hatred. In all my years of studying
the print media in South Africa (where I am from) I never saw anything
of the sort. But then, they have a vast horde of poison containers
(the blacks) who can deal with all their bad feelings for them...
I was stunned to find such overt references to swaddling: In years
of reading the German press I think I have seen one swaddling Image.
The predominant tone of the images is of infants who are extremely
afraid of being attacked and fighting back In every way they can.
The interpretation is that the parents of these children (which
can be read as all Yugoslav children) are unaware of what effect
they have on their children, because of neurotic scotomata, [blind
spot -eh] and consequently hurt them mercilessly while not
being conscious of what they are doing; this infuriates the grandiose
self of the child, who compromises by passivity and given-up, giving-up
behavior, while they undertake to have revenge at some stage (usually
the war which waits in the wings)... what all fills means is that
the group in Yugoslavia is working through feelings that were worked
through In Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, except that
at this point they are forced to do so under a unified regime and
with a minimum of the pressure outlets (such as crusades and all
those jolly rape-and-warfare missions of the Knights) available
at that time. Thus the feeling of a pressure cooker that is conveyed
in the materials... Thus the images from the media reflect all the
violent fantasies underlying true melan-cholia (of the Middle Ages).(58)
To add an argument In favor of the forecasting abilities
of this type of psychoanalysis of cartoons as national dreams, I might
as well quote the author's conclusion from the same letter:
I was very frightened by these images, and it must
be very painful for you to live amongst that. I wish there was something
I could do to help you. Maybe an abduction from purgatory, even
If only in imagination.
By mid-eighties, stuck Into debts and paralysis of
the communist rule, the country was already feeling extreme pressures;
the unrecognized disintegration of Yugoslavia began, with two major
actors breaking up the common house, pulling in opposite directions:
Slovenia and Serbia. For many years they played the leading roles
In matrimonial fights, with Slovenia the wife or sister and Serbia
the husband or elder brother. By 1985/86 they both displayed clear
signs of revitalization movements: great anxiety, rage, search for
love, rebirth. But they showed significant differences, too, as revealed
by the degree and type of sacrificial violence they felt necessary
to achieve the rebirth. These emotions, communicated by verbal and
non-verbal means, tell the sto-ries of very different childhoods or
psychoclasses.
One of the signs of the disease was the so-called
"Slovene syndrome," as the movement towards democratization
was labeled: an emergence of various democratic, protest and peace
movements, punk and art groups, feminist, lesbian and gay rights groups
which provoked enormous anxiety and rage all over the rest of Yugoslavia.
They were accompanied by groups of opposition intellectuals whose
message was similar, although articulated in academic ways, through
learned essays on repression and freedom. And they were gradually
accompanied by some party officials, who found increasing courage
to voice different opinions. In short, Slovenia got tired of being
a victim, stuck In the repressive atmosphere of communism, and delighted
in being innovative, provocative, different, in opposition, repeating
the slogan of Europe at every possible occasion. Her contempt of everything
"oriental," byzantine, eastern, Balkan grew daily. Her self-esteem
visibly increased with various acts of courage she displayed, shouting
defiantly: "I won't put up with it any more! I am fed up with
your dreadful behavior! I won't be intimidated! I am not paying your
debts any more!" And finally: "I want a room of my own.
The next time you want sex, you had better ask me, or I will scream
and kick!"
All this and more caused increasing uproar. it strengthened
two lines of attitude in the rest of Yugoslavia. The first: Slovenia
is selfish, greedy, separatist; they are actually fascists, Germans,
agents of the Fourth Reich. The second: She deserves to be punished,
she is asking for it! Let's show her who is the master!
If this pattern of behavior provided a major cause
In the disinte-gration of Yugoslavia, it seems less important now.
Slovenia was punished in her ten days of war (In June and July 1991)
and managed to divorce and escape as a separate nation. If anything,
its fate provides an interesting example of great satisfaction groups
find in the so - called intelligent use of force, when they embark
on the course of rebirth.(59) what happened In Serbia was of much
greater Importance and will continue to be for quite some time.
8.) SERBIA AND THE FEELINGS OF VICTIMIZATION
There are many ways of telling the story of Serbia
during the past decade. One of them Is the story of severely abused
children, whose fantasies for revenge have been steadily growing and
voiced, focusing primarily around two early traumas: sibling rivalry
(jealousy; fear of violence and death) and sexual abuse. They were
spelled out In two major concerns - - the cradle of life (and glory;
which Is Kosovo, the seat of their ancient glory; literally home or
placenta) and sexual exploitation or rape.
These two major concerns reemerged In 1981, with the
first Albanian riots In Kosovo, which were ruthlessly repressed. The
Albanians were seen as rivals, competing for the cradle that belonged
to Serbia and nobody else, cradle standing for mother's and father's
love, their nurturing care, the threatening possibility of infanticide,
asphyxiation, loss of home, hearth, life. This fear was soon articulated
In additional way: the Albanians posses an extreme potency, they are
breeding at an enormous rate, they are copulating all the time, their
own women are not enough, they make advances at our women, too, in
fact they are raping them, even little girls and nuns.
The first fear gradually spread out and eventually
covered the fantasy world provided by cradle to grave verbal image:
the cradle is not only Kosovo, the seat of medieval Serbia, it is
not only where the Serbs live, it is, moreover, wherever the Serbs
had been buried and their bones laid to rest. Every single piece of
such territory is actually Serbia, that is, home; it is not the living
that constitute the country, it is the graveyards that delineate its
borders and make fighting legitimate.
The search for enemies therefore started with Albanians
as the target, moving only much later further on: to Slovenes (for
siding with the Albanians or showing some sympathy), and quite late
to the Croats, still later to the Moslems of Bosnia. The very painful
nature of childhood traumas involved in this were quite obvious to
a psychohistorically Inclined observer. Slobodan Milosevic actually
became the great leader of Serbs In 1987, when he had a remarkable
speech, promising a big rally: "Nobody has the right to beat
my people! I promise you to take care of it: nobody will be beaten
any more!" This forceful message made him an instant hero, a
charismatic leader, a cru-sader who promised to fight back-and his
people loved and adored him for it. Within few months, Serbia was
literally covered with his pictures, thousands of people chanted his
name, greeting him as their savior, promising to follow him to the
end of the world. The rest of Yugoslavia was either embarrassed-a
communist as a charismatic leader at the end of the eighties! -- or
perplexed, then more and more frightened.
In fact, I can think of no better case In contemporary
Europe to sub-stantiate Jerrold Atias' study on childhood punishment
and adult hypnotizability (60) than what happened between the Serbs
and Milosevic' in 1987: the Serbs were waiting for him, they created
him and they followed him gratefully and more than voluntarily in
a hypnotic trance. it was a perfect example of a two-way hypnotic
power, the leader enchanting the people, the people enchanting their
leader. It was also a perfect example of a popular hero leading his
nation through the birth channel.
Three years later, In December 1990, with communist
rule gone all over Eastern Europe, the communist party of Serbia finally
agreed to elections (the last one to do so In Eastern Europe, excepting
Albania); Milosevic' and his party won, Serbia providing the only
such case in Eastern Europe. Their election slogan "No uncertainty
with us!" tells a lot about the deprivations of Serbian childhood,
where any certainty, however painful and abusive it may be, seems
the best way of life. While all over Eastern Europe, in varying degrees,
people were voting for change, risk, alternative, with ballots or
their feet, in more or less vel-vety revolutions, the Serbs behaved
in a way typical for battered children: The communist party as the
parent was seen as the only provider of love and care; if love comes
mixed with anger, harsh treatment, punishment, battering, It is nevertheless
love, security, haven.(61) Two years later, in December 1992, the
same pattern was repeated, although by then additional evidence of
the abusive nature of this love was available.
One of the most interesting features of Serbian group-fantasies
evolving into virtual paranoia of extreme self-pity and victimization,
can be seen in their rhetoric, for instance in the use of the term
genocide. To de-scribe the contemporary (i.e. not the WW2) fate of
the Serbs It was first employed In 1985, when a group of intellectuals
(members of the Academy of Science and Arts) wrote a memorandum on
the current situation in Yugoslavia and the "economic subjugation"
of Serbia by Slovenia and Croatia. The experience of Serbs in Kosovo
was described as "physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide.
"(62) A few months later the same definition was used in several
petitions, letters of protest and public speeches all over Serbia.
Although there was no evidence of actual killing going on, let alone
loss of life on a major scale, the term was repeated over and over,
gradually turning into a virtual obsession, justifying any counter-action.
By 1988, there was hardly a Serb to be found unacquainted with this
Greek-Latin word, and current events were freely mixed with the Second
World War, the 19th century rebellions against the Turks, the Middle
Ages, the battle of Kosovo in 1389, as well as the horrors that might
yet come, In the near future.(63) This gruesome abuse of a very specific
term meaning mostly the destruction of half of Jewish population during
the Second World War, the extermination planned by Adolf Hitler, the
ultimate crime against humanity, became so wide-spread It finally
substituted about a dozen words, evolving into one of the most frequent
words in the Serbian rhetoric. By mid-1991, when the current war started,
it became the third most frequent word used to describe the Serbian
fate in Croatia although Serbia was actually attacking Croatia, while
still officially claiming It had nothing to do with wan Foreign diplomats
were offered extensive studies on the genocide against the Serbs,
a permanent exhibition on genocide opened In Belgrade, half a century
old mass graves were opened and so on. The phenomenon included some
ridiculous elements, provided, for Instance, by generals claiming
the federal army was a victim of genocide In Zagreb: its officers
were harassed by the neighbors, their life made difficult and unpleasant,
in short, they were made to feel unwelcome in their Zagreb flats.
This development of pseudologia phantastica, or borrowing
the mask of Jewish victims on a vast scale, was greatly helped by
a handful of Jews from Serbia. They put their weight behind the "Serbian
cause", drawing a direct parallel between the fate of Jews and
Serbs, proclaiming Serbs one of the most victimized people in the
history of humanity, standing alone in the face of the entire threatening
world: Vatican plots, German plots, American plots, Croatian plots,
all united with a single aim - to wipe out the Serbs. To prove it
and to fight against it, an association of Jewish-Serb friendship
was established in 1988; its leader (who survived Holocaust as a baby
and was brought up In a Serb family In Belgrade) has this to say,
using the first person plural for the Jews, the second for the Serbs:
Your people have passed through Golgothas, too, through hell, your
people know how to fight, know how to survive. I am positive this
is the last hell you are meant to pass through. Bear it with dignity.
I am simply delighted I have the privilege to live amongst you...
You are actually one of the very few peoples on this earth that just
does not know how to hate. Your enemies are lucky, the God has not
provided you with this ability. You cannot hate even those who caused
you evil. Jewish people are not used to being loved either. People
work with us, they cooperate with us, they trade with us, but I have
never been convinced of any genuine affection or love towards us.
With the Serbs, the situation is totally different... So fight and
save your nation! The European gangster democracy will never break
the Serbs!(65)
This highly emotional collective fantasies of Identification
with Jews have an interesting trait: they are used exclusively to
express enormous fear and pain, as well as suicidal readiness for
self-immolation. The mask of Jewish victims comes dose to necrophilla,
as In their love for the Jews the Serbs recognize nothing else but
Holocaust or a horrible pile of six million corpses, the only difference
being that they will die proudly, In battle. But no amount of victims
Is too great, as revealed by a recent state-ment: "There are
12 million Serbs, if half of us should get killed, there will still
be 6 million of us left."(66) The other half of the stereotype
and the possible use or abuse of Jews has been reserved for some enemies
of the Serbs: The Slovenes or the north westerners are greedy, thrifty,
money-makers and money-grabbers, blood-suckers, exploiters, who know
no shame. These accusations played a major role, due again to the
differences In tradition, that is the zadruga type of family which
functioned without private property and left a heritage of seeing
money as an evil, corrupting agent and commerce as a shameful, humiliating
activity.
The extremely regressive way that the Serbian revitalization
movement took could be seen, too, quite literally, as much of it was
publicly produced, in sequences of mass spectacles; they resembled
medieval pilgrimages and gatherings, revealing a massive slide into
history. If during the Eighties all over Eastern Europe a popular
rediscovery of the national past could be detected - this was one
of the major forms of defiance against the communist power - and a
lot of it was labeled nationalism, the case of Serbia was a particularly
severe example of peopie trapped In time. The country was soon drowning
In ancient history, with crowds dressed in folkcostumes, waving medieval
flags and similar ancient symbols. The other quite visible feature
was a rediscovery of religion, with heavily adorned Eastern Orthodox
priests becoming prominent public figures.
And if all over Eastern Europe people proclaimed their
boundless love for Europe (meaning the West, democracy etc.), behaving
like orphans In search for adoptive mother, the Serbs developed a
hostile attitude toward the same Europe or West, turning instead toward
Russia. The 19th century romantic movement of Slavophiles was revived,
stressing the bonds of blood, brotherhood, common soul, spiritual
inclinations, purity of simple life, special destiny, religion, as
well as a pronounced ability to fight and stand against the rest of
the world. This new family romance provoked a great deterioration
of the already tenuous relations between the northwest and the southeast:
My God, Big Brother again?!
When actual fighting started, the fear proved well
grounded: Russians soon became involved, either as soldiers, fighting
for the common cause, or as a growing number of visiting public figures
and writers, proclaiming the same with words. The most prominent among
them Is Eduard Limonov, who often tours the battlefields, firing a
few shots here, a few there, or promising the nuclear weapons to his
Serb brothers, if the pro-Western Yeltsin finally falls, as he did
on March 16, 1993 in Belgrade.(67) To substantiate his claims, one
can quote many ar-ticles In Russian press; thus, an article on "Our
men in Belgrade" In Novoe Vremya asked: "Why does not Boris
Yeltsin, with so many nuclear bombs at his disposal, do something
to help our Orthodox brothers" and answering with a battle cry:
"To the weapons, Slavs!"(68)
9.) WAR FANTASY AND TRIAL ACTION
It has been proposed by Casper Schmidt, in his "Trial
Actions" article,(69) that groups go through various distinct
stages during their preparation for war, floating fantasies, with
a trial action being the most prominent. He defined trial action as
"a form of floating a fantasy in which the verbal component of
the fantasy is repressed," this mock battle being the safest
way of Informing the leader what the group really wants. I would like
to offer a comment or some additional thoughts and illustrations.
Essentially, my argument is that this is true of the way the more
advanced psychoclasses behave; children raised with a modest use of
physical force, children permitted to quarrel but not to fight, usually
show an Inhibition and repression of aggressive impulses; they learn
to try and hide them and express them in all sorts of oblique ways,
but are reluctant to display their aggression openly, even verbally.
They resort to quite fantastic trial actions and mock battles.
On the other hand, children of much lower psychoclass,
beaten, battered and actually taught that violent behaviour is a virtue,
do not display such inhibitions. On the contrary, they quite easily
express them and are extremely direct and picturesque when doing so.
As I am convinced that this Is the case of the Serbs and Montenegrins,
I will offer a collection of examples.
As early as 1987-that is, four years before the fighting
actually started -- enormous crowds started chanting declarations
of war. The message was either simple, "We want arms, give us
arms!" or "The battle of Kosovo!" or "We want
Russians!" (meaning to help us fight.) They were more elaborate,
too, either on soccer stadiums, In pubs or rallies as one of popular
rhymes reveals:
Tonight is our night,
Tonight so-and-so is set alight,
Let him roast from left to right
The wretched fuck had no luck.
In 1988 and 1989, old chetnik songs came into vogue,
one of them announcing: "We'll drink Croatian blood, send us
the salad, we'll take care of the meat (flesh), butchering the Croats."
Or: "Hey, ustashi, never mind, there's a deep
pit set aside, For you, one metre wide, And deep one kilometer inside.
" (70)
A great number of intellectuals and writers joined
the game of war declarations. Thus In September 1988 Vuk Draskovic
announced on BBC: "If Europe wants her own Lebanon, she'll have
it!" Two months later, Milan Komnenic said to "all Albanian
criminals" that "we all know we are at war and that this
is not the first undeclared war in which we have found ourselves.
But this war is the most brutal of all." He promised Serbs will
fight and "we'll burn all Europe, if necessary." And the
writers as leaders of the movement of rebirth through war were soon
joined even by psychiatrists.(71)
in 1989, a public opinion poll was carried out among
the high school students in Belgrade, with several respondent saying
that "all Slovenes should be killed." A Montenegrin boy
became famous by his public statement: "If the 7th session of
the Central committee does not solve all our problems, I will search
for freedom on the bombing fields like Bosko Buha" (this being
a teenager hero from WW2 resistance). (72)
And the story goes on and on, reaching one of the
first climaxes in June 1989, the celebration of the 500th anniversary
of the battle of Kosovo, where several speakers, Milosevic among them,
announced the approaching war-and the crowd roared with pleasure and
approval. As it came nearer, the first paramilitary units started
to pose with weapons, knives Included. In winter 1989119901 first
saw a photograph of a group of heavily armed men, waving a black flag,
with a scull and crossbones. As the urge for war increased dramatically,
the threats be-came extremely elaborate and obscene, promising not
lust war and death, but endless torments, mutilations, rapes, all
of It In garish de-tails. The Americans might not be aware of It,
but one of the most fa-mous Serbian painters, who loves to be a poet,
too, has written an epic poem in seventy verses on their eventual
fate: From their sockets your eyes shall ooze, Gorged as they drip
by crows let loose. Backward hence-forth shall turn your toes, And
with dogs you shall scramble for bones. Black shroud shall envelop
your home, From the itch no scratch shall help you. Your sickle shall
cut thorns full of snakes, And icy stone your scythe shall rub. Your
girdle shall be the horse's cord, And beggar's cane your main support.
Down to the ground your guts shall dangle' Fowl shall peck you up
to the waist, From the waist up your flesh worms shall gnaw. Dying
on end, unable to die, With your own hands digging your grave. Smitten
forever by Negro wrath.(73) When the same man uses oil and brush Instead
of words, he loves to paint the scenes of war devas-tation, for Instance
the death of Vukovar: "Vukovar was liberated from the Croat Nazis.
They were helped by Central European scum. They crawled from under
the papal tiara, as a dart of a serpent's tongue that protruded from
the bloated Kraut and Euro-communal over-stretched anus. The figures
of Genseher, Kohl, van den Broeck, de Michelis, Mock, and Waldheim
will help me finish my new painting, The Mocking of Christ, in the
manner of Bosch. The title will be augmented into The Mocking of Serbian
Christ."(74)
Epic or lyric poems with similar contents have lately
developed into the latest artistic craze In Serbia, based mainly on
the ancient tradition of magic curses. Some of them are even written
by teenage girls, for instance on "Europe the bitch", which
strings a long line of curses, concluding:
"Your screams, bitch, will be lonely, no one
will hear them because we are heading for the sky to punish God!"{75}
In short: the approaching reality was forecast, with
atrocities spelled out in forte fortissimo, spread out In print, and
no verbal component repressed, long before they happened. Most of
it could be detected in cartoons and similar visual material as well,
again in advance, as an avalanche of printed media reveal. But there
is a notable exception: sexual abuse or, to be specific, rape.
Let me return to the dominant hi-polarity of Yugoslavia
in the mid-Eighties, the northwest - southeast split, meaning mostly
Slovenia and Serbia as the most outspoken representatives of the great
divide. Slovenia, as I have shown, increasingly behaved like a rebellious
adolescent: provocative, nasty, let's raise hell type of behavior.
That at least was how an Important part of the opposition behaved:
sexual freedom was one of the most prominent ways of showing off,
of proving freedom and gaining it at the same time. Among many printed
proofs of this phenomenon Is Its self-portrait as Pornoslavia: the
heroine of a comic strip, a bi-sexual, more lesbian than heterosexual,
prepared for a sadomasochistic orgy and determined to enjoy it. In
1988 she was openly saying: "Rape? Go ahead, the pleasure will
be mine. But let's not be mistaken: you'll be sorry!"(76)
Such comic strips, some of them running under the
title of "hard-fuckers, were an Important component of the so-called
"Slovene spring" or "Slovene syndrome," that Is,
its growing opposition against communism and the patriarchal regime
of Yugoslavia, the deliberate rocking of the boat. The so-called alternative
scene in Slovenia was very strong, closely connected to various artistic
movements In the West, and finding enormous satisfaction In being
as provocative as hell. It spelled out as clearly as possible: "War
is rape - let's enjoy it when it comes. "(77)
When It did come, there was a lot of joy In it, and
It offered great sat-isfaction. But there was not a single actual
rape! /_\164
The fighting lasted for ten days, It was a very modern
affair, and the overt sexual abuse played no part In It. When it was
over, it was over, Slovenes were more than satisfied with the result,
nobody dreamed of prolonging it by going over the border and fighting
for Croats or Bosnians, even less to cross over and have some fun
in raping. For the more advanced psychoclass, the chapter was over.
On the other hand, in the printed media in the rest
of Yugoslavia there are no cartoons or comic strips with open sexual
contents, let alone rapes. And there are no pictures of naked or half
naked people at all. (Of course, I am not referring to pornographic
magazines, which are numerous and show very explicit pictures.) In
fact, I cannot provide any cartoons with women at all. They are lust
not there. All political cartoons or article illustrations from Croatia
to Bosnia and Montenegro show men and men exclusively: adults, boys,
babies, but never women or girls. The situation is the same in either
peace or war: women are absent.
And yet, as we are by now painfully aware, women are
one of the prime targets of the current war, be it Bosnia or Croatia.
No reliable figures are available) but there arc firm reasons to believe
that thousands of women, of all ages, have been raped so far. Yet
none of it can be seen in nonverbal communication.
On the other hand, the trial action, as well as the
actual, very real actions, have been full of direct, non-repressed
verbal threats of just that: We shall rape, we want to rape! As early
as 1986, a man proclaimed In a public gathering In Belgrade: "Let
them (the Albanians) rape our women, we shall rape, too!"(78)
In 1988, there were already large crowds shouting: "We'll fuck
so-and-so!" (names provided) and using various four letter words
in public speeches, in connection with specific names, some of them
drowning in obscenities. And they more than fulfilled their promises.
What accounts for this intriguing pattern? The reason
can probably be found In a fairly early mode of childhood, where children
are largely brought up by women, men being high above the job. Women
are the sole source of love and care, but at the same time children,
particularly boys, are prodded and taught to despise them. The conflicting
feelings of love and hate towards women in general, love for the affection
received, resentment for the affection not received and hate for the
abuse suffered in the process, all seem to accumulate, waiting for
an outburst of revenge. Or the reason may be hidden In an enormously
high incidence of direct sexual abuse of children, who just cannot
bring themselves to touch the subject, unless it is expressed In a
socially accepted, unthreatening way of swearing and shouting obscenities.
Let me conclude with an observation on "ethnic
cleaning" All such expressions, not to mention the reality they
cover, are revolting, but this one is inappropriate, too, in fact
as misleading as it can be. it has nothing whatsoever to do with the
concept of cleanliness, which implies order, discipline, punctuality.
On the contrary, it is sheer tenor on a vast scale, messy, dirty,
drunk, random, berserk. And there is no plan behind it, no vision
of a structured, orderly, rational eventual life. The wish behind
it is very simple: Let's huddle together, brothers, and let's butcher
as many of those who do not deserve to be our brothers any more, before
they butcher us. Let's inflict our childhood traumas upon others,
rather than work it through in our new freedom. And let's enjoy the
messy carnage!
As a shocked observed put it: "There is a repulsive
Serbocroat proverb about a cretin sexually abusing the deaf-mute.
I think about it often."(79)
In fact, if, as deMause has said, wars are
flashbacks to abusive childrearing practices, the one in Bosnia offers
a perfect example: chaotic, torturous childhoods turned into chaotic,
torturous war.
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