Serbia, writes the New York Times, is prudent in burning bridges with the West, but also sensitive to Putin’s victimization that inspires that of the country’s nationalists, who feel they are victims of the wrong suffered 23 years ago
Mindful of open wounds and not yet healed left by the NATO bombing of Serbia more than 20 years ago, the ambassador of Ukraine appeared on Serbian television after Russia invaded and bombed his country in hopes of arousing sympathy.
Instead of having time to explain Ukraine’s suffering, however, the ambassador, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, had to sit amidst the rants of pro-Russian Serbian commentators and long videos of Russian President Vladimir Putin denouncing Ukraine as a den. of Nazis. The show, broadcast on pro-government TV Happy, lasted three hours, more than half of which with Putin.
Angry at the aired ambush, the ambassador complained to the producer of the pro-Kremlin propaganda exercise, but was told not to take it personally and that Putin “works well for our ratings.”
That the leader of Russia, seen by many in the West – including President Biden – as a war criminal, is useful in Serbia as a decoy for onlookers and a sign that the Kremlin still has admirers in Europe, the NYT writes.
While Germany, Poland and several other EU countries show solidarity with Ukraine by waving its flag outside their Belgrade embassies, a nearby street pays tribute to Putin. A mural painted on the wall features an image of the Russian leader next to the word “brother” written in Serbian.
Part of Putin’s appeal lies in his image as a strongman, an attractive role model for both Aleksandr Vucic, Serbia’s increasingly authoritarian president, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary’s belligerently illiberal leader. Facing Sunday’s elections, Serbian and Hungarian leaders also look to Russia as a reliable source of energy to keep their constituents happy. Polls suggest they will both win.
Then there is the story, or at least a mythologized version of the past, which in the case of Serbia presents Russia, a Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation, as an unshakable friend and protector over the centuries. But perhaps most important is Putin’s role as a point of reference for nations who, regardless of their past crimes, see themselves as sufferers, not aggressors, and whose politics and psyche revolve around the cult of victimhood fueled by resentment and grievance against the West.
Arijan Djan, a psychotherapist from Belgrade, said she was shocked by the lack of empathy among many Serbs for the suffering of Ukrainians, but realized that many still bore the scars of past trauma that erased all feelings for the pain of others.
“Individuals who go through trauma that they have never dealt with cannot feel empathy,” he said. Societies, like individuals affected by trauma, he added, “repeat the same stories of their suffering over and over again”, a broken record that “erases all responsibility” for what they have done to others.
A sense of victimhood runs deep in Serbia, seeing the crimes committed by ethnic relatives during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response to the suffering inflicted on the Serbs, just as Putin presents his bloody invasion of Ukraine as a just effort to protect the persecuted of Russian ethnicity who belong to the “Russian world”.
Putin’s “Russian world” is an exact copy of what our nationalists call “Greater Serbia,” said Bosko Jaksic, a columnist for a pro-Western newspaper. Both, he added, feed on partially remembered stories of past injustices and erased memories of their sins.
The narrative of the victims is so strong among some in Serbia that Informer, a tabloid that often reflects President Vucic’s thinking, last month reported on Russia’s preparations for the invasion of Ukraine with a front-page headline depicting Moscow like a guiltless innocent: “Ukraine attacks Russia!” he yelled.
The Serbian government, cautious in burning bridges with the West but sensitive to the widespread public sympathy for Russia as a victim of the wrong it suffered, has since pushed news agencies to take a more neutral stance, Zoran Gavrilovic said. the executive director of Birodi, an independent media monitoring group in Serbia. Russia is hardly ever criticized, he said, but the abuse of Ukraine has diminished.
Aleksandrovych, the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia, said he welcomed the change in tone, but that he still struggled to get Serbs to look beyond their suffering at the hands of NATO in 1999. “Because of the trauma of what It happened 23 years ago, whatever bad thing happens in the world is seen as America’s fault, ”he said.
Hungary, allied with the losing side in two world wars, also feeds an oversized victim complex, rooted in the loss of large portions of its territory. Orban has been fueling these resentments with enthusiasm for years, often siding with Russia over Ukraine, which controls a slice of Hungarian land and has played a leading role in his efforts to present himself as a defender of ethnic Hungarians living beyond. the border of the country.
In neighboring Serbia, Vucic, anxious to avoid alienating pro-Russian voters ahead of Sunday’s elections, hesitated to impose sanctions on Russia and suspend flights between Belgrade and Moscow. But Serbia voted in favor of a UN resolution on March 2 condemning the invasion of Russia.
This was enough to get Vucic praise from US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who thanked Serbia “for its support of Ukraine”. But she hasn’t stopped Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, from suggesting Belgrade on Monday as a possible place to hold peace talks between Moscow and Kiev.
Serbs who want their country to join the European Union and stop dancing between east and west accuse Vucic of playing a double game. “There are tectonic changes going on and we are trying to sleep on it,” said Vladimir Medjak, vice president of the European Movement Serbia, a pressure group pushing for EU membership.
Serbia, he said, “does not love Russia as much as it hates NATO”.
Instead of moving to Europe, he added: “We are still talking about what happened in the 1990s. It is an endless cycle. We are stuck talking about the same things over and over ”.
More than two decades after the end of the fighting in the Balkans, many Serbs still liquidate war crimes in Srebrenica, where Serbian soldiers massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995, and in Kosovo, where the brutal Serbian persecution of ethnic Albanians pushed the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, the flip side of the suffering inflicted on ethnic Serbs.
When asked if she approved of the war unleashed by Putin, as she walked by the Belgrade mural in his honor, Milica Zuric, a 25-year-old bank employee, replied by asking why the Western media focused on the agonies of Ukraine when “you had no interest in the Serbian pain” caused by NATO warplanes in 1999. “Nobody cried about what happened to us,” he said.
With much of the world media focused last week on Russia’s destruction of Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city, Serbia commemorated the start of NATO’s bombing campaign. The front pages were lined with photos of buildings and railway lines destroyed by NATO. “We can not forget. We know what it means to live under bombing ”, read the headline of Kurir, a pro-government tabloid.
A small group of protesters gathered outside the US embassy and then joined a much larger pro-Russia demonstration, with the protesters waving Russian flags and banners adorned with the letter Z, an emblem of support. invasion of Russia.
Damnjan Knezevic, the leader of People’s Patrol, a far-right group that organized the rally, said he sympathized with Russia because it was portrayed as an aggressor in the West, just like Serbia in the 1990s, when, according to he, “Serbia was actually the biggest victim”. Russia had a duty to protect ethnicities in Ukraine, just like Serbia in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Knezevic said.
Bosko Obradovic, the leader of Dveri, a conservative party, said he regrets the civilian casualties in Ukraine, but insisted that “NATO bears enormous responsibility” for their fate.
Obradovic gathered cheering supporters on Sunday for a pre-election rally in a Belgrade cinema. A stall outside the entrance sold Serbian paratrooper caps, military caps, and large Russian flags.
Predrag Markovic, director of the Belgrade Institute of Contemporary History, said history has served as the foundation of the nation but, distorted by political agendas, “always offers the wrong lessons.” The only case of a country in Europe that fully recognizes its past crimes, he added, was Germany after World War II.
“All the others – concludes Markovic – have a history of victimization”.
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione)
