By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Does anyone know the exact number—how many of our people are working abroad? If they were lined up in a column, how far would that column of our “economic migrants” stretch? From Podgorica, say, all the way to Klagenfurt? Or Munich? Even further?
I have been to Petnjica only once. Mirsad Rastoder and I drank coffee on the terrace of a small café next to the town mosque. They say it is the only three-story mosque in this part of the Balkans. Still, there were no tourists visiting it. It was late summer, and the place had slipped back into a slow, snail-on-morphine pace of existence, from which it will only be shaken again next July, when Petnjica’s migrants return home. Two or three Petnjicas live in Luxembourg and Germany—I can’t even remember exactly how it was explained to me.
It’s the same in Plav, Gusinje, and Rozaje, it’s the same in Ulcinj: people left, people are still leaving. In summer, the streets fill up when boys arrive from the West with nice cars, looking for wives. Weddings are the best business in summer; it’s a whole small industry. Wedding halls host several celebrations a day. Hundreds, thousands of people must be fed, and they need somewhere to sleep. In Rozaje, I once stayed in an empty hotel that has three wedding halls. In summer, everything is full, a man who worked there as bartender, waiter, receptionist, and guard told me.
It’s the same in Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, it’s the same in Croatia. Just when we created the religious and national states our ancestors supposedly dreamed of, we boarded crowded buses and fled those very states. States that, as it turns out, are good for patriotic dreams and poor for living.
Does anyone know how much money our migrants send home each year? If those banknotes were stacked one on top of another, would that pile be taller than any building in Podgorica?
Truly: people are our greatest wealth. A cheap, renewable resource. We no longer produce anything—at least nothing anyone wants to buy. But we do make children, whom we export as soon as they are ready to work. And best of all: no matter how many you send away, next year you have just as many again. As Dusko Radovic said: children are expensive, but they last.
We have created countries people are fleeing from. And then those same people send money back to the countries they fled.
The pressure on our emigrants is immense. On one side, the societies they moved to say they are not integrating fast enough. On the other, back home they are expected not to forget their “tradition, culture, and values,” without answering the question: if those traditions and values are so valuable, why did people have to run from their consequences? The Balkans is full of monuments to those expectations: unfinished houses without facades or roofs, with another floor to be added next year, ready for when they earn enough and decide to return. But that will not happen: the times when you could work hard in Europe for 10–20 years and then spend the rest of your life at home living off what you earned are long gone.
… and the clouds over our countries are still thick.
Thirty years later—everything is still the same. Three decades after the greatest catastrophe in its history, Germany had become an economic giant. Thirty years after our wars ended, we are colonies with greedy local elites whose servility toward their masters is only surpassed by their brutality toward their subjects—us.
The region is arming itself and new military alliances are forming. Ideas of greater states are still not buried. It is as if our peace is reluctant—not a peace of wisdom, but a peace of necessity, a peace we were forced into. Instead of renovating their homes, people here are still whitewashing the past. Have we really learned that the past must not block the future, that time is not a snake swallowing its own tail? Or do we still believe there is no future worth not sacrificing for a better, imagined past?
For another year, two or three, we will have our new big story—European integration. And then what? When we get European money and passports, will we once again rediscover our “authentic values” and love—will Brussels again feel more distant than Belgrade, Moscow, and Istanbul?
Our “we are going to the EU” is a form of migrant-worker-system — except the eldest son is not the one leaving, but the entire state. That is what worries me.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of CdM)
