By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
The Revelation Chapter 6 starts out as follows: “And I saw that the lamb had opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures, as if it were the voice of thunder: come and see.”
That’s what I did this morning before dawn. I headed to Cetinje through a narrow, bumpy road through Crmnica.
You, great winners over your own citizens, saw Veselin Veljovic and Milo Djukanovic behind every action in Cetinje. As bad actions of the former government are the only excuse for your dirty acts – and there are so many of them stinking far and wide – that you yourself can remember.
I saw something else.
I saw the police barricades through which they let us pass on foot, strong men under full combat gear, alpha males whose eyes were showing determination and suspicion. As we were moving away from the barricade and descending towards Cetinje, one of them shouted: “Guys, there’s only violence down there.”
I saw scientists, brilliant minds of this country and the endless sadness flooding their eyes – the sadness that rose like a tidal wave while they were asking themselves: is it possible that we’re facing such an injustice? A question to which nothing, not even science, has an answer.
I saw young men who had spent the entire night on the barricades entering a flat with their eyes red from the poison fired at them and vinegar they used to wash their faces, talking briskly about what should be done tomorrow – because the struggle continues and will never end…
I saw guys who recognized my friend, wanted to take picture with him and told him: “Thank you for coming so that we can jointly expose ourselves to tear gas”.
I saw a police cordon which fired tear gas at us without any reason while we were chatting on the square peacefully, with our hands in our pockets. I saw another cordon which blocked the next street we were trying to escape through. They fired tear gas at us as well. Then we tried to use the third street, but there was another police cordon, which, again, fired the poisonous smoke at us.
I saw an elderly woman who opened the door of a basement and invited us to hide. I saw people who were there with me: young girls in T-shirts displaying the Montenegrin coat of arms who made us coffee, freshly-shaved men in their 60s wearing their best suits, as for them, this fight is a ceremony, such as a ball or an opera is for somebody else.
I saw the interior of the flat owned by our saviour: it reminded me of a flat my grandma used to live in. Both were comfortable, equipped with antique, brown furniture for which loans used to be requested.
I saw people who were offering help at every corner.
I saw that the government didn’t attack demonstrators or those who violated the rules: they attacked the town.
I saw the police firing tear gas for hours at every living soul they saw until it was literally impossible to breathe in Cetinje. Until every Cetinje resident and us, their guests, were forced to withdraw into buildings’ halls resembling jail cells.
And it was then, I saw, when they brought joyous priests by helicopter to the town they had previously emptied to serve them and their pride. Those same priests whose vanity and hatred made them (police) fire a poisonous fog at the people who didn’t want to stay silent – the fog far thicker than the one following the course of the sulfur river Styx that is flowing in the world of the dead.
I saw an old woman who, right before cops would throw tear gas at her, shouted: shame on you – as she would say to her son, whose outburst she witnessed.
I saw an old man kneeling on the sidewalk, fighting for his breath in a cloud of tear gas, and then he got up and sent a lot of greetings to Milo Djukanovic – not because the statesman’s locusts ate three decades of the old man’s life, not because of the glamorous, sweet-spoken envoys sent by the statesman to Cetinje to promise chocolate factories and performance centers, but because the statesman turned the state into a whorehouse, which is now being demolished by someone else’s army, drunk with force, dressed in Montenegrin uniforms.
I saw a big rat congratulating a little rat on the plague he sent to the city that they both hate with every bit of their plastic heart, black as a garbage bag.
I saw a stinking vapor above the announcement of the American embassy in Podgorica, greenish as mold on the bark of a rotten fruit tree.
When the wind that descended through the Lovcen forest carried away tear gas with which you bombed Cetinje all morning, long and slowly as a python, you, proud lords of the state and miserable servants of the Church, saw the people you think you defeated.
I went there and saw something else – the people who can’t be defeated.
