Written by Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
You know those guys who sit on beer crates in front of small rural and suburban stores all day long, passing a bottle of rakia (fruit brandy) from hand to hand? Mandic’s comrades, whom he addressed in parliament whose speaker he is now, calling on them to take their weapons and “be Christ’s soldiers”? They often wear the jackets-uniforms of the Army of Yugoslavia that they also wear when they go to harvest badnjak (an oak branch that is the local variant of Christmas tree), as well as during the pig slaughtering period. They don’t talk much: everything has already been said and everyone thinks the same. From time to time, they stare at a butt of women carrying bags of bread and milk. They are envious and want to possess everything. They are apparently peaceful. They are furious and infinitely dangerous.
What I’m describing is the local version of the Munich beer halls, the birthplace of Nazism.
A special type of Balkan man, whose political representative is Marko Kovacevic, lives there: all their values are summed up in him, in a similar way that Donald Trump is the voice of white trash from the Bible Belt.
This is how a friend of mine described their Bosnian version that’s essentially no different from the one here: “In all towns along the Drina,” he told, “you will come across these groups of half-drunk scumbags, terrible human shadows, who you don’t know if they are like that because they are haunted by a criminal subconscious or if they are just tired of crime. They sit in front of boarded-up wooden newsagents; in front of ruined shops; in front of dirty bars typical for the Balkans – as if that dirt can never be removed. They sit there drinking beer and brandy. They look ominously at everything that passes by – people and also birds. They are watching them while being silent. As if they are resting between the two rounds of shooting they regularly do.”
You brought those people – and their sons – to power. They occupied ministries, municipal offices. They brought them to Elektroprivreda, the army and the police. They run the parliament. They run the education sector. The church is theirs. They feel that this is now their time and their country. And it is. And you really think that these people will calmly return to their old habits, sit on beer crates in front of their village shops, just because you exerted “civic pressure”, had performances and carried posters?
Please just google it. To those sons of a bitch – their mouths full of lofty words and their pockets full of silver coins, all 30 of them – who sold Montenegro to them when it all started, I told not to hope that they would be able to train the wild horse of Great Serbian nationalism they rode just to bring them to power – because they would end up under that horse’s underrun heels. I quoted the Slovenian historian Bozo Repe: “Fascism always comes to power through coalitions, usually the liberal ones.”
A liberal party brought them to power. Another one keeps them in power. The latter will end up the same as the first one. But it doesn’t matter, because they are all expendable and agreed to it: they are just teams taking turns like in ice hockey.
They attack and dictate the dynamics. They open topic after topic, finish job after job, and we don’t even get to respond verbally to all of it, let alone formulate an adequate political response. Our position is no longer even defensive. We no longer defend our network. We collect the pucks that missed our net, already full to the brim.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the views or opinions of the CdM news team)
