Good morning! Yesterday, something very important happened in neighboring Kosovo, when lawyer Cedomir Stojkovic laid flowers on the grave of 7-year-old Blerina Jashari and asked for forgiveness. While I was listening to Ceda speak, I thought “That’s a Serb” in the best possible sense of the word Serb.
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That’s a Serb!
None of Serbia’s neighbours wants Serbia to remain forever trapped in nationalism and imperial appetites towards all of us. No normal person wants the Serbs to be denounced as a people. I don’t think there is a normal Balkan person who doesn’t want to live in a region where everyone has a consensus on universal values, and where inter-ethnic disputes are resolved in a civilized manner. I think we all want to live in the Balkans where nobody wants anything from someone else, and where we can say “forgive us” for the indisputable crimes committed in our name.
Ceda Stojkovic has been on the Serbian opposition scene for a long time. He was part of DHSS, and its director. Ceda is a Serb, from Belgrade, originally from Valjevo. Perhaps, precisely because he is not Precanin (*a term used in the broadest sense for Serbs living outside the borders of Serbia), Ceda is doing all this. Maybe that’s why he thinks politically about Serbia in the first place, unlike the current and past political leaders, mostly coming from Bosnia or Montenegro, who use Serbia for their nostalgic and anachronistic urges to annex the homelands of their ancestors to Belgrade.
Ceda came into the focus of the regional public with his harsh criticism of Russia and demands that Serbia join NATO. Ceda is not a Russophobe, he does not like the Russian government. He proved this with his selfless involvement with Russian activists, who were banned from entering Serbia.
Ceda, to be clear, is politically and morally a man in his place.
This is not Ode to Ceda. A child is a human being. He/She may make a mistake tomorrow, he/she may have made a mistake in the past. Like all of us. But that moment in time yesterday, when Ceda, having crossed himself, bowed and laid flowers on the grave of the child of the “enemy”, deserves to be remembered.
Ceda performed with dignity – like a statesman, even though he is not a statesman. There was no humiliation in his gesture and his attitude. On the contrary, he said it so necessarily “I’m sorry” in the most dignified way possible. I thought that in some parallel universe where Zoran Djindjic survived the assassination, Ceda became prime minister. In that universe, Serbia recognized Kosovo’s independence, and we were all in the EU and NATO. Imagine that universe in which Ceda as prime minister or president of European Serbia did that. Wouldn’t that be the best of all universes?
But that is not the case. Ceda made this gesture because his client was detained by the Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) for the same gesture in Serbia, beaten, tortured and arrested, and in this way, the constitution and laws of Serbia were brutally trampled. For who knows how many times, the rule of law has been killed in that country.
Nevertheless, the Serbian institutionalized opposition does not consider Ceda as an ally. They don’t call Ceda on N1 TV or Nova TV, because he doesn’t fit their template. He criticizes Russia excessively and is excessively pro-NATO. The attitude of the opposition scene and the opposition media towards Stojkovic is an excellent answer to why the opposition in Serbia is weak. It is looking for a replacement, not a change. What they offer is ideological and worldview continuity. As an activist, not as a politician, Ceda offers a revolutionary break with the past, rejecting ballast and launching Serbia to the West. That requires courage and responsibility.
As one man said on Twitter yesterday: “There, it’s not difficult and it doesn’t hurt. And it eases the soul”.
That’s it for today and this week. We wish you a pleasant weekend. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
