The actors of confrontation in Serbia’s streets today are children born or raised in this century. While the world’s attention is focused on other crises, that same world has assumed that somehow, with the passage of time, the wounds of the past would heal, that the new generations growing up in Serbia would naturally become democrats and liberals like most of their European peers. Serbia has not known or has not wanted to confront the past. Today its problem is the inability to confront the present.
By Veton Surroi
1.
Andrej, the brother of Serbia’s president, Vučić, joined a protest against the student demonstrators (as they are still called, although for some time they have not been students but part of a broader popular movement). His appearance was a sign that even the government knows how to take to the streets, and moreover, that it can do so thanks to the wide support it enjoys among citizens—support ritualistically confirmed in elections since 2012, which his brother consistently wins at the helm of a populist political movement.
As Andrej Vučić’s group approached the protesters, cameras caught their chant aimed at the opposition: “Ustash, ustash…!”
That same night, the anti-government protesters formulated their own chant, directed at President Vučić—known among his supporters as “Aco Srbine” (“Aco the Serb”), a popular seal of his national or nationalist credentials. The counter-chant was: “Aco Šiptare!”
The protesters then made their meaning clearer by taunting the Serbian special police units: “Why don’t you go to Kosovo?”—because if they went to Kosovo, Serbia’s special police units would, by tradition, be expected to beat and kill Albanians, a role historically assigned to them, instead of what they were now doing: the routine beating of Serbs.
2.
Serbia has entered an unprecedented tension between two opposing camps, a tension I do not believe existed even at the fall of Milošević on October 5, 2000. A quarter of a century after his downfall, this tension is no longer between “partisans” and “chetniks,” between “communists” and “democrats,” or even between “pro-Europeans” and “pro-Russians.” It has now been simplified into the language of football hooligans, so that the struggle between Vučić’s supporters and his opponents is waged as a war between “Šiptars” and “Ustashas.”
Of course, not all protesters on either side call each other “Šiptar” or “Ustasha,” but this linguistic eruption of a single night seems to me indicative of a broader social phenomenon in Serbia. It signals the revival of the term “Šiptar” as an insult.
In socialist Yugoslavia, citizens—respecting linguistic correctness—used the term Albanci for their Albanian compatriots, though many chose Šiptar not only to distinguish Albanians of Yugoslavia from those of Albania, but also to imply a lower social status of the named. Šiptar was less an ethnic marker than a social one: it denoted manual laborers, coal carriers, or woodcutters for winter heating.
Thus, when protesters call President Vučić a Šiptar, they do so with two aims. First, to show that he is not “Aco the Serb,” but his opposite—the betrayer of Serbian national interests. And second, to reduce him by a rung, placing him socially and civilizationally below any Serbian citizen.
A similar logic underpins the use of Ustasha. The term, referring to the Croatian quisling formations of World War II, began to be used in Serbia during the Yugoslav breakup to frame the armed Serbian campaign to divide and occupy Croatia as a war of “anti-fascists” against “Ustashas.” Since then, anyone opposing Serbian nationalist politics in Croatia has been an Ustasha—which leaves out virtually no one in that country. Now, by linguistic extension, the student-led anti-Vučić movement is also branded “Ustashas.”
3.
Both labels belong to a long-established model of dehumanization. If Vučić is a Šiptar, then he is not only a foreign body within Serbia but also belongs to a lower social stratum—making violence against him, one day, a rational act. Violence of Serb against Serb (brother against brother) is unacceptable; but violence against a “Šiptar” is not only tolerable—it is, by tradition, entirely legitimate. Even more so today, when that once despised stratum of “Šiptars” created from Kosovo an independent state, recognized by much of the civilized world, even its most advanced parts.
Likewise, violence against “Ustashas” becomes entirely legitimate. The term is tied to the systematic persecution of Serbs in World War II and is now assigned to all Croats who created their own independent state, joined NATO, and entered the European Union.
In a strange way, Serbia seems to be preparing itself for a new war. In the 1990s, the dehumanization of opponents in other parts of Yugoslavia was the prelude to campaigns of violence against them. Slovenes were “Vienna stable boys,” Croats “Ustashas,” Bosniaks “Turks,” and Albanians simply “Šiptars”—all part of a grand anti-Serb conspiracy of the Vatican-CIA-Iran. Once they were branded stable boys, Ustashas, Turks, or Šiptars, the war against them became easier.
Now, after all the wars against other peoples, Serbia is entering a discourse that seeks to justify violence against political opponents within its own borders. The “Albanian-Croatian” war is thus becoming Serbia’s last war.
4.
The actors of confrontation in Serbia’s streets today are children born or raised in this century. While the world’s gaze has shifted to other crises, it has assumed that the wounds of the past would somehow heal with time, and that Serbia’s younger generations would naturally grow into democrats and liberals like most of their European peers.
Some critical intellectuals in Serbia long warned that Serbia—like all of former Yugoslavia—must confront its past, as a necessary foundation for democracy, much as Germany did after World War II.
The European Parliament, as well as the Berlin Process, has repeatedly stressed that Serbia must confront its past. Not only has it failed to do so, but it has rewritten history so that every crime against other peoples—even genocide—finds justification and legitimacy within the value system of the modern Serbian state.
Serbia has not known, or has not wanted, to confront its past. Now its problem is the inability to confront the present.