peacekeepers and houses burned to their basements. He also found
himself with very little money. Rugova and Bukoshi, on the other hand,
have access to funds but very few adherents. Rugova's decline did not
start in March 1999. It started long ago when he objected even to
peaceful student demonstrations (which the Serbs found tolerable). It
was then clear that if there ever was any distinction between his
pacifism and traitorous, collaborationist cowardice - it has long
vanished. People deserted him in droves and in Rambouillet, it was
Thaci who headed the Kosovar delegation, not his elder rival.
So now Thaci needs money. One way is to collect taxes, as Rugova did.
Another is to monopolize the business interests of Kosovo. He set
himself upon this task no less ferociously than he did fighting the
Serbs. In collaboration with Albanian politicians (government
supporters) and with Macedonian politicians of Albanian descent, he
began to take over lucrative trades and economic activities both in
Kosovo and in its neighbours. The Berisha (Albanian opposition) crowd
regard him as an imminent danger. They believe his aim is to become the
President of a Greater Albania comprising Albania and Kosovo (though
not Macedonia, a new found and perhaps short lived ally). This is a
recipe for a civil war, the second one within two years in Albania. The
first one erupted after the life savings of one third of the population
were squandered by a cronyist group of investment houses in pyramid
schemes.
The Spoils
The Greeks are grabbing Macedonian property: real estate, banks,
factories, and a refinery, perhaps the Macedonian Telecom. They pay
outlandishly cheap prices. The Macedonians are on their knees, reduced
by the war to a loosely connected network of bartering businesses.
While plundering, the Greeks do not refrain from political
arm-twisting. They vetoed Macedonia's application to become the centre
of the reconstruction of Kosovo and then proceeded to propose
Thessalonica (Saloniki) - a proposal adopted by the EU. They also
refuse to call Macedonia by its constitutional name, forcing the
impossible acronym FYROM on the international community. The next
logical target is Serbia. To the Greek businessmen, Kosovo is lost due
to the brutal treatment of Albanian refugees in Greece and the
expressed pro-Serb sympathies of the Greek main street.
Thus, strange, chimeral alliances emerge. They are likely to prove as
ephemeral as their predecessors, to melt away in the searing heat of
the Balkanian summer. But while they last they give one pause. The
Russians and two NATO members, Greece and Italy, are likely to defy
America and enthusiastically embark upon the lucrative reconstruction
of devastated Serbia. Financed by German money through the inefficient
and corrupt money transfer mechanism known as the EU, German businesses
are not likely to tolerate this Christian Orthodox monopoly. They will
join the fray, to America's increasing dismay and chagrin. American
firms, on the other hand, will probably not be allowed to undo the
damage their government wrought. Left out of the game, America will try
to spoil it. It might well succeed, for it controls the strings of the
American purses known as IMF and World Bank. Americans never hesitate
to bully and to blackmail where money is involved.
The Russians are preparing to supply Serbia with new military
technology as do other rogue states. Greece is secretly negotiating
with Iran. Serb leaders visit Iraq. Russians are meeting North Koreans.
So do the Chinese. Russian aircraft breach NATO's airspace. The
Europeans are hastily forming their own defence alliance and finally
appointed Mr. PESC, the long awaited EU foreign policy supremo. The
ramblings of a new cold war (the world against the USA) are clearly
audible to the attentive ear. In the margins more minor players such as
Israel position themselves to counter what they regard as dangerous
liaisons between Pakistani, Afghani and Albanian Islamic
fundamentalist, terrorist cum drug concerns (sometimes in the guise of
aid organizations). Bin Laden is in the area. Every secret service,
every crime organization, every terrorist group, every liberation
movement, every weapons dealer, every drug pusher are here, eager not
to miss the unfolding action.
These wrangles will surely depress investors' appetites. They will not
increase the pledges in bow tied donor conferences either. Good money
(investments and international aid) rarely follows bad one (crime and
weapons trading, for example).
The Balkan countries stand to get a small fraction of the magnificent
and magnanimous and generous promises made to them in the heat of the
battle. The Balkan will be forgotten because it refuses to reform,
because it is obstreperous. The number of officials visiting will
decline. The journalists will beat a path to other blazes. The local
politicians, pampered by the likes of Clinton and the CNN will revert
unwillingly to their petty squabbles and ragged local papers. In a few
months, it is will all seem like a mirage. It will all sink into the
fertile soil of this luscious region, fertilized by countless bodies
and bloody rivulets. The great togetherness will evaporate leaving
behind the putrid fumes of re-emerging, centuries old, grudges and
suspicions. The people will complain. The leaders will thieve and
collaborate with organized crime. The criminals will prosper. The
farmers will toil their land and intellectuals will conspire. It is the
Balkans where nothing changes.
And nothing ever will.
(Article written on July 11, 1999 and published July 19, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 4)
Return
The Dance of Jael
"Envy is forever looking upwards. It does not look sideways. In 'Facial
Justice' Hartley (1960) describes a life after a catastrophic war. A
Dictator has decreed that envy is so destructive that it has to be
eliminated. The citizens are coerced to be as alike each other as
possible. The worst crime is not envy itself but to excite envy.
'Equality and Envy - the two E's were...the positive and negative poles
on which the New State rotated' (p.12). In order to exterminate envy
everything that was enviable has been destroyed. Of course that in
itself is the very essence of envy. Neither envy nor equality are
spoken of as words but referred to as Good and Bad E. All tall
buildings had been destroyed in the war except the tower of Ely
Cathedral and none are allowed to be built - a horizontal view of life
is required. No comparisons are to be made, women are encouraged to
undertake an operation so they all looked alike, to be pretty would
excite envy. The result is that the populace loses its humanity and
becomes a non-thinking mass. The independently minded heroine, Jael,
visits the Ely and looks up at the tower and leads a dance round it.
She pays the price of having her more than averagely pretty face (an
Alpha face) changed to a Beta face by cosmetic surgery and so made
indistinguishable from the others."
(From "Cronos and His Children - Envy and Reparation" by Mary Ashwin -
Chapter II "Everyday Envy")
The distinction between fiction and non-fiction became ever subtler in
the "Underground" world of post-socialism, "After the Rain" of
communism. In a lethal embrace, in an act of unprecedented intercourse,
literature penetrated reality as only the most fervent lovers or the
most avid haters do. A topsy-turvy continent adrift among the gales of
newspeak, under the gaze of a million grey bureaucrats passing for big
brothers. A motion picture gone awry: the plot long forgotten, the
actors wondering forlornly on a dilapidated scene and the credits
flashing over and again, in an endless loop.
This crazed landscape, this party of mad hatters, where time stood
still was the result of the two great equalizers: oppression and
ideology. The substrate of numerous experiments of groups without
control, the inhabitants of these feverish lands internalised their own
predicament. The broken toys of spoiled imperial children, the guinea
pigs of scientific materialism and then of materialism only - they
strutted around, eyes wide shut, ears clogged, mouths stapled, lips
sown with the wire of terror. Everyone was equal under their occupiers,
their tormentors, and their slave masters. And everyone was equal by
decree, on pain of death or exile, by the horror-stricken conviction
called ideology. To succumb to the former was to survive - to subscribe
to the latter was to flourish. Many flourished.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines envy as: "A feeling of
discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's
possessions, qualities, or luck." And an earlier version (The Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary) adds: "Mortification and ill will occasioned
by the contemplation of another's superior advantages."
Pathological envy - the second deadly sin - is a compounded emotion. It
is brought on by the realization of some lack, deficiency, or
inadequacy in oneself. It is the result of unfavourably comparing
oneself to others: to their success, their reputation, their
possessions, their luck, and their qualities. It is misery and
humiliation and impotent rage and a tortuous, slippery path to nowhere.
The effort to break the padded walls of this self-visited purgatory
often leads to attacks on the perceived source of frustration.
Pathological envy is THE driving force of post-communist Central and
Eastern Europe. Unable to cope with the sudden shift in values from
enforced and artificial equality to primitive, pirate capitalism - the
populace retreated to acrimony and bitterness. Faced with the chasmic
inequalities engendered by the serial collective robberies known as
"privatisation" - it reacted with suppressed rage, with despair, with
the multiple sadness which is nostalgia. The land has split between a
colourful, dynamic, rapacious and omnivorous class - and the sepia-like
and quaint backdrop of their compatriots. As the castles of the former
rose - so were the abodes of the latter humbled.
The resentment led to fears of abandoning one's self-control, of
confronting one's rulers and their cronies, of losing even the little
one was allowed to possess. It was a muted mutiny, a rebel-less
rebellion, a static trip from guilt to hate. To maintain these seething
undercurrents from erupting, to avoid the volcanic tremors that precede
every revolution - behaviour was formalized and ritualised. Speech
became ever vaguer and ambiguous. Effective communication was halted.
The community splintered and the very fabric of society was consumed by
this massive act of dissociation.
Pathological envy mutated into solutions the envious could live with.
Some sought to imitate or even emulate the newfound heroes of the
capitalist revolution. They immersed themselves in conspicuous
consumption, the badly matched purchases of the nouveaux riches replete
with the vulgar manners of unrefined power. They adhered to coarse
materialism with its confusion of ends and means. They suffered the
ever-present agitation of envy, the constant comparison to one's
superiors, the plagued rat race. To get rich quick through schemes of
crime and corruption is thought by these people to be the epitome of
cleverness (providing one does not get caught), the sport of living, a
winked-at vice, a spice.
Yet others embarked on paths of rivalry and enmity and destruction.
This hydra has many heads. From scratching the paint of new cars and
flattening their tyres, to spreading vicious gossip, to media-hyped
arrests of successful and rich businessmen, to wars against advantaged
neighbours. The stifling, condensed vapours of envy cannot be
dispersed. They invade their victims and snatch their rageful eyes,
their calculating souls, they guide their hands in evil doings and dip
their tongues in vitriol. This is the day-to-day existence in places as
far apart as Moscow and the Balkans. A constant hiss, a tangible
malice, the piercing of a thousand eyes. The imminence and immanence of
violence. The poisoned joy of depriving the other of that which you do
not or cannot have.
There are those who idealize the successful and the rich and the lucky.
They attribute to them super-human, almost divine, qualities. They
think of serendipity as earned, of work as bestowed, of success as
deserved and reserved to the deserving. In an effort to justify the
agonizing disparities between themselves and others, they humble
themselves as they elevate the others. They reduce and diminish their
own gifts, they disparage their own achievements, they degrade their
own possessions and look with disdain and contempt upon their nearest
and dearest, who are unable to discern their fundamental shortcomings.
They feel worthy only of abasement and punishment. Besieged by guilt
and remorse, voided of self-esteem, self-hating and self-deprecating -
this is by far the more dangerous species. For he who derives
contentment from his own humiliation cannot but derive happiness from
the downfall of others. Indeed, most of them end up driving the objects
of their own devotion and adulation to destruction and decrepitude.
But the most common reaction is the good old cognitive dissonance. In
Central and Eastern Europe, entire societies are in its grip. It is to
prefer the belief that the grapes are sour to the admission of their
desirability. These people devalue the source of their frustration and
envy. They find faults, unattractive features, high costs to pay,
immorality in everything they really most desire and aspire to and in
everyone who has attained that which they so often can't. They walk
around critical and self-righteous, inflated with a justice of their
making and secure in the wisdom of being what they are rather than what
they could have been and really wish to be. They make a virtue of
abstention, of wishful constipation, of judgmental neutrality, this
oxymoron, the favourite of the disabled.
Topped by a thin layer of coagulated fat, a bubble of enraged and
maddened envy is boiling underneath - from Murmansk to Athens and from
Prague to Dresden. Will it burst and spill over or will it only noisily
release its steam is anybody's guess. It is a force to reckon with. The
tide of capitalism has lifted few yachts and no one else's boats.
People feel cheated. They feel used and abused. They feel conned out of
their dignity and their possessions and their future. They look around
and see island castles surrounded by oceans of physical and moral
filth. This is no decadence because it has no aesthetic values to
ameliorate it. It is as ugly as the survival of the thiefest. As
Central and Eastern Europe engages, for the first time, in serious
restructuring - the social costs will mount dramatically and so will
inequality. The process can be reversed only by the redistribution of
wealth. But that it will be achieved through progressive taxation
rather than through a bloodbath is not a foregone conclusion.
(Article written on September 26, 1999 and published October 11, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 16)
Return
Homo Balkanus
How does one respond to a torrent of belligerent correspondence from
Balkanians arguing against the belligerence of Balkanians asserted by
one in one's articles? Were it not sad, it surely would have been
farcical. Only yesterday (August 17th, 1999 - five months after the
Kosovo conflict) Macedonian papers argued fiercely, vehemently and
threateningly against an apparently innocuous remark by Albania's Prime
Minister. He said that all Albanians, wherever they are, should share
the same curriculum of studies. A preparatory step on the way to a
Greater Albania perhaps? In this region of opaque mirrors and "magla"
(fog) it is possible. And what is possible surely IS.
I do not believe in the future of this part of the world only because I
know its history too well. Every psychologist will tell you that past
violent behaviour is the best predictor of future recidivism. Homo
Balkanus is lifted straight off the rustling pages of the Diagnostic
and Statistics Manual (DSM) version IV (1994) - the bible of the
psychiatric profession:
"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for
admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and
present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the
following:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates
achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without
commensurate achievements);
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power,
brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;
3. Believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be
understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status
people (or institutions);
4. Requires excessive admiration;
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of
especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her
expectations;
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of
others to achieve his or her own ends;
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the
feelings and needs of others;
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious
of him or her;
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes."
Narcissism is a result of stunted growth and of childhood abuse. It is
a reactive pattern, the indelible traces of an effort to survive
against all odds, against bestial repression and all-pervasive decay.
Brutally suppressed by the Turks for hundreds of years and then by
communism in some countries and by cruel, capricious banana republic
regimes in others - Homo Balkanus has grown to be a full-fledged
narcissist.
The nation state structure and ideology enthusiastically adopted by
Homo Balkanus in the wake of the collapse of the rotten Ottoman edifice
- has proven to be a costly mistake. Tribal village societies are not
fit for the consumption of abstract models of political organization.
This is as true in Africa as it is in the Balkans. The first allegiance
of Homo Balkanus is to his family, his clan, and his village. Local
patriotism was never really supplanted by patriotism. Homo Balkanus
shares an Ottoman unconscious with his co-regionists. The "authorities"
were and are always perceived to be a brutal, menacing and
unpredictable presence, a natural power, to be resisted by the equal
employment of cunning and corruption. Turkish habits die hard. The
natives find it difficult not to bribe their way through their own
officialdom, to pay taxes, not to litter, to volunteer, in short: to be
citizens, rather than occupants or inhabitants. Their
passive-aggressive instincts are intact and on autopilot.
The Balkanian experiment with nation states has visited only misery and
carnage upon the heads of its perpetrators. Borders tracked
convulsively the movements of half-nomad populations. This instability
of boundaries led to ethnic cleansing, to numerous international
congresses, to fitful wars. In an effort to justify a distinct
existence and identity, thousands of "scholars" embarked on Herculean
efforts of inventing histories for their newly emergent nations.
Inevitably, these histories conflicted and led to yet more bloodshed. A
land fertilized by blood produces harvests of bloated corpses.
In the Balkans people fight for their very own identity. They aspire to
purity, albeit racial, and to boundaries, albeit of the abstract kind.
It is, perhaps, the kernel of this Greek tragedy: that real people are
sacrificing real people on the altar of the abstract. It is a battle of
tastes, a clash of preferences, an Armageddon of opinions, judgements,
and lessons. Armies are still moved by ancient events, by symbols, by
fiery speeches, by abstract, diffuse notions. It is a land devoid of
its present, where the past and future reign supreme. No syllogism, no
logic, no theory can referee that which cannot be decided but by the
compelling thrust of the sword. "We versus They" - they, the aliens.
Threatened by the otherness of others, Homo Balkanus succumbs to the
protection of the collective. A dual track: an individualist against
the authorities - a mindless robot against all others, the foreigners,
the strangers, the occupiers. The violent acting out of this
schizophrenia is often referred to as "the history of the Balkans".
This spastic nature was further exacerbated by the egregious behaviour
of the superpowers. Unfortunately possessed of strategic import, the
Balkan was ravaged by geopolitics. Turks and Bulgarians and Hungarians
and Austrians and Russians and Britons and Germans and Communists and
the warplanes of NATO - the apocalyptic horsemen in the mountains and
rivers and valleys and sunsets of this otherworldly, tortured piece of
land. Raped by its protectors, impregnated by the demon seeds of global
interests and their ruthless pursuit - the Balkan was transformed into
a horror chamber of amputated, zombie nations, a veritable hellish
scene. Many a Pomeranian grenadier bequeathed their bones to the
Balkans but Pomeranian grenadiers came and went while the people of the
Balkan languished.
Thus, it was not difficult to foster a "We" against every "They" (or
imagined "They"). A crossroads of fault lines, a confluence of tectonic
clashes - the Balkan always obliged.
Religion came handy in this trade of hate. Orthodox Serbs fought Muslim
Serbs in Bosnia (the latter were forced to convert by the Turks
hundreds of years ago). Catholic Croats fought Orthodox Serbs. And
Bulgarians (a Turkic tribe) expelled the Turks in 1989, having
compelled them to change their Muslim names to Bulgarian sounding ones
in 1984.
Race was useful in the agitated effort to prevail. Albanians are of
Illyrian origin. The Greeks regard the Macedonians as upstart Slavs.
The Bulgarians regard the Macedonians as rebel Bulgarians. The
Macedonian regard the Bulgarians as Tartars (that is, Barbarian and
Turkish). The Slovenes and the Croats and, yes, the Hungarians claim
not to belong in this cauldron of seething, venomous emotions.
And culture was used abundantly in the Balkan conflicts. Where was the
Cyrillic alphabet invented (Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria) and by whom
(Greeks, Macedonians, Bulgarians). Are some nations mere inventions?
(The Bulgarians say this about the Macedonians). Are some languages one
and the same? Minorities are either cleansed or denied out of
existence. The Greek still claim that there are no minorities in
Greece, only Greeks with different religions. The Bulgars in Greece
used to be "Bulgarophone Greeks". The Balkan is the eternal hunting
grounds of oxymorons, tautologies and logical fallacies.
It is here that intellectuals usually step in (see my article: "The
Poets and the Eclipse"). But the Balkan has no intelligentsia in the
Russian or even American sense. It has no one to buck the trend, to
play the non-conforming, to rattle, to provoke, to call upon one's
conscience. It does not have this channel to (other) ideas and view
called "intellectuals". It is this last point, which makes me the most
pessimistic. The Balkan is a body without a brain.
(Article written on August 8, 1999 and published September 6, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 11)
Return
The MinMaj Rule