What is the General Staff to us and what to them

The fate of Vukovar, Mostar, Baščaršije ominously reminds me of the possible fate of Belgrade. Ne, I don't think there will be any new ones, some other destroyers, someone else's... under the walls of Kalemegdan. I am afraid., it is sad to say, our master destroyers. Jer, cities are not only destroyed from the outside and physically, but can also be destroyed from the inside and spiritually. And that variant is much more certain.

— Bogdan Bogdanović, "Three war books", 1993.

An ensemble of buildings on the corner of Kneza Miloša and Nemanjina streets, colloquially called General Staff, architect Nikola Dobrović, has been standing heavily damaged by NATO bombing for 25 years. During all that time, the only ideas about its future were in the direction of total demolition and commercialization of the land, and all during the current government: in 2014, associates Donald Trump is coming to Belgrade and they are considering building a hotel in that place; In 2015, the Ministry of Defense announced that the hotel would in fact be built by the United Arab Emirates; In 2016, Prime Minister Vučić announced that everything would be demolished in order to erect a monument to Stefan Nemanja.

In March 2024, we learn that the government is returning to the hotel idea, this time in partnership with Trump (through son-in-law Jared Kushner's company) and the United Arab Emirates. Since this is not legally possible because the object is protected as a cultural monument, the government starts violence against the legal order and intimidates people who work in the institutions, and on November 14, 2024, it revokes the protection. At the same time, an unprecedented mobilization of the domestic and international professional public is taking place. On April 23, a public hearing was held at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, in which more than 350 architects and engineers of various professions participated and made a declaration demanding that the General Staff complex be restored and that its administrative purpose be preserved. The declaration is signed by more than 6.000 individuals, and the whole initiative for now represents the main resistance to the offensive project of the Trump Center and the devastation of one of the most important points in the history of Belgrade.

GLOBAL COMPENSATION SCHEMES

Although the contract signed with Jared Kushner mentions "revitalization", judging by the visualizations published on his Instagram profile, it seems as if everything is being demolished, and not two, but three gigantic structures are being planned, which is only possible if, in addition to the damaged buildings, the undamaged Old General Staff (Baumgarten Palace from 1928 at Kneza Miloša 33) and the tower of building "B" towards Birčaninova, which is in good condition, are also demolished condition and all the time in operation.

Demolition of our legacy would be at our expense, as well as contamination removal, so the partner would be gifted empty and furnished land worth around $100 million. The former chief of the General Staff, Zdravko Ponoš, said that for the amount of money it would cost us to demolish, clean and equip the infrastructure, the buildings could be renovated normally.

This project has received a lot of international attention because Kushner's company Affinity Global is an unusual investment fund that has been receiving money exclusively from foreigners for three years, and not turning it over, so it is suspected that what he is actually trading is political influence, which the US Senate launched an investigation into in September 2024. Kushner, as the sole owner, founded it in 2021 at the end of Trump's first term and has since received $3 billion, mostly from the United Arab Emirates. His first projects will be, as the Bloomberg portal writes, "Balkan war relics" - two projects in Albania and one in Serbia, worth a total of one billion dollars. Tourist mega-resorts are planned for the Albanian island of Sazan, a former military base and the Zvernec peninsula. Kushner boasted in American tabloids that 5 kilometers of untouched Mediterranean coast and 560 hectares of undeveloped island was an opportunity he had to take advantage of. Like the Serbian government, the Albanian government violated its own constitutional order for this project and removed protection from the national park and ecologically protected zone. Thus, bizarre global partnerships have opened up space for unexpected potential alliances: for example, the Belgrade population that does not want to lose its historical heritage and land in the heart of the city is a natural ally of the Albanian population that opposes the construction and permanent pollution of its national park, and their logical most powerful ally is the American Democrats who challenge the legality of private deals between the presidential family and foreign governments. The envisaged financial-management model is similar to Belgrade on the water, only this time the state of Serbia receives a smaller share of the profits, and Muhamed Alabar, its investor, who has been buying Belgrade for a decade, has joined the project.

photo: sara dević

SHINING NEW CONSTRUCTION

If all that happens, it's hard not to wonder, when hundreds of private apartments and hotel rooms tower over the most important authorities of a country, what does that mean for their security? Also, no matter how much the land is decontaminated and the new construction is sleazy, who is so morbid as to buy an apartment in a place where a bomb fell and people were killed, and the first neighbor has a museum about destruction and death?

This psychedelic and, for the citizens of Serbia, humiliating project makes perfect sense in the pragmatism of neoliberal urban development where reasonable is what brings money, and the most reasonable is what brings the most money. An additional benefit is the removal of the most visible traces of arrangement that had a different understanding of the property. Forced to live under the simple and inexorable principle of profit maximization on attractive land for the benefit of private firms, we have a right to memory to the extent that it helps the turnover of capital.

All this comes at the moment of the demolition of the "Yugoslavia" hotel, the attempt to demolish the Old Sava Bridge and the announcement of the demolition of two halls of the Belgrade Fair. The widespread and deliberate destruction of the city is increasingly being labeled as "urbicide", a term that world literature claims originated in this region, when a group of Mostar architects published the publication "Mostar '92 - Urbicide" during the war. For a long time, I was looking for a more precise articulation of why the destruction of the city is such a painful event and what exactly is affecting us there, and I found it in a note by the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić after the demolition of the old bridge in Mostar in 1993 by the HVO. Looking at the two photos side by side, she wrote: "Why does the picture of the destroyed bridge hurt me more than the picture of the murdered woman? Maybe because I see my mortality in the image of the bridge rather than in the image of the woman. We are aware that people will die. We count on the fact that our lives will end at some point. Destroying the bridge, however, is something else. The bridge was built to outlive us. It is a product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcends our individual destinies. The dead woman is one of us - but the bridge is all of us".

URBICIDE BEGINS IN IDEAS

What is most difficult to understand is the destructive drive towards one's own city. Just like now in the case of Belgrade, even then the leaders of the destruction of Mostar and Sarajevo were born from Mostar and Sarajevo. And not the born marginalized citizens of those cities, but those who were in very high positions. All this was preceded by the construction of the idea that a certain architecture is hostile and that it is therefore acceptable to eliminate it.

We can really see that method even today in Belgrade. In order to justify the destruction of their own city, Belgrade politicians say that the bridge over the Sava is not ours but German fascist, that the General Staff and Hotel "Yugoslavia" are not ours but communist. Pages and pages of carefully articulated appeals by top domestic and international experts seem fragile compared to the video of an excavator that, without adequate studies, plows through the body of the "Yugoslavia" hotel (a scene to which many on social media reacted with expressions of physical pain), and we constantly wonder what the power of words is against a club, that is, an excavator. In an earlier text, in the context of violence against women, writer Lana Bastašić wrote: "Violence is not born in hands, but in ideas." For years, they have been investing in the idea that a part of our heritage is worthless and belongs to someone else, and this idea has prepared the ground for execution. So far, the most subtle intervention of the city government in the public discourse on the history and urbanism of Belgrade is the internet portal and Instagram page Kaldrma.rs. Although this media is presented as a project of a group of enthusiasts, it was actually initiated by the City of Belgrade, the material is provided by the Historical Archive of Belgrade, and the posts are created by a marketing agency. Although it is not noticeable at first glance and is not present in every article, untruths and historical revisionism are woven through exceptional archival material, interesting and sympathetic stories. If you pay attention, you will notice that the posts are usually nice archival material taken out of context trying to support some current city government project with a few baseless claims. For example, in December 2024, when Mayor Šapić announces thirty new roundabouts in Belgrade, Kaldrma.rs publishes the article "The roundabout was the main solution of Belgrade in the 20th century". And four days after the illegal cancellation of the protection of the General Staff ensemble, they publish an article and an Instagram post about the "demolitionist Dobrović", in an attempt to cast doubt on the intentions of one of our greatest architects and thereby support the destruction of his only work in Belgrade.

Correctly recognizing that young people are mainly informed and form their opinions through Instagram and beautiful visual content, through this medium the city government succeeds in what it has never been able to do before, which is to influence educated youth.

photo: sara dević

ARCHITECTS CAN'T DO IT ALONE

If we leave Trump and all the previous destructive ideas aside for a moment, the truth is that there was never a vision for the future of the General Staff. One reason for this can be seen in the current efforts of the professional public to preserve it.

Namely, in the current speech about the importance of the General Staff, the avoidance of its history is striking; only the moment in which it became a ruin is mentioned. The phrases "part of cultural identity", "point of special memory" are repeated, but it is not said what the memory is. In a large public debate at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, it was said that "the bombed buildings are empty, therefore, they were bombed as a symbol" (it is not said of what), "and we have to restore them as a symbol" (again it is not said of what). Architect Nikola Dobrović offered two parallel interpretations of his work, one was the theory of "moving space" based on the philosophy of Henri Bergson; the other is the Sutjeska canyon, a symbolic reading that connected the building with the history and ideological system of socialist Yugoslavia. In the most serious study of the interpretation of the architecture of the General Staff, made by Vladimir Kulić and which received the European award for architectural criticism in 2009, the relationship between those two interpretations and how social circumstances changed over time so much that the second meaning became undesirable was shown. Today, architects only talk about "moving space", an explanation that does not have a vision of society, but is purely formalistic and empty.
I'm guessing that in the efforts to preserve the General Staff, they resorted to emptying it of symbolic content because we don't know what to do with it. The double structure on the corner of Nemanjina and Knez Miloš is an extremely complicated hub of our recent history that everyone shys away from, and as such it is precisely a metaphor for the relationship to that history. If we want to preserve architecture, we must deal with what produced it and what was its role over time. Architects cannot carry out this enormous undertaking alone. Not only can't, but they shouldn't; as long as only architects and conservators deal with the problem of the General Staff ensemble, the conversation will remain in the domain of the quality of construction and the form and reputation of the designer.

The whole story needs to be told about the Yugoslav People's Army, which built it in 1956 and used it until its suspension in 1992. What was the anti-fascist struggle that this architecture symbolizes and what was that army? How has her role and perception of her changed over time?

Then, we need to make some sense of the fact that within this architecture, behind the ruddy Kosjerić stone and marble slabs from Brač, the terrible destruction of Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo and other cities and settlements of former fraternal nations and minorities was managed.

At a press conference the morning after the attack on the General Staff, one of the NATO leaders said that the "heart of the war machine" was targeted. How did it come to be that the architecture, which for decades symbolized the victory of the Yugoslav peoples over fascism, was characterized in this way? And further, how could there have been an attack in the first place if international law and the UN did not allow it? I think that the decades-long absence of a vision for the future of the General Staff is the result, among other things, of the inability to hold answers to all these questions together, in a complete narrative that is not based on hatred.

GENERAL STAFF MEMORIAL CENTER

Undoubtedly, the demolition is the worst thing that can happen because with the disappearance of great witnesses in the physical space it is much easier to forget, and it will be much more difficult for the society of shopping malls and hotels owned by foreign companies, which does not know what was before, to plan where it is going.

In an ideal scenario, the vision of the future of the General Staff would be preceded by a series of public talks in which the whole story of this place would be told in a responsible manner and based on verified facts. And only then would the architects enter the scene, to give form to a well-thought-out vision (in terms of public procurement, project assignment) of the memorial center. And all the knowledge that is abundant in our institutions would rush in. The most beautiful thing that was said at a large meeting of the profession was that it can all be done: fantastic examples of the restoration of our medieval churches were shown, it was said that the IMS Institute did an analysis of the construction of the General Staff and that it is in good condition and that there is no obstacle to reconstructing the buildings to their original state. The structural structure is open, which means that there is a lot of freedom to redesign the internal layout while preserving the external appearance, and the tower is almost intact. While clearing rubble after the attack, the soldiers collected and saved the red stone for rebuilding one day. So, it can be done!

In the current student protests, many see a burst of cheerfulness into the public space, and the spirit it would create. Within the blocked Faculty of Architecture, a group has been launched that deals with the importance of the General Staff, and so far two forums have been held in the crowded halls of the Faculty of Architecture and Philosophy, and the second public forum has been announced for February 3 at the Grad Cultural Center. I believe that all is still not lost, but that those who want to deal with the General Staff in a productive way that is oriented towards the future will succeed to the extent that they do not fall into the trap of dealing exclusively with form and, in speaking about the role and symbolism of this space, do not agree to selective memory.