The news that on July 11, the 31st anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, Writer and peace activist Vladimir Arsenijević was beaten in Belgrade, as if she horrified the region more than the public in Serbia. But it seems that he is not alone Arsenijević he wasn't too surprised to be twenty or thirty teenagers it was eight in the morning under the Branko bridge. Vladimir Arsenijević talks about this lack of shock, the fact that the people who attacked him are surprisingly young, but also about preventing part of the local public from condemning the attack on him, because then he has to say what and the reason for the attack (the commemoration of the Srebrenica victims in Belgrade).
"WEATHER" What was the first thing that went through your mind when the attack started after you got out of the taxi?
Vladimir Arsenijevic: All I could think was: fuck, I can be their grandfather. Not that I can be their father, theoretically I can be their grandfather. I am 61 years old, and these are seventeen-year-olds. I wasn't beaten en masse, someone kicked me in football matches... These were individual blows in the middle of what was some kind of conversation between us. Then they are so, like, they can't stand what I'm saying, that every time someone else hits me. Like, they can't listen, I'm so nasty to them that they hit me. Then the others shout: "Don't, don't!", and then this one gets annoyed again by what I say and so on.
They tried to communicate with me their fantasy, national-ethnic, ethno-national intoned. And you see that those children drank everything they were poisoned with in their lives.
I came with the intention of tidying up that space a bit, because this event was scheduled for 11 o'clock and we duly reported it to the police and invited the guests, certain ambassadors and other guests were supposed to come. And then I saw them on the plateau. I didn't stop and count, but there were somewhere between 20 and 30 of those young people. Now, you might think, in that relatively small space, they were everywhere. One group wrote some graffiti - that "Ratko Mladić Serbian hero" and similar shit. The latter were kind of sitting and, somehow, they were in those black shirts with caps, which is the classic look of those right-wing hooligans.
I just got out of the taxi, I didn't know where to go at that moment, but I didn't feel like sneaking around and avoiding them.
As soon as they saw me, they somehow turned towards me as a group and the interaction started, so I didn't have much time to think about the situation. I started towards them because instinctively it seemed stupid to turn my back on them and head towards the Crocodile Center. I said, "Guys, why are you whining?" and then the exchange started, which ended in blows.
You keep using descriptions like "classic","common insults", on Instagram, immediately after the attack, You used the phrase "well-known vocabulary". Are we normalizing their hateful language after so many decades of dealing with it?
Well, unfortunately, that language is all around us, we live in it. When this frenzy of right-wing control of city surfaces and walls began, one graffiti artist said: "The worst day of my life was when someone sprayed graffiti on a football hooligan."
And that is a fact, that language, those messages, the reductiveness of those messages, the multiplication of those reduced messages in thousands of versions, that is something that is part of our visual reality. I even saw how numb people were to all that a few years ago, when we put an end to the first sign "When the army returns to Kosovo", which was facing the children's playground in the Mitić hole in Slavija, at the Institute of Chemistry, Technology and Metallurgy. We painted over it with white paint, it stood for an hour and immediately some new inscriptions appeared, complete madness, something like "Long live Putin", "Vučić the fag", "Kosovo"... So, it's like a flea market of their political ideas, isn't it... I photographed that and noticed, while photographing, how some people, a man and two women, were passing by. I watched that photo afterwards, how they pass by without a word and don't notice anything, don't pay attention. Then I realized that there could be a white wall, graffiti "When the army returns to Kosovo", "Vučić the fag" or any other symbol, people simply don't have the capacity to consume and notice it.
And that is the most terrible consequence of all that, that we are terribly desensitized and simply cannot feel these things. That's what's scary, because you can draw some analogies and imagine the same nice, good, normal person, normal people, walking past swastikas in Germany in the 1930s, walking past broken shop windows after Kristallnacht, walking past gas chambers and concentration camps and simply not noticing anything. And we are in that process right now.
Are we in the process or overwhelmed, both visual and mental, because you can no longer pass through the center of Belgrade, and beyond, without seeing that everything is scribbled with it "FCKBLK","rectal dick","Ustasha blockaders"? It's truly a visual assault., who are you, I think so, even neurological shutdowns.
The visual side is one part of it all. Quite simply, our public spaces are defaced. They could also be distorted by, say, benign messages. It would be the same if it was written everywhere, I don't know, "Ana loves Milovan", so that everything would be destroyed again. But there is a semantic matter here, how we get used to it. It says "rectal groin" everywhere and if you stop and think about it... Well, it's so disgusting.
Especially against whom it refers to. But by constantly multiplying it, we simply get used to it, it becomes part of our vocabulary, we don't even think about it anymore. It is shocking to me that they really chant "Aco Šiptare" and "Vučiću pederu" and so on.
If you try to draw attention to why people shouldn't be insulted with a pejorative name for an ethnic group and nation, after all, and for sexual orientation, people say: so what, we shouldn't even insult him. People have simply lost touch with the authentic meaning of those words.
On the day you were attacked, there were really a lot of messages of support, condemnations of attacks and so on. However, it was striking that one part of society did not speak up, and I don't mean this pro-regime one, I think so, who was silent, as if they think: if we condemn the attack on Vladimir Arsenijević, we must also mention the reason why he was attacked. Do you see that problem too??
It is a well-known tradition in our society that is not from yesterday. To me, that was phenomenal in the book Foot in the door Dubravka Stojanović, who goes through the period from the 1960s to the present day and quite vividly analyzes that eternally oppositional atmosphere in our country. Her conclusion is that with us, the fear of consequences has always been worse than the consequences themselves. If you remember when there was the situation with the Belarusian political immigrant in our country, Andrej Gnjot, for whom the Belarusian authorities asked Serbia to extradite him, so he was in prison here, and then they put a leg on him, he was able to leave his apartment in time and in the end he went to some EU country...
And then some of those young Belarusians who live in our country demonstrated in front of the Palace of Justice and carried placards with the names and ages of people who were picked up by the Belarusian regime at these anti-government demonstrations back then. There were people who have been missing for 500 days and no one knows where they are. And with us, for example, when we removed graffiti and did similar things, what happens to you with this system here? It is to put you to sleep with some minor misdemeanor charges that amount to paying a fine. In the case of Aida Ćorović, it was a significant 100.000 dinars, but mostly it comes down to 10.000 dinars. Well, then the "sensibility" of the country of Serbia in the 21st century appears to you - if you pay in a month, you get a 50 percent discount. That discount is not there for nothing. It is a way to get people to implicitly admit that they did something that is a violation, even though they only removed some graffiti, with those small financial fines, which will not make a dent in anyone's pocket.
Therefore, the consequences are not so dire in our country, but there is a big tendency among people to roll up their sleeves, to deal with some things and to solve some problems. That calculativeness has somehow become widespread and people would rather not give themselves headaches, it's simpler to keep quiet.
But I would like to return to the fact that the attack on you was caused by the fact that you wanted to cover the event which is the commemoration of the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica. And every time we have to say that word, genocide, those of us who are visible in public pause for a moment, because we fear exactly what happened to you.
I think that the story about sandwiches and per diems is true, but I think that there is a harmonization here, what one would say, bottom up i top down. So, at the same time, those people who do these dirty jobs are motivated by something and receive instructions from above, but I also think that they authentically believe in what was served to them in this society in the previous 40 years.
Many people have grown up and live exclusively in that world view. I found myself surrounded by devastatingly young people. And I also know that they are young - they vandalize our premises several times a month, we have surveillance cameras, they are always young, beardless faces. It's a man's world, made up of young men, who really have nothing better to do than destroy someone's property or beat someone up. But with tremendous conviction….
You asked me what was going through my mind while I was being beaten. Let me return to Dubravka Stojanović and her analysis of history textbooks The past is coming, where you can see what and how these children are served and what they grow up on. But whatever the system teaches you, you have no right to be an idiot. I was also taught Marxism at school, so I didn't fall for everything. Therefore, I think that even though they are young, they have responsibility for how they use the capacities that have been given to them.
photo: marija janković...
Forwards, they are always young, they are not drinking the elixir of youth for sure, rather, new generations are constantly being recruited. How is it possible that this system, some parallel system of raising young people, radical and aggressive, survives for three decades?
My son was born in 1990 and the critical moments of maturation for him were at the beginning of the 2000s. Until then, he lived within the family environment and listened to those things that we also communicated about. Everything we talked about with each other, we also talked with our children. But then he started separating from his family, which usually happens when a child aged 11-12 stays in the park with his friends for a while. All of a sudden he started coming home with very strange attitudes, he started to feel uncomfortable with the things we believe in, even on a very basic level. Let's say, if you say: all people are good... Such elementary truths did not fit because already in the playground those children influence someone who is only two or three years younger than them. So, someone who is 14-15 years old and who preaches an obscurantist ideology makes children extremely uncomfortable. What are you going to say - it's okay to be gay when you're 14? In a group of boys, you're done, you're socially dead.
Well, that's how it's constantly renewed and you always have the same young faces, new and new ones keep coming. And it is a broad group that is very agile, that is very mobile, that can do whatever you want, and we feel it very well on concrete examples.
Belgrade is considered a safe city among tourists. And what about the locals?, especially when they are recognizable in the public?
Well, those are also some parallel realities. While that scene was going on under the Branko bridge, I noticed out of the corner of my eye two temporary tourists, I would say, from Western Europe. Somehow they passed this way and that, with amazement, watching what was happening, but it was clear that they would not stay long. And there they had the opportunity to see a part of our reality that remains mostly invisible to them, and it is good that it is so. I keep saying that it is a good thing for our guests from abroad that a large part of the hate graffiti is in Cyrillic, so the light connections have nothing to say.
Imagine that someone explained to them that the hooligans were just beating the writer.
But be careful, whatever we think and feel, Belgrade is still a city where you can walk with your hands in your pockets at two in the morning and not think, because nothing will happen to you. And tourists come here with one expectation of something dark, then they come and find a colorful city, with attractive people who speak English, a good culinary offer, night life, and they are pleasantly surprised. I am aware of this and I am ready for this bipolarity; while we endure these dynamics of ours, and they do not penetrate to the guests, and it is good that it is so.
Can you still walk around Belgrade at two in the morning with your hands in your pockets??
Oh, I can... I can. They finished what they wanted to do and left. I climbed into the "Krokodil" and contacted the family. Nothing, my colleagues came, we called the police, I went to the emergency room and then we tried to remove as much of their graffiti as we could. They came to us a thousand times, we have recordings, these are really abnormal dialogues that we conduct with them from the terrace. But they come and go and we normally leave work at five o'clock.
Real journalism costs money, and we will not be bought by tycoons and corporations. Support us with a one-time or monthly donation. The time for it is now!
