Foreign Policy In Focus

Daniel Bucan is not your usual run-of-the-mill Euroskeptic. He's a former diplomat whose last posting was in Strasbourg, at the Council of Europe.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989.

In order to get into the European Union, Croatia needs the support of each one of the current 27 members. So far, 20 countries have ratified Croatia’s EU accession treaty. As long as the other seven countries do the same, Croatia will become a member on July 1, 2013. In December, as a final sweetener, the EU added a final pre-accession allotment of nearly 50 million Euro – part of a package of nearly 1 billion Euro since 2007 – to help Croatia reach EU standards in various categories. Once Croatia enters the club, then it will have access to another pot of money, known as the Structural and Cohesion funds.

But this long-sought-after goal is by no means a done deal. In mid-December, Croatia’s sovereign debt dropped to junk bond level. The financial powers-that-be are not happy with the current Croatian government’s somewhat permissive approach to austerity. With unemployment at nearly 20 percent and the domestic economy contracting, the Social Democrats allowed the deficit to rise from 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP. This economic performance has contributed to assessments like that of the speaker of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, who said in October that Croatia “isn’t ready for EU membership.” Germany has yet to ratify the accession treaty.

Still, a queasy economy won’t keep Croatia out of the EU; it will just put the country on par with other troubled members, like Romania and Greece.

Croatia’s long-simmering conflict with Slovenia, on the other hand, might prove to be more than a speed bump. The two countries have been haggling for years over Croatian savings in a defunct Slovenian bank. Slovenia wants Croatia to stop the lawsuits for the recovery of the money in the Croatian accounts in Ljubljanska Banka or else it might block entrance to the EU. It’s not a small sum: 172 million Euro. Croatia wants to settle the issue separately from accession.

Croatian support for accession remains high. A year ago, 66 percent of voters said yes to EU membership in a national referendum. But not everyone is enthusiastic.

“I don’t believe anymore in the European Union,” Daniel Bucan told me. “As soon as the EU tries to become a political union, it will end in a bad way. You cannot make a state out of Europe. Look at Yugoslavia, look at the Soviet Union, look at Czechoslovakia. Such multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious, multinational constructs are always kept together by force. When I say by force, I don’t necessarily mean by tyranny, but by any kind of power. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were kept together by the force of the Communist Party and communist dictatorship. The EU is kept together by the power of Germany and France. No one believes that the Czech Republic or Denmark for example has the same weight as Germany or France.”

Daniel Bucan is not your usual run-of-the-mill Euroskeptic. He’s a former diplomat whose last posting was in Strasbourg, at the Council of Europe. In other words, this is someone who is no stranger to European affairs.

I met Daniel Bucan 22 years ago when he was in the ministry of information in the newly formed government of Franjo Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union. Much of his skepticism about Yugoslavia has translated into skepticism of Europe. We also talked about the Croatian Spring, his conversations with Tudjman, and what it means to be a Croatian nationalist.

The Interview

Do you remember where you were when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall and what you were thinking?

I cannot remember exactly. The only thing I remember is seeing it on TV. But let me try to remember…I was for sure in Zagreb, probably at home. Anyhow, it was a historic moment as they say, and I felt like I was witnessing a historic moment. Actually, it didn’t come as a surprise to me, but probably everybody by then knew things were going to change. I mean, there was a process building up to this point. But still, although we might have been expecting those changes, the symbolic dimension of the event was like something you read in a good novel or book of poetry. And that’s how I felt for a moment seeing this.

Did you think at all about what impact it would have here?

Of course. Especially because things had practically already started here, with Milosevic and his party coup in Serbia, what was called in Serbian dogadjanje naroda, which means “the nation is happening.” And he was changing the political elite in Kosovo and Vojvodina. He was instigating these public meetings and political demonstrations all over former Yugoslavia, especially in Croatia. They were already pledging support in Serbia for Knin and other parts of Croatia. So, things here had already been started, and I could not think that the fall of the Wall couldn’t have an impact on what was going to happen here in Yugoslavia.

As a matter of fact, I felt that the problem might be the abrupt way it was happening. There was practically no transition. That was something I felt we should be afraid of. Unfortunately, knowing Milosevic’s political agenda — to consolidate all the republics and to make a unitary state out of Yugoslavia based on the principle of “one person, one vote” — I knew that things were not going to develop in a good way. At that time, the republics had so-called national defense units staffed not by the Yugoslav army but the citizens of the republics. That meant that there was a certain amount of weapons in each of the republics. At a certain point in Croatia, these weapons were withdrawn from the republic. It was a sign to expect the worst, which later on actually happened.

Where were you working in 1989?

I was with the radio, the so-called Third Program, that specialized in culture, art, science. I entered politics because, along with all my friends, we had been dissidents. One of them was a member of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and a friend of Franjo Tudjman. Milovan Šibl is his name: he was also a journalist at the radio. And then immediately after the elections, when he was nominated minister of information, he asked me whether I would become his vice minister. I was reluctant, I said: “I’m not a politician, I’m not a party member, I’m not…” And then he said, “But, you know, for decades we’ve been waiting every day for this to happen, and you shouldn’t give up now.” Finally he talked me into accepting it, and that’s how I entered politics.

But I never became a politician in terms of being a member of any party. For a short period of time, I was vice minister of information, and then I joined the president’s office. Tudjman chose a number of counselors and advisors, and I was one of them. Mario Nobilo and I took care of press conferences and so on. For a short period of time everyone was doing everything, and then Tudjman asked me one day: “What would you like to do? Would you like to remain in journalism?” And I said, “You know all my life I’ve been a man of culture. I know that it’s not such a moment to…” And he said, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay! I like to have you with me, and you can, if you want, be my advisor for cultural affairs.” So I spent two years with him there.

Then when the issue of appointing the first ambassador to Cairo was raised, he remembered that I was an Arabist and that I had some experience with the Arab world. And that’s how I entered diplomacy and remained until 2008, when I retired.

So you were in Egypt…

Egypt, and after that I was in Greece. And my third post was the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. I spent probably the best five years of my life in Egypt. It was tough at the beginning because I arrived there in 1993 when the war between Croats and Muslims in Bosnia had started, and I found all the doors closed to me. I couldn’t do anything. Not having any previous diplomatic experience, I was thinking that this was my fault. It took me some time to understand that the position of ambassador depends on the position of the country, rather than vice versa. I believed at first very naively that the position of the country depends on  how much the ambassador is capable. But things changed after the Washington agreement on ending the conflict between Croats and Muslims was signed , and there was a turnabout. All the doors opened to me.

I was personally very much interested in Egypt because I had been an Arabist, and I had a lot of opportunities to find books and things. Ancient Egypt was something I’d been interested in since I was a little boy. I was always imagining myself as an archeologist going down there… After that, four years in Greece was very important. While I was in Greece, Prime Minister Costas Simitis proposed to Croatian Prime Minister Ivica Racan that Croatia apply for candidacy for EU membership. So I participated in that process.

After that it was Strasbourg, which was a little bit disappointing. As I said, it took me some time to understand the position and role of ambassador in bilateral negotiations, but when I understood it, it was relatively easy. You have your country’s interests; the host country has its interests. If you can combine the two, then fine. If not, then, you know… I like this realistic aspect of bilateral relations. The Council of Europe is an organization based on values, on ideas. It’s a watchdog that sees how those ideas are being implemented in different countries in Europe. It was a disappointment because very soon I understood that this is only on paper. The principles are principles, but the practice is something else. There was a double standard regarding different countries. What Russia can afford to do, for instance, Hungary can’t afford to do, and so on

Actually, it wasn’t disappointing because by then I understood what politics is, and what international relations are. But it was difficult to be there every day sitting at the meetings and pretending that you don’t see these discrepancies. As a matter of fact, I very often pointed out such discrepancies, loudly… So anyhow, I didn’t like Strasbourg as a job, because it’s very difficult for me to say something I don’t believe in. I’m not good at it. Suddenly, I feel like I don’t have enough words to say or enough imagination to formulate the phrases.

So, I was actually looking forward to my retirement. As a matter of fact I had to ask for it. In Strasbourg you are busy from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening, every day. There’s an ocean of meetings, and papers, and it’s not easy. And the Council of Europe is not important anymore. Even for us. It’s not a post that everybody grabs for, so they were keeping me there. If I didn’t write letters to the president, to the prime minister, maybe I’d still be there! I’m joking, of course, but that’s how I felt.

I would like to retire to freedom and live the life I would like to live in these few years that remain. For last 30 years I’ve been busy with medieval Arab philosophy. I’ve translated the books of the five or six most important Arab philosophers, including the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who wrote his main philosophical work using the  Hebrew script, but in the Arab language. And I wrote – three books on medieval philosophy. So I wanted to get rid of all of my other obligations.

I want to go back to 1989. You were a journalist working at a radio station, and at that time, if I remember correctly, there was a big scandal around Mladina, the Slovenian newspaper, and press freedom was very important at that moment. I’m curious how that influenced your work as a journalist.

I was lucky having this job on the Third Program, which was in a way an oasis of relative freedom because we tackled exclusively scientific, cultural, and art matters. There was a little bit more freedom within the media not geared to the masses. But every now and then we felt some ridiculous pressures:  for example, whether we should use this or that word, whether it was a Croatian word or a Serbian word. It’s very difficult to understand for people who never experienced that part of life.

The choice of words was a very important issue during the Croatian Spring.

Yes, because language is one of the elements that constitutes the identity of a nation. Anyhow, the Mladina controversy was very much influencing not maybe the media but what was being talked about in cafes, in intellectual circles, and so on. Freedom is something that, once you get a little bit of it, you are not ready to go back. You only want to go forward and get even more freedom. There was no way to stop it. Yugoslavia wanted to be perceived as a socialist country, even a communist country, but one with freedoms: the freedom to say certain things and absolutely not say certain other things. As soon as you touched on those that couldn’t or shouldn’t be said, you had problems.

Was there a moment in your own personal life when you felt in your own mind that you were a dissident?

Of course. As a young guy, when I was 18, I became a member of the Communist Party. It was very attractive to young people, this belief that you are making history, that we are going to lead the world, and so on. I became a member of the party just before going to university. Then I came to Zagreb in 1965 after finishing my studies in Belgrade, and I found a job on radio. And there, I confronted what life really is. I understood that our society is completely different from what I thought before.

I always was very sensitive to language. That’s my talent, that’s why I’m a philologist. So, the first thing I discovered was that I was under enormous pressure not to use certain words and then, of course, not to write about certain subjects. Then I noticed that a majority of the leading people on radio and television were Serbs, local Serbs that is. Then I found out that the police is made up of 60% Serbs, although they were only 11 percent of population in Croatia, and so on… That’s how I became a dissident, and that’s how I became what they call a Croatian nationalist.

I remember one of the people who came and talked to me when I was vice minister for information, I don’t remember whether it was you or not, we had been talking like this, and then at a certain point he said, “But Mr. Bucan, I understand from what you are saying that you are a real intellectual. How can you be a nationalist?” And I said, “For me it is not an issue of nationalism. It is an issue of justice.” I mean, I am reacting to injustice. Unfortunately, the injustice has been based on nationality. If it were based on something else, then I would be something else.

So that’s how I became interested in politics.

So you were here in Zagreb during the Croatian Spring.

Actually, I was the secretary of the party at the radio at the time in Croatia. It was a period of euphoria. I was still very young. I said something at the time that almost cost me my job later on. But I didn’t lose my job.

At a party meeting at Radio Zagreb, I proposed that we change the name of Radio Zagreb to Croatian Radio. This was taken as a major sin, because we were discussing short-wave programs listened to around the world. The general director of the radio-television at that time, he was a member of the central committee, he asked me after the meeting, “Are you crazy, what are you doing?” So, with this anecdote, I just want to say that I was young, and it was a period of euphoria.

I was also writing for the Croatian Weekly and it sold 150,000 copies every issue. We felt that people were reading us, believing us, and so that felt great. One felt important. I was mingling with all these people that became friends of mine, like Vlado Gotovac, who was on TV (and before that he was on radio). I remember after Karadjordjevo, which was the end of the Croatian Spring, I wrote a text — I never published it, I gave it to some friends to read — about this defeat. I wrote that it might be a defeat for us, but it might bring victory for the next generation. We were pointing out things that were perceived wrongly in the international community. Abroad, Yugoslavia was perceived as a country of freedom, as almost an “ideal” country. For me, Croatia was something like what I said about freedom: you get a little bit of it and you cannot go back. But the defeat was terrible because a lot of people, including many of my friends, went to prison, and even more lost their jobs.

For a long time I was afraid that I would also go to prison. Years later, I heard that a friend of my father’s who had good relations with Jure Bilic, one of the Communist leaders who took over after the end of the Croatian Spring, had said, “He’s a young guy, his mother was hanged by the Ustasa, his father was a Partisan, so you shouldn’t bother him. Let him be.” It seems that that’s how I didn’t go to prison.

In any case, the Croatian Spring was like a seed planted into the ground.

Even though the Croatian Spring was defeated and many people went to jail, the 1974 constitution was a recognition of these movements — not just in Croatia, but of course elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Some people argue that the 1974 constitution was the end of Yugoslavia, because it decentralized authority in a way that was irrevocable.

That was typical of Tito. I never liked him; I don’t like him now. But he always liked to play both sides, and that’s what he did there too. But in a way, the constitution of 1974 was a return to the origins of Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia was reconstructed in 1944 and 1945 by Tito and the Communist Party, it was a voluntary coming together of different peoples, nations, republics, and so on. That’s what we were always taught in school. But you couldn’t say it this way in a political context or you would be immediately sent to prison. The 1974 constitution allowed this political formulation, and in a way it became later on the constitutional basis for dismantling Yugoslavia.

Many people have told me how strange it was to live in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, because the country was more liberal than Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria, and so many people from the region came here on vacation, to sell /buy things. And of course many people could travel to Western Europe and work as guest workers and bring money back, and build houses. So it obviously was more liberal than some places, and yet still as you point out, there was censorship, there were people going to jail, there were limits to what you could say. I mean, how did you feel in those years when Yugoslavia was in the middle of the spectrum between the much more repressive governments of the east and the much more liberal countries of the west?

As a young guy, without the experiences and knowledge that came later, I probably wasn’t aware of all this. As I told you, I became aware of things when I started to live: when I married, when I got a job, and when I began to have problems at my workplace… It was pleasant to hear that we were perceived as “better” than some others. But when I started to live a real life, with my eyes open in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes I thought that the situation here was worse than it was for Hungarians or Czechs or Slovaks or Bulgarians. Not worse in a real sense. But those people knew how they suffered. And we didn’t want to recognize it: we lived in a lie. We thought we were enjoying ourselves. So, it was this double-edged feeling.

When I was talking to Zarko Puhovski, he said he talked with Franjo Tudjman in 1989, because he knew Tudjman’s son, and Tudjman at the time said: “In one year I will be president.” And Puhovski thought, “This man is crazy. He’s already in his 60s. He’s a lunatic.” Then he realized one year later when Tudjman became President, that he, Puhovski, was the lunatic. Things happened so quickly in those days. Did you have any expectation that things would change so quickly with HDZ or Tudjman’s political trajectory?      

I’m not sure, but I’ll say this. A few months before the elections in 1990, we were discussing political parties every day in the café: who is going to win, who we are going to vote for, and so on. And 99% of my friends had been for the Coalition of People’s Accord, organized by Mika Tripalo and Savka Dabčević-Kučar and others who were engaged in the Croatian Spring (minus Tudjman). And I and a friend of mine said, “No, we are going to vote for Tudjman, for HDZ.” “But he’s a communist general!” they said. And I said, “Guys, you are very naive. Don’t you see that everybody is against Tudjman? The communist government is against Tujdman. It’s not against Savka-Tripalo, the Coalition. That means that Tudjman is the guy.” And that’s how I voted for Tudjman.

And many other people did the same.

The basis of Tudjman’s success was that he was saying, “We want an independent Croatia.” That was enough for the people, because everybody was thinking it, but didn’t dare say it. Besides that, frankly speaking, he had the support of parts of the secret services: the State Security Administration (UDBA). I knew that Josip Manolic, who was practically number two in HDZ, had been in UDBA. But it seems that it wasn’t only Manolic. Thanks to that fact, Tudjman had the logistics that were needed for such success. Of course he was elected freely, and he was saying what people wanted to hear. But I’m not sure that he could have been sure a year before the elections that he would be president without such support.

When you think back to your worldview at that time, in 1989-1990, is there anything that you’ve had second thoughts about? Have you changed your mind about anything?

Essentially not. Everything that happened, I was expecting to happen: even the corruption and the negative things. Look, we have the same problems as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovenia — everywhere there is corruption, maybe a little bit more here or a little bit less there. It was something I was expecting, because a revolution creates a certain mentality. This revolution freed people: freedom of speech, freedom of enterprise. Everybody was thinking, “I don’t have money. I’ve been in bad shape economically because of communism. Now communism is gone, I can now live as they live in Germany, in Austria, in England. So, how should I become rich?”

The thing that I didn’t expect, frankly speaking, is the role played by the political elite in this corruption. I naively thought that people who are leading the country, especially a country which has freed itself from communism and later on from an aggression, that those people are going to have the national interest and the well-being of the people foremost in their mind. But like everybody else, they had their own private interests foremost in mind, and this is something that I didn’t expect.

So you expected corruption at a certain level, but you didn’t expect it to rise all the way to the top?

Corruption, unfortunately, is not an individual phenomenon. Rather, it’s a system. Corruption within the elite is not only in terms of wealth and money. Corruption also is when you become a minister and you give posts to your friends.

Anyway, like most people, I’m not satisfied with the way things are economically. We are in bad shape, but then today everybody is. On the other hand, we are also ready, and all the governments have been ready, to accept the pressures from the so-called international community, even in things we couldn’t oppose and did not accept happily. In a way, this is again something that is not new to me. Croatia is like an unwanted baby that wants everybody to like him, and he is ready to do anything to be loved. That’s how we behave, and it’s not a good thing for the country. But as I told you, we are ready to accept everything the “big ones” are asking, even if it goes against our interest.

If you would ask me whether I think that the last 20 years — even including the war — was worth it, I would say: “Yes.” Unfortunately, it was. There is something special about our case, about Yugoslavia. Everywhere I went — Cairo, Athens, Strasbourg — whoever I met in the diplomatic community often asked me, “But weren’t you better off within Yugoslavia, when you were all together?” And I said, “But I never heard you asking this of the Czech ambassador or the Slovak ambassador or the Russian ambassador. Why do you believe that it was better back then? If it had been better, what happened wouldn’t have happened.” Unfortunately, it happened in the most terrible way. If it could have happened like in Czechoslovakia, I would without any reluctance say that it was worth it. But even with what happened, I believe, all in all, that it was worth it.

Do you think that the war could’ve gone on a different path? Do you think that Croatia had any control over the way the war happened?

Not really, except that Tudjman artfully conducted the first months of war, trying to postpone things. He was negotiating with everybody and everyone, and he was gaining time. He was gaining both time and a certain perception within the international community. So to that extent, Croatia had some control. But not in terms of what was going on on the ground. At a certain point, almost a third of our country was occupied. But I would say that Tudjman did a very good job in those years.

One of the dominant interpretations is that Tudjman was, as you say, diplomatically very astute in those early years of the war, and that Croatia as a country had a very high reputation. But that shifted, especially those years when you were in Cairo and the doors were closed to you. That’s when Croatia’s reputation dropped considerably. I guess you felt that to certain extent when you were in Egypt.

Yes, of course. 

Do you think that could’ve been avoided and Croatia could have somehow maintained its high reputation?

Since I wasn’t here at that time, I have no direct insight, unlike the first two years when I was with Tudjman in his office. At that time, I was with him every day at lunch and he liked me because I was one of the people who spoke openly. He always said, “I am going to decide, but I want you to tell me what you think.” He also liked me because I was not a politician: I was not a member of the party, I had no relations with other politicians and ministers. Every lunch, every day, I heard all of his discussions with people, and so I had direct insight.

Later on, the reason for this shift in perception of Croatia within the international community was due to the issue of Bosnia. Tudjman believed that Bosnia could not survive as it is. He said, “Bosnia is a micro-Yugoslavia. And Bosnia could exist as Bosnia only under Yugoslavia, before that under the Ottoman Empire, and for a short period of time under Austro-Hungarian Empire.” And so he believed that Bosnia couldn’t survive, and that Croats should secure their territories in Bosnia: for their own sake and for the strategic sake of Croatia. Not necessarily in terms of the dismantlement of Bosnia-Hercegovina, but in any case in terms of an “internal structural division.”

He conducted such a policy in Bosnia. He recognized Bosnia. Actually he made Bosnian-Croats vote for an independent Bosnia. But he always thought that Bosnia was going to be divided, whether in terms of giving some parts to Croatia and some parts to establish a Muslim country if it was dismantled, or to establish within the borders of Bosnia various republics or cantons or regions that have a certain independence in terms of cultural and local development policy. The international community — the United States and so on — wanted Bosnia to survive as it was. But that’s when things fell apart.

In Cairo, I was in contact with an American diplomat more or less regularly, and he told me, “Tudjman is a great man. There are no more statesmen today. He’s a real statesman. He has a sense of history.” Of course I knew that he was just trying to butter me up. This went on until the Dayton Agreement was signed. As soon as Dayton was signed, meaning they didn’t have any more need for Tudjman, the same guy began to tell me an ocean of ugly things about Tudjman. So, they accepted Tudjman when he was playing into their hands. When he started to play his own game, they rejected him.

As far as Bosnia is concerned, frankly speaking I still believe that Tudjman was right, that Bosnia should be divided in terms of political structure. I remember when I came to Zagreb from Cairo after the Dayton Agreement, I met Tudjman and I said to him, “It seems to me that the Dayton Agreement is not a good one.” “How do you mean?!” he asked. I said, “To me it seems like a division of Bosnia between Serbs and Muslims.” And he said, “You may be right, but it was the only way to stop the war, and we are not going to allow Bosnia to be divided between Serbs and Muslims.” That’s what he said. And as a matter of fact I believe that that’s what is going on, and it will be unfortunate for Bosnian-Croats.

Do you think that there was a meeting at Kardjordjevo? Not the one that you referred to before, but the later one where Tudjman and Milosevic sat down and…?

Yes, they sat down. There was this meeting, but nobody knows what they were talking about.

But probably they talked about…

I don’t know what they were talking about, but I know what Tudjman thought about Milosevic. First of all, he firmly believed that developments in former Yugoslavia depend essentially on Croats and Serbs, that the Croats and Serbs are the main players and that they should come together and find a compromise. In that way, he accepted Milosevic as a counterpart. But he didn’t believe him. I mean, everybody says that Tudjman believed Milosevic. It’s not true. But Tudjman said, “What can I do? The Serbian people elected him. He is a representative of the Serbian people, and I have to speak with him. I have to negotiate with him.” Part of this negotiation was probably only tactical, to gain time, and part was strategic in terms of finding a solution, trying to convince Milosevic that he cannot have all of Yugoslavia, including part of Croatia. But then what to do about Bosnia? I cannot say concretely what they were negotiating and discussing.

In Richard Holbrooke’s memoir of the Dayton Agreement, he talks very candidly about his discussions with Croatian top generals. He said to them, “Take as much territory as possible before the agreement, because we need pressure on Milosevic and because after the agreement it will be very difficult to rearrange the borders.” So from Holbrooke’s point of view the Croatian military was an extremely important force on the ground for diplomacy.

But still they stopped us before Banja Luka.

That’s true. Holbrooke said, “Absolutely not Banja Luka.”  

So this is another indication that Bosnia was the core issue and that they wanted Bosnia to remain as it is. Or they wanted a balance between Serbia and Croatia. If you look at the trials at The Hague, there as well they are trying to establish a balance… Maybe they were afraid that the Russians were going to take over Serbia, which they didn’t want to happen. Serbia is geo-strategically important. Croatia can be bypassed, but Serbia cannot be. Once I told Tudjman, “To me, Milosevic is crazy. He has something that he could sell for great profit. But he doesn’t do it. I don’t know why he’s playing with the Russians.” Because of Serbia’s geo-strategic importance maybe, the international community didn’t want Serbia to be defeated.

Were you surprised at the indictments handed down at The Hague?

Which one? Against Gotovina?

That was the most controversial one.

Frankly speaking I was not surprised. I expected it. I firmly believe that it’s unjust,  but that it’s explained by this framework of making a balance. I mean, how can you compare Vukovar and Knin? I am still sure that the Hague Tribunal is a political thing. Look at the judges that are looking into the verdict to decide at the final level. They say to the prosecution: “You cannot convict them on the grounds of excessive bombardment.” And they ask the prosecution to find something else as a basis for conviction. This is unheard of! I mean, Gotovina and Markac have been before the court for this “excessive bombardment,” the judge says they cannot be convicted on this charge, so they should be free!

There were also accusations concerning conduct in Bosnia during the Bosnian War.

I have no insight into those things except for what I’ve read in papers. But generally speaking I would say that the Hague judges don’t distinguish between the aggressor and the defender. Of course, there have been crimes on both sides, and they should be prosecuted and punished. But you cannot, for example, give Gotovina a sentence of 24 years because of Knin and Veselin Šljivančanin a sentence of 10 years for Vukovar and then let him out after seven! They wanted to make both parties guilty. Why? I believe it is easier to manipulate someone who is guilty than someone who is not.

As you said, there is enormous international pressure on Croatia to abide by the rulings of the Hague Tribunal. And of course, the most important pressure point was membership in the European Union. Do you think ultimately, even if the Hague Tribunal was a bad process, or an unjust process, or a political process, was it worth it to abide by the rulings of the Tribunal in order to get into the European Union?

I don’t think so. Especially because I don’t believe anymore in the European Union. As soon as the EU tries to become a political union, it will end in a bad way. You cannot make a state out of Europe. Look at Yugoslavia, look at the Soviet Union, look at Czechoslovakia. Such multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious, multinational constructs are always kept together by force. When I say by force, I don’t necessarily mean by tyranny, but by any kind of power. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were kept together by the force of the Communist Party and communist dictatorship. The EU is kept together by the  power of Germany and France. No one believes that the Czech Republic or Denmark for example has the same weight as Germany or France.

Did you believe in the European Union when you got to Strasbourg?

Not anymore.

At what point did you stop believing in the EU?

I stopped believing when I saw that the reforms were going in the direction of creating more and more centralized power. This centralized power means bureaucracy, which is always a terrible thing, and it means that the strongest rule. I also started to look into how the EU functions, who is paying how much into the budget, and it seemed to me that Germany was paying for everything. How long will they be willing to pay for everything and everybody? This is a shaky foundation. I understand that the EU needs a more centralized decision-making process during this crisis. But then, if it were not for this centralizing tendency, if it were not for the Euro, the EU would probably not have this crisis.

Anyhow, I’m not sure that the EU has a bright future, and I’m not sure that we “sold” ourselves successfully. Because what we gain from the EU will depend on our capacity to exploit EU funds, and our capacity to do so is very low. And yes, we will be sitting at the same table, but we won’t have a real voice. That is, we are going to have a vote, but what does this vote mean for a country like Croatia beside the vote of France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and others?

Isn’t it better to have a small vote rather than no vote at all?

Again, it depends on our capacity. If we can be independent outside of the European Union, it would be better not to have a vote at all. But to be independent in such a context you have to have resources, and a capable leadership, and an efficient governing structure — which we don’t have. So I don’t know whether it is better for Croatia to be in the EU or outside. Theoretically speaking, I would opt for being outside, but practically speaking I’m not sure anymore.

Earlier you said that the issue is injustice, and that you were a nationalist because the issue was an imbalance of power at a national level. Croatia is now independent, more or less, and it’s a sovereign country, so do you still consider yourself a nationalist if that injustice has been removed?

I never considered myself a nationalist in terms of the definition of nationalism, either then or now. If you ask me whether I still believe that national issues are still important, I would say yes. Look at human rights. If you want to be politically correct you have to recognize the rights of all different groups, in terms of sexual orientation, national minorities, any minority. But when you start speaking about Croat national rights or Serb national rights, they are going to look at you as a nationalist, even a chauvinist. A man is defined by many things. He is defined by his sexual orientation, by his gender, by the social group he belongs to, and by his nationality in terms of his language, and so on. So why should I recognize his right as a homosexual, his right as a football player, and not his right as a Croat? In those terms, I believe that this national dimension has weight, at least as much as these other dimensions. These issues are not important in the social and political context where there is no discrimination. But if there is discrimination based on language…

Do you think that there is discrimination against Croatians?

There is in Bosnia. I remember very well at the Council of Europe we were discussing the issue of the school system in Bosnia. There had been a lot of criticism of Bosnian Croats because of the so-called “two schools under one roof.” Meaning that the curricula of Bosniaks and Croats differ in mother language and history. And then I said, “Do you remember when the issue of the reintegration of Eastern Slavonia was discussed at the Council of Europe? Both the Council of Europe and the European Union insisted on different curricula for Croats and Serbs. So how can you deny Croats the right to have the Croatian language as a subject matter, and Croatian history as a subject matter, when you insisted on exactly that in Eastern Slavonia?” Nobody said anything. And they of course acted like I’d never said anything.

So those issues are still important, in Bosnia especially. They don’t have, if I’m not wrong, any TV stations for Croats. Of course, Croats in Bosnia are a minority now. And they, at the end, will be constitutionally recognized as a minority, and there will be no problem anymore with such things. But as long as they are one of the so-called three constituent people, they should be treated like one.

What do you think about the current political situation here in Croatia? Many people have told me that they think — if you put aside the issue of corruption, which of course is always a big issue — that the political situation is more or less normal. You have two parties that are strong, and they kind of go back and forth in terms of who’s in power. The extremes are relatively unpopular, and Croatia is now a normal European country.

More or less yes. Because of this corruption issue and, maybe more so because of the economic crisis, not only are parties not popular but politicians in general are not popular. The ordinary people on the street would say to you “they are all the same,” and they would be right. I might have more or less sympathy for this or that party because of ideology, but they are all the same. And I resent that all of them — or both of them because it’s really just HDZ and SDP with their coalition partners — don’t take care of the national interest as they should. Not just in terms of relations with neighbors. They sold out everything. Croatia doesn’t own anything anymore in Croatia.

So the privatization of…

It’s not the same thing to privatize a factory and to privatize practically the whole banking system — 94%, I believe. Or the communications system. But this happened more or less everywhere. And, again, it’s something I did expect, even back in the 1990s. Because Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia included, was for practically half a century under the Communists, and everything has been destroyed in terms of a normal economy. So, when I was discussing such things with my friends, I would say, “Eastern Europe is going to be for the rest of Europe what Latin America is for the United States.” Maybe it won’t be one hundred percent similar, but close enough.

How we are going to reach the same level with Western Europe, in terms of economy, production and everything? It’s impossible if we are going to become a new kind of colony. Unfortunately, it was probably inevitable. But even as a colony you can conduct yourself in better ways and worse ways.

Because you spent so much time in Egypt, I have to ask whether you were completely surprised by the Arab Spring in Egypt, and how would you compare what happened there with this part of the world?

Again, I wasn’t surprised. Actually, if I was surprised, I was surprised that it happened only now and not before. But then it didn’t happen only in Egypt. It is happening all over the Arab World. And the notion of the so-called “Arab Spring” is completely misleading. It’s an Islamist spring, a fundamentalist spring. Why? In the mind of the average Arab citizen, whether it’s in Egypt or Libya, the alternative to the dictatorship they have been under is not democracy. They have no idea of democracy, unlike Europe. Even here in Yugoslavia we had no experience of democracy, but we had this idea of democracy before our eyes. They don’t have it. Of course, a very thin layer of society, intellectuals and so on, have this idea, but average people don’t have it. So what’s the alternative to the dictatorship of Mubarak, or Qaddafi, or Assad? It’s “real and authentic” Islam.

Even politically it was structured like this. The only real political opposition was the Muslim Brotherhood and such groupings. In an article I wrote a year ago, I predicted what was going to happen in Egypt. In the first stage, the army is going to take power and guarantee the alliance with Washington. If there would be free elections in Egypt, then the Muslim Brotherhood is going to win — which happened. And it’s happening more or less everywhere, and this is, again, normal. But it might have enormous consequences globally, because it will probably change the balance of power in the Middle East, which is one of the most strategically important regions in the world.

These quantitative questions are the last ones. The first one is, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being least -satisfied and 10 being most satisfied, when you think about all that has changed here in Croatia since 1989 until today, what would be your evaluation?

5. Because all in all, as I said, I think it has been worth it. It’s better that those changes happened, rather than not. On the other hand, I don’t think we achieved — especially in terms of economy — everything we could have, even in terms of our position within the international community or within international politics. There are things I’m dissatisfied with, and things I’m satisfied with.

Okay. Same scale from 1 to 10, same period of time, but your own personal life.

That’s tougher. I never thought about it, that’s why it’s tough. Because you live your life and you don’t think about. Well, taking into account that I spent five years in Egypt, four years in Greece, and it was great, and taking into account that I was witnessing, from the inside, a historical process, I would say 8.

Finally, looking into the near future, when you think about what will happen here in Croatia in the next couple of years here, how would you rate the prospects on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the most pessimistic, and 10 being the most optimistic?

Probably no more than 5.

The author interviews Aleksandar Zograf, who first gained notoriety for his political cartoons during the NATO bombing of Serbia.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989.

Pancevo is a small Serbian city located just northeast of Belgrade. It has some lovely Habsburg architecture. There’s a thriving arts scene and a growing Chinese community. But this city of about 73,000 people is perhaps best known for the damage it sustained during the NATO bombing in 1999, when an industrial park containing an oil refinery, a petrochemical plant, and a fertilizer factory was hit.

The most vivid reporting from Pancevo during the NATO bombing came from a cartoonist publishing under the pen name of Aleksandar Zograf. His weekly dispatches, Regards from Serbia, appeared in various magazines and websites, and were translated into several languages. A collection of these columns, plus the emails that he wrote during this period and some work from both before and after the bombings, is available from Top Shelf Productions.

In a drawing style reminiscent of R. Crumb, Zograf produces frequently acerbic cartoons, for instance one that depicts the residents of Pancevo welcoming the “smart bombs” and “cute little cluster bombs” of NATO. He catalogues the victims of the Yugoslav wars and the NATO attacks. He chronicles life under sanctions. He struggles to put pen to paper. “Invisible NATO bombers, hundreds of thousands of refugees, crazy dictators, army moves, explosions, propaganda lies,” he writes in one panel. “Hey! Somebody wake me up! I just want to sit and draw my pathetic little cartoons!!”

In late September, I took a bus from Belgrade to Pancevo to meet Aleksandar Zograf, who turns out to be Sasa Rakezic, a thoughtful man who was born in 1963, the same year I was. He rode his bike to the bus station to meet me, then pushed it along as he took me on a tour of Pancevo. He showed me the cultural center, and we talked about one of his recent fascinations: Neolithic life at the confluence of Pancevo’s rivers, the Danube and the Tamis. Eventually we sat down at a café to talk about life during wartime, the challenges of lucid dreaming, and the surrealism of the everyday. During our conversation, I realized that Rakezic was very much an archaeologist by inclination. He likes to dig into history, into the substratum of human experience, into what lies beneath consciousness.

The collapse of Yugoslavia and the wars that engulfed the region had a profound effect on the cartoonist and his art. “Before, I was just another guy in a small town in a small country who was not asking himself very important questions,” he told me. “After that I began to question everything. A time of crisis can be horrible, it can bring doom to a person’s physical existence. He could kill himself or be killed or kill someone else. He could become depressed. But in a crisis, you begin to question things you take for granted. But in a psychological sense, it’s good to go through the crisis. You learn something about yourself.”

The Interview

Do you remember when the Berlin Wall fell and how you felt about it? Your book begins with 1993-94. There’s nothing before that. Were you doing comic strips at that time?

At that time, I was not really doing comics of the same type that I did later. I was still at that point experimenting with comics. I was also a writer, and I was writing about mostly rock music and art and also a little bit about comics and literature. It was at that point that I started experimenting with publishing comics.

It was different here in Yugoslavia — at that point, Yugoslavia still existed – since we had a different history compared to the rest of Eastern Europe. We were a mixture of a socialist bloc country and a more Western country. We were somehow on the brink of the two worlds. So, for us, it was not so dramatic, the end of the Berlin Wall. It was happening elsewhere.

Most people here, if you ask them about normal life in the time of socialism, they would say it was more comfortable than now. I have this feeling that 80 percent of the people, particularly if they are old enough to remember these times, would say that their life was easier then. It was not the same as it was in other Eastern European countries. But still, I would say that we expected that things would change in many ways. We were not sure if it was going to be for the better or the worse.

And how did you feel personally about life in Yugoslavia?

Generally I would say that I had a happy life in those days. For example, life was cheap and you could live with a small amount of money, which is good for artists. The level of stress was somehow much less. But on the other hand, some of the opportunities that you have now were not present at that time. For me, I wish that I had used this time better than I did. I was not very clever when I was younger. I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.

There was this famous musician from Belgrade, who said — not about these times, but about the wars in former Yugoslavia — that "we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to understand what happened during the wars of the 1990s." This is also true about this socialist period. We will spend ages thinking about what happened and what was good and what was bad. It was far from a black-and-white picture, especially for the artists. Artists are never satisfied with the general atmosphere of the system in which they live. They always feel a little to the side of society, rejected in some way. They would have to struggle in any form of society anyway. They also learn not to be excited by the system they live in. I could imagine that someone with a steady career and a job in a society that would enable him to live comfortably will be excited about the system that allows him to live like that. But for the artist, he knows that he will have to struggle in this system as he would struggle in any other one.

I’m against this idea that the time before the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially in former Yugoslavia, was exclusively bad. Every time that you live in, you have an opportunity to live the best way that you can. There is no perfect society.

I was just now reading an anthropological study about cannibalism. It’s horrible. I had to read only a small portion of the book at a time because it is so difficult to take. A lot of different cultures practiced cannibalism throughout human history. For us, in this age, it’s something horrifying, and I was horrified to read about it. But generations were born within this different social and cultural framework, within these societies that are called “primitive” and where such practices were part of the belief system and sometimes simply because they were using humans as food. It was very widespread until the 19^th century, which was just yesterday. Within these cultures, they also produced great stories, great traditional dances, great thoughts.

It’s not that I would enjoy being a cannibal. But I should understand that this was part of the human experience, and there were people who were born and died with this mind frame. Someone living in a different society in the future would probably say that Western European people who lived in the European Union in 2012 were primitive idiots, just as we think about cannibals today. It’s all relative.

The fall of the Berlin Wall itself, do you remember thinking that this was great for the Germans and then you went about your own life? Or did you say, that will have implications for life here in Yugoslavia?

I didn’t really realize that it would have any impact on our life. I didn’t realize that it would have such an impact on Yugoslavia. It was just like a foreign affair. It was maybe silly of me. That’s why I say, sometimes when you live so much in one society, in one society’s mind frame, you just don’t see what’s going on. Someone from outside can see things more easily.

I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who did an interview with the British music deejay John Peel, a very interesting personality, a very clever man. This was in 1991 just shortly after the first incidents in Croatia with the Serbian minority there opposing the Croatian government, which would eventually lead to the war in ex-Yugoslavia. When the interview was over, my friend was asked by John Peel, of all people, “Okay, can I ask you one question?”

My friend said, “Yeah sure.”

John Peel said, “What is going on in your country? It seems like there’s going to be a war over there. ”

And my friend said, “War? No, no. They quarrel all the time over some stupid thing. But in the end they eventually end up in a bar getting drunk. It will be like an affair that lasts a few days and everything will be fine after that.”

My friend never mentioned this in the article he wrote for a paper here. I remember this incident years after the interview because I was just like my friend. I thought everything would stop after a few days. So, I was thinking how was it possible that a disk jockey understood what was going to happen in Yugoslavia? But we the people living here couldn’t understand.

I want to talk about your work. What struck me the most about Regards from Serbia is the reluctance. So much of your work is about your dream life. At several points, you say that you started observing the life around you, that there were interesting things if you just paid attention to them. But you often were running away from this. At some points you were just drawing things in your head – demons, and so on. Can you talk about this dream life and this reluctance?

It’s connected to my own personal quest. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, just a little before the crisis started, and just when the crisis started, I stated to explore these inner realities. I was very interested in presenting different material from the dream states in comics. Comics are a very good way of presenting your dreams. You can use pictures and words to explain these different experiences. I was also interested in different dream states. I started to practice lucid dreaming. I was successful to a certain extent. I was able to wake up in my dreams and explore the reality of the dream.

It was a very overwhelming thing to experience. Suddenly I was becoming aware of another state of being. There is wakened reality, there are dreams, and there is the state of lucid dreaming. I managed to look at my hands in my dreams and become lucid while I was dreaming. I was able to go very deep into all these things. It was very exciting, as if I were conquering a distant country or another realm. I was trying to capture a lot of information coming from inside, from these very deep inner realities, and turn it into artistic material.

But it stopped when the crisis emerged in ex-Yugoslavia. You have to use a lot of your energy connected to your awakened reality to achieve the state of lucid dreaming. Since I was a very poor artist who didn’t have any savings when the crisis started, it was very difficult for me. I started to struggle with everyday reality. I realized that what was happening around me were these tragic things – the splitting up of the country called Yugoslavia. Like many other people I had to struggle just to be alive in this situation. There was not enough food, for instance.  I had to go from this inner reality to an outside reality that was very dramatic and sometimes even more surrealistic than what I would find inside.

 Can you give an example of something that was more surrealistic outside than inside?

Everything was more surrealistic. In 1993, when I started to make comics about what was going on around me, we went into a period of hyperinflation that was very much like what happened in Germany or Hungary after the first World War. You go to buy bread. In the morning, the price was 10 dinars. At noon it was 100 dinars. In the evening it was 1000 dinars. It was a completely crazy situation just to buy regular things. I remember thinking that it had been like this forever, ever since I was born.

I was very curious about these quests that I was doing in lucid dreaming – and several other dream states that I tried to explore – and I was not very happy to return to the grey and stupid reality of being in a country that was on the brink of a war for an unknown reason with a crazy leader leading everyone straight into a catastrophe with an economy that was completely destroyed. It was not a reality that I liked very much.

I started to think that at least I should take the premise of this and use it for the scripts of comics. If you take it as it is and make a script for a comic strip, it actually functions like an appealing description of the most surrealistic things on earth. It was strange to become awake every night and be inside the dream reality. It was just as strange to wake up and find yourself in the midst of the huge crisis going on all around. I tried to struggle between these two strange realities.

Both of these experiences changed me for good. Before, I was just another guy in a small town in a small country who was not asking himself very important questions. After that I began to question everything. A time of crisis can be horrible, it can bring doom to a person’s physical existence. He could kill himself or be killed or kill someone else. He could become depressed. But in a crisis, you begin to question things you take for granted. But in a psychological sense, it’s good to go through the crisis. You learn something about yourself. You learn to ask yourself questions. It’s horrible to go numb in very comfortable circumstances. A lot of people have enough to eat, they have enough material goods, they feel safe within their social situation, and they don’t want to change it. That’s also dangerous. Sometimes you need a slap in the face. You need a crisis. You need to get wild. You need to ask yourself questions. That’s what happened to us. I should not be complaining.

One of your stories is about your Hungarian colleague who set up an exhibition about life in Serbia under Milosevic and under sanctions. He said he would keep it going as long as Milosevic was in power.

This was a friend in Hungary who did an exhibition of my stuff and he said it would last until the fall of Milosevic. It opened in 1999, when the bombing of Serbia started. I was thinking that it was going to the longest running exhibition in the history of Hungary. It’s another indication that if you live inside a reality you cannot judge it. I thought he would rule forever, that we were doomed to live under his reign for the rest of our lives. The exhibition lasted until the year 2000 when Milosevic fell from power. I guess this friend in Hungary was able to detect something that we were not aware of. I can go into the underground levels of society, just like many artists do. But somehow I can’t predict what will happen in the surface reality the next day.

You talk about outside perceptions of Serbs in your comic strip. You travelled some during the time you were making the strips. Were you surprised at the reactions when you said you were from Serbia?

Basically, I should say that we are living in a different time. It’s not like the 1940s. At that point in history, even in Western Europe, people were relying so much on national identities, also religious identities. These were much more important than in modern time, when we live in an ambiguous culture which can be very narrow-minded but which can also accept many different types of information from many different parts of the world. I didn’t encounter any problems from most people when I said that I was from Serbia, which was at that point a place with a burning crisis with a crazy president Milosevic in charge. I think people understood that they were meeting somebody from another country where the situation is not so stable. Basically they were polite. Maybe because I was in my circle of friends and acquaintances. They were mostly artists. It might have been different if I’d gone to a bar where truck drivers were hanging out.

For most people, if you said you were from Serbia in the 1990s, it was scary. You were part of a reality presented like it was Nazi Germany, which was not really the case. It was very much a society that turned the wrong way in many ways, that made many bad decisions politically and also strategically. But if I had to judge it now, it was a confused country with confused people who were not able to realize what was going on around them. Sometimes when you are confused, you act violently. It’s again this psychological thing. I think most of the atrocities done on the Serbian side were done not with some strict plan, like was the case with Nazi Germany, where they had a plan of the different society they wanted to build. Here, the people were bewildered by everything going on.

Maybe this is going to sound awful, but in many sense, these were crimes of passion. Most of the people liked Yugoslavia and they didn’t want it to split apart. Sometimes if someone very close to you betrays you, you have violent feelings and you want to kick him or kill him. A huge part of it was done in this strange state of betrayal, like the lover who has been betrayed. And this society was very irrational, and there were a lot of con men who could use that, who said, “Okay, we are going to do everything for you and you just sit there and be quiet. We are going to clear things up for you.”

I was not participating in any of that. Like many artists, we were feeling like we were watching not from the inside but from a point outside. We were disgusted by everything. For many people, for instance in Western Europe or the United States where it is more rational and not so emotional, it was very hard to understand.

But as you point out in one of your strips, after 9-11 the United States was in a similar situation, with big flags and emotional reactions.

Yes, in some way, it is universal. We are not Martians here in the Balkans, and our experiences are similar to other human experiences in other parts of the world. And that’s why it’s so difficult to talk about this. If someone wants to explain what happened here in one sentence, I would say, “Be careful!” I have spent years trying to understand this, and still I don’t understand why it happened or how it happened.

How much do you think people in Serbia or in Croatia or Bosnia have decided to understand this and how much do they want to forget about it because it was so horrible?

People want to forget. That’s certainly the case. Most of them don’t want to be reminded. I mean – look at me. I don’t say that I’m very different. I don’t like to think about these things. It was very difficult. It was very hard to go through all that. I also want to forget about it. I don’t wake up every morning and think about it. It was so horrible and unpleasant that I understand why people don’t want to go back to it. For most people it was like a trauma.

You have to know that something bad happened on your side. You can be a patriot who says “Yeah, we did the right thing.” Still, you know that somebody did something. Maybe you would like to hide this from yourself. So, it’s better to forget than to be reminded of that.

When you look back at the work that you’ve done between 1992 and 2001, can you give an example of something you think you did very well and another example of something you wish you did a little differently?

Whenever I look at my work, I think it could be different. Usually after I do a drawing, I just flip the page over because I always see the wrong things in my drawings. I don’t like to concentrate so much on what I did because I will probably find something that could be changed. I did it with an honest perspective at that point in time. But later I think I could have done better.

I’m proud of some things. I ‘m glad that I used my time in a useful way. At least I tried to make something out of this horrible situation.

And you have a record of it. 

Yes.

At one point in your book you are reproducing emails when Pancevo was being bombed. I’m wondering why it was easier to write this in email form rather than make strips.

It was easier because in the emails I was referring to things that were happening on a daily basis. Some of the details weren’t easy to illustrate in drawings. At the same time, I was so depressed that I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to draw. You go through all the different phases in situations like that. Some things were easier to express in drawings, sometimes it was easier to express in words. So I made a combination of these two media, which was based on my mood, nothing else.

The Chinese have a curse: may you live in interesting times. You were obviously living in interesting times. Since the end of these wars, and the end of hyperinflation, the end of sanctions, things have become more normal. Has this been a challenge for you artistically to live in less interesting times?

I have found different challenges. After the end of the crisis in the Balkans, I have started to work on comics for Vreme magazine, a political weekly published here in Belgrade. I do two pages in color every week on a different topic. Usually it doesn’t address the political situation in a straightforward way. I find old articles, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, and then I illustrate them in the form of a comic strip. It was a golden age for the press. You can find many intriguing articles back then. Now the press is becoming less interesting and more analytical and with much less fantasy than in the past.

Even if it is not a political commentary, it also speaks about the people here. People, they don’t change. You can go into the past, and you can find some of the same elements. People were probably in a bar 100 years ago and speaking about similar topics as we do now.

I’ll give you one example. I found one article about a man who came back from the front after the end of the first World War. He lived in Zajechar, a town in eastern Serbia. He began to behave in a funny way. He went to his regular job, but he began to act a little bit differently. At some point, he burst into a strange kind of anger. He began to talk about how the human race is moving toward catastrophe. He went to his own house and burned it down. He ruined it completely and started to live in a hole in the ground next to his house. His wife and his children ran away. For me, it was this fantastical scenario. You can’t imagine that a human being could do something more drastic than that. This story is completely forgotten. I spoke to people from that town and there’s no memory of that man. Newspapers are supposed to live for a day or a week, and then it’s forgotten. But you can find some great stories from the past, and by bringing them to the surface you can learn something from them.

There’s a relatively new government here now in Serbia that at least outsiders call a nationalist government. We’ve seen the rise of some even more nationalistic groups like Dveri Srpske. I’m curious what you think about these formations. Do you think they’re temporary or represent a more fundamental shift?

It’s different from what it used to be. The nationalists of 2012 are different from the Serbian nationalists of the 1990s. The reason is that there is some sort of realization among the people to agree with Western values. The nationalistic government that is in charge says, “We want to play by the rules of the West.” Which means that our nationalism is not going to be like the time of Milosevic. Even these nationalistic forces that are now in change won the elections by speaking about joining the European Union. I would call them conservative-minded people who try to imitate the conservative-minded people in Western Europe. Milosevic didn’t feel like he was following this line. He expressed his nationalism in a much more straightforward and much more brutal way.

These new nationalists, they are politically correct nationalists. They know the line. That is the Western way. If you are polite enough, you can do everything. You can say that you don’t like Muslims, but you can’t say it like that, you have to find a way to put the sentence in a different way with that same meaning. If you say “I hate Muslims” in a correct way, it can pass. So these new nationalists learn this. Which means that Serbs can become part of Western civilization, for better or for worse. It doesn’t mean that these people are any better, at least for me. I despise them the same way I hated them before. But there is a different frame.

Or at least it seems to me at this moment. Maybe I will change my mind. Maybe I will be wrong again. I don’t want to speak in absolute terms.

The people who belong to the parties in charge, they pretend that they want to be part of the European Union, and the EU pretends that it wants Serbia to be part of the EU. So there is this strange game. In Serbia, people are afraid of change, afraid of becoming something else. They are afraid that their substance will be changed when they become something else, which is of course stupid. And the EU is in this crisis where they are very much afraid of having more irrational elements inside the union. So they gave some signals to the Serbian administration that were very discouraging. On the surface, they say they will bring you into the club tomorrow. But under the surface, there is the message: you better stay in your wild part of the world. There is this strange dishonesty on both sides, which is not permanent. It is going to change. Is it going to be a fast change or will it be an exhausting change that lasts for 10-20 years? I don’t know, but I think it will change.

So, that’s why you are reasonably optimistic? 

We are living in a world that is transforming, that is reaching some sort of world  civilization, a united states of the world. It’s not an easy process. We should not expect it to happen in five days or five years or 50 years. This change is going to happen. It’s just a matter for time. So I’m relatively optimistic. I don’t know whether it will take a long time or a short time. But things are going to change for everyone, including the cannibals and the Serbs and the Eastern European freaks. They will all become well-adjusted citizens.

For better or for worse.

Quantitative Questions

I ask all of those I interview in my travels through Central and Eastern Europe three quantitative questions to see if I can get, by the end, a quick thumbnail assessment, country by country, of what has and has not changed since 1989.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being most disappointed and ten being least disappointed, how do you feel about the changes that have taken place in Serbia since 1989?

I would say five. There are very good points and very bad points.

On the same scale, how do you feel about the changes that have taken place in your own life over the same period of time?

I feel like I’m older and cleverer than I was when I was a kid. So I would say a two. I feel now that most people are not comfortable with getting older. But with me, I feel like I’m getting better as I get older. Maybe I’m crazy this way, I don’t know.

And how do you feel about the near future for Serbia, on a scale of one to ten with one being most optimistic and ten being least optimistic?

I would say two here as well. I’m not very deeply pessimistic but I am a bit pessimistic. I’m not hugely pessimistic because I think that things will get better because here people feel so disappointed that it has to end at some point. We don’t know which point it is. But I believe that it will be change for the better. But I’m bad at predicting things, so who knows.

As chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals Carla Del Ponte found herself struggling uphill against institutional indifference and opposition.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and surveying its transformations since 1989.

Carla del Ponte’s memoir of her time as the chief prosecutor of the two major international tribunals – on Yugoslavia and Rwanda – is basically a tedious book. It can be summed up in a single sentence: she fought tooth and nail against stubborn national leaders, indifferent UN bureaucrats, and elusive war criminals, and although they all put up their “rubber wall” (muro di gomma), she managed in the end to achieve some measure of justice. During her tenure, the Yugoslav tribunal indicted 161 individuals and, through August 2007, took 91 accused into custody.

The book made headlines back in 2009 with its allegations of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members establishing a network to harvest organs from Serbs and sell them on the global market. An investigation into these allegations is still ongoing, with a KLA witness recently coming forward with some new and horrifying details.

But perhaps the most telling part of the book comes at the very beginning when del Ponte confronts George Tenet, the head of the CIA under George W. Bush, and tries to enlist the U.S. intelligence service in her fight to apprehend the two top suspects, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

Tenet is not particularly forthcoming with promises of assistance.

“If you won’t do anything, I think you should at least support our efforts,” she pressed.

“Look, Madame,” Tenet replied. “I don’t give a shit what you think.

Tenet was only giving voice to what many people were thinking in those days, and continue to think today, when confronted with appeals for justice from victims, lawyers, or even top international officials like Carla del Ponte. Tenet was also summing up U.S. foreign policy at its unilateral worst: we’re the United States, and we don’t give a shit what you think.

Still, del Ponte’s book is a powerful – though repetitious – reminder of what it takes to achieve justice in today’s world: relentless, single-minded pressure. Del Ponte simply showed up, day in and day out, to make the same demands of the same people in power.

At the same time, reading the book while traveling through ex-Yugoslavia has meant that every time I encounter a group of men of a certain age, I can’t help but think of where they were, and what they were doing, 20 years before. I say “groups of men” rather than individuals because it’s the group behavior that prompts me to reflect on the relationship between hooliganism and war crimes. A single individual can be loud or drunk or obnoxious, but his impact is generally limited. Groups, on the other hand, make my palms sweat.

I was on the train between Belgrade and Zagreb, for instance, when I had my first del Ponte moment. From the Serbian capital to the Croatian border, I had the compartment to myself, and it was glorious. I relaxed and read her memoir, feet up on the chair cushion across from me.

In the city of Slavonski Brod, however, a crowd of people got on the train, and my compartment was suddenly full. One guy sat down and quietly read a magazine. Another guy installed himself across from me and started to talk loudly on his cell phone. But it was the two last arrivals that worried me – two 40-something guys with a bag full of beer. They popped the tops off the first two, interrupted the conversation of the guy on the cell phone (possibly they knew each other), and generally created what I’m sure they considered to be a festive atmosphere in our compartment. I was sitting next to the window, and I shrank into my seat. It was only a couple more hours to Zagreb. I was sure I could endure the party.

Then one of them lit a cigarette.

I’d chosen the compartment precisely because it was non-smoking (later I learned that smoking is forbidden throughout Croatian trains). I pointed to the No Smoking icon on the door and said, more or less, “not allowed.” The magazine-reading passenger translated my garbled phrase into proper Croatian. The guy laughed, but eventually stood up and took his cigarette out to the corridor and the open window there. That didn’t last long. For his second cigarette, he sat back down in the compartment, tapping the ash and exhaling the smoke into the corridor. For the third cigarette, he didn’t even bother to do this.

I glared at him.

He and his friend laughed again. But not in a friendly manner. They’d already finished their first beers. They looked at me in that challenging, alpha-male way. It didn’t look like the magazine reader and the cell phone user were going to link arms with me in solidarity. I’m not one to fight.

So, with a curse, I got up and gathered my belongings. I was convinced at this point that they were not just football hooligans but actual war criminals. I could see them in uniforms with closely cropped haircuts. I cursed them some more, which was really not the smartest thing to do. Eventually, after I’d already made it several steps down the corridor, they managed to dig up some half-remembered English curses to hurl in my direction.

I’m sure they were just jerks, and there are jerks everywhere, particularly among the tourist class. But I was more upset about the failure of the other two passengers to come to my defense and the conductor’s lack of interest in enforcing the non-smoking rules. First they come for the non-smokers, I thought, still under the influence of del Ponte. After I cooled off in another compartment, I reflected on my over-reaction. Surely the conductor and my fellow passengers would have intervened in the case of actual violence.

In countries where the rule of law holds, such altercations remain minor annoyances. But in countries where a culture of impunity reigns, these trifles somehow become unspeakable horrors. In her book Madness Visible, journalist Janine di Giovanni tells the story from the war period of a Bosniak judge who recognizes his ethnic Serbian torturer. In this case familiarity bred much worse than mere contempt. “So now you’ll never give me a parking ticket again!” the torturer thundered at his victim.

Croatia has moved far beyond the impunity of the Tudjman era. It eventually complied fully with del Ponte’s investigations, and now it is poised to join the European Union next year. The conservative party, the Croatian Democratic Union, is out of power, its leadership on trial for corruption, and its politics considerably more centrist than in the past. The Party of Rights, further to the right, has only one representative in parliament (coming up soon: my interview with that representative).

So, when I encountered other vaguely aggressive groups of men in Croatia, it’s the del Ponte in me that keeps me fixated on the past. But Croatia has moved on.

Just like the craft-store owner that I met later in Zagreb. He too was a man of a certain age. We were alone in the store, and we were speaking in English. Unbidden, he told me that he was in the Croatian army in the 1990s. They sent him to the border with Slovenia.

“It was terrible,” he said quietly. “I’m a pacifist. I hope I didn’t kill anyone.”

As with so much that happens in the past, uncertainty is what we are left with, and this uncertainty holds its own terrors.