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PARTISAN REVIEW
any such thing. It's just very revealing: it is how the world sees "the
Balkans." The message is, "It is the peasants who are doing all this, you
know." The problem is that since the very beginning, these kinds of
pictures took over. The pictures clearly suggest cruelty, atrocities, savages,
tribes, peasants, centuries-old hatreds; particular, complicated, strange.
When I saw this cover page I said, "But this is not me, l don't belong to
this, I don't identify with these people. I am urban, I have been living in
a city all my life, I don't have anything to do with the peasants. Some
other picture represents us, which other people, the people from the
West, could identify with."
The photo in fact reinforces the underlying gap which has widened in
spite of the Berlin Wall going down, in spite of Communism collapsing:
East-West, developed-underdeveloped, city dwellers-peasants,
civilization-savages. Of course the first reaction to these dramatic images a
year ago, of concentration camps and dead bodies, was shock. This is one
of the wars that has been covered the mostby the media; everything has
happened in front of the television cameras. We have seen it all - every
single atrocity. Saturation set in and became estrangement. For the West,
it became less and less possible to find points of identification. Who are
these savage and cruel people? What do they have in common with us?
What do we have in common with them, when they are so obviously
different? On the symbolic level, it was difficult to remove the barrier of
"otherness." We, the civilized ones, can't understand what is going on
there. Why all that killing? I think that all the pain and the suffering is
somehow overshadowed by the images of cruelty and primitivism,
sending a strong message and forming prejudices on the other side of the
still-existing Berlin Wall. I'm purposely not talking about politics here ,
but rather about how political decisions were supported by the created
images of the war, and by the problems of identification.
If we see the fighting nations are "different" and "special" and
"violent," qualities which we very often would like to attribute for
example to the Serbs, saying that they are genocidally evil - in other
words, "different" - then the consequence is that no one is responsible
for what is happening and for stopping the killings. Because if it is
somehow built into this nation, then how could you possibly be expected
to do anything about that? In short, the construction of the "otherness" is
helping to create the indifference, the tolerance of massacres, ethnic
cleansing, the repetition of history. By now, we should have learned one
lesson about this war. It has the power to change the destiny of the
Continent. Not because it could explode out of the borders of ex–
Yugoslavia, but because the rules and principles for dealing with similar
situations in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR are being set right there
and right now, and if we don't understand this, we don't understand
