SLAVENKA DRAKULIC
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worse pictures projected; you have worse and worse atrocities committed;
and the world is getting used to it. This is what I find so troubling, the
phenomenon of getting used to it.
David Sidorsky:
On the one hand, your objection is to the difference,
the otherness that we see as the Balkans as savagery. And you have evoked
the metaphor of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, to describe what is
going on. On the other hand, you say the war should be treated as if it
were
not
singular; that there should be rules for dealing with it, so that we
would know how to deal with similar future happenings in, for instance,
the former Soviet Union. But if that's the case you're making, then what
strikes one as missing is a defensible political analysis that asserts this is a
war of a fairly similar, repeatable sort.
As you say, it will repeat itself in Ossetia, in Azerbaijan, in many
places. Namely, if you have a federation, and there is a secession which is
disputed, and there are minorities who previously lived under a
federation, then there is bound to be some sort of conflict. If Yugoslavia
existed and a Serb population ruled, essentially, in Yugoslavia, with a Serb
minority in Bosnia- Herzegovina, and there is a secession, then there is
some need for some sort of solution on the political level. Croatia as an
independent country has a solution; Slovenia had a solution. Bosnia–
Herzegovina represents a very distinctive problem, and if one wants
similarity, then at some point the political analysis comes; you suggested
one part of it and dismissed it, that is to say, that there should be a
Bosnian-Muslim autonomy. The Serbian population goes to Serbia, the
Croatian population goes to Croatia. This, I understand, since you want
rules for the future, is one formula of rules. There are others. There could
of course be the insistence on the integrity ofBosnia-Herzegovina, with a
Muslim majority, and no aggression from Serbia, or from Croatia, where
the Croatian population is, if I understand the issue.
My point - this is just a logical point, I'm not an expert on
Yugoslavia - is that to stress the otherness, to compare it inappropriately
to the Nazi-Jewish experience, where there was no ethnic conflict over a
territorial issue at all, is precisely to say this is
not
similar. The similarity
among all such issues has to do with the ethnic breakup of a federation,
and this is, of course, exactly what you said about rules for what will
happen in Georgia if North Ossetia and the Georgians wish to break up:
what are the rules? But looking at the problem in this way, one stresses
the political solution, or the political aspects of the problem; which, I
gather, because of the demands you make on our sense of responsibility
and emotional concern, you are not willing to address.
