SLAVENKA DRAKULIC
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terrorism, all over Europe. I think that the metaphor ofJews works very
well for the fact that they have been exterminated people, so that
regardless of where it occurred, were they Poles or were they in Croatia -
we had the Jews being killed in Croatian concentration camps- the point
is that people were standing there and didn't help. We see things
happening to others, and we think it doesn't have anything to do with us.
This is the essence of that metaphor.
It
doesn't really matter whether we
are speaking about Jews and Poles or about Muslims or any other kind of
otherness. Each of us could become a part of that otherness, in another
situation. I wouldn't like you to take this so literally. I think there's
always a Jew and always a community.
Dimitri Urnov:
You mentioned the repetition of the past, and we can–
not but be concrete in talking about the past, and in taking some lessons
out of it. What we have today is certainly an outcome of that remote past
which repeats itself, but in what ways?
Slavenka Drakulic:
I agree that part of this war in ex-Yugoslavia comes
from the past, and it is somehow as if you had returned to the past, and as
if it were a war of the living actually fighting the spirits of the dead of the
Second World War. But I would say it is not only that, because I have
lived in that country for forty-four years, and I know that we all lived in
peace for a very long period of time. I see this war as having begun from
the very top, not from the people, because in the ethnically mixed places
like Vukovar, for example, we were not aware of any hidden conflicts. I
would agree that the war began among the people, if it had in fact started
five years ago, little by little, people fighting, and ethnic conflicts growing
up to the point where the war started. But what I saw happening is just
the opposite. I saw it happening at the very top. I saw the war being con–
structed, the idea of the war, the concept of the war, at a very high level,
and then somehow in a spiral motion thrown down to the ground where
it was almost impossible, much later on, to stop it, because when the first
houses were burned, and the first people were killed, it was already done.
I think it has very much to do with the fact that communism collapsed.
You can't expect such a mammoth system, which existed for so many
years and within which so many millions of people lived, to go away just
like that.
Nationalism arose out of the collapse because as we know,
historically, there was feudalism and after that communism, with no time
in between for the development of a civil society and of the values of a
democratic and liberal society. When, as it is popular to say, "the lid was
lifted," you had two basic things that had always existed there: religion
and the nation. And so, when the big system started to break down,
