Read Online Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online Page B

… Stalingrad …” But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand, military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb. Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, “So you want to be independent, do you? This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end of it is nothing but ruins.”
    It is hard not to think, as you stand in shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction. All these ancientwalls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.
    Some quite uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here. The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in a video arcade. It didn’t even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs. Now many of them lie on the city’s outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.
    The Serbs have inherited the ruins that they themselves have made. One might have expected regret or shame, or failing that, some state of moral confusion about what they had done to the city. But nothing, not a syllable. Only a kind of embarrassed silence.
    It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration. No one is responsible for anything but the other side. In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot. Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first. Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on. Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication. Nowhere did this reach such a nadir asin Vukovar. The pistol-toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was a Hungarian; the Krajinan Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar hospital handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city. For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.
    Serbian Krajina calls itself a state, but is more like a feudal kingdom run by small-time warlords, called Deputy Minister This and Supreme Commander That, whose power depends on how many cars, weapons, and men they can commandeer. You soon discover that their writ usually runs out at the next checkpoint.
    Mr. Kojić, the security boss of Vukovar and district, assures you he has the town under control, but there are three impact clusters on the bulletproof windshield of his Passat from a firefight with the local gangsters three nights before. There are guns everywhere: on the backs of old men bicycling out to guard duty on their village checkpoints; hanging from the belts of the militiamen who check your papers at the entrance to the town; behind the counter in the local bar.