11 New and old disorder (excerpt)Nadja Tesich
Ultimately I am talking about fascism of a different sort, but I cannot write about fascism in a few pages. It would take at least a book. For the purpose of this essay I’ll limit myself to the propaganda against the Serbs these past four years. And my own experience—not just as a writer, filmmaker, professor of film, but as a person who observed events, people, the war itself, often risking my life.
When the civil war started in 1991, I went back. I had decided that if what I saw in the papers about Serbia was true, then I’d never go back again. I was born there, but I have lived in the United States most of my life.
What I saw was a drastically different image from the one in the U.S. press: people crying about the breakup of Yugoslavia, the wounded, the refugees from Slavonia, and the first very mutilated kids in the hospitals. I speak the language, I could move in and out, listen unobserved. These were not the people described as barbarians in the Times. The Times reporter, Chuck Sudetic, would set the tone, a man whose background was Croatian. The essential thing is that prior to this, he had a top security job in Washington. I didn’t know this at the time, I just knew something was wrong about his reporting.
Back in New York, I attempted to correct this information—what was true, what was lies—but largely I tried to add the missing parts of the picture. Always with names and events that could be checked. Without attacking any other group, I tried to talk about the suffering on the Serb side. The embargo that turns the country into an economic concentration camp, factories shut, hospitals without spare parts, doctors without plastic gloves, operations with no anesthesia, lack of medicine, kids dying because of the embargo, along with old people and those not so old. When I reported these things, I was called a nationalist.
I contacted most of the papers, most of the women’s magazines, television stations including PBS, Nightline, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, the Times magazine section, Mother Jones, Harper’s, the New Yorker, etc. Nobody wanted to hear about doctors, or ordinary people, or about a woman called Azra from a Muslim background who goes to Belgrade every year from Florida. Nobody wanted to hear about Croatians living in Belgrade or the real story of how three women, me included—Muslim, Croat, and Serb—traveled together to a funeral in a village in western Serbia. This was too peaceful for them, not exciting enough. They wanted to hear about rapes. (Got any rape stories, we want to hear about rapes.) But the moment I mentioned Serb women raped, they were not interested.
The first part of this article was delivered as a speech in October 1995 to a New York teach-in on Bosnia sponsored by the International Action Center.
*******
The full text of this chapter is available in the book, NATO in the Balkans. Link here for order information.
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: mailto:iacenter@action-mail.org
En Espanol: iac-cai@action-mail.org
Web: http://www.iacenter.org
Support Mumia Abu-Jamal: http://www.millions4mumia.org/
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
Make a donation to the IAC and its projects
The International Action Center
Home ActionAlerts Press
Share this page with a friend