A Moral Mystery: Serbian Self-Pity

By LANCE MORROW

THE PRESIDENT'S LUNCH IN BELGRADE DRAGGED ON FOR hours, into the gloomy Balkan dusk. The bruised voice across the banquet table belonged to an interpreter -- off duty for the moment -- a thin, brittle woman with black circles under her eyes. She smoked cigarettes one after another, down to the knuckle. She said she had not slept in days. Outrage burst from her mouth in agitated spurts of smoke: How could the world be so stupid? How could the media be so evil? How could everyone treat the Serbs -- the Serbs, of all people! -- so unfairly?

The air tasted of some heavy, acrid East European woe. Beside the woman, a Serbian political journalist -- a dandy in houndstooth jacket, wearing Jean- Paul Sartre glasses -- nodded angry agreement and flicked ashes onto the fish carcass on his plate.

Here might be a key to a moral mystery. I had wondered for months how in the face of the world's almost unanimous condemnation and disgust, the Serbs could keep up a war conducted by rape, murder and the starvation of whole cities. "Ethnic cleansing" has generated the worst public relations problem since Pol Pot went into politics: How do the Serbs keep on? How do they explain themselves to themselves?

The Serbs have found an amazing solution: they feel sorry for themselves. They marinate in self-pity. In their own minds, they have solved their formidable moral problem by declaring themselves the injured party. An artful, if disgraceful display of jujitsu; this is a tactic one encounters in wife beaters and child abusers, who ingeniously manage to convince themselves, if not the authorities, that they were driven to it by the terrible behavior of their victims. A filthy conscience often goes to hide in the refuge of self- pity.

The Serbs have other means to talk themselves into an attitude of aggrieved innocence. The Belgrade television stations endlessly show atrocity scenes, dramas displaying Serbs as victims, with grinning Muslim devils holding the severed heads of Serbs. The truly accomplished ethnic self-pitier projects all around him as a siege of malevolent conspiracy.

Self-pity is one ingredient in the black brew. Slivovitz, plum brandy, taken in great quantities, starting at breakfast time, is another; alcohol numbs the conscience and lubricates the trigger finger. The sacrament of slivovitz -- though some get there without it -- helps keep Serbs, both fighters and sideline supporters -- in that fourth dimension of tribal passion where heroic patriotism and great atrocity become equally possible. This is the dimension of tribal memory, drifting in time, across centuries. Grievances float through the dimension like ghosts, crying out for justice -- for the Serbs whom the Croats massacred during the Hitler years, say, or for those Serbs who died at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when they stood against the Muslims' westward tide toward Vienna and tried to save ungrateful Europe. The fourth dimension is the blood dimension, the great tribal justifier.

Mobs have an evil dynamic. An ethnic tribe, at its worst, is a supermob. A sense of narcissistic self-pity that is merely contemptible in an individual is transformed to heroism in the tribal context: a fierce, virtuous assertion of the group. That is why ethnic grievance -- a rising force in so much of the world -- is so dangerous. When the subjective goes tribal, the self-indulgence of one man or woman comes frighteningly alive, collective, suddenly legitimized, glorious even. What would be individual shame now blossoms into shamelessness. The weak and vicious transfer their worst defects to the larger cause (Greater Serbia, perhaps). Thus does self-pity become selfless and, by this magic, righteous. And thus a brute killer portrays himself as a victim, who is therefore infinitely justified. Ethnic cleansing is merely injured virtue catching up. Nothing is more empowering, as they say, than being a victim. It is the Rolls-Royce of self-justifications, a plenary indulgence. W.H. Auden described it as if it were one of Newton's laws: "Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return."

In any case, self-pity congeals to make a hard shell. The Serbs are indifferent to mere world opinion. Their leaders have manipulated them to obduracy. So Bosnia becomes another parable (savoring ominously of the '30s) of the primary human mystery, the beast potential in everyone. Sometimes the beast can be talked out -- negotiated out -- and calmed and recivilized. But the bully-beast loves to play with the people's hopeful illusions. Sometimes the beast, once risen among us, needs to be beaten until it is helpless to harm any longer. Sometimes it simply needs to be killed.

Will anyone drive the beast out of Bosnia? The terror of getting involved is powerful. The craven thought is that one Bosnia begets another. But Bosnia will happen again and again elsewhere unless this one is stopped. Europe should have undertaken the job. But the Europeans long ago exhausted themselves in sponsoring such projects as colonialism and two world wars. They have ended up smug, fat-bottomed and morally useless.

Who then? The U.S., leading the U.N.? Perhaps. Or is it all too late? The least that America should do, for now, is to end the arms embargo that has kept the Bosnian Muslims from defending themselves against the ruthless "victims" from Serbia.

Some of us thought that the coming of electronic glasnost to the global village would bring a reign of sunshine in which the germs of atrocity would have trouble surviving. We were wrong. The germs can flourish in the light. How many divisions does CNN have?