The Balkans' Heritage of Hatred

By LANCE MORROW

I went to Yugoslavia a few years ago with Elie Wiesel, whose work repeats what is, in the context of the Holocaust, an unassailable warning: Never forget. Yet now we descended into a place where memory--indignant, obsessive, murderous--is both a way of life and a fatal disease.

I checked into the Hotel Inter-Continental in Belgrade, and within 15 minutes someone slipped a manila envelope under the door, a sort of Serbian press kit. It contained atrocity pictures--hideous stills of bodies mutilated, bodies burned in mass graves, bodies without genitals or heads. Welcome to the Balkans. The press kit implied that Bosnian Muslims, the focus of Serbian rage at the time, had done this filthy work. But who could identify killers or victims? Everyone has a death archive; everyone performs a moral sleight of hand: "We're not doing it! And even if we are doing it, you should see what they did to us." In this jurisdiction, "Guilty, with an explanation" equals functional innocence.

Bill Clinton deprecated the Balkans' reputation for blood feud. But sanctified outrage passes down from generation to generation. The Battle of Kosovo--when the Turks, advancing west toward Vienna in 1389, defeated the Serbs and left their bodies to the crows--might have been the day before yesterday.

An eye for an eye: our Serbian hosts led us to the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade to see a photo exhibit designed to justify their ethnic cleansing and brutal destruction at Vukovar. In a glass case was a steel instrument that looked like a tuning fork, but with the prongs spaced 3 1/2 in. apart. The Croat Ustache used to use the handy device to gouge out Serb prisoners' eyes, both at once. Applied art, indeed.

In a Serbian twilight, they took us to see Slobodan Milosevic in his presidential residence. He had reddish, piggy eyes set in a big round head. He wore a brush cut that looked like static electricity firing up from his pink skull. Milosevic settled complacently onto a sofa, with Wiesel on his right, and cocked one leg onto the cushion, showing an expanse of hairless, pale calf above his black sock.

"Truth is the first casualty of war!" Milosevic announced with a flourish (and a subliminal wink, as if to say, "Ah, you are surprised that I speak in your cliches?"). The Serbs at that moment were blasting Sarajevo apart and "cleansing" the countryside of Muslims. Milosevic told us smoothly, "There is no Serb aggression...We are merely protecting ourselves." Besides, the Croats "cleansed" several hundred thousand Serbs 50 years before.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the least Balkan of men, formulated the American theology of forward spin. He might have been speaking to the Balkans when he asked, "Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory?"

The conundrum of memory: Healthier to remember? Surely it is best sometimes to forget--though not to forget Kosovo now. Eventual obliviousness may equally free all sides from the hereditary obligation to hate. I wonder how Bill Clinton and the privileged American tribe will fare in the dark wood of the Balkans. What's happening there now amounts to a religious war between the future and the past. Beware: in that place, the past is a black hole.