Free Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Page B

the days ahead, is part of the ritual style of Serbian nationalism itself. The dance has its opening quadrille: we won’t talk, the West never understands; we despise you, you tell nothing but lies; then they start talking and never stop. Ask anybody a simple question and you get that telltale phrase: “You have to understand our history …” Twenty minutes later and you are still hearing about King Lazar, the Turks, and the Battle of Kosovo. This deep conviction that no one understands them, coupled with the fervent, unstoppable desire to explain and justify themselves, seemed to define the style of every conversation I had in Belgrade.
    Next morning, when I visit a bank queue, the same rituals repeat themselves. People violently and vehemently refuse to talk, only to start into a stream of Serbian self-justification that begins with their immemorial struggle against the Turks and concludes with their defense of Serbian Bosnia against the Muslim fundamentalists. Along the way, the invective sweeps up the anti-Serbian crimes of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Tito into a rhetorical flow as muddy as a spring torrent.
    Bank queues are as fundamental a part of Belgrade life as the petrol queue. The economy is in a state of advanced hyperinflation—running at 200 percent per month. In the restaurants, the price stickers on the menus change overnight. The only reliable hedge against inflation is a hard-currency account. Many private banks have opened for businessand promise to pay 10 percent per month on such accounts. How they manage to do so is a mystery. The rumor is that the private banks are deeply engaged in the nether-world of smuggling, illegal oil imports from Ukraine, and arms trading with Russia, together with the laundering of Western drug money. Some of these banks have gone bust, and the fear is that if more of them do, the MiloÅ¡ević regime itself might be swept away in the ensuing economic chaos.
    So anxious are the small depositors about the fate of their accounts that many of them queue all night long in order to be sure to be able to withdraw their hard currency. These queues stretch hundreds of meters down the streets, a pushing, shoving mass of cold, deeply unhappy old-age pensioners, some of them weak with tiredness.
    You might have thought such queues would be full of anti-MiloÅ¡ević grumbling. Belgrade, after all, never voted for him and has always resented its demotion from a world capital of the nonaligned movement, as it was under Tito, to an isolated, embargoed Balkan provincial capital. Yet, again, all the anger that might be directed at MiloÅ¡ević is directed at the West—at Churchill, at Mrs. Thatcher for having supported the Croats, at the Americans for aiding the Bosnian Muslims, and so on.
    DJILAS
    He answers the door of his Belgrade flat himself. His hair is white now, and age has loosened the sharp, aquiline features I remembered from the book jacket of his Conversations with Stalin . He is eighty-two, and seems stooped and frail as he leads me down the corridor to his study. He tells me which of the low green velvet armchairs to sit in, and asks me whetherI want tea or a drink. When I decline, he laughs and remembers the time he led a Yugoslav delegation to meet Stalin in 1944. The Russians offered them vodka, and when the Yugoslavs turned them down, the Russians shouted, “What kind of people are you?” “We were partisans,” says Milovan Djilas, with a thin, watchful smile. There is something of the puritanical partisan in him still.
    Djilas was at Tito’s side throughout the partisan guerrilla campaigns against the German occupiers and their Serbian and Croatian collaborators. Better than anyone else, he knows that the mutual loathings of 1993 all go back to the massacres and countermassacres among Yugoslavs between 1941 and 1945. As the last great partisan leader left alive, he is the last one who still remembers the Yugoslav dream