WILL IT EVER GET BETTER IN SERBIA?

On June 27, 2024, I left Prishtina for Belgrade to participate in this year’s edition of the Mirëdita, Dobar Dan! festival, organized by Integra in Kosovo and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) of Civic Initiatives in Serbia. The festival, now in its tenth edition, serves as a platform for exchange and cooperation between artists, intellectuals and activists from Serbia and Kosovo. It was supposed to open with the play “Father and Father” by Jeton Neziraj, directed by Kushtrim Koliqi. The play follows the life of a family defined by the absence of the father, who, like 1,597 others, is still missing after disappearing during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo. However, the play was not performed. This edition of the festival did not open. A few hours before it was set to begin, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia banned it.

This ban was the epilogue of a several-week campaign against the festival. Leading this campaign were, among others, Serbian Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković, Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin and Minister of the Internal Affairs Ivica Dačić, who ultimately sealed the ban. On the day of the festival, a bus carrying participants from Kosovo was stopped when entering Belgrade and escorted back to the Kosovo border by the police.

For a long time, successive Serbian governments, especially the one led by Aleksandar Vučić, have made it clear that we are not welcome in Belgrade. But this time, they explicitly banned us. The way it all happened reminded me of my other trips to Belgrade, perhaps because this trip was inseparable from previous ones. Each journey had slowly led to this point.

Belgrade has been building barriers

I first went to Belgrade in 2014 as a participant in a program focused on dealing with the past. Since then, over the past ten years, I have visited Belgrade at least twice a year, mainly for work.

I participated in the Mirëdita, Dobar dan! festival for the first time in May 2022, during its ninth edition in Belgrade. At the festival, we promoted the book I had edited, titled “Hije të shtrembëruara” — Distorted Shadows — published by Integra. The book summarizes accounts of Albanian political prisoners from Kosovo who survived brutal torture in the infamous Goli Otok prison in Croatia during the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

At the opening of that edition we were evacuated from the courtyard of the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) due to a bomb threat. CZKD was the home of the courageous and inspiring playwright Borka Pavićević, who stood against the nationalism of her country for her entire life. We went from the suspected bomb site out onto the street where we were met by a crowd of men shouting and holding up hateful nationalist slogans and symbols directed towards Albanians.

In June of the same year, I went to Belgrade for a performance of the play “The Handke Project” by Jeton Neziraj, directed by Blerta Neziraj. The play problematizes the decision to award the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019 to Austrian writer Peter Handke. A little more than ten years before receiving the prize, Handle gave a eulogy at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, the man who ordered the killing of thousands of people in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. In his work, Handke also relativized and denied the crimes of the Serbian state in the Yugoslav wars.

IN LESS THAN TWO MONTHS, I WITNESSED A NORMALIZATION OF THINGS THAT SHOULD NEVER BE CONSIDERED NORMAL.

We refused to present “The Handke Project” and other shows in the alternative spaces that welcomed us, such as CZKD. Instead, we insisted on the play being performed in a public institution, so that it could be seen by a larger audience and accomplish its goal of confronting people, especially those who might disagree with its content. The play was clearly anti-genocide and challenged all the Peter Handkes of today. We knew it wasn’t going to be just another show in Belgrade. In 2022, “The Handke Project” was staged at the BITEF public theater. But it was performed under police supervision around the theater building and with an icy atmosphere from the audience, despite the sweltering summer heat.

In less than two months, I witnessed a normalization of things that should never be considered normal. Looking back from today’s perspective, these two visits to Belgrade were clear signs that the Serbian government, both secretly and somewhat covertly, was normalizing the ban. It was sharpening its teeth.

Ultimately, the government banned it

Ironically, the Serbian government, along with the men who usually gather their nationalistic banners and raise their voices to sing hateful songs, always creates a lot of commotion when it comes to cultural exchanges. Thus, this government proves that there is still a need to support culture and art and to ensure its sustainability, especially for an independent cultural scene that is struggling in Serbia. However, the government fears the power of culture and art to unite people, bring them closer together and keep them curious to find and spread the truth. The truth, for the Serbian government, means facing itself and its own faults.

THIS YEAR, ORDINARY MEN, ALONG WITH POLITICAL LEADERS, AMBUSHED THE MIRËDITA, DOBAR DAN! FESTIVAL AGAIN AND EVENTUALLY BANNED IT.

This year, ordinary men, along with political leaders, ambushed the Mirëdita, Dobar Dan! festival again and eventually banned it. The discussion I was invited to participate in, called “Normalization of Ban or Ban of Normalization: Hindering Cultural Exchange,” was also banned. In this discussion, I would have talked about the ways we had found to navigate the hateful and malicious climate installed by the Serbian government. This is the climate that we and our colleagues from Serbia had faced in every attempt at normal cultural exchange. I would have shown how we had proved ourselves resilient and managed to navigate this hostile environment, somehow managing to succeed. I would have talked to some media outlets, academics and a handful of artists in Serbia. Some of them comply with the government and some obey out of fear of this tyranny, which is the same, anyway.

But, maybe it’s better that I didn’t speak and the festival was banned by government decision. Finally, the country’s leaders have to handle the hot potato themselves. They are no longer satisfied with making contradictory statements. Those statements were enough to legitimize the fascist calls on the street and to claim that it made efforts to protect history, but not enough to stop the festival. Their attitude has always been: pull it, but don’t tear it.

Maybe, it’s for the better because I fear that if this hadn’t happened, we would have continued navigating the status quo for a long time. We would have kept on struggling to find difficult paths in an exclusionary environment where bomb threats are normalized and public insults from figures from both Kosovo and Serbia have made normal communication and cooperation a personal and political challenge. Perhaps, by being neither completely forbidden nor completely permitted, we would maintain the illusion that we have accomplished something.

FOR THIS TO HAPPEN, THE SERBIAN STATE MUST FIRST LET GO OF KOSOVO.

Perhaps this decision will be an eye-opener and will mobilize Serbian society against an inherited state structure that becomes more fearful each year, clarifying its position and proving through actions that it remains steadfast in its tyrannical stance. While the people of Kosovo need time to heal from a devastating war, the Serbian state needs to heal from its own government to properly address the past. For this to happen, the Serbian state must first let go of Kosovo.

FESTIVALS LIKE MIRËDITA, DOBAR DAN! DO NOT GO TO BELGRADE TO DENY THE PAST OR TO PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED.

Maybe this is how healing will begin. It cannot happen in isolation. Each country needs to communicate honestly and accept their true positions, even if it is uncomfortable.

Mirëdita, Dobar dan! is an example of this healing effort. Festivals like this do not go to Belgrade to deny the past or to pretend it never happened. On the contrary, they create spaces for people to deal with the past, to sift through it, as this is the only path to a less noisy and violent future for this troubled region.

THE SERBIAN GOVERNMENT IS SEEING ITS SELF-MADE MYTH SLIP AWAY BECAUSE PEOPLE INEVITABLY GRAVITATE TOWARD THE TRUTH, EVEN IF THEY DO SO LATE.

If the leaders of the Serbian state are proud of their nation’s past, then why do these platforms threaten them? Herein lies their fear. When people talk, the truth emerges and finds its place. This political class has made it clear that its only consistent mission is to maintain the fiction it has created for itself. Isolating society from the truth is what keeps this fiction alive. Tyrannical systems fear exposing people to the truth or multiple truths because that alone can destabilize their position. When their position is shaken, tyrannical systems become unstable and start micromanaging people’s movements, listening to what they say, controlling who enters the borders and where people sleep. The system becomes increasingly paranoid.

The cancellation of this edition of Mirëdita, Dobar dan! is the clearest manifestation of this paranoia. It indicates the weakening of the propaganda apparatus. The Serbian government is seeing its self-made myth slip away because people inevitably gravitate toward the truth, even if they do so late.

The Serbian government defends itself

This myth is perpetuated both openly and covertly, hidden behind men’s groups or the often state-controlled media. The government does this by watching and even enabling the painting of Belgrade with the face of war criminal and perpetrator of the Srebrenica genocide, Ratko Mladić, arresting anyone who tries to challenge the city’s genocidal appearance. It canceled EuroPride in 2022, turning a blind eye to attacks against civil society organizations that do not align with it. It inflates supporter numbers and wins elections under serious suspicions of malpractice.

THE SERBIAN POLITICAL CLASS URGENTLY NEEDS TO IMPROVE — IF IT TRULY LOVES ITS PEOPLE.

In these circumstances, the Serbian political class urgently needs to improve — if it truly loves its people. Therefore, it must first begin to love its own people and then to finally open up to others: those in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and the entire region — those who it once tried to destroy. Serbia must understand that it has not exterminated these peoples, that they have survived, that they are there. And in their existence, they will speak, remember and tell their story.

Initiatives like Mirëdita, Dobar dan! enable people to have these conversations, cultivate memories, and tell their own stories. They recognize that societies in the region are interconnected, and whether they like it or not, they influence each other. Unfortunately, the nationalism nurtured by the Serbian state threatens Kosovo and other states in the region, which is a serious concern.

The generations that lived through the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia will do everything possible to avoid such conflicts again. But what about the generations born after the wars? How can we convince them that violent resistance to normal communication and cooperation is not the right path?

After the festival was canceled in Belgrade, we were effectively deported following a strict security protocol. By expelling us from Serbia in this manner, they claimed to be respecting the “will of the people” and “protecting” us from having “violated” that will.

But who exactly are the people in Serbia? Who does the Serbian government recognize as its people? Serbia’s people include individuals such as Sofija Todorović from YIHR in Serbia, who received a severed pig’s head a day after the festival was banned, as if warning her that she is being watched. They include people like Aida Corović, who threw eggs at a mural of Mladić in Belgrade. They also include Andrej Nosov and Biljana Srbljanović from Heartefact and Sasa Ilić from the Polip festival. These activists, artists, friends and colleagues apologized on behalf of their country for this incident.

The road trip I took with a police escort was very different from the one I took when traveling from Prishtina to Belgrade. On that journey, I met people whom Serbia tries to silence — like the policeman in Prokuplje, who wished me a good trip and the gas station attendant who spoke to me in Albanian, saying, “Have a good day, thank you!” I will return to Belgrade for all these people, united with me in the mission for truth. I will return because Serbia also has this side, which, despite being weakened and tired from state violence, exists and will triumph.

On the way to Prishtina, with sirens and armored vehicles escorting a group of artists and activists from Kosovo, the Serbian government did not protect its people. It protected itself from itself.

Author: Aurela Kadriu

Feature image: Dion Krasniqi with photos from Integra.

This article was originally produced for and published by Kosovo 2.0. It has been re-published here with permission.