Even at an intuitive level, sanctions never made much sense to me. If North Korea is such an isolated country, and isolation only reinforces the leadership's paranoia, then adopting a policy of further isolating the country through sanctions seems counterproductive. If you want the people of Iran to rise up against their leaders, why give the leadership an easy target to blame for the economic conditions that adversely affect the standard of living of average people? And then there are all those statistics about the spike in infant mortality - and the death of more than 200,000 children -directly attributed to the sanctions applied to Iraq in the 1990s. Sanctions are like drones: they cause death and destruction at a distance and there's no one visible in the cockpit.
Sanctions are also an expression of the impotence of policymakers. They are the one alternative that politicians can think of between doing nothing and waging war. Of course, sanctions are not just one thing. They can range from an arms embargo and a freeze on assets held overseas to air embargoes and export bans.
In the 1990s, Serbia was subjected to a series of sanctions, as a result of first the war in Bosnia and then the conflict with Kosovo. As a result, Serbia became an international pariah, its economy tanked, and its population suffered. Did this erode the grip of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade? One part of the population supported him whatever he did; one part opposed him whatever the circumstances. The key question is whether the "wavering class" responded to sanctions by shifting their position and whether that shift had any impact. Serbian public opinion for much of the period of sanctions suggested that the population resented the intervention from outside and was determined to withstand the economic adversity.
Milena Dragicevic Sesic doesn't think the sanctions and embargoes had much effect on Milosevic. "The embargo didn't hurt Milosevic," she told me in her office at the University of Belgrade last October. "But it hurt our industry. All factories were closed. There was no possibility to sell anything to anybody except through mafia links. If it was really a crucially important item like copper, then it was exported all the time. But the textile industry? No. And who lost out? Textile workers. The average person was the greatest loser."
As a leading dissident and a key figure in the cultural world, Milena Dragicevic Sesic was in a good position to evaluate the impact of these isolating policies on Serbian culture. She told me about the vibrant youth culture that was completely overshadowed, during the war years, by a rising tide of nationalism. And the embargoes only intensified this nationalism.
"International embargoes never fulfill their aims," she asserted. "They just strengthen mafia structures in every country. They prevent people from developing, from getting an education, and the result is that people become more nationalistic and aggressive, like in Iran. It produces the opposite."
She spent those embargo years trying to support independent politics and culture inside Serbia and maintaining the slender lifelines between the cultural community and the outside world. We talked about her work with the independent radio station B92, the problem of blank spots in Yugoslav history, and her very disappointing trip to Kosovo in the late 1970s.
The Interview
How would you characterize the impact on culture of the resurgence of nationalism and the reaction to it?
In the early 1980s, the appearance of youth subcultures and youth media represented something important. Before the war, the generation of artists and youth subculture was basically the "happy youth of the 1980s." It was a time of nearly total freedom. Everything was available. The country was living on easy credits, and we were all living beyond our means. We were traveling. The nightclubs were open, as well as many other private entrepreneurial initiatives (galleries, antique shops, cafe-bars, and so on). Students were very proud to say that they were apolitical because to be politicized meant to be a member of the Communist Party and that was not cool. But they also didn't want to be dissidents. Life was good, and life for students was perfect! It's not like now when they have to finish their exams on time and they can't be permanent students. Do you know how long the average was for studying in those days?
In the 1980s? I have no idea.
Nine years, for a four-year program. For some programs, like law, it was 11 years! It was nice to be a student. Even good students sometimes didn't want to graduate on time. Up to 1997, if they had the bad luck to have a dead father or mother, they could get the retirement benefits until the age of 27, so why graduate and lose that benefit? There were jokes about these "permanent students." You could change from school to school. Then, as a student, you qualified for free tickets for travel and so on. There were hundreds of busses going to Venice for the Biennale: for the architecture students, students of fine arts, applied arts, people interested in culture could go there. It was a nice life for the majority.
But also at that time came the slow rise of nationalism and the publication of the nationalist books of Dobrica Cosic and other nationalistic writers. There was one book that I take as a paradigm. It was called Knjiga o Milutinu or The Book about Milutin. It's a novel about a Serbian peasant who says everything that the nationalists think. It was total bestseller. Everyone was reading it. We didn't really notice the moment when this nationalist discourse overtook the youth subculture. And with the beginning of war, because of the mobilization threat, the core group of urban youth involved in the alternative rock movement, the poetry movement, they immediately emigrated because they didn't want to fight. It wasn't just young people from Serbia who were leaving, but it was mostly from Serbia. That was the first time in Serbian history that escaping military obligation was not considered treason. Milosevic wanted to say that it was that, of course. But in wider social circles, everyone would say, "If you have a chance, go!" It was a huge exodus. For our university, it was tragic. In 1991-2, 25 percent of students and 10 percent of professors left the country. Everyone asked me why I wasn't leaving. I could have. But there was my family, my parents. And there was my husband, his job and his family. My sister was already abroad. Somebody has had to stay with the parents.
But the majority of those who left are still living abroad. Very few came back. You know who came back? Film directors. They couldn't cope with the Hollywood way that producers owned the project. Here the directors are the bosses. We, managers and producers, are in the service of the artists. When film directors realized that they couldn't really have all this freedom, they returned. Even writers, like David Abahari or the poet Dragan Jovanovic, whose work depends so much on language, they left and stayed away. From one moment to the next, the urban art scene collapsed in 1991.
In 1992, a visual artist who'd become blind, Miomir Grujic, created a project called Urbazona. He was a great personality. He'd invite people onto his show to make an event, a performance. That's how B92 started to make performative events. For example, when the siege of Sarajevo began, B92 invited their audience to make barricades in Belgrade to show in a humorous way how stupid the barricading of Sarajevo was.
Little by little a new generation of artists started to appear. Or, sometimes, artists who in the 1980s were totally politically insignificant, like Milica Tomic, became very different in their work. Back in 1992, Serbia was the subject of an international embargo that was not just military and economic but also educational, athletic, and cultural. There was also an internal embargo in which the Serbian government labeled everything foreign as "evil." In spring 1992, in reaction to these embargoes, Milica Tomic invited people to bring a piece of foreign art they privately possessed to her house for an exhibition called Private/Public. She turned her house into a public space to show foreign art. From that moment on, she became an artist activist creating very important projects. For instance, when the Serbian army killed many civilians in a village in Kosovo, she recreated that event by restaging it on video. She was the first one to speak out about it and call it a crime.
Also part of this new generation were three young students of architecture that called their group Skart. It was 1992. They were university students, but they were so small they looked like high school students. They produced some cartoons, gave them to people in the markets, and documented the project through photographs. Open Society - I was on the board of the foundation back then -- sponsored the translation of the project into English (Sadness). We wanted people to see that there were voices in Serbia other than the nationalists. There was also the group Ice Art that created objects out of ice that then melted. Many artist collectives were created. Open Society helped two groups to establish two independent spaces: Rex for B92 in 1994 and the Center for Cultural Decontamination in 1995. These were civil society spaces where you could give a lecture, where we would bring students from abroad to meet with our students and organize exhibitions, panels, and theater performances.
In 1993-94, the Yugoslav Drama Theater produced a few performances that could be considered anti-war by Nenad Prokic. Today he is in politics, in the Liberal Democratic Party. There were also many alternative theater groups at that time, like the Dah Theater and Dubravka Knezevic. In spring 1992 Dah Theater prepared a performance inspired by different texts of Bertolt Brecht called This Babylonian Confusion. It was a very strong anti-war performance, probably the first one in Belgrade. It started in the gallery of the Cultural Center and then went on the street. Inside the gallery, the audience was of course people like us, who knew what we were going to watch and supported it. But when they went out on the Square of the Republic, many people approached to see what was going on. And when they heard these strong anti-war statements, many people were offended: "What, you don't want to defend our people! We should just leave those poor Serbs to be killed by the Ustase and the Bosnians?" Because the feeling of the people at the time was that we were defending Serbian people in Croatia and Bosnia, that we, Serbs, are "eternal victims."
They continue to make these very brave presentations even today. Tomorrow they'll put on an anti-war performance based on the oral history of women during the war. And each July 11th, they do a performance in the public space devoted to the Srebrenica genocide, which in Belgrade is unfortunately still courageous. There are always right-wing people and groups with crosses and with strong right-wing visual statements who stand there and look threatening. The artists might be ready for that and able to resist it, but if the average person approaches the performance and sees that group of right-wing protestors, they'll just walk away.
But during the war the majority of the public cultural institutions did very "neutral" performances like Moliere or Shakespeare comedies. That's the reason why this alternative scene became very important. And the Open Society was one of the only funders. Because of the embargo, other institutes or funders were not around as that wouldn't have been politically correct or well perceived in their countries.
Because of the embargo, even I, as a known dissident, had a lot of problems going to international conferences. I couldn't easily receive visas. I had to have a private invitation. If it was a conference invitation, no way. An official invitation to teach, no way. The director of the program had to invite me for a private visit. Once even, the French minister of culture invited me for a meeting. The French embassy told me the visa was refused by the French ministry of foreign affairs which they represent. "Here at the consulate, we are the ministry of foreign affairs," I was told. "We are here precisely to prevent the French minister of culture from collaborating with you. An embargo is an embargo."
International embargoes never fulfill their aims. They just strengthen mafia structures in every country. They prevent people from developing, from getting an education, and the result is that people become more nationalistic and aggressive, like in Iran. It produces the opposite. And people die because the system is somehow manipulated to keep out pharmaceuticals. I had an aunt who was a pharmacist. At the time of the embargo, she was 80 years old. She went to the doctor to receive her medication. It was all humanitarian aid, and it was all past its expiration date. She became angry.
"It's free," the doctor told her. "What do you want for free?
"But it's a poison now!" she said.
And the doctor, who didn't know that she'd been a pharmacist, said, "Lady, some medications become poison, some don't. You never know which one!"
And I told the doctor, "Actually this lady knows very well because she made those medications when she was working!
The embargo didn't hurt Milosevic. But it hurt our industry. All factories were closed. There was no possibility to sell anything to anybody except through mafia links. If it was really a crucially important item like copper, then it was exported all the time. But the textile industry? No. And who lost out? Textile workers. The average person was the greatest loser.
What about the intellectuals who threw their lot in with the nationalists, like Dobrica Cosic or the Shakespeare scholar Nikola Koljevic?
To read the rest of the interview, click here.