Frustrations in Serbia’s Margins

A defiant Ratko Mladic told a UN war crimes court Friday that he “didn’t kill anyone in Libya.” But the Serbian ultranationalist who tried to plunge a large knife into me thought I did, or at least deserved blame for the ongoing military intervention there.

That’s the risk you run as an American when you attend what is basically the hajj for extremists in Serbia. Most are quite hospitable. But when enormous quantities of alcohol combine with a deep frustration of being unfairly targeted by the West, fuses can grow quite short. In the case of my attacker, I became the face of the America that attacked his country on behalf of Kosovo and was mounting the same aggression on Libya.

“Kosovo! Libya! Bombs! Babies!” the drunken man yelled as he raised his blade.

This was almost two weeks before Mladic’s arrest. The place: Ravna Gora.

Every year, ultranationalists flock to the central Serbian highlands to be among like-minded people. It’s like a carnival, one where you can buy T-shirts in all different colors, for men, women and kids, featuring the image of the Bosnian Serb wartime commander who’s accused of atrocities unseen in Europe since World War II. And many of the attendees are armed.

These people feel misunderstood, and that they’re taking too much of the blame for the tragic, bloody collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. To them, people like Mladic are valiant defenders, not monsters.

The Ravna Gora crowd has a collective view that clashes with Serbia’s current government. Instead of a Greater Serbia championed by the ultranationalists, Belgrade is pinning the country’s future on the European Union.

Mladic’s arrest is very big step toward the EU, but there remains one big piece of unfinished business: Kosovo.

I live in Pristina, the capital of the predominately Albanian Kosovo. Here, people greeted the arrest with skepticism, cynicism and a certain degree of fear.

Many feel that by delivering Mladic, Serbia now has a much stronger hand in ongoing negotiations with Kosovo. They have a basic disagreement over Kosovo’s right to exist as an independent country.

These talks are intended resolve the many practical problems caused by this dispute, like Kosovo’s inability to export to or through Serbia.

But now Kosovars see their former occupier as the EU’s darling, and that they’ll be muscled into compromising their sovereignty for the sake of Serbia’s European integration.