RIGHTS-YUGOSLAVIA: Angry Start to New Year

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jan 6 2003 (IPS) - The New Year dawned in Serbia with an outbreak of several incidents of violence over racial and religious differences over several days.

A group of angry Serbs prevented an Anglican priest from holding a Christmas service in a chapel which is the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The following day a Cuban who teaches Spanish at Belgrade university was kept out of a market with the remark that "gypsies are not allowed in."

A Serb from Canada and his black wife were beaten up by revellers on New Year’s eve. Two Chinese-owned shops were burnt down in a provincial town the same day. Other such incidents have been reported.

Analysts warn that Serbia remains an intolerant society where little has changed despite the fall of the xenophobic regime of Slobodan Milosevic two years ago.

"Ours is a society where the lack of goodwill and a good heart remains visible," says Ljubivoje Stojanovic, professor at the theology faculty of Belgrade University. "We are paying the price of being non-believers turned into superficial believers, without getting the right idea what religion is all about."

Religion was pushed aside in the years of communist rule following the end of the second world war. But through the decade of wars in the nineties, Serbs came to see themselves as firm believers in the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Serbs were told during the days of Milosevic that Serbs are very different from Catholic Croats or Muslims. The Serbian Orthodox Church became a prime symbol in this sense of separation.

Fighting for its long lost place in Serbian society, the church itself did not draw a clear line between religious belief and the politics of the regime. It opened its doors to the people with the message that only going to church made someone a true Orthodox believer.

Zarko Trebjesanin, professor of social psychology at Belgrade University, blames the state for doing nothing to change that climate. Political leaders fear losing popularity, he says.

"The changes after the fall of Milosevic did not include important changes in the people’s state of mind," Trebjesanin told IPS. "It’s okay to reform the institutions and the economy, but it is not okay to forget the reform of the state of mind, that must include tolerance and sympathy for others."

Most Serbs still show no sympathy for victims of the wars of the nineties, such as the 5,000 Muslims killed in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb army in 1995, or the Albanian families massacred in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 by Serbian security forces.

Society cannot be healed without restructuring the social values destroyed in the Milosevic era, Trebjesanin says. "A whole generation grew up in a decade of poverty, incredible economic collapse, wars and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing," he says. "Those defeats can in a way be compared to the defeat of Germany in the second world war. The state now has to take on reform of the state of mind, and it is doing nothing."

Serbs seem an intolerant people in other ways as well. A recent opinion poll showed that 76 per cent think homosexuals are "sick" and should be "treated medically". Almost half would refuse any contact with a homosexual. Another 26.2 per cent would "try to convince him or her that it is wrong."

Another survey by the agency Faktor showed that 87.1 per cent of 1,500 people polled kept no contact with homosexuals.