POLITICS-SERBIA: Tell Me My Country’s Name These Days

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 10 2003 (IPS) - Yugoslavia went into history without tears last week, but a lot of people do not know what to do with a country called Serbia and Montenegro.

"It would have been easy to change a name plate," says historian Bojan Dimitrijevic. "But it is hard to kill a feeling of identity, of belonging to something that existed for more than seven decades."

A survey by a Belgrade agency shows that some 71 per cent of people already miss the name ‘Yugoslavia’.

The parliament of the old Federal Republic of Yugoslavia adopted a constitutional charter Tuesday last week that dissolved the federation and turned it into a loose union of its two republics, Serbia and Montenegro – and called just that.

This name of one republic and another brings daily trouble. Officials have had to explain that millions of blue passports that carry the insignia of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will be valid at least for another three years. Serbia and Montenegro will decide then whether they want independence. This new name of sorts too may not last.

"It would be extremely expensive and unnecessary to change the passports," federal interior minister Zoran Zivkovic told IPS. "We still don’t know if the union will live after those three years or not."

Sports fans do not know how to cheer basketball, water polo or volleyball players. They do not know how to honour world, European or Olympic champions.

"It was so easy to chant ‘Yu-go-sla-via’, it had rhythm," says basketball ace Zoran Sretenovic. "I guess people will turn to ‘pla-vi, pla-vi’ (blue, blue) for the traditional colour of our jerseys." The country has a colour to speak of, if not a name worth shouting in a match. And it would not help if the other side wore some sort of blue.

Serbia and Montenegro have no national anthem, flag or national emblem. The new symbols will be created by the end of the year, to last possibly another two. And then it could start all over again.

Internet providers do not know if the registered domain "yu" will need renaming and what the new abbreviations will be.

"SM looks stupid, the international abbreviation for Serbia is three letters ‘Ser’, Montenegro does not have one, and it is all a real headache," says Milan Djordjevic from Eunet, the largest provider.

But it is in cyberspace where Yugoslavia still lives on.

"Cyber Yugoslavia" is a virtual state created for Yugo-nostalgics. It was created by Zoran Bacic, a writer who left the country in 1991 and lives in Holland. Its ‘founder population’ of 152 in 1999 has grown to 16,112 today. They are all citizens of Cyber Yugoslavia.

"It’s a Yugoslavia for all those who lost their country in 1991," the website says. "This is the place where we are still one nation regardless of our background – Serb, Croat, Bosnian – and without fights and wars".

The real Yugoslavia fell apart in bloody wars that began in 1991 after the government in Belgrade opposed the independence moves of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. More than 200,000 died in this first war in Europe after the Second World War. Macedonia was the only republic to leave the federation peacefully.

Former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and the leadership of the tiny republic of Montenegro created the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in April 1992 from what was left of the former federation.

Unlike the former Yugoslavia, proud of its high living standards, freedom of travel and a policy balanced between the communist world and the West, Milosevic’s Federal Republic of Yugoslavia became an impoverished country, ostracised for his warmongering politics.

It lived through 11 traumatic weeks of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing in 1999 provoked by Milosevic’s policies against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Its slow return to the international community began only in 2000 after Milosevic was ousted from power.

In a little over two years the country split again. "No matter how calm things look on the surface, it was a kind of emotional shock," analyst Ivan Torov told IPS. "But it is the lost idea of the former six-member Yugoslav federation that most people feel sorry about."