POLITICS-SERBIA: The Make-Believe Becomes Believable

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jun 3 2003 (IPS) - A group of 22 well established doctors applied for jobs last month at a hospital in Northern Cyprus. They paid 400 dollars each, almost a month’s wages, to apply for jobs that promised 2,000 dollars a month with free board and lodging. It turned out that the hospital does not exist.

The ‘agent’ who collected the application money sent a text message to one of the doctors saying "thank you for supporting my budget", and disappeared.

The doctors were not the only ones to be duped by such offers. Thousands fall for such schemes every year despite repeated warnings in the media to be careful about offers of jobs abroad, particularly those requiring advance payment in cash.

Thousands of people – jobless nurses, farmers, automobile mechanics, manual workers and others – are trying desperately to improve their lot in a country struggling to emerge from poverty left by the decade of international sanctions under former president Slobodan Milosevic.

The new regime, which took over more than two years ago, has not delivered the quick economic recovery people had expected.

"Living through unprecedented crisis and poverty for more than a decade makes people prone to all kinds of manipulation," Zarko Trebjesanin, professor of psychology at Belgrade University told IPS. "Many longing for jobs and improvement easily fall prey to fraudsters. Hungry people see food everywhere."

Trebjesanin points to other weaknesses that came to cloud the judgement of many Serbs, and still do. "And that is superstition, and believing in the paranormal, which is understandable under the circumstances."

The trial of Zorka Pucar (55), well known for years as "Clairvoyant Zorka" illustrates just how such superstition worked.

Zorka ran an agency under her name in her luxurious home in a Belgrade suburb. Her home was filled with people who wanted her to fix their present, and the future.

Zorka Pucar is now standing trial for fraud. More than 40 people have come to give evidence against her. They paid her hundreds of dollars each to rid them of what they believed was black magic, or at least a bad spell. She is said to have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars for her own future.

"She was treating my fears with a red cloth that I kept under my pillow," Milisav Milosevic, a locksmith from the southern Serbian town Nis told the court. "I paid thousands of German marks, but I did not feel better."

Zorka’s office was closed shortly after Milosevic fell from power in October 2000. TV shows of Zorka and others like her were quickly taken off the air. These shows used to fill prime time on the most popular channel, TV Pink.

"People want to hear something positive about what stands ahead of them," says psychologist Nevenka Bogdanovic. "The catastrophic times they went through, the inability to meet the basic needs in their existence, led them to Zorka and others. Plus, the brainwashing was complete through TV."

Such shows received encouragement from the state. Like other victims of Zorka and others through the nineties, Milosevic said that doctors could not help him, and so he had to seek help elsewhere.

The end of Zorka’s show and others such has not meant the end of the business of promises. Dozens of magazines on the ‘paranormal’ still come out in Serbia. Their names speak for themselves – ‘Twilight Zone’, ‘Third Eye’ or ‘X Files’. In the days of Milosevic, many of them described the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing in 1999 as an invasion by aliens, or a global conspiracy against the chosen nation of Serbs.

"We lack laws that would check such things," says Trebjesanin. "As long as things remain the same, manipulation will survive, and people will go on believing the unbelievable."

The paranormals are not giving up. The latest on offer is that the man standing trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague is not Slobodan Milosevic but his double, while the real Milosevic lives on in Serbia. It takes a third eye to see double, but too many Serbs still cannot see facts because they are looking with the third eye.