Serb Paranoia And The Belief Russia Is The Best Defender of Serb Interests
Slavs stick together, which isn't always the best option
Having lived in Serbia for a few months once upon a time, I have a slightly better idea of how Serbs think and see the world than most Americans. However, I struggle with explaining that to my compatriots who’ve never been to eastern Europe. Serbia and the Serbian view of themselves and their place in the world make no sense if you look at it from a conventionally American point of view. It’s difficult to explain the uniquely Serbian paranoia, particularly when it comes from an “us vs. the world” point of view that seems unwarranted to an outsider.
First, you have to wrap your head around one of the most significant moments in Serbian history, a battle in which the Ottoman Turks routed their army. The Battle of Kosovo Polje, in 1389, was not a moment in which the Serbian army covered itself in glory. It got its collective ass handed to them by the Turks. Yet, for reasons only Serbs fully understand, the Battle of Kosovo Polje has, for more than 600 years, been celebrated as a defining moment in the history of the Serbian nation. Go figure.
Imagine celebrating the Vietnam War as a proud and defining moment in American history. I know, right? You’re thinking, “WTF???” And you should be.
Because Serbia is a small country that has a long history of being defeated and chopped up by its conquerors, Serbs have an innate paranoia. Talk to your average man or woman on the street or along the Knez Mihailova in Belgrade, and you’ll probably hear variations on the same theme- the world is allied against Serbia and wants to destroy the Serbian nation and its traditions.
That presumes, of course, that the rest of the world gives a damn about Serbia (it doesn’t). Most Americans couldn’t find Serbia on a map if you spotted them an Eastern European Geography Ph.D. and a globe in which Serbia flashes a brilliant red.
These days, those who argue that the world is out to get Serbia will point to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbian forces in Kosovo. Not surprisingly, Serbs see that war from a very different angle than the West. To Serbs, the war in Kosovo was justified- after all, Kosovo IS historically part of Serbia, at least as they define history.
What Serbs won’t acknowledge is that the Albanian population in Kosovo is now north of 90%. When I lived there, it was between 80-85%, yet the Serbs controlled the levers of government and treated Albanians like second-class citizens. I occasionally received calls in my office from people with Serb accents threatening to kill me if they saw me working or socializing with Albanians.
Because my job required me to work (and socialize) with Albanians daily, there wasn’t much I could do, so I always told the callers to come and find me. They had the phone number of my office. They knew where I worked. And I lived across the street from a member of the Serbian secret police. I wasn’t tough to find because as an American I stood out like a sore thumb. At the time, I was one of only two Americans (that I was aware of) in a city of 150,000 people. Almost literally everyone knew who I was and what I was doing there.
I walked through almost a third of Kosovo’s capital city- Pristina- to get to my office. I never made any effort to hide my movements, so if anyone wanted to find me, I made it very easy. Yet during my time there, no one made a threatening move toward me.
I got used to Serb paranoia, but it was never pleasant to be around. Nor did I ever feel completely safe. Not that I ever went out of my way to let whatever threats may have come my way stop me from doing what I needed to, but I frequently dealt with police officers with ugly dispositions and itchy trigger fingers. I knew some of them had fought- and killed people- in Bosnia and Croatia, so pulling a trigger on me wouldn’t have dented their conscience. That said, I wasn’t about to give anyone the satisfaction of letting them feel that they’d succeeded in scaring me.
Not that I ever felt completely at ease, though. It’s surprising the level of stress and paranoia you can adapt to when you have no other choice. I grew accustomed to knowing that I was occasionally followed and under surveillance when I was working. It became like background music that I eventually learned to ignore.
As I mentioned earlier, my neighbor across the street was a member of the Serbian secret police. He made it quite clear that if war broke out, he planned on killing me, as well as the Albanian family I was billeted with. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he wasn’t kidding. He would’ve carried out that promise if the opportunity presented itself, and he would’ve done it with no sense of guilt or remorse.
(If you want to trade “neighbor from Hell” stories, I think I’ll win that one.)
That all-consuming, everyone-hates-us paranoia is a big part of why Serbia is still a Third World country. They have strong cultural and religious ties to Russia as fellow Orthodox Slavs, but Russia is currently in no position to be of much assistance. The Russian army is crumbling like a stale fortune cookie before a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and the Russian economy has taken some major hits because of the war .
Nowhere, though, is support for Russia more emotional than in the Serb enclave in Mitrovica, a depressing, joyless copper mining town in northern Kosovo. I spent a day there once and left convinced that it was the saddest place I’d ever visited. Most Serbs fled Kosovo after the 1999 war, but the Serbs in Mitrovica have stayed put and maintained a grim determination to keep what they see as their rightful place in Kosovo.
The international community has long since recognized Kosovo as an independent country. Its government and virtually every aspect of public life are now dominated by Albanians. This feeds into the Serbian paranoia and persecution complex, which still festers in Mitrovica, where only the Ibar River separates the two communities.
Even though Russia is in no position to be of assistance to Serbia or the Serb population of Mitrovica, Serbs still maintain a long-held and deep affection for Russia. They remain convinced that Russia will someday come to their rescue.
On the main road out of Mitrovica to the north — past a guard post manned by American soldiers — a billboard assures local Serbs that they are not standing alone against the West and still have influential friends: It displays pictures of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, hailed as “honorary citizens” of a nearby ethnic Serb settlement.
Mr. Putin has not shown up to collect his honorary title, but he still figures prominently in the minds of many residents as a potential and much hoped-for savior, the latest in a long line of Russians who, in the Serb accounting of the past, have labored tirelessly to protect their Slavic “brothers” from hostile outsiders, particularly Muslims.
Russia fought more than a dozen wars with the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which defeated an Orthodox Christian Serb ruler, Prince Lazar, at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. That ancient reversal bulks large in modern Serb nationalism, feeding a deep well of grievance toward Kosovo’s largely Muslim ethnic Albanian population, even though some Albanians fought on the Serb side.
In the center of Mitrovica stand statues honoring Prince Lazar and Grigory Scherbina, a Russian envoy to the region who was killed near the city by a Muslim soldier in 1903. An inscription on the envoy’s statue reads: “A drop of brotherly Russian blood joins the stream of Serbian blood that has been flowing for centuries.”
Not mentioned is that the Russian envoy was of Ukrainian origin.
Of course not; that would be uncomfortably inconvenient, given what’s happening with the war in Ukraine just now.
No matter how bad the news has been for the Russian army, and despite the long and growing list of atrocities Russian soldiers have been accused of committing, Serbs have remained unwavering in their support.
Then again, given the historical bonds between Russia and Serbia, that unflinching support is understandable. And it’s not as if Serbia has other friends they can turn to for assistance.
History, much of it bloody and dominated by tales of masculine martial valor, looms large across the Balkans, particularly in the celebration — or denunciation — of “brotherly” bonds between Russia and Serbia, both predominantly Orthodox Christian nations.
“We have too much history and too much Balkan masculinity,” said Ljiljana Drazevic, who runs a small business weaving woolen shawls. Skeptical that Mr. Putin offered salvation, she said, “People are desperate, but I never had any hope of getting anything from Russia.”
And Russia hasn’t done Serbia’s cause any favor, particularly when it comes to its claims that Kosovo is Serbia.
Aside from supporting Serbia at the United Nations and giving diplomatic heft to claims that Kosovo still belongs to Serbia, Russia has provided little in the way of concrete aid. And, by repeatedly citing the West’s intervention in Kosovo to justify Russia’s seizure of Crimea and other Ukrainian land, Mr. Putin has undermined the principle of territorial integrity on which Serbia bases its claim to Kosovo.
But, said Marko Jaksic, a former local councilor in North Mitrovica, the ethnic Serb part of the city: “When you lose all hope, you believe in miracles. For many people here, Russia is the last hope of protection.”
The attitude described by Jaksic is prevalent throughout Serbia. Still, it’s particularly solid in Mitrovica, where the Serbian enclave has felt surrounded and abandoned since the 1999 bombing campaign that drove Serbia and most Serbs out of Kosovo.
Part of the problem is that Serbs have had no interest in sharing Kosovo with the majority Albanian population, who might have been amenable to such an arrangement had the Serbs not been so arrogant, aggressive, and oppressive. When I lived there, an Albanian nonprofit organization estimated that the Serbian secret police had mistreated fully 50% of the Albanian population. That mistreatment ran the gamut from minor harassment to beatings to killings.
After decades of such abuse and mistreatment, the Albanians rebelled, and the 1999 war was a (not so) civil war to force Serbia out of Kosovo. Albanians were tired of being denied employment, equal treatment, and access to theaters, restaurants, hospitals, and other public venues.
The Serbs who remained in Mitrovica were victims of their intransigence regarding their Albanian neighbors. They felt victimized, but they had no legitimate claim to victimhood then or today. Their refusal to accept that Russian troops committed atrocities in Ukraine only confirms their rogue status.
Kosovo is not Serbia any more than Crimea is Russia. Stealing territory via military aggression doesn’t legitimize that theft. But, of course, Mitrovica’s Serbs- and many in Serbia proper- are desperate enough that they’ll forgive Russia just about anything short of using nuclear weapons. And even that act of madness might find considerable support among Serbs.
Before NATO intervened, a storekeeper, who declined to give her name, said that the dark, potholed street outside her shop had been well paved and well lit. She said that she felt sorry for Ukrainians killed by Russian troops but wondered why the West did “not cry for us” during the NATO bombing campaign.
Asked by pollsters last year who was “the best defender of Serb interests,” more than 65 percent of residents in northern Kosovo chose Russia and only 3 percent the United States.
North Mitrovica’s role as a citadel of pro-Russian sentiment has created a problem for Mr. Vucic, the Serbian president. He has rejected imposing sanctions on Moscow over the invasion, and for years, he has fanned Serbs’ sense of victimhood. At the same time, however, he has labored to convince the West that he is not in the Kremlin’s pocket.
For Mr. Vucic, a leader who is trying to get his country into the European Union, ethnic Serbs’ rooting for Russia in a Kosovo region firmly under his thumb is a bad look.
The West didn’t cry for Serbia during their 1999 NATO bombing campaign because the Serbian government and local Serbs had mistreated Kosovo’s majority Albanian population for decades. When given the opportunity to stop their mistreatment of Albanians, the Serbian government arrogantly refused.
The bombing campaign was a definitive statement made by the West that the status quo would not be allowed to stand. Serbs didn’t like that, and while there’s no reason they should have, NATO considered the matter to be a human rights issue. Western governments had also grown tired of the Serbian government and its faux victimhood.
So now President Vucic is trying to have it both ways. He’s trying to convince the West that he’s not in the Kremlin’s pocket even as Mitrovica’s Serbs openly and defiantly root for Vladimir Putin and Russia.
A word of warning for those in Mitrovica hoping the Russians will ride to their rescue: Vladimir Putin isn’t walking through that door anytime soon, if ever.
Y’all are on your own.