BELGRADE LETTER:EU accession will not solve all of Serbia's problems, but they believe it offers hope, writes Piaras MacEinri
AT FIRST sight, it looks, and in many respects is, like any other central European city.
There are wide boulevards and handsome late 19th century buildings. Sometimes the architect's name, set in stone on a building's exterior, mentions Prague as well as Belgrade. The Orthodox churches of St Sava and St Mark are magnificent and Byzantine in style; people of all ages come to light candles in front of favoured icons.
There are few beggars in the streets, but buskers play jazz, classical and traditional Serbian music. Young people dress the way they do anywhere. The shops bear the usual names found from Berlin to Barcelona.
And yet, my hotel is the Continental, a soulless modern 1970s building probably most renowned as the place where Zeljko Ranatovi, a paramilitary war criminal and gangster better known as Arkan, was killed in 2000. Just across the road a shanty town sprawls, home to gypsies from different parts of old Yugoslavia, many without papers or official identities. This impoverished slum of wooden shacks houses people whose children have little chance of schooling and who in many cases cannot themselves read or write.
Walking in the old city, I come to a bookshop dominated by a huge bust of Radovan Karadzic, now in The Hague on trial for war crimes. Nationalist literature in the window is all about Kosovo, Serbia's lost territory.
Graffiti on walls features a "no parking" circular sign with "EU" inside it. In the main square, a small group of mostly older people, but with a few of the kind of muscular young men to be seen on such occasions from Beirut to Belfast, hold a large banner proclaiming "No to Nato fascism". The flags are those of Russia and Serbia. On walls and gables everywhere the year 1389 commemorates a key encounter between Serbs and Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo, a founding myth of Serbian identity.
The Chinese embassy, bombed by Nato (whether accidentally or not) during the events of 1999, is still a wrecked and gutted building. The television centre has been repaired, but 16 young staff members, their names engraved on a monument outside, perished when it was targeted from the air.
The streets are crowded with innumerable older, small cars, many of them Zastavas, a Yugoslav version of Fiat. Some are used for improvised car boot sales by impoverished Serbs who fled other parts of the former Yugoslavia as it imploded in a welter of extreme nationalism, war and ethnic cleansing. Serbs brought much of this on themselves but others, such as Croatian leader Franjo Tujman, also played a part.
It is not all bad news. EU membership offers the possibility, to both Croatia and Serbia, of moving beyond violence and rampant corruption. In July a new government under the slogan "For a European Serbia" took office. A broad-based moderate grouping in a fragile country, it still faces a strong challenge from the far right.
I was in Belgrade for a conference organised by Serbia's Ministry for Diaspora and the UNDP. There were papers from Israel, Armenia, India, Slovenia, Croatia and Ireland (myself). Representatives of the Serbian diaspora in France, Sweden and Germany also attended, and did not hesitate to lay into the politicians and civil servants of Serbia for their alleged failures.
It all made for a lively and sometimes acrimonious debate, a tribute to a more open and liberal Serbia. Diaspora representatives were divided between a nostalgic desire to return to a restored greater Serbia, and those who said Serbs in the diaspora should integrate in their countries of residence while preserving their language, culture and identity. Most participants agreed with the Slovenian speaker, who pleaded that Serbs should relinquish the entire idea of a nationality based on blood in favour of a broader notion of identity.
My remarks focused on the Irish diaspora and Government policy, but when I mentioned the Irish Lisbon Treaty referendum and hopes for a second more positive outcome, I had everyone's attention. EU accession matters very much to most Serbs and their Croatian neighbours. It will not solve all their complex internal problems, but they clearly believe it offers a window of hope and progress. The failure to ratify Lisbon is seen as a serious obstacle.
Before leaving, I visited Belgrade's main Jewish cemetery as well as the city centre quarter Dorcol, home to Belgrade's old Jewish district. It is also the location of the 17th-century Bajrakli mosque, burned by Serbian Orthodox fanatics in 2004 but since restored. Muslim-Jewish relations are good. In the cemetery there are names from all parts of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewry, a poignant testimony to their role in Serbia's life over the centuries.
The vast majority of Balkan Jews perished in the Holocaust; Belgrade was one of the first cities declared Judenfrei by the Nazis. Pro-fascist Serbian Chetnik paramilitaries, as well as some Muslims, played a murderous role, but many Serbs opposed Nazi policy and Tito's partisans welcomed Jewish volunteers. Serbia's record is better than that of Croatia, where the Ustashe puppet regime pursued a genocidal policy against Jews, Serbs and others, with active support from significant parts of the Catholic Church.
Like Ireland, the states of the former Yugoslavia are seeking to lay their demons to rest. We should offer them every support.
Piaras Mac Éinrí is a lecturer at the Department of Geography, UCC