Published in Guardian Weekly
Friday May 9th 2008
As Serbia prepares to go to the polls on Sunday, a new generation of voters will be choosing between the nationalist Radical Party and a variety of democratic factions. Vanessa Able asks some of the country's younger voters which way they will go.
"SUPPORT SERBIA", "EXPAND FURTHER", "KOSOVO IS SERBIA", "TOWARDS A EUROPEAN SERBIA"; campaign banners in the streets of Belgrade scream a medley of messages to an electorate facing its third election in four months this Sunday, while politicians from the 22 competing parties hit the hustings.
On the streets, youngsters volunteering to canvass for various political factions are a common sight; one lap of the main street leaves the pockets of Belgrade's shoppers brimming with a multitude of campaign leaflets voicing a variety of strategies to pull Serbia out of the moral rut following Kosovo's declaration of independence in March.
Adrea Siminov, 23, launched herself into political activism following the assassination of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. She was still in high school at the time: "I was so angry. I didn't see how anyone had the right to do that, to me, to my family, and to my future children."
Today Siminov works at the headquarters of Liberal Democratic Party candidate, Cedomir Jovanovic. The LDP only holds about 7% of Serbia's vote. Their liberal pro-reform and pro-Europe policies are considered by many Serbs to be unrealistically progressive for a country in Serbia's position, and Jovanovic himself is often branded "unpatriotic" and "treacherous" for these same reasons.
However, inside the LDP offices, the atmosphere in the run up to elections is electric; a phalanx of twenty-somethings throw themselves into the task of answering phones and planning various campaign strategies.
The average age in the office is noticeably young; this is Serbia's first generation to grow up with no memory of communism. They were raised against a background of genocide, war and Nato bombs; they were barely teenagers when their president was deposed in a dramatic revolution, and had only made it to university when their reformist prime minister was assassinated outside parliament.
A picture of the murdered Zoran Djindjic hangs on the wall of the LDP office, a reminder to its junior workers of the fragility of democracy, in a country whose support for nationalist and hard-right factions is growing by the day. It’s as a reaction to this trend that students like Siminov choose to spend their free time engaged in political campaigning rather than sitting in cafes or going to bars.
Boris Jovanovic, 24, is another volunteer at the LDP headquarters who recalls a childhood fraught with political milestones. He remembers riding his father's back to a rally in the city centre in 1990, having two whole months off school at the age of 12 when the streets of Belgrade were swamped with protesters. He was just 16 when he witnessed first-hand the October 5 Revolution, the storming of parliament, and the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic.
But it was the death of Milosevic that finally pushed him into politics: "A couple of days after Milosevic died, I saw on TV that they were holding a minute's silence for him in parliament. I couldn't believe it. I was shocked and for the first time I really asked myself how much further this was all going to go."
Hanging on another wall is a map of Serbia with each polling region marked in different colours. Kosovo has been left in dark grey. Jovanovic good-naturedly jokes: "It's just that we haven't found anyone willing to take on that region yet."
Not all young people share Jovanovic's disgruntlement with nationalism, however. Vladimir Djukanovic, 29, is an outspoken supporter of the right-wing Radical Party (SRS), led by Tomislav Nikolic in the absence of party president, Vojslav Seselj, who is currently defending himself against charges of war crimes in the Hague.
In a climate of swelling patriotic sentiment in Serbia, following Kosovo's declaration of independence, some predict that the nationalist and (some say) isolationist sentiment of the SRS will secure them election victory.
"Serbia can only enter the EU in its entirety," Djukanovic says, explaining his party's line on joining Europe. “No one should be shifting our borders. Until the EU recognises that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, we have no business with them.”
Djukanovic, who is currently working at Radikal's media centre in the run up to elections, believes the youth of Serbia is deeply split along nationalist and democratic lines, and he criticises what he considers the demonisation of nationalist aspirations at home and abroad.
"Nationalism is a positive phenomenon; it's not a bad thing. A nationalist is simply someone who loves his own country. How would an Englishman feel if Yorkshire declared independence tomorrow?"
Thousands of people joined marches in February spearheaded by right-wing groups in the country that culminated in a violent storming the US embassy and the death of a young protestor, 20-year-old Zoran Vujovic.
Vujovic has since become the poster boy for Serbia's most notorious and outspoken clero-nationalist group Obraz, a name that roughly translates as "honour”.
In his office in a decaying Communist tenement in New Belgrade, Mladen Obradovic, 28, secretary general of Obraz, is staunchly against co-operation with Europe. A poster of purported war criminal Ratko Mladic hangs ceremoniously on the office wall, while a pile of cuttings sit on Obradovic's desk: recent newspaper reports of Obraz's public actions, including the most recent intervention and forced closing of a show of Albanian artwork in Belgrade.
Obradovic explains, "A large number of young people are turning towards nationalism and orthodox beliefs, and that's the main reason why there are so many young people in Obraz." He claims that the average age of members is 20, and seems fairly nonplussed by media portrayals of the group as Neo-Nazis.
"We don't hate anyone, but we are conscious of the fact that we have to separate our friends from our enemies. Our enemies are everyone who is against the Serbian people: from Albanian terrorists, Nato and the EU, Ustashe; to drug addicts, homosexuals, NGOs... They all work by destroying the traditional roots of Serbian people."
"Right now the values in Serbia are all wrong,” Says 18-year-old Alexandra Miletic, who now volunteers as an activist for a local NGO to promote political awareness in young people in Serbia. "There are some kids in our school who stick pictures of the war criminals to the inside cover of their books. People like Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadjic and Legija (who is in jail for organising the assassination of Zoran Djindjic) are like national heroes."
Miletic, and her friend Petar Vragovic, also 18, are still in secondary school, and spent their Easter holiday working with the youth initiative on a street campaign, calling for youth awareness in the coming elections. They live in the suburb of Zemun, an area dominated by the Radical Party, whose party headquarters is a mere four blocks from their school.
The pair are going to the polling station for the first time next week and they are certain which box they're going to tick. But as self-declared liberals looking towards a future in Europe, Miletic and Vragovic consider themselves a minority among their peers. Vragovic has even received threats over YouTube after he was involved with a youth initiative video campaign.
"It’s really not easy for kids these days," says a voice from an older generation. Former Olympic rower Djordje Visatski has secured his future, for the time being at least, by opening a successful physiotherapy clinic in Belgrade. He outlines that the main problem facing students and graduates today is the lack of a framework within which to succeed. "Now it's all about who you know and how much money you have.
"I sometimes think we might have been better off under Milosevic," Visatski says. Why? "Because at least then we had hope in an alternative. We knew that eventually he'd die or be deposed, and we hoped that when that happened we'd be able to live in a straightforward democracy. But I really feel like that hope is fading daily."
