Elections and Cinema

Well, the Serbian elections went off pretty much without a bang, despite me listening intently for the sound of gunshots or riots in the street as I sat watching the results unfurl on the television.

Nikolic, the Radical Party candidate, won resoundingly, although that doesn't necessarily mean that he will win on February 3rd, when the top two candidates have a run-off to see who will be President. Tadic, the second candidate and current President, is doing his best at the moment to present his opponent as an ultra nationalist crazy (well, its pretty much true) who will take Serbia back to the bad old days of war, sanctions and international pariah status.

While this may be fair enough, Tadic himself is insisting that Kosovo will not be allowed to separate from Serbia, and denying (despite much evidence to the contrary) that the EU he is so desperate to join will have any problem with this. We'll see. The President is largely a figurehead anyway, but in the unstable way of Balkans politics this could easily be changed if a strong enough President came into the position. Milosevic switched between Prime Minister and President a number of times during his career, just ensuring that whichever position he held at the time was the one with the power.

It won't do Serbia any good to have Radical Nikolic as President, if he wins on February 3. But then maybe it would certain NATO countries stand up and realise that imposing sanctions on a country so that people reach near starvation point, bombing them, and now preventing them from travelling abroad (Serbs face queues of 8 hours if they want a visa to go to Germany, and are often then refused it) does not a West-loving country make.

In between the times I've been watching Serbian news re the election I've been going to see Serbian language films. This unfortunately does not mean my Serbian has improved, just that I'm developing a lot of patience and becoming good at reading Balkan facial expressions. When I say Serbian films, I mean specifically one, which I went to see the other night with James and his friend Vladimir, a Serbian who grew up in Zimbabwe and is now doing his PhD at LSE, and thus made a very good interpretor for when I really just wanted to know what the hell was going on in the move.

It was called 'Belle Epoque, or the Last Waltz of Sarajevo' and I recommend it to everyone, and really hope that it gets release in the West. The movie was actually made in 1990, and was in post-production when the war began and thus ended up collecting dust in a basement somewhere where it thankfully survived the bombings. It has only just been released, and has had some showings at international festivals in Europe, but hopefully it will get beyond the arthouse circuit so people will actually see it.

The nexus around which the story turns is the assasination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, told through the eyes of a young aspiring filmmaker whose loyalties are torn between his mother, who has cuddled up to the Austro-Hungarian regime, and the girl he loves who is an underground revolutionary working for the terrorist group 'Mlada Bosna'. One thing I was interested to find out through the film was that Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Franz Ferdinand, actually worked for the Sarajevo based Mlada Bosna, a socialist-leaning group fighting for Bosnian independence, and not the Greater Serb nationalists the Black Hand. I don't know about anyone else, but I was always taught in school it was the Black Hand who killed F-F, not a socialist leaning Bosnian independence group. The lies they tell us! (This reminds me of a quote of Gloria Steinham's I heard yesterday - The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off. Not that Steinham is usually my favourite person to quote, but here I totally agree).

Anyway, the film was actually very moving, and did a good job of showing the tangled web of allegiances that was early twentieth century Sarajevo. The director made a somewhat heavy-handed statement at the beginning about how you need to understand the violent way in which Sarajevo began the twentieth century to udnerstand the violent way it ended it (I don't buy pointless attempts at historical symmetry) but apart from this the film was relatively free of reductionism or didacticism. If it comes out with English subtitles, I want someone to tell me, because if I could understand the dialogue it would mean even more...

Srbija!

Much as I love the nomadic lifestyle, I was relieved on Tuesday to arrive home again, albeit a new home where James and I were, at least for the first night, sans apartment or mobile or any other signifiers of a life. My first view of Belgrade, the said new home, was not overly promising, as we arrived in the middle of a thick fog when no one could see more than half a metre in front of them, and the ground was covered in snow and treacherous ice (I saw at least four Belgraders come to grief on it, which only seemed to amuse them...) If I wanted to be poetic a could say the fog was a good metaphor for my own semi-blindness in a new country, but really it was just annoying as I was impatient to explore Belgrade having heard so much about it from James and Serbian friends.

Luckily, by yesterday the fog had lifted and we had a beautiful day wandering around and exploring before we moved into our new apartment in the evening. Belgrade is both as run down and derelict as I expected, and as vibrant and festive feeling as I had been led to believe by friends who had been here. The best way I could think of to describe Belgrade (having just come from St Petersburg) was the Dublin of the Balkans - not as pretty as the other showcase cities of Eastern Europe, but much friendlier, cheaper, and more quirky. The main legacy of centuries of Turkish rule is a plethora of great cafes, a relief after the hell of drinking coffee in Rossija. Everyone here seems to spend their time, as far as I can tell, sitting in cafes chatting and waiting for the bars to open so they can go, drink rakija and dance the night away. As a result of this, the city has the vaguely romantic yet decaying look about it, as no one seems to want to take the time to clean it up. That said, the few really tourist-tastic sites in Belgrade live up to their hype - we spent the afternoon yesterday wandering around Kalemegdan, the most ancient site in the city. This is where the Romans built a fort in the first century AD, which was later turned into a medieval stronghold and has been crumbling and being rebuilt ever since. One of the great benefits of the aforementioned aversion Belgraders seem to have to beautifying their city is that, with sites like Kalemegdan, what you see is what you get - no one rebuilt it in faux-gothic style in the early twentieth century or anything. You really are wandering over an ancient fort and the effect is magical, something heightened by the position of the site which is on a promontary overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, the two great Serbian waterways. I wanted to add a picture we took while tripping through the ruins yesterday but unfortunately my camera isn't hooking up to my computer properly at the moment, so here is one not taken by me to give you a feel for the place...



The big news in Belgrade at the moment is the Presidential election, due to take place in ten days. Having just come from a Russia gripped with election fever, I felt a distinct sense of deja vu when I was confronted by the election posters advertising Boris Tadic (incumbent President and quasi-liberal) and Tomislav Nikolic (the candidate for the Serbia Radical Party, which is led by Vojislav Šešelj - Šešelj cannot run for president as he is currently on trial for war crimes in the Hague...) Unlike the Russian election, the result of this one is not a foregone conclusion - though Tadic is likely to win, Nikolic has a lot of support. Flicking through the Serbian television news last night I saw campaign speeches on ten of the fifteen channels, and many people interviewed on the news were voicing their support for the Radicals. Time will tell what the result will be...and what the affect of that result will be on the negotiations regarding Kosovo.