They know that most South Africans don’t care about Kosovo, but the Yugoslav community of Johannesburg feel strongly about what’s happening in their motherland, writes Kit Peel
It seems there is no stopping the United States president. To divert the limelight from the famous “safe sex” Starr report, Bill Clinton began one of the most punitive bombing campaigns in recent times.
Egged on by Tony Blair and a co-operative Nato, he has set about to destroy the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and most of Yugoslavia, not for a humanitarian goal, but for a political and personal one.
At least that is the opinion of Johannesburg’s Yugoslav community. “The politicians, they’re rapists, including [Slobodan] Milosevic, Tony Blair, Clinton, [Boris] Yeltsin; they’re rapists,” said Goran Indjich after a Yugoslav demonstration in Rosebank.
He and 30 others had gathered outside the US- owned Park Hyatt Hotel to protest against what they called the “unlawful, inhumane and above all unjust aggression against Yugoslavia, the killing of civilians and destruction of civilian targets, new imperialism and a unipolar world”.
This was a rare public display by a community that has largely stayed out of the limelight in South Africa. The war in Kosovo has been splashed across every newspaper’s front page, and is updated daily on CNN’s World Report, but it has hardly captured the public imagination.
The Cyrano caf and bakery in the northern suburbs is a little Yugoslavia. Here Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Kosovans and even the occasional Muslim meet to discuss the war and watch the constant updates on satellite television. They are very much a community, sharing not only coffee but also a heritage that the past decade of war in Yugoslavia hasn’t fractured. On Saturday, they were noisily singing Yugoslav love songs.
“We have sung these love songs across Yugoslavia for thousands of years,” says caf owner Milivoje Milovanovic. “We do this here, but when we go to Yugoslavia, we get caught up in it all and kill each other.”
Being in South Africa has put Milovanovic and the others in an interesting position. They aren’t caught up in the nationalism that has fuelled Yugoslav conflict since 1989. Nor are they subjected to the one-sided propaganda of a largely pro-Nato press, as in England or the US.
They are unanimous in their condemnation of Nato’s bombing, but their opinions about the war tend to be measured and, on the whole, intelligent. “The problem of Kosovo is actually a problem of poverty. People must understand this,” says Indjich. “The Albanians, who came from a very poor country, came to Kosovo and they found a better life. Then, of course, when the economic crisis started to grow in Yugoslavia, it had a negative effect on them.
“It’s pure politics, but you have to understand that poor people suffer, it doesn’t matter which nationality. So we’re not against Albanians, we’re not against Muslims, we are for peaceful life in the Balkans. But they [both sides] are going to destroy it and make more poverty.”
For all the folk songs, the mood in the Cyrano caf is bleak. For the past two months, they have watched the events in their homeland with a combination of horror and disbelief. “When this is all over, Yugoslavia will be all stuffed up,” says Milovanovic, “There will be no bridges, no factories. The Serbs are destroying one country [Kosovo] but Nato is destroying Yugoslavia.”
Milovanovic is under no illusions about the widely reported atrocities in Kosovo. “Serbs are rough. We’re killing the Albanians; it’s not Nato driving them away.” But he and his fellow Yugoslavs believe the stories of ethnic cleansing to have been deliberately exaggerated. “The story about human rights is a story for small children,” says Dr V Nedelkovic, the former head of department in a Serbian hospital, now starting from scratch in Johannesburg. “This is about politics.”
This is consistent with the overwhelming view in the caf that the human rights issue that is the impetus for Nato’s attacks is a smokescreen for geopolitical power play. “The US and United Kingdom,” says Milovanovic, “use the bombing to check the power of China and Russia. They use us as the whipping boy.”
More extravagant theories are bandied about on former Yugoslav leader Marshall Tito being an English spy and Milosevic working for the West – almost anything to unravel a conflict, the latest in the turbulent history of the Balkans, a region under 500 years of Ottoman rule until the end of the last century, and then heavily involved in the two world wars.
Answers haven’t come in the form of the television set (perpetually on) to the right of the bar. CNN, nicknamed the “comic news network” by Nedelkovic, bears the brunt of their ridicule.
Nedelkovic saw a factory destroyed in Serbia that he recognised. “It was in Valjevo – I worked there during my high school – it makes jams and fruit juice. CNN called it a military target.”
At the caf, the coverage of the war on what they see as the “Nato-controlled” CNN and BBC is almost as heavily criticised as the Nato bombing. They ask why there is no talk of Serb refugees fleeing from Kosovo to Serbia and they question the reports of atrocities in the province.
Commenting on recent opposing views in articles in the UKand USpress, Indjich believes the truth is slowly starting to emerge, but is still critical at what he perceives as the media’s subjective standpoint. “Why do people with information divide the world?” he asks. “They don’t want to make bridges and stop this disaster.”
Mirko Kapikol, protesting outside the Hyatt, mocks the humanitarian standpoint of the UKand US. “The Englishmen who destroyed millions of people all over the world with their colonies – they come to protect humanity. The Americans who destroyed the Red Indians – they protect that humanity by destroying a people.”
Pushed further, the view in the caf is that most South Africans neither know nor care about what is going on in the Balkans. “South Africans think the world is turning around South Africa,” says Milovanovic. Besides, he comments, the war is not real for them: “They see it on television like it’s a video game.”
Miki describes how he went to see the Oliver Stone film, Saviour, last year in nearby Hyde Park. The film stars Dennis Quaid as a mercenary caught up in the Bosnian war of 1991. He recalls how the audience watched in silence as people were brutally slaughtered, their only reaction coming when Quaid sees a kitten limping out of a destroyed building. The whole audience broke out in cries of “shame”.
“No one reacted to the killing,” Milovanovic shrugs, “because it was just a movie, but for them the kitten was a real thing.” But they are wrong, he continues: “Everybody on Earth should be worried about what’s happening there.”
One unconcerned party appears to be the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria. When asked about immigration statistics for Yugoslavs, the lady in the immigration department mused, “Yugoslavia?” obviously without a clue.
“You know,” I pushed, “Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo …”
No obvious sign of recognition. “It’s where they’re having the war, Nato bombings, the thing that’s always on TV,” I practically shouted.
“Oh, that place,” she said, “No, I have no idea about figures.”
“South Africa has its own problems, I don’t expect South Africa to be interested,” comments Nedelkovic. Nedelkovic wonders whether South Africans who have emigrated can better understand the difficulty of starting afresh in a new country. But, he points out, “they have some money. People coming from a war zone have nothing.”
Miso Mihailovic, an outspoken Montenegrin who has been living in South Africa for 26 years, is more blunt: “South African people don’t even know where Yugoslavia is.”
Mihailovic argues people don’t understand what is going on there because they have nothing to relate it to. Commenting on the Albanian emigration into Kosovo in the 1960s, which changed the demographics from mostly Serbian to 90% Albanian in 1999, he puts this into a context he feels South Africans will understand.
“If there were 90% Nigerians living in Berea and they turned to Mbeki and said, `Now Berea is Nigerian,’ what do you think he would say? There is a saying that who owns the sheep owns the ground. But we Yugoslavs say that the sheep own the sheep, but we still control the ground.”
The members of this little Yugoslavia are interested to know what is going to be written about them, interested in what the others have been saying and what approach the article will take.
“Please don’t use what we discuss for just one side, but for the truth,” are Goran’s parting words.