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Introduction
1.) The Nature Of Simple Life In The Balkans
2.) Battering As A Way Of Life
3.) Sexual Abuse
4.) Traditional Life: Combination Of Channeled Rage And Love
5.) Two Case Studies
6.) Some Current Data On Child Abuse
7.) The Death Of The Patriarch And The Dissolution Of The Yugoslav Zadruga
8.) Serbia And The Feelings Of Victimization
9.) War Fantasy And Trial Action
~ REFERENCES
Momo Kaporwas born In 1937 in Sarajevo, the only son of a fairly well-off parents. The Second World War shattered his childhood. When he was four and a halt a bomb destroyed their house, killing his mother; while the little boy, close to asphyxiation, was pulled from among the ruins and from under his mother's crushed body. He spent the rest of the war with various people, amid the many atrocities that gradually devastated his home town and the whole country. After the war he moved to Belgrade, lived in desolate poverty, but managed to get a good education, finishing at the college of art. Eventually he developed Into an accomplished painter; writer and TV personality, becoming a best selling author; celebrity, charmer; lady's man, In short, one of the most popular personalities In the country, famous for his wit and charm.(39)
Ten years ago, he started to evolve into a Serbian nationalist, which brought him Into some conflict with the authorities. This only intensified his attitude; his love-hate relationship towards his native Sarajevo and its people became more and more pronounced. Finally his childhood terror totally prevailed, turning him into one of the leading Serbian war-mongers, advocating violence to prevent the Moslem gangs from butchering the Serbs, ridiculing any attempts of peaceful solution etc.(40)
Kapor has never said much about the details of his early years, stressing only their horror and loneliness. Ruins, devastation, loss of home, search for love, violence, corpses, will to survive these are the most frequent words he offers when asked about it. He was far more eloquent when describing his post-war years, spent in institutions and summer camps for orphans. These were organized on a quasi-military basis, Soviet style, as established by Makarenko, who was very popular at the time.(41) There, from eight to ten years old, he started to learn how to get on, how to charm his way with smiles and compliance, pleasing everybody-he managed this extremely well-while secretly dreaming of revenge. Here are some passages from his autobiographical novel The Provincial,(42) where a middle-aged, successful man meets his ten-year-old self and commits suicide in despair:
"Now and then he was patted on the head and praised, just when he was silently plotting one of his many vendettas. Nobody can be as vicious as an angry child, deeply convinced of the justification of his hatred. H. was pitiless. There was no understanding In him, out of which a little goodness could have sprung in his desperate and there-fore prematurely hardened heart... One cannot expect mercy from a boy of ten, who has seen houses being demolished and people hanged, a boy who has tried to survive evil as best he could!"
During his many "Interrogations" and punishments, meant to "re-educate him," the boy resorts to two survival strategies. One is a calculated development of boyish charm and friendly manner; the second is the creation of a secret world. He used to "escape into one of his secret passages, thinking of some other matters, but maintaining a pleasant face, calculated only not to annoy the educators. But underneath his apologetic face there was hidden the untamed stubbornness of a young beast, which cannot be pushed Into a cage or tamed and made to retrieve the thrown stick. If forced to, he brought it back smiling, but his provocative smile (which made the staff furious) was announcing that one day, when he had the chance, the stick In his hands would be the weapon of revenge. "(43)
And so the boy, "thrown Into the hell of orphanages, boarding houses, camps and re-education, utterly lonely among people and children", is sustained by his drive for success and revenge. Some day, "he will scatter his tormentors, punish them, doing everything possible to settle accounts for the hell he had to endure." But his own private hell Is not the only subject of his revengeful dreams. His fantasies involve the ancient battle of Kosovo as well: to introduce modern weapons into the battlefield of 1389, to destroy the Turks and to change the course of history-this would bring him fame, making a hero out of "nothing and nobody. (44)
As the adult hero comes to recognize the utter superficiality of his life and success, approaching suicidal despair, he manages to send a message to his own home address: "I do not know how to return from 1947. Please, I urgently need help!" Finally, in a scene reminiscent of Lord of the Flies by William Golding, he is attacked by a gang of boys, his childish self among them, and is driven Into the sea.(45)
During the last years, Momo Kapor has lost most of his urbane polish, turned into one of the leading Belgrade figures of revenge, writ-ing and speaking profusely, using almost exclusively apocalyptic, sadistic and masochistic language to express his inner devastated self. He seems to be finally turning into reality his childhood fantasies of revenge without mercy -- against all the hostile world, but particularly against his native town of Sarajevo.(46)
The second case I wish to present involves a younger man.
Jovan Radulovic was born in 1951, in a very backward village near Knin in Croatia, the mountainous area between the sea and Bosnia, a region famous for Its swagger and aggresslon.(47) In 1980 he published a book of short stories Golubnjaca.(48) The stories, a record of the physical and mental suffering of his childhood, were soon turned Into a play. The production (first staged In Serbia, as Radulovic Is a Serb) caused a tremendous sensation; it is no exaggeration td say it was one of the most important events In the history of post-Tito Yugoslavia and Its vi-olent disintegration. The play was put on stage, then banned, causing violent polemics, utterly damned and praised at the same time, turning an unknown author into an instant celebrity.(49) Seven years later; in summer 1990, the Knin Krajlna staged an armed rebellion against Croatia, proclaiming its autonomous status, i.e. its secession from Croatia, thus triggering the present war In Yugoslavia. Jovan Radulovic was among Its leaders, becoming its secretary of foreign affairs.
The main reason for the uproar was political and Ideological. First of all, its author touched on a forbidden topic. Golubnjaca Is an enormous karst pit, full of corpses; the Croat (fascist) ustashi used it to dump the bodies of Serbs, slaughtered or alive, during the Second World War. in describing the life of a village, whose people refuse to forget it, Radulovic' broke one of the basic laws of Yugoslav brotherhood: the devastation of war was to be constantly remembered, but without mentioning clearly who murdered whom. Secondly, the play was considered far too coarse, not "true to life," not acknowledging progress, again a political offence. But in spite of the widespread debates, the crucial topic was never touched, let alone discussed, namely the horror of child abuse on a horrendous scale.
Golubnjaca portrays village life in 1960/61, with two boys of nine and ten as protagonists, in a succession of brutal scenes. The boys torture animals - sheep, goats, dogs, donkeys, even a newborn lamb - and kill them; the bees are simply smashed, while a very tough donkey (who is sentenced to death because he turns out to be impotent) 'is quite a problem. When a grown man is unable to finish him oft the boys volunteer to do it; they put a stick of explosive into his anus, but as he is still alive after the explosion, though badly wounded, they push some additional explosive down his throat.
In scenes of perpetual violence, with beating, thrashing, stoning, pelting with dung, shouting obscenities, everybody tortures everybody. Men are threatening to kill their wives, grandparents, children, neighbors, and the boys repeatedly threaten to kill the parents and other children, using a gun, explosives, a knife, a hand grenade. The more violent boy keeps announcing he will take his own life, too, Is several times on the verge of either murder or suicide and finally blows him-self out of existence with a hand grenade.
Most of the scenes mix verbal and physical violence with sexual ag-gressiveness, combining lust with pain and involving adults, children and animals. Both boys are sexually exploited and encouraged to sexually abuse the girls of their own age. In one scene the first boy is invited to his (male) teacher's room, undressed, bathed and taken to bed; we are made to understand it was neither the first nor the last such incident. In another scene, the second boy is ordered to drop his pants by his grandfather; who insist on checking how the boy's penis is growing. The boy's response shows this is a routine practice, as he demands to be paid before obliging. His friend arrives, declines to undress and there is much coarse boasting about the size of male organs. The grandfather enquires about the development of their friend, a girl of ten, the look of her private parts, the pubic hair; insisting the girl is mature enough to be taken. The boys knock him down and try to check the old man's crotch. In the next scene, they try to rape the girl.
All these goes on in the shadow of the Second World War (referring mainly to the civil war between the Serbs and the Croats), with people remembering the slaughters, rapes and mutilations, the pit being in the prime position at the center of the action and gradually becoming the focus of their lives.
As I have already said,
the debate concentrated on the issues of artistic freedom, on the
advisability of evoking the horrors of the civil war among the
Serbs and the Croats, and on the possibility of future revenge.
This was mainly due to the final scene, the boy's apocalyptic
vision in which the pit opens and all its dead inhabitants come
out, in a gruesome procession of corpses that include the goat
the boy has killed (for being too sexually aggressive in
attacking his flock!), plus a young girl, dressed in a folk
costume, Serbian of course, who was butchered by the Croats. what
nobody dared to touch was the confession of a much - abused man
who had the courage to speak out, producing a horrible book and
play, although hardly a work of art.
Once again, It was found much easier to make a political scandal
and to use an enormous amount of words to condemn a person for
his ideological wrongdoing, while remaining silent about the much
more painful subject. Nobody paid any attention to the problem of
emotionally disturbed children, let alone severely abused ones,
to the reality of childhood in at least the backward parts of the
country, to the possible wrong doings of parents, grandparents,
teachers in general, or to the author's credibility and his
particular experiences. Nobody wanted to know anything of child
abuse and Its effects. The author himself joined the game of hide
and seek, pulling back from the painful subject, choosing to be a
martyr for the Serbian cause and a victim of national trauma
rather than the victim of his own parents and relatives.
The case of Jovan Radulovic deserves this much coverage, as it shows so well some of the crucial problems of abused children. This battered and sexually exploited boy was obviously Intelligent and among the mistreatments he was spared was the fate of an inarticulate boy, closed up in silence. He was sent to school, had a good educa-tion - he has a university degree in literature - and found the courage to scream out his pain. If most abused children tend to take on their own shoulders the burden of badness, clinging to the image of loving and nurturing parents (caught In poverty, which alleviates their guilt, in his case), he managed to present his case in a rather even - handed way - his public was left to choose who was the more to blame. But when he met with public outcry of a political nature, a perfect solution was offered, not available to the majority of abused children. He was literally pushed again into denying and repressing his private hell, and given the chance to become a public martyr and hero. His guilt (or his parents' guilt) was forgotten, obliterated. His private life and Its horrible nature were he'd aside. Instead, his personal hell was turned to marvelous advantage, his trauma was modified into a national trauma and used to constitute the new life of his people.
All of a sudden, there was no necessity for repression and Isolation, for denial and amnesia. He was offered the chance to enjoy public adoration on a vast scale, his secret need for revenge was given the opportunity to become a loud cry for public revenge. His dirty, guilt-ridden traumas were spelled out and forgotten at the same time, replaced by something far more important and given a decent name at last!
The real enemy was found and spelled out, the Croats, the ustashi, and, let us not forget, there were quite a lot of solid facts behind this amazing metamorphosis of a private hell into a public hell of victimization.(50) Anyway, the emotional life of a large number of Serbs was ready for this type of abused child as a hero. History was once again used to hide the dirty details of child abuse and assault, of rapes, incest, sodomy etc. what has come to be known as soul murder was turned into a soul resurrection for the entire Serb nation.
To balance this fictional account which may seem inadmissible evidence to many readers, some facts on the subject of violence and sexual aggressiveness are necessary. Unfortunately, statistical evidence and scholarly research on a national scale are not available and there are no reliable stud-ies covering larger areas, let alone different ethnic groups. what can be found are several minor studies. I shall briefly show some of the results.
To begin with, in many parts of former Yugoslavia domestic life seems to be violent, meaning that beating children and wives is quite common. Among the six republics that used to constitute Yugoslavia, Slovenla alone recognized rape between spouses as rape - an offense that can be taken to court (not that many wives do it).
Some data on Croatia: An SOS service for battered wives was estab-lished a few years ago and has had a lot of work. Of all the complaints just 6% reported sexual aggression, but the picture is utterly wrong, as the majority of women never thought of admitting it or even calling a forced intercourse a rape. A detailed study for 1988 found out that 93% cases of beating ended in forcible intercourse.
A similar research in Belgrade, Serbia, found out that in 30% of battered cases, reported to the SOS Center, women were terrorized with threats of murder as well (to stab, strangle, butcher them); 49% admitted they were victims of violent behavior every day; 74% of cases included child battering as well. In most cases the source of violence was the husband, but 10% of women were mistreated by their sons, and 6% by their fathers - usually in combination with husbands. The Belgrade study concluded that in at least 25% of cases mistreatment was so bad it constituted extreme danger for women's lives.
Both studies reveal the long reaching effects of traditional life, meaning the life style characteristic of zadrugas. To endure violent behavior is still considered moral obligation on the part of women; they are often maltreated by their husbands, sons and fathers at the same time, and they tend to avoid divorce out of fear of their father's and brother's opinion.(51)
The same pattern of continuity of traditional family life seems to be true of some other aspects of abuse. For instance, between 1978-1988 the Forensic psychiatry center In Zagreb, Croatia, was asked for the evaluation of 170 cases of crimes of "degradation and immorality", among them 30 cases of incest (involving 40 victims). Among these 30 cases 6 involved sons raping their mothers. And two additional cases involved young men of 22 raping their grandmothers, aged 67 and 77; one was murdered as well, while the other committed suicide.(52) This reveals an unusually high degree of hostility towards the older and the eldest generation of female relatives.
The zadruga type of life was the unconscious model for the organization of the Yugoslav federal state; its development as well as its final dissolution reveal most of the positive and negative aspects of this type of common life. It was set up and run according to the value system of collec-tivism, egalitarianism, solidarity-everyone was expected to contribute according to his abilities, each received (approximately) according to its needs. There was, of course, a certain amount of democracy, but it was mostly a fake democracy - the Communist Party was on the top, Tito was Its head, supreme authority and master-for-life. Although on the surface it looked quite appealing, something like a display of "harsh happiness", there was much repression and violence underneath.
when the great patriarch died In 1980, the picture of nice simple life slowly revealed severe flaws. To begin with, the idealized brotherhood and unity, Its dominant slogan, showed some signs of actual sibling rivalry, even hostility. Before the death of the patriarch, taskmaster and judge, such feelings were not acknowledged, and if they occasionally were, the patriarch dealt with them in his resolute, often brutal way. The brothers were never allowed to voice their resentments and problems, let alone to learn to negotiate them. Anyway, the entire institution "discouraged the expression of individual wishes," indeed, the repression of individualism was so severe as to be "incomprehensible to individualists in the West," as Erlich put it to describe the zadruga life.(53) Still, enormous differences persisted, and they increasingly showed when the issue of economic and political reforms became unavoidable. The ideas on how to organize life in the future, how to change it - if at all - followed the differences in childrearing and family backgrounds, Including vast differences in infant mortality,(54) as well as recent experiences of punishment for willful behavior.(55) In fact, the development of post-Tito Yugoslavia provides a dramatic picture of a zadruga at its worst its utter inability to face the demands of modern way of life, as well as its members' feelings of being lost when the old man is gone: He was strict, severe and brutal, but what do we do now? Of course the common house was fairly bad, but it was so cozy and safe, it offered such comfort! what we have now is messy freedom, jealous and hateful brothers, full of envy and greed.
Let me picture some responses to the situation and Its challenges. Slovenia, who never knew the zadruga type of life and was very un-happy with this style of brotherhood, started to behave as a naughty girl, getting closer and closer to the role of family delinquent. She has always seen her position in the psychodynamics of the Yugoslav family in a feminine way: playing a little girl in need of protection, a young maid seeking the haven of marriage, an exploited and battered wife. But during the eighties she started to behave as an increasingly liberated adolescent, openly defying the patriarchal regime with various proposals for democratization.(55) Serbia, on the other hand, relied primarily on the role of the elder brother, whose authority should be recognized by younger brothers, not to mention the sisters. This primacy was to be tacitly understood, but If not, force was considered a legitimate solution. For many years, Croatia played only a minor role In family quarrels, due largely to the painful experiences of 1971, when It was ruthlessly punished for the attempt to modernize the interpersonal relationship within the Yugoslav family, not to mention bad memories of World War II misdeeds.(56) And Bosnia? This was the case of very undeveloped sense of Identity and individuality. To the last days of peace (March 1992), Bosnia strongly believed in the brotherhood, the common table - even if meant constant bickering over too few available spoons - the hostile but safe atmosphere of the crowded common home and patriarchal regime. The first shots were actually fired into a large crowd of protesters in the middle of Sarajevo, with people carry-ing the pictures of long dead Tito, still seen as the nurturing, potent father, shouting slogans on brotherhood, unity, communism, Yugoslavia for ever.
During the past years an enormous amount of books and articles was published on the subject, and I will not repeat their descriptions and explanations on what seems to have happened. Let me rather state that from 1981 onwards a crisis started to develop and in the atmosphere of slowly growing freedom the voices of misery - previously repressed - came to the surface.(57) The key words and feelings were: loss of father & home & love, danger, dying, suffocating, pain, betrayal, hunger, abuse, dismemberment, cradle, help!
In 1983 I started to collect visual material-political cartoons, magazine covers, illustrations - trying to analyze the fantasies going on in Yugoslavia, being at the same time deeply disturbed by them and in a growing rebellious mood. In 1984 I sent a large package to Lloyd deMause and his Institute for Psychohistory, and he passed them on to a psychiatrist, Casper Schmidt so instead of my lay (and partial) opinions I prefer to quote him:
I was shocked and horrified to see so much cruelty, and especially the Intensity of the hatred. In all my years of studying the print media in South Africa (where I am from) I never saw anything of the sort. But then, they have a vast horde of poison containers (the blacks) who can deal with all their bad feelings for them... I was stunned to find such overt references to swaddling: In years of reading the German press I think I have seen one swaddling Image. The predominant tone of the images is of infants who are extremely afraid of being attacked and fighting back In every way they can. The interpretation is that the parents of these children (which can be read as all Yugoslav children) are unaware of what effect they have on their children, because of neurotic scotomata, [blind spot -eh] and consequently hurt them mercilessly while not being conscious of what they are doing; this infuriates the grandiose self of the child, who compromises by passivity and given-up, giving-up behavior, while they undertake to have revenge at some stage (usually the war which waits in the wings)... what all fills means is that the group in Yugoslavia is working through feelings that were worked through In Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, except that at this point they are forced to do so under a unified regime and with a minimum of the pressure outlets (such as crusades and all those jolly rape-and-warfare missions of the Knights) available at that time. Thus the feeling of a pressure cooker that is conveyed in the materials... Thus the images from the media reflect all the violent fantasies underlying true melan-cholia (of the Middle Ages).(58)
To add an argument In favor of the forecasting abilities of this type of psychoanalysis of cartoons as national dreams, I might as well quote the author's conclusion from the same letter:
I was very frightened by these images, and it must be very painful for you to live amongst that. I wish there was something I could do to help you. Maybe an abduction from purgatory, even If only in imagination.
By mid-eighties, stuck Into debts and paralysis of the communist rule, the country was already feeling extreme pressures; the unrecognized disintegration of Yugoslavia began, with two major actors breaking up the common house, pulling in opposite directions: Slovenia and Serbia. For many years they played the leading roles In matrimonial fights, with Slovenia the wife or sister and Serbia the husband or elder brother. By 1985/86 they both displayed clear signs of revitalization movements: great anxiety, rage, search for love, rebirth. But they showed significant differences, too, as revealed by the degree and type of sacrificial violence they felt necessary to achieve the rebirth. These emotions, communicated by verbal and non-verbal means, tell the sto-ries of very different childhoods or psychoclasses.
One of the signs of the disease was the so-called "Slovene syndrome," as the movement towards democratization was labeled: an emergence of various democratic, protest and peace movements, punk and art groups, feminist, lesbian and gay rights groups which provoked enormous anxiety and rage all over the rest of Yugoslavia. They were accompanied by groups of opposition intellectuals whose message was similar, although articulated in academic ways, through learned essays on repression and freedom. And they were gradually accompanied by some party officials, who found increasing courage to voice different opinions. In short, Slovenia got tired of being a victim, stuck In the repressive atmosphere of communism, and delighted in being innovative, provocative, different, in opposition, repeating the slogan of Europe at every possible occasion. Her contempt of everything "oriental," byzantine, eastern, Balkan grew daily. Her self-esteem visibly increased with various acts of courage she displayed, shouting defiantly: "I won't put up with it any more! I am fed up with your dreadful behavior! I won't be intimidated! I am not paying your debts any more!" And finally: "I want a room of my own. The next time you want sex, you had better ask me, or I will scream and kick!"
All this and more caused increasing uproar. it strengthened two lines of attitude in the rest of Yugoslavia. The first: Slovenia is selfish, greedy, separatist; they are actually fascists, Germans, agents of the Fourth Reich. The second: She deserves to be punished, she is asking for it! Let's show her who is the master!
If this pattern of behavior provided a major cause In the disinte-gration of Yugoslavia, it seems less important now. Slovenia was punished in her ten days of war (In June and July 1991) and managed to divorce and escape as a separate nation. If anything, its fate provides an interesting example of great satisfaction groups find in the so - called intelligent use of force, when they embark on the course of rebirth.(59) what happened In Serbia was of much greater Importance and will continue to be for quite some time.
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