KRAJISNIK'S HOUSE OF LORDS

Senate of RS or Ruin of Serb Intelligentsia

Senators agree that the wounds in Republica Srpska are deep, but the herb offered as remedy by Ms. Plavsic, for their taste of a fragile ethnic establishment which they are, was too biting

AIM Banja Luka, 4 August, 1997

When less than a year ago, she began to believe that she was really sitting in the presidential chair of Radovan Karadzic, Biljana Plavsic inherited from her predecessor a lot and very little at the same time: the presidential system and as much power as a mediocre head of protocol, the rank of a generalissimos of an army which existed only for the parade on Vidovdan (national holiday) - and the Senate, full of Radovan's friends, conceived as the biggest Serb gathering of wisdom and honour which should have been at her service whenever needed.

Planned back in the days of Karadzic's rule, the Senate was supposed to be something like the upper chamber of the parliament of RS. Members are selected by the president who also convenes the sessions. In other words, the Senate was conceived as an advisory gathering of people of the highest reputation whose decisions would be obligatory only because of the strength of their intellectual arguments and moral force. In other words, the Senate was supposed to be something between the British House of Lords and a brain trust. Although a great majority of senators had lived in Belgrade for years, it soon proved that the agency suffered of all deficiency as the entire leadership of RS constantly suffered: it was less and less a brain trust and more and more the house of lords.

How Can You Become a Senator?

At the very beginning, Karadzic himself saw to it by his choice of senators. There were three criteria: the largest number of senators were from the ranks of humanistic intelligentsia, and among them, writers had the honorary post. The former president chose people from the circle of intellectuals he himself had been formed by. They were mostly intellectuals whose biggest historical burden had been the well-known several days in the summer of '68 and what happened after that. The third criterion for becoming a senator was that they were persons who had been close to Slobodan Milosevic in the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, or at least those who had tried to be that. When he had got rid of them in '94, they remained loyal to the "national cause", and could do nothing else but advise Karadzic, when it could not have been Milosevic. How they advised him, he knows best.

Writers in Serb politics from '45 are a specific topic: they had an abundance of visions, poor ideas and a miserable performance. The Serb writers who on the eve and during the war put themselves at the service of the fatherland have not been told that the fact that Dositej Obradovic had not completed his job did not mean that the age of enlightenment still lasted among the Serbs. Visionaries and enlighteners were banished from world politics back with De Gaulle, and the Serb uprising, as they imagined it should have looked like, came about 100 years too late. Nevertheless, the influence of writers on Serb politics should not be overestimated. With their moustaches and hangovers, they were at its top only just something like a rare wild cherry on top. To them, Serb politics increasingly reminded of the decasyllabic national poetry, and its subjects crammed in trenches, refugee camps and offices of the Red Cross - of literary heroes. This was a triumph of literature over life.

The Serb generation of '68 has used so much subversive literature, destructive avant-gardism, upstart anti-traditionalism, cheap alcohol, strong perfumes and weak ideas, that in the end the deity of history - the only one they believed in - had to reward them with a war. Because those who had matured in this circle tittle-tattled so much about disharmony between theory and (Socialist) practice that in the eighties, without their having felt it, this question came back to them as a boomerang in the form of the choice between the state and democracy. Those who have chosen the former ended up (with rare exceptions who can be counted on the fingers of one hand) in the senate of RS, those who were in favour of the latter are nowadays in the Civic Alliance, and those who considered this question to be stupid, had to settle down for depressive silence or a one-way ticket to a foreign country.

How the Leftists Became Nationalists?

And then, Milosevic came to power, and they replaced their endless leftist theories and struggle for social justice by concern for the national cause. They simply replaced the ideological discourse, which is by definition narrow and cramped, by national, narrowing it further to the ideological matrix. That is how the Serb issue was brought down to slogans such as those by Veselin Djuretic about conspiracy of the Vatican, Comintern and the Arabs, or sentimentalism of Momo Kapor in his "Chronicle of the Lost City". This was a mispresentation of Serb intellectuals who believed themselves to be nationalists, but could not even be that. But this was also a mispresentation of the problem. When Milosevic did not need them any more, invitations for guest appearances on Radio-Television Serbia became very rare, and our writers crossed the Drina and put themselves in the service of Radovan Karadzic, who was gradually sinking into solitude. In his own misfortune, this company of men disgusted with the moral collapse of the entire world must have seemed to him as a visit of someone with pockets full of cigarettes to a man sentenced for life.

That is how the Serb senate was established and it tried to convince the public in RS via the media (which are always on the alert) that there are but about ten odd real intellectuals who lived in Belgrade (Kapor, Djuretic, Djogo, Kalajic, Jeftic...), and who were sending word to them in RS that in their poverty they were the only ones who were right, and that they should just endure because the world would sooner or later get tired of breathing down their necks. The problem of the senate is not, as Milos Prica, chief of staff of Biljana Plavsic, pragmatically claims in the fact that majority of the senators live on the left side of the Drina and know nothing about the situation. The problem is much simpler although its resolution is complicated: nationalism of Biljana Plavsic which does not appear as claustrophobic and ideologically passionate enough, would one day have to begin relying on a new generation of the thinking Serbs, because they would then go into redefining of everything that had happened in the past ten years. And then many collected works of the "senators" would end up recycled, just as they had rightfully done with the works of the generation of their predecessors.

But, this will have to wait. Because Karadzic has missed his last opportunity on the very same day he gathered around himself former Milosevic's advisors who once stepped in front of the international community prepared like for some district court, and all those experts for Islam who used to believe that a universal solution for expansion of this religion was called Vojislav Seselj. Those were the same "art-lovers" who, disappointed because Milosevic's protruding chin did not fit into iconography of Mussolini's Italy, came searching for Serb Valkyrie in plateaus near Kupres. Instead to understand Milosevic's blockade introduced in '94 as an ideal moment for a political shift of his own towards democracy, even if it were national, Karadzic acted as a more consistent Milosevic than the original. Although at the time media from Pale were imbued with bitterness whenever official Belgrade was mentioned, there was even more nostalgia for the "good old" Sloba. That is why Milosevic was enabled to return to RS through the agreement on special relations, but also through the senate in which there are at least twenty people whose blood boils at the very mention of his name.

Why is the Senate against Plavsic?

In the beginning, when the conflict between Ms. Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik was made public, the senate was inclined more to support the president of RS, at least according to some unofficial statements of its members. Discussing the special relations between RS and FRY a few months ago in Bijeljina, the senators said a few very unpleasant things bluntly to Krajisnik. Since, however, it is a well known fact that the Serb member of B&H Presidency considers men of letters as persons good to chat with but not to work with, the incident passed almost unnoticed by media. The senate then split, Biljana Plavsic inclusive, convinced that for the developments to come she would have support of the "Serb wisdom".

She, of course, was wrong. Majority of the senators agreed that the wound was deep, but that the herb offered by Ms. Plavsic as a remedy, for their taste of a fragile national establishment such as they were, was too biting. At the time, a group of senators headed by the agile Belgrade poet and publisher Gojko Djogo, who is close to Pale, separated from the rest. The senators started travelling between Belgrade and Pale and Banja Luka, advocating a very original thesis: Plavsic and Krajisnik should come to terms with each other, but so that the president of RS obeyed what Krajisnik told her to do. It was assessed by people around Plavsic that under the circumstances there was no point in convening a session of the Serb "house of lords". The senators, however, decided not to give up: Djogo and chairman of the parliament Dragan Kalinic, who alone had done the job of a medium-sized politbureau in the campaign against the President of RS, scheduled a meeting of the senators for 10 July in Zvornik. What they concluded there is very simple: the crisis in RS was so profound that there was no time to be lost in discussions but it was necessary to sit down and devote all the time and energy to call the President to her senses.

Then, a four-member delegation of senators (Djogo, Slavko Leovac, Smilja Avramov and Kosta Cavoski) set out to Banja Luka, where Ms. Plavsic received them. As one of the senators present there said for AIM whose courage did not permit him to have his name stated, something that could have resembled an agreement was reached in Banja Luka: Ms. Plavsic would reconsider her decision to dissolve the parliament, and Krajisnik would give up the patronage of the government and agree to its dismissal. The fragile optimism of the senator lasted only for about as long as it took them to get to Pale where they had the opportunity to see for themselves why Krajisnik was called "Mister No". After that, they naturally said that Biljana Plavsic had deceived them.

Session in Bijeljina

Two weeks later, considerably truncated, the senate met in Bijeljina. One of its members, the Zvornik-Tuzla Bishop Vasilije (Kacavenda) left the session at the very beginning, which made it clear to the also present Krajisnik and Aleksa Buha why nobody from the Church was present at the session of the assembly of RS three weeks prior to that in Jahorina, just a day after Biljana Plavsic had dissolved it. Krajisnik used the departure of the Bishop best, because he swore to God and the Scriptures at the session in Bijeljina that he had nothing to do with crime and that he lived in Pale modestly in a rented apartment. Biljana Plavsic did not seem impressed, but Predrag Lazarevic, one of the two senators from the rump senate supported the president of RS and accused Aleksa Buha of negotiating with the HDZ about exchange of Sipovo and Mrkonjic-Grad for a part of the sea coast near Konavle. Then, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljuba Tadic, said that he was disgusted by the campaign led against Biljana Plavsic by RTS, while the others spoke about the conspiracy of the world, reconciliation, merits of certain personages and similar. The senate also proposed that "the decision of the constitutional court had to be accepted", and that RS was operating on a kind of a co-presidential system in which a coordinating managing body would be formed "which would be alternately chaired by Plavsic and Krajisnik".

Even the fact that after the end of the session Ms. Plavsic declared that she had seen through the intentions of the senators, sending word to them that they would not succeed in them, was not sufficient to prevent the senators from demanding from the President to keep her promise and withdraw her decision about dissolution of the assembly. Not only because as a rule the one who wishes to make quarrelled parties come to terms between each other usually ends up the first with his nose busted, the session in Bijeljina did not mark only the debacle of the senate of RS, but also of the entire faction of Serb intelligentsia which liked to present itself as national, without in fact having ever been that at all. The house of the lords took sides with Krajisnik who had the rare honour to be supported by intellectuals this time, with whom he had never had any business relationship before and who mostly smoke the brand of cigarettes he had never imported because of their low price. This move of the senators, however, is understandable and imaginable: victory of Biljana Plavsic would lead to such redefinition of the nonexistent Serb national program that a new generation of men of learning would inevitably have to come to the scene. Should that happen, it is hard to believe that "nationalism in jeans" of Momo Kapor would be included in textbooks, nor that heroes like another intellectual enthusiastically welcomed in Pale - Miroljub Jevtic, could make profits in the midst of Serb poverty by selling at pre-election gatherings of the ruling party their video-cassettes with detailed instructions how to live side by side with the Muslims without problems. The senate is, therefore, a finished episode.

Ivan Djordjevic