HELSINKI CHARTER

PAGE 2/3

NO 117-118

PAGE 2/3 ::: 1 | 2 | 3

INFO   :::  Helsinki Charter - PAGE 2 > Helsinki Charter No. 117-118

Helsinki Charter No. 117-118

March - April 2008

Editorial

SERBIA - FIVE YEARS LATER

By Sonja Biserko

The Radicals and the Socialists are now skillfully placing the responsibility for Milosevic's decades-long devastation of Serbia and all its institutions on the democratic forces. Moreover, they are accusing them of having adopted a neo-liberal concept Europe abandoned back in the 19th century. They are advocating dignity for the sick, old and poor as if those vulnerable groups had shouldered the heaviest burden while the war was ravaging Bosnia and Croatia. They seem to have forgotten the hyperinflation that drove mad citizens of Serbia for whom that period - coinciding with genocide in Bosnia - was Milosevic's biggest crime against the Serbs. Even...   More >>>

ROMA, WIRE, ELECTIONS...

By Slobodanka Ast

We run into them all the time - at crossings, in underground passages, along roads.Some would like to wipe our windshields, others sell this or that, most just beg money. Even those little guys of five or six know how to hold out their hands and say sadly, "Give a coin, give me for bread." Some give them some change, dispassionately and not even looking at them, but for the most those children are invisible. And while in all the media political parties stage ruthless election campaign for Kosovo in Serbia or for both Kosovo and accession to the EU, while some tell fairy tales about kindergartens for all children their parties will secure and threat no one would dare sack Roma (!) once they...   More >>>

FROM THE DEPTH OF SOUL

By Velimir Curgus Kazimir

I was born in late September 1948. In the 19th century Europe the people of "eighty-four" were perceived as revolutionaries' intent to restrict the power of monarchy and introduce new, popular (national) rights. The Yugoslav experience of the year 48 of the 20th century was revolutionary and counter-revolutionary (revisionist) at the same time. Depending on interpreters of the break-up. And all of them were "original" communists. When the Informbureau resolution against the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was publicized on June 28, 1948 my mother was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Both my mother and father declared themselves "properly:" for Tito and against Stalin. The...   More >>>

POLITICAL MURDER: GOAL OR MEANS

By Vladimir Gligorov

Five years after the assassination of Zoran Djindjic we still wait for an answer to the question, "Why was he murdered?" Executioners were tried but the motives behind the murder were not asserted. As if the murder itself was the goal rather than means. One can hardly accept that even had not his murder been a political one. And one should the more so expect the stronger pressure from the public to have revealed the goal of the political murder. In this context the Serb public attitude corresponds with the deeply rooted one towards political murders. Objectively, such attitude could lead to very bad moral and political consequences, to put it mildly. Therefore, the fifth anniversary of Djindjic's...   More >>>

THE YEARS OF MENACING EMPTINESS

By Nikola Samardzic

The assassination of Premier Zoran Djindjic on March 12, 2003 declared the crime a paradigm of the current in the Serbian politics that regained predominance in the meantime - a negation of justice and human aspiration for free thought and vocation, for free expression of views are also realized in politics. And that should be the basics of modern politics. In this sense, the Djindjic assassination was a crucial step towards demolishment of the emerging civilization in Serbia, based on the rule of law and individual values, the only components of a completely free community. As time went by, political motives and personal interests behind the murder of the Premier were...   More >>>

WAS ZORAN DJINDJIC AN IMMORALIST?

By Vesna Pešic

I deliberately used the term immoralist in the headline. I had in mind Andre Gide's work under the same title dealing with immorality. Gide's hero, as I understood it, was neither amoral nor unmoral, not a person violating moral norms and hurting other people. He was a person guided by aesthetic values focused on exhibitionist smashing of the rule that shape people's behavior. Or more precisely, the Immoralist researches the field of absolute freedom. Gide does the same in his other books such as "Prometheus Misbound" or "The Vatican Cellars." One of his heroes slaps a passerby and gives him an envelope with money. That's how Gide testes free will, unbound and...   More >>>

NO 117-118

PAGE 2/3 ::: 1 | 2 | 3