Who Defends
Human Rights Defenders?
By Pavel Domonji
5. October 2008, HCHRS
Serbia is a dangerous country for human rights
defenders. Daily assaults, demonization and vulgar defamations are the
sad reality of human rights defenders in Serbia. A campaign against the
Helsinki Committee and Sonja Biserko, the organization's chairwoman, has
been on in Serbia for a month already. Over the past week the assault
has turned into an open lynch call. Having denounced her as an immoral
person and slandered in the worst possible way, a weekly magazine for
the second time publicized Sonja Biserko's home address.
What formally caused the campaign was the Helsinki
Committee's annual report for the year 2007. The Committee was accused
of having made a list of unsuitable intellectuals. Whoever
regularly reads the Committee's reports and is at
least familiar with its work knows perfectly well that the organization
has never composed any list whatsoever. The true focus of the
Committee's annual report is Serb nationalism. The report just quotes
the statements by ideologists, executioners and apologists of Serb
nationalism. What bothered its critics, among other things, was the
report's cover page. The picture on it shows Serbia without Kosovo for
the first time and for all to see. Serbia is pictured as a floating ice
field that gradually melts down and melts away.
The cover page speaks for itself. The sea in which the
Serb ice field floats is nothing but Serb nationalism. Serbia is not
melting down and fragmentizing due to Sonja Biserko, Natasa Kandic,
Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco and their European friends and associates but due
to Serb nationalism. It was not Sonja Biserko who brought disrepute to
Serbia but nationalists' arrogance and brutality. It was not the
Helsinki Committee that put Serbia in the dock in the International
Court of Justice but the crimes committed in the name of the nation.
The assaults against non-governmental organizations,
intellectuals and the media standing for human rights and insisting on
their full respect testify of the deplorable situation of human rights
in Serbia. Unlike in many post-communist countries where elites managed
to reach consensus on some fundamental issues, the Serb political elite
is not only incapable of reaching a consensus on its own political
future but also to solve the country's decades-long identity crisis. It
is unready to confront the past and unable to break with nationalism.
The conservative and nationalistic part of Serbia's political and
intellectual elite tried to profit on Kosovo's independence declaration
and extradition of Radovan Karadzic to imbed itself in power. That part
of the elite constantly exploits the myth of its own nation presenting
it as a victim deprived of its legitimate interests, the victim punished
all the time - and now punished by a seizure of a part of its territory.
Insistence on one's own victimized nation is a handy
ideological gadget - on the one hand, it is used to erase the memory of
dark and traumatic chapters of national history - the chapters in which
we were executioners rather than victims - and, on the other, to prepare
the terrain for a showdown with all those who would not approve myths,
nationalistic dogmas and futile stories of the nation's moral
impeccability. Instead of making a clear break with nationalism,
dedicating itself to consolidation of democracy and catching up with the
time Serbia has lost while role-playing a 19th century imperial power,
the Serb elite spares no effort to save nationalism, normalize it and
justify as Serbia's and the Serbs' unavoidable and self-explanatory
response to the misfortune and injustice that have befallen them. With
the support of the political establishment, the nationalistic elite
deliberately and cunningly mixes up causes and consequences, and
denounces to the frustrated people all those who have seen through its
mystifications as false missionaries and anational elements preferring
some supra-ethnic, abstract concept of human rights to loyalty to their
own nation.
Domestic authorities' response to the attacks
targeting lately Sonja Biserko, as well as other human rights defenders
such as Natasa Kandic, Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco or Borka Pavicevic, is
utterly inadequate. Instead of implementing laws and penal provisions
they remain indifferent - and their indifference only intensifies the
impression that these assaults and the actions by various rightist
organizations alike are silently supported by responsible governmental
agencies. When neo-Nazis attacked the participants in the anti-fascist
protest in Novi Sad last year, some MPs were openly equalizing them with
the League of Vojvodina Social Democrats and the Liberal Democratic
Party and accusing the later of extremism. Those remarking in pubic that
neo-Nazi groups operate in other European states as well seem to forget
that neo-Nazis are not those that make Serbia different from others.
What differs Serbia from the rest are its political elite, political
imbecility and moral idiotism.
True, individuals and NGOs committed to the defense of
human rights have always been targeted by nationalists, various
organizations of the extreme right and the shotgun media. However, those
individuals and NGOs are not the ultimate targets. The ultimate target
is the state itself. The state's duty is not to safeguard the myth of
Kosovo, Cyrillic alphabet, the Uzice round dance or the sauté a la
Leskovac. The state's duty is to secure peace, safety, security and full
exercise of human rights to all its citizens, including human rights
defenders. When a state is either unwilling or unable to secure that to
its citizens, one can raise one question only - "What's the difference
between a state and a robber band?"
The author is a head of the Novi Sad branch
office of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia |