Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 191-204 
E U R O P E A F T E R 1989: 
E T H N I C WARS, T H E F A S C I S A T I O N O F S O C I A L LIFE 
A N D B O D Y P O L I T I C S IN SERBIA 
ZARANA PAPIC 
This paper deals with the specific area of representational practices in which 
the media product ion/appropria t ion of reality in Serbia played the decisive 
role in the process of the fascisation of social life and every day practices in 
Serbia - before and during the wars in former Yugoslavia. 
It concerns how the chosen discourses of appropriation of social memory, 
collective trauma and the re-creation of the Enemy-Otherness in image and 
event can become an integral, "self-participatory" agent in the pro-Fascist 
construction of the social reality - through the very image/concept of the 
"reality" itself, which then becomes the lived experience of people exposed to 
the constant working of the image/concept. 
The power of the over-representation of the social reality can therefore be 
seen as the strongest discursive instrument of a political order. Its power lies 
in the position of the selective legitimisation/delegitimisation of social memory 
and social "presence": through narration/negation of social trauma, shift-
able presence/absence of violence, the constitution/virtuality of the public 
sphere, and the formation of the "collective consciousness." The legitimising 
power of this dominant discourse lies in the construction of the collective 
consensus as the cultural/political code of language. 
The process of the social and political transformations in Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe since the Fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, labelled rather euphemisti-
cally as a "transition," brought with it the phenomenon of violence as an acute 
social and political problem, although in its milder forms both forms of vio-
lence - gender and ethnic - were present in all other countries of the Eastern 
block as well. Their over-all persistence in post-communist regimes reveals 
their structural dependency, which allows them to be defined as societies of 
highly charged ethnic/racial, and sexual politics (Enloe, 1993). 
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One could even say that in the times of crisis and basic social transforma-
tions, the deconstruction of the previous gendered order is one of the most 
fundamental factors of change, and an effective instrument of the global re-
structuring of power. Furthermore, since the most influential concept in post-
communist state-building processes was the patriarchal nation-state concept, 
the ideology of state and ethnic nationalism (based on patriarchal principles) 
inevitably became the most dominan t building force. Various forms of 
hegemonistic nationalisms, national separatisms, chauvinist and racist exclu-
sion or marginalisation of (old and new) minority groups are, as a rule, closely 
connected with patriarchal, discriminatory and violent politics against women 
and their civil and social rights previously "guaranteed" under the old com-
munist order (Papic, 1994a). 
The absence of women from politics in post-communist transitions re-
veals the damaging effects of the communist patriarchal legacy - which gave 
women legal rights (to work, equal pay, education, divorce, abortion), but 
strategically prevented them from becoming active political subjects of their 
own destiny. The disappearance of a communist "equality paradigm" and the 
old-new conservative ideology of State, Nation or Religion in each post-com-
munist country was crucially based on the strategies of the retraditionalisation, 
instrumentalisation and naturalisation of women's identities, their social roles, 
and symbolic representations. 
The structural connection between ethnic and gender violence is most 
clearly seen in the case of former Yugoslavia. The genocidal brutality of the 
ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia shows how ethnic hatreds have been 
provoked/produced in order to construct the new frontiers of Enemy-Other-
ness through the fluid and mixed lines of religion, culture, ethnicity and gen-
der, thus reflect ing the con tempora ry redef in i t ion of racial hostility 
(Eisenstein, 1996). Furthermore, ethnic nationalism, or more precisely, ethno-
fascist nationalism, is based on a specific gender identity/difference politics in 
which women are simultaneously mythologized as the Nation's deepest "es-
sence," and instrumentalised in their "natural" difference - as the Nation's 
life/birth saver/producer. This allows one to conclude that the wars in the 
former Yugoslavia could not be interpreted as the result of the tribal and 
"eternal" barbarian mentality of its peoples, but as a contemporary phenom-
enon of violent, post-communist strategies for the redistribution of e thnic / 
gender power by defining new ethnic and sub-ethnic borders between men, 
and their respective (often militarised) elite-structures (Papic, 1994b) 
Also, the nationalist abuse of women (Muel-Dreyfuss, 1996) shed light 
on the phenomenon of totalitarian ethnic nationhood as a naturalised frater-
nal order, in which women are doubly subjugated: as insiders they are colonised 
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and instrumentalised in their "natural" function as the Nation's sacred "es-
sence" and "birth-machines;" as outsiders they are reified into the target of 
destruction, as a mediated instrument of violence against other men's Nation 
and cultural identity. 
The abuse of women and their bodies in the "pure" nation-building pro-
cesses results in two inter-dependent forms of violence against women: highly 
restricted identity "demands" (no abortion) for women-insiders, and extreme 
violence (consistent, as in cases of rape) against women-outsiders. The exter-
nal destruction of one social/cultural identity system in war is the most brutal 
form of deconstruction, but life under the processes of malign-ed/ant inter-
nal mutations is, perhaps, equally disastrous because it systematically dimin-
ishes and humiliates the basic human values of decency, honesty, tolerance, 
individual morality, or even more basic assumptions, such as the concept of 
time (past, present and future) , personal identity, or the simple ten com-
mandments (love thy neighbour, thou shall not kill). In Serbia one could see 
these values all disappear, only to be replaced with alien substitutes - and 
taken for the "real" thing. 
Briefly, in ex-Yugoslavia four basic identity levels were in extreme tur-
moil, under violent and (only seemingly) chaotic deconstruction/construc-
tion: Self-identity, Gender identity, Civic/Urban identity, and the identity of 
the Other. In all these four dimensions of public/private identity the follow-
ing "forces" are circularly and claustrophobically intertwined: Nation, Tradi-
tion and Patriarchy - acted out through the following instruments or "chan-
nels:" closure, fear, exclusion, conflict, violence, revenge, extinction, displace-
ment, disempowerment, brutality, insecurity, unpredictability, poverty. 
Speaking of Serbia, one could say that all four of these identity levels 
were in turmoil not due to any outside, but only due to internal forces of 
nationalist and patriarchal "aggression." Although (on the surface) Milosevic's 
regime still maintained a strange mixture of nationalist and "socialist" ideas 
and values, the decisive process is one of a peculiar retraditionalisation - a 
tightly combined dynamic of fundamental civic disempowerment and state/ 
nationalist/patriarchal authoritarianism which bases its power on the revival/ 
survival of the rural/feudal/collective identity that delegates/ transfers enor-
mous power to the Leader, which (accidentally or not) in the ancient Serbian 
language actually has a triple meaning: the Duke/Master/Leader. 
The feminist slogan "the personal is the political," in a deeply ironic sense, 
became part of the official, state-nationalist policy in Serbia. First of all, it 
translates as "the personal belongs to the State politics," but, since (years be-
fore the war) politics in Serbia had been identified with the National/ist Cause, 
Destiny and Glory, its precise translation is "the personal is national/ist." In 
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every nationalism, and particularly in its aggressive/ethno-Fascist form, men 
are those who make/crea te / form the "soul" and the "engine" of the vision/ 
interpretation of the exclusionary, war-oriented "essence" of the Nation, and 
women are systematically made invisible, unless they become the much 
publicised victims of the Enemy-Nation. This invisibility may appear advanta-
geous since they are at least not under constant pressure from nationalist 
slogans, recipes and advice on how to become "real" Serbian women. But, in 
fact, this position of women's "non-presence" in the public sphere is itself the 
sign of a strong Serbian patriarchal culture and politics (Papic, 1994). They 
are not even to be talked about publicly - except in the "natural" context of 
nationhood. 
The nationalist revival of the patriarchal tradition invoked, strengthened 
and (combined with the communist patriarchal legacy) formed the "new" 
Serbian nationalist patriarchy, very much marked by the features of Milosevic's 
rule. One could even say that Serbian nationalist patriarchy is, to some ex-
tent, its own contradiction, since he despotically subjugated all members of 
the "female" Nation. More precisely, f rom the beginning he consistently po-
litically disempowered all political institutions and therefore all men (except 
himself) in order to exclude any possible competition of "equals." 
On the other hand, the unstable social circumstances and the extremely 
difficult living conditions in Serbia (Bolcic, 1995) have activated enormous 
reserves of women's energy in their over-mobilisation for survival (Milic, 1995), 
the hyper-intensified form of their subjugated empowerment in this vital ad-
aptation to a time of crisis, war, and violence. By activating their "natural" 
survival potential, women actually carried Serbia's heaviest burden of the so-
cial and economic crises during the period of UN sanctions, and therefore, 
willingly or not, actually played the part of Milosevic's most faithful "ally." 
The fact that his despotic charisma has been associated with certain types of 
women faithfully "adoring" him from the beginning, might be read as fol-
lows: the majority of women in Serbia have been, in fact, seduced by One 
Man as despotic patriarch and they therefore have complied with the expected, 
"monumental" epic Serbian women's destiny of being self-sacrificing moth-
ers, dutiful daughters, unselfish mothers-in-law, open-hearted aunts, hard-
working cousins, reliable neighbours, friends and supporters. 
The overall civic void which was consistently filled with the disempowering 
hegemony of the nationalist collective homogenisation, the constant life-in-
crisis conditions, the near-war situation, the economic, political and legal 
destruction of society in Serbia, the autocratic power structure of one man 
which disempowered every other political institution and force, the mytholo-
gized total investment in Great History and Great Sacrifice - in Serbia re-
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suited in a specific gender dynamics which cannot be seen as the one-dimen-
sional oppression of women by men but as something more complex. It is 
contradictory and significantly different on a public and a private level in 
terms of its practices and discourses. On the public level, both in practice and 
in the dominant nationalist discourse, women are legally, economically and 
institutionally almost totally disempowered. But, in contradiction to what they 
would think and declare, men are not empowered on both public levels. Only 
on the level of manifest ideological nationalist discourse are they the domi-
nant, ruling, militant and heroic actor-gender, because Milosevic's despotic 
destruction and dissolution of the social/civic institutional/political fabric 
on the level of public practice made them almost as disempowered as women. 
They have invested, delegated, and transferred all aspects of their own public 
power to the mysterious, unpredictable and uncontrolled power of One Man. 
This structural emasculation of men's power on the public level makes 
the gender power-dynamics on the private level even less one-dimensional. 
The men's public disempowerment makes them privately powerless more than 
ever before. The distribution of power on the private-everyday level - has lost 
its traditional dichotomic character because men's power structure in every-
day life has deteriorated and almost all means of their private power over 
women has dissolved except for the dominant ideological discourse. How-
ever, the increased incidence of men being violent to women is, of course, an 
alarming sign of how men are coping, or failing to cope, with this sudden and 
obviously unwanted gender egalitarianism. This gender egalitarian solidarity 
is, in fact, the result of one other equality - the equality of living under des-
potic powerlessness. 
So, if we are to compare the same women's "escape into privacy," a phe-
nomenon visible in all other previous communist countries, I would not say 
that in the case of Serbia their "escape" was an escape at all, or nostalgia for 
simple private rewards after the socialist public overburdening. The case for 
women in Serbia is different. In the period of extreme existential insecurity 
they were offered only one choice: the traditional women's strengtheningstrat-
egy by complying with the deepest, most "natural" patriarchal expectations of 
women - their self-identification with a re-traditionalised, basic patriarchal 
power structure. As so many times before, women took what was pathetically 
offered to them - to "save the nation" by making their "own" family survive. 
The private empowerment of women in this process is, in itself, an extremely 
costly achievement, and what is more - it actually helped the despotic nation-
alist political system that caused and provoked the very crisis they tried to 
struggle with, to survive. 
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Media Production of Reality in Serbia and The Chosen Discourses of 
Appropriation: The Integrating Power of Fascism 
Terror and repression in Serbia have been carefully planned, but they 
have never been systematically applied except to the media; this has left social 
areas in which one has simply not been noticed as a serious opponent of the 
regime. The wars in former Yugoslavia were being planned long before the 
first TV pictures were first broadcast in June 1991. Those pictures showed the 
realisation of a hegemonistic Serb policy articulated in the mid-eighties; it 
was obvious that the 'Yugoslav People's Army" would take the side of Milosevic's 
genocidal ideology. War had been presented to the people of Serbia as "the 
only option" already in 1989, when Milosevic went off to Gazimestan and 
there renewed the Kosovo myth and announced "possible war" before a mil-
lion Serb men and women. Like Hitler at a rally of SS units, Milosevic de-
scended from the heavens (sceptics would say landed in a helicopter) onto the 
holy ground of Gazimestan, in order to inform us that the time had come for 
new heroic battles - i.e., war. 
That was a period of popular fascination with Milosevic, he became a 
mega-phenomenon, his pictures everywhere, people familiarised his image 
with the new Serb Icon. The people - the inhabitants, not necessarily Serbs -
of Serbia indeed went through a phase of absolute fascination with the Leader 
"Slobo," and made possible the Fascist homogenisation of the collective. Ev-
eryone submitted to it: men and women, old and young, educated and un-
educated. Women would repeat; "he is so beautiful." Why did the majority of 
Serbian women side with Milosevic? It is because they too embraced a schizo-
phrenic role, an absolute separation of their private and public identities. 
They wished to be "mothers of great warriors," they wished to sacrifice them-
selves. In patriarchal societies they cannot imagine themselves outside this 
role of being a victim. Also, many prominent "democratic" personas from the 
opposition, have indeed gradually internalised some of the elements of fas-
cism: the "Serb holy nature" of certain territories, the heroic Kosovo past, the 
holy objects of the Church, or the attitude of surprise regarding "why NATO 
is suddenly bombing us for no reason at all." In other words, during the past 
few years also the independent circles have lapsed into the Serbo-centric nar-
cissistic rhetoric they have learnt f rom the "infallible" regime. 
The re-invention of Serb patriarchal society was, therefore, developed at 
epic, political, literary, scientific, sentimental, Christian and pagan levels -
people really believed that "with Slobo" they would finally reach a Serbian 
mythic all-embracing unity. What united the people was not so much a mythi-
cal vision of the future Serb Heaven, but a substitute for more reasonable 
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instruments to help people confront the great issue of fear that began after 
1989. That was almost perfect political instrumentalisaton with basic Fears: of 
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yugoslavia's break-up and the "void" heralded by the 
collapse of the hegemonistic Yugoslav nation. Milosevic exploited this to the 
full. He sent a message to the men that they were to fight "heroically" for the 
preservation of Yugoslavia, while to the women the message was to shut up. 
Fascisation of Social Memory, Collective Trauma and The Exclusion of Otherness 
As an instrument of constructing pre-war eruptive emotions that would 
finally lead to the psychological fascisation of people's minds, much effort 
was expended to evoke and revive the Serbian World War II trauma of 1941-
45. Much was also done also to revive the Orthodox faith among the popula-
tion of Serbia, but the symbolic identification with World War II was probably 
the most effective method of homogenisation: by providing a continuous vi-
sual presentation on TV every day - for instance of the exhumation of mass 
graves in Herzegovina. The intention was to use the media so that people 
would once again internalise the traumas of Ustasha crimes. The exhumation 
of the bones was in reality a way of preparing the ground for the new mass 
graves that were dug after 1991. Propaganda was created proclaiming that 
"the Serbs are the biggest victims," who therefore have the "right" of revenge 
and the "right" to wage new wars and commit crimes. Karadzic, for example, 
stated that "Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina have the right to preventive defence." 
In other words, he amnestied in advance the crimes that were to come, by 
exploiting the traumas associated with the unearthed bones from 1941. 
So there was a particular peregrination of the trauma (Papic, 2000) just as 
there was a shift in time of national identity - back into the past - and a shift 
of responsibility for war crimes exclusively to the Croat Ustasha side, while 
Serb Chetnik crimes were methodically set aside. Reality was divided schizo-
phrenically into a virtual reality of the media and the ordinary reality of the 
war, with the media reality for many people becoming far stronger than any-
thing they saw with their own eyes. This is all part of a re-invention of the chosen 
trauma at the level of the public political phenomenon and through the state 
media: a carefully planned revision of the historical balance sheet. The media 
did a great j ob of preparing people to accept war as a "natural," "historic," 
etc. series of events. The media did consistently forge the Serbs' indifference 
towards the Other(s), the trauma became so internalised that Croatian and 
Bosnian victims could never reach the sacred status of the allegedly "prime-
val," "greatest," Serbian, victims of 1941-42. 
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One could perhaps describe this even as a fictionalisation of the chosen 
trauma. Moreover, it was not only a fictionalisation of trauma, but also, at the 
same time, a displacement of the trauma - in time and in space. This was a very 
sophisticated transfer of the local Bosnian-Herzegovinian drama way back 
from 1941-42 to across the river Drina, to the population in Serbia which had 
never experienced that trauma, and who were supposed to go through "reliving" 
it, in 1991. 
Layers of Responsibility: Bones and Relics 
Another aspect, the common post-1989 revival of Orthodox Christianity, 
is also closely connected with these processes. The Serbian Orthodox Church 
once again started to teach people how to become "good" Serb men or women, 
for example with long Orthodox ritual processions around Serbia carrying 
the holy relics of Tsar Lazar, who died in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. For 
months these relics travelled across and all over Serbia, they were ceremoni-
ally carried from - and thus clearly fusing - the year 1389 to the year 1989. So, 
here we do not have only fictionalisation and displacement of trauma, but a 
much greater political tool: the compression/decompression of time - time fusion 
and confusion. The relics "confirmed" that to be a Serb is in fact a vocation, an 
invitation to become a victim, since Serbs are in fact a "heavenly people." 
What was repeatedly written in the print media or shown on TV referred to a 
narrative model of a "lack of understanding for the injustices committed 
against the Serbs;" hence, in parallel, to the "Serb right" to refuse to live in 
peace with other nations who "for centuries" have behaved in an evil way 
towards them. 
So, to conclude briefly, all these years we went through a whole set of prepa-
rations for war: verbal and visual, emotional and cognitive, mental (or even 
mysdcal) and public, horizontal and vertical, time and timelessness, spatial and 
a-spatial - all these aspects were actively included in the overall fascisation of 
public and private life in Serbia. The war actually arrived late: the indifference to 
and "tolerance" of future genocide in people's minds were psychologically ready 
for activation as early as 1989. It was already accepted that even some "less good 
Serbs" would also be sacrificed: those who do not fully belong to Greater Serbia. 
Those were the days and years of a specific phenomenon in Serbia, seemingly 
naive or rational, which I am freely labelling as Turbo-Fascism. 
It is, of course, known that Fascism is a historical term; that the history of 
Nazi Germany is not the same as that of Milosevic's Serbia. However, in post-
modernist and feminist theory we speak of "shifting concepts," when a new 
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epoch inherits with some additions concepts belonging to an earlier one, 
like, for instance the feminist notion of shifting patriarchy. In my view we should 
not fear the use of "big terms" if they accurately describe certain political reali-
ties. Serbian Fascism had its own concentration camps, its own systematic rep-
resentation of violence against Others, its own cult of the family and cult of 
the leader, an explicitly patriarchal structure, a culture of indifference to-
wards the exclusion of the Other, a closure of society upon itself and upon its 
own past; it had a taboo on empathy and a taboo on multiculturalism; it had 
powerful media acting as proponents of genocide; it had a nationalist ideol-
ogy; it had an epic mentality of listening to the word and obeying authority. 
The prefix "turbo" refers to the specific mixture of politics, culture, "men-
tal powers" and the pauperisation of life in Serbia: the mixture of rural and 
urban, pre-modern and post-modern, pop culture and heroines, real and vir-
tual, mystical and "normal," etc. In this term, despite its naive or innocent 
appearances, there is still fascism in its proper sense. Like all fascisms, Turbo-
Fascism includes and celebrates a pejorative renaming, alienation, and finally 
removal, of the Other: Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians. Turbo-fascism in fact 
demands and basically relies on this culture of the normality of fascism that had 
been structurally constituted well before all the killings in the wars started. 
Here is an example: Serbia introduced an economic ban on Slovene 
goods, i.e., - on all objects symbolising the Slovene as the Other with whom 
Serbs had had contact! The integrative force of fascism is here evident: the 
order from above and through "populist sentiments" in the media, people 
were not to consume Slovene milk, any more. This strategy discouraged people 
from buying an object because it would mean they "love" a subject - Slovenes. 
In this way the strategy was very successful: Slovenes were transferred from co-
citizens or a compatriot position to a symbolic position of the "milk" which 
must not be touched. This process of objectifying and excluding the Other via 
an object that symbolises the whole ethnic group, quickly becomes part of the 
"common values," under the Law of Common Sense. That is how people in 
Serbia (long before June 1991, when the war started) were taught to hate the 
"Slovene Body." Without that politically constructed aversion towards the body 
of the Other, until the Body of the Other becomes an Abject Body - the massa-
cres and murders of so many Croatians, Bosnians and Albanian bodies would 
not have been possible. 
On the other hand this spatial transfer of trauma played a significant part. 
Briefly put, the Drina River, which divides Serbia from all other western parts 
of ex-Yugoslavia, namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, played an enormous sym-
bolic role in dividing the two realities: war and destruction stopped just at the 
west side of the Drina River. That reality never entered Serbia in its full mon-
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strosity, and so the Drina River became a symbolic border beyond which em-
pathy no longer existed. The Serbs of Serbia had no feeling of responsibility 
for anything that occurred on the far, west side of the Drina, since the people 
over there symbolically were no longer human beings - they were abjected-
objectivised enemies. That makes the Serb crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina the 
last result of a destroyed reason, a destruction of all reason: it is not just a 
repetition but a reinforcement, and continuation of the Fascist crimes of the 
past Second World War. It is, in my view, a very malignant continuation of the 
"reawakening of old ghosts," who are now no longer ghosts, but new victims, 
live people suffering, and it will go into the following generations. 
Paradoxically or not, from the late eighties this normality of evil against 
the Other belonged to the normal everyday life in Serbia. The above mentioned 
processes and changes were necessary in order for it to become so. This was 
the result of a sophisticated policy of collective amnesia that made individual 
consciences feel "free" to be suspended by a collective Super-Ego. In these 
processes of issuing, "licenses to kill" were systematically issued by the state 
TV, private and commercial TV programs, it was the dominant form of politi-
cal discourse, and an open message from the "holy messages of the Serbian 
Orthodox Church." These Serbian institutions and individuals did construct 
during eighties some kind of super-conscience that permitted oblivion and the 
suspension of empathy, memory and tolerance toward the Other. We are still 
far away from any understanding that there exists a whole range of layers of 
responsibility for the crimes committed: for example, responsibility for remain-
ing silent, for forgetting, for hatred and for media propaganda. The respon-
sibility for remaining silent is the most complicated, since silence includes 
agreement, but also awareness of repression - and even a shadow of doubt. 
Male And Female Bodies And Their Representation In Serbia During The 1990s 
First of all, the male body underwent a deconstruction of the peaceable 
and relatively urbanised identity that it had achieved under socialism. Sec-
ondly, the male under Tito's regime always inhabited the border between 
rural and urban: he lived in the village and worked in the factory. He was a 
sufficiently hybrid creature to retain many epic and pagan elements that would 
later be transformed into the masculine ideal of the warrior under Milosevic's 
regime. Milosevic very carefully constructed the "Serb hero" and all male fan-
tasies-he permitted the highest heroism in words, particularly in his own words 
- in fact, the Milosevic as the greatest national Leader did not necessarily 
have to do much in reality. His powerful image and existence were sufficient. 
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Also Dobrica Cosic, writer and "Father of the Nation," did a serious job of 
articulating the "Serbian Soul;" he had only "given the word" and through his 
words the genocidal fantasies of the collective were fulfilled. Once again, schizo-
phrenically, the "heroes" were civilians who only delivered messages of war -
they did not cut throats or murder, but gave the orders for those things to be 
done. All males in Serbia were subject to a media brainwashing in the course of 
which they had to identify with the Leader: i.e. , the male population was gripped 
even more strongly by fascination with the Leader than was the female. 
Milosevic's war regime was designed for patriarchal males, for whom, as 
in every patriarchal society, only males are subjects: women are objects (orna-
ments or trophies). Vera Erlich's fundamental anthropological study of the 
pre-Second World War patriarchal family system in the Balkans - of the Dinaric 
patriarchal zadruga society - in which, for example, the eldest female has the 
ritual duty to kiss and wash the feet of the youngest male. Moreover, there are 
obscure signs of the homoerotic sides of Milosevic's regime. I recall the im-
age conveyed on television at the start of the 1990s, when the Leader went to 
visit Kosovo. In the first village he visited we saw this ritual: the oldest villager 
stepped forward from a line of ceremoniously assembled most important men 
- i.e., the symbolic wise man who traditionally embodies the (male) authority 
of the whole community - in order to kiss Milosevic's hand. This is not only 
homoerotic but also infantile, since the whole community is submitting sym-
bolically to "paternal authority." We are dealing here once again with the 
avoidance of all individual responsibility: the "father of the nation" is respon-
sible; we "little children" did not know what we were doing, we just obeyed 
"Daddy." Male identification with the Great Leader also opens a space for 
molesting women: what matters is what the males from the local tavern think; 
women are not important all. But there is a paradox: the Serb warriors are so 
humbly obedient to Big Father Milosevic, that they in fact accept the female 
role as defined by classic patriarchal societies: they are passive, they have no 
right to speak, they fear the Father's anger, they submit to his desires. The 
warriors-volunteers de facto played the role of the frustrated patriarchal wives 
of their ideological leaders. 
The Body of the Warrior 
We are talking here mainly about the poorer strata, lumpen-proletariat 
or rural poor, which gave birth to Bokan and Arkan as well as many members 
of The (Serbmn) Eagles. These were the only ones who really did set off over 
the Drina to "defend Serbdom," while the great majority, which will never be 
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accused of the crimes committed, sat at home and enjoyed Arkan's Travels 
and the "Balkan Cinema." A special layer of sadists went off to terrorise, loot 
and murder, but only at weekends - as a kind of "short break." Others joined 
various paramilitary units and so became part of the "great body of the Army." 
The body that killed, therefore, was that which fully merged into the collectivity, 
that which fully gave up its individuality. Its "reward" was that the violence it 
wreaked led to local public affirmation. One should not forget the role of the 
mystifying Orthodoxy and Russophilia that provided the warriors with "mis-
sions" - which, in other words, sanctified the body that killed. In contrast to 
the government that did not dare to legalise the "heroism" of its killers, the 
Church rewarded them with symbolic capital. 
The only "heroes" the state legitimised were politicians or intellectuals in 
their political service. Arkan's men and other such death-squad volunteers 
until recendy received no money or privileges from the state: in legal terms 
they were "outsiders," invisible as a social group. Yet, through another schizo-
phrenic splitting, they were the centre of the Greater-Serbia phantasm - the 
story telling! That is why many people in Serbia could inventjustifications in 
the form of "We did not" take part in the war: not only because there has 
been no official recognition of the "services" of the ethnic cleansers, but also 
the warriors, local heroes and killers were few in number compared to the 
majority of Serbs, who watched and supported the war from their armchairs. 
The Female Body under the Ruins of Milosevic Nationalist Reign 
The journey into the past did not avoid the female body either. It had to 
suffer the return to tradition and the deeper patriarchal glorification of the 
Serb warrior "mentality" and the male body. Women remained silent and 
censored themselves so that they would not be subjected to violence. Silence 
became a universal norm: sons and fathers remained silent before their daugh-
ters, brothers before their sisters, women before other women. The sediment 
of the socialist emancipation of women once again worked in Milosevic's favour: 
his wife Mira Markovic - at least in the beginning - exploited her image as a 
sociologist and emancipated woman. The rights of women in Serbia were 
thus suspended without their noticing. In any case, they were far too con-
cerned with inflation and elementary survival. When all other social institu-
tions in the system fell apart, when there were no more child benefits, when 
men lost their jobs en masse or were mobilised, the whole burden fell on the 
family and on the women. Women queued, secured food (kinfolk from the 
village played a crucial role here), cooked, looked after children and the eld-
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EUROPE AFTER 1 9 8 9 : E T H N I C W A R S , FASCISATION OF SOCIAL LIFE AND THE BODY POLITICS . . . 
erly, and may have also worked in the grey economy. Within the family, but 
only in that private zone, women became stronger than ever - i.e., they took on 
the Big Mother role. 
What has happened with sexuality ? 
Sexuality existed only in Serb "neo-folk" music, where it was/is greatly 
magnified. Examples of the allegedly "Happy" Serbian Woman's Body, a plump 
body acting out permanent submission and joy over its sexual accessibility, are 
furnished by a whole series of so-called "turbo-folk queens" (singers). They play 
a mixture of Serb and oriental melodies, at first in oriental and rural settings, 
with belly-dancer movements (later on they would travel and be displaced exclu-
sively into urban settings (but not having left behind the belly dancer's aura). 
This mixture of traditional folk music, oriental influences and female singers 
"giving themselves willingly" did not have the objective to just arouse tavern 
emotions and relax the clientele, but precisely to inflame and re-affirm pro-
Fascist emotions - sending a clear sexual message that, in fact, life is beautiful, 
like the music that these Serbian women sang. Moreover, that "our women" 
are undoubtedly the most beautiful women in the whole world and that sex is 
great and functioning despite these difficult times in Serbia. 
The singers were, in a way, the Representation of the Chosen Over-Sexualized 
Serbian Women (exclusively Serbs, or they would hide their different ethnic 
origin), who alone have the right to invite and excite Serbian Men through 
music - to the Fantasy of Sexuality. They are there to "comfort" men in a 
difficult time, even the rapists, in the sense of showing them they are still 
potent. Violence is wreaked solely upon the bodies of women of oi/ierethnicities. 
Serb women were not raped "systematically." In the national propaganda they 
are presented as Mothers and Sisters - so they are raped only sporadically, 
secretly and at home. 
There is a hierarchy in Serb violence against women. The greatest is vio-
lence against Albanian women, which is not even recorded, since they have 
no rights whatsoever - they are "things" (the whole of Serb war fascism was 
trained in the apartheid system that Milosevic's Serbs introduced against the 
Albanian ethnos during the 1980s). Violence against Croat and Muslim women 
is a matter of a warrior's "prestige" and "positive" self-affirmation. Violence 
against Serb women is usually presented as an "excess" or otherwise hidden. 
Concerning the over-sexualization of the female pop-singers' bodies, I should 
state that the very fact of the empty space left on the Serbian folk scene by the 
disappearance of non-Serb singers also represented a kind of free licence for 
203 
ZARANA PAPIC 
violence against the bodies of those who were "not there," those eliminated 
Others. 
It is important to point out that the greatest symbolic and material poli-
tics of the destruction of the Body of the Other was carried out much earlier-
at the end of the 1980s in the south of the former Yugoslavia, with the suspen-
sion of Kosovo's autonomous' rights; while the real war violence began at the 
start of the 1990s in the north, in Slovenia. As in all schizophrenias, reality 
took time to reach the centre of its virtual obsession: chronologically speak-
ing, Kosovo was the last to be engulfed by war and Greater-Serbian occupa-
tion, which precisely bases itself upon the Kosovo myth. 
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Eisenstein, Zillah (1996) Hatreds: Sexualised and Racialized Conflicts in 21st Cen-
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York: Routledge 
Enloe, Cynthia (1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold 
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204