In just a few days there were two murders of women in the centers for social work in Belgrade. There was usually a debate about who was responsible, why it was happening and what actually caused the death of women in the middle of a bright day in the capital of this country. Everything could be heard: that the killer was a returnee from the war, that there were some ties to the political leaders, that poverty was a justifiable reason for the "micro-violence" within four walls of our homes, that some women choose poorly, so to say they kind of like the bullies. The bottom lines of these stories portraying in the media and on social networks in the old-fashioned manner "from gossip to truth" are two dead women, one dead child, three children who were left without both parents. Recently, we could have heard in the echoes, that the education of children about gender-based violence had been superfluous, because all of our families, just as our own, were normal. Maybe we should have to asking ourselves, again. And then again, and again. Because families and individuals who make them do not live outside of society, on the contrary, they are fundamentally shaped by it.
There are many words spoken about femicide. Although this is still the right topic, I will look at something else that is deeply intertwined with this act that feeds black chronicles, while on parallel pages it is discussed about the white plague and the spoiled Serbs who are reluctant to give birth. Namely, it is about the omnipresent violence that permeates our lives and forms our view of the world, our feelings, our everyday behavior in city transport, on railway stations, in waiting rooms, in schools and in maternity wards. Everywhere.
The first form of violence that we must talk about is the
war violence. Serbia took part in a war of furious proportions. Many men who still live in this country were in the police, military, and paramilitary units - because they wanted, or because they had to, they killed, they were present at killing, torture, rape, robbery. Upon returning to Serbia, a country that "was never at war", except formally during the Bombing in 1999 (NATO terrorist aggression on F.R. Yugoslavia, rem. LGN), they themselves did not publicly exist as people who survived the war. However, the fact that the laws of this country were not respected that fact, was it was unanimously accepted by the public of the country to hide this the most publicly known secret, that the failed "revolution" on October the 5th produced a social consensus that the wars had ended, as if they had never been - this fact does not diminish the presence of violence that fractionally flows through the lives of those who has done it and those who were close to it, then or much later. PTSD is here, and the trauma has never been even admitted, nor recognized.
The other form of violence we live is the
violence of growing structural imbalances. This was the country in which the generations grew and lived in the spirit of equality and promised prosperity. Today, this is a country where the split between the relatively poor and extremely poor narrows day in, day out, while the gap between this vast group and the group of extremely rich becomes an insurmountable canyon. Serbia has become a country where someone can jump to Cuba, and someone does not have 300 dinars to go from the village to nearby town to pick up a pension. Serbia has become a country in which hospital aid, treatment at birth, and schooling depend on the amount of allocated money. Of course, that does not mean that there are still no honorable and honest people of a good heart. However, structural inequality, a legally justified right of a stronger and precise definition to whom that right belong, affects our emotions, our honesty, our perceptions of what is permissible, desirable and possible.
The third form of violence, intertwined with the preceding two, is
the violence of illusion, the violence against common sense. We are constantly hearing that it has never been better for us, that the institutions have never worked like nowadays, that the world has never been more in our favor, that "European values" have never been adopted so much, as today. What we are hearing, what is being said to us has never been in a bigger discrepancy with what we see, what we are experiencing. The common sense turns around as a glove: workers are blamed that strike because they are starving, because it creates a bad illusion for magical investors; Women are guilty because they erroneously chose, despite the fact that the laws we have are as a charm, as well as institutions that put them to work; Guilty are those who were left without life, real or symbolic, who were put into mass graves, they somehow found themselves there.
Serbia is a country where the violence does not stop growing. Panic keys are definitely a good solution, as they may succeed in preventing duplication of new loss of life. However, the problems that this society faces, the problems that appears on a daily basis are so wide, deep and encompassing that no giant panic key would suffice.
Any political power in this country will have to tackle the thick trolls of a long-standing state of emergency that structures us as criminals - melancholic, unequal and devoid of common sense. [
Updated: July 14, 2017 | Translated by LG]
