[In the following interview, Drakulic discusses the political situation in the former Yugoslavia and possible solutions to the conflicts in the region.]

[Phillips]: I'm William Phillips, Editor of Partisan Review. We're glad to have with us tonight Slavenka Drakulic, one of the famous “five witches,” the group of Croatian women writers recently denounced in a nationalist Croatian weekly for their dissident views. I want to introduce Edith Kurzweil, Executive Editor of Partisan Review, who will moderate the discussion and the questions after the talk.

[Kurzweil]: Many of you met Slavenka last year at our conference in Newark [“Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” Partisan Review Fall 1992] and afterwards here in New York. In the meantime she has written yet another wonderful book, called The Balkan Express.

[Drakulic]: I'm very happy to be here with you. I arrived just two days ago from Zagreb. As you know, there is a war only in some parts of Croatia, such as Dalmatia to the south, so I'm not exactly coming from the war zone, but I'm close enough; Zagreb is only about thirty miles from the war zone. I have chosen to tell you a story tonight which has to do with responsibility, one of the things we should talk more about. This story, the last one in Balkan Express, is called “High-heeled Shoes.” It is a very personal and painful experience about how I myself became an accomplice of the war. You know, it's not enough to see only what's happening to other people; at some point I realized I had to look into the mirror and see what had happened to me and see how much I have been changed by what has been going on around me. I believe that if we look away from the war, believing it is only the politicians and the military power and the nations or the states who are responsible for it, then we are delegating our citizens' human and personal responsibility. It is this refusal to become engaged on an individual level that has allowed the war to go on. I think that each of us has to look into the mirror.

This story is about a friend of mine, a journalist, who left Sarajevo a year ago. When it was still possible to leave Sarajevo by normal means of transportation, she came to Zagreb with only a suitcase and her six-year-old daughter, And she brought clothes only for her daughter because she had planned to leave her with friends and go back herself to Sarajevo in a week. While in Zagreb, she saw on television footage showing that her house had been burned down; she couldn't go back there, because there was no longer a place to go back to. She asked for our help, and because she was a long-time friend everyone helped get her an apartment, gave her some money, assist with the child, get her clothes. One day she came to my house, because my daughter was to give her some clothes, and among the things she gave her were a pair of high-heeled shoes, black patent leather shoes that ladies wear to parties, very fashionable shoes. The moment I saw my daughter give her the high-heeled shoes, I said to her, “Why did you give her high-heeled shoes? She doesn't need them, she's a refugee.” My daughter's reaction was very strong. She said, “Mother, just because she's a refugee doesn't mean that she needs to go out barefoot. She needs somehow to confirm her identity, and this is a good thing, to give her high-heeled shoes.” Of course I became puzzled by my own reaction, and started to think about it, and this is where my, what shall I call it, vivisection began. I think that it has much to do with the projection of this war, with the media, with the prejudices, with the symbolic level of the war, and perhaps with what I call the image of this war. Of course all of you have seen these photos and images on television, all these peasants' faces, people poorly dressed, especially refugees, and women covered with scars, their peasant faces, their hands, the way they dress.

Here I will digress from the story and show you several photos, so that you can understand better what I am talking about when I say “the image of this war.” Some of the photos are quite shocking, but I think that by now we all have become immune to them. This is precisely the problem I would like to address. The first photo is from a magazine cover page that was printed last year. The war in Croatia was more or less over, and the war in Bosnia already well on its way. It is a picture that somehow escaped my attention then, but later on I wrote another story entitled “Three Little Hens,” based on it. It's a picture of a dead man who is lying on the floor: his skull is open and there are three hens picking at his brain. This is a pretty dramatic photo, but we have seen even more dramatic ones, especially on television.

The second one appeared just a couple of weeks ago all over the world press. This is a blown-up picture of a woman who is hugging a skull. This third picture too is very meaningful for me. It's a cover of a slick, cultural, very highbrow magazine, which devoted a whole issue to the Balkans. One the cover they put a plain picture of two men and one woman. The woman has a dramatic expression of pain on her face, but you can't say which nationality any of them are or where it was taken. Are they Kurds, are they Serbs, are they Azerbaijanis? You can say only that they are peasants. Now you wonder why, after two years of war, the editors decided to put this picture on the cover of the Balkan issue. It's not depicting any kind of trauma, it's not of someone being beheaded or any such thing. It's just very revealing: it is how the world sees “the Balkans.” The message is, “It is the peasants who are doing all this, you know.” The problem is that since the very beginning, these kinds of pictures took over. The pictures clearly suggest cruelty, atrocities, savages, tribes, peasants, centuries-old hatreds; particular, complicated, strange. When I saw this cover page I said, “But this is not me, I don't belong to this, I don't identify with these people. I am urban, I have been living in a city all my life, I don't have anything to do with the peasants. Some other picture represents us, which other people, the people from the West, could identify with.”

The photo in fact reinforces the underlying gap which has widened in spite of the Berlin Wall going down, in spite of Communism collapsing: East-West, developed-underdeveloped, city dwellers-peasants, civilization-savages. Of course the first reaction to these dramatic images a year ago, of concentration camps and dead bodies, was shock. This is one of the wars that has been covered the most-by the media; everything has happened in front of the television cameras. We have seen it all—every single atrocity. Saturation set in and became estrangement. For the West, it became less and less possible to find points of identification. Who are these savage and cruel people? What do they have in common with us? What do we have in common with them, when they are so obviously different? On the symbolic level, it was difficult to remove the barrier of “otherness.” We, the civilized ones, can't understand what is going on there. Why all that killing? I think that all the pain and the suffering is somehow overshadowed by the images of cruelty and primitivism, sending a strong message and forming prejudices on the other side of the still-existing Berlin Wall. I'm purposely not talking about politics here, but rather about how political decisions were supported by the created images of the war, and by the problems of identification.

If we see the fighting nations are “different” and “special” and “violent,” qualities which we very often would like to attribute for example to the Serbs, saying that they are genocidally evil—in other words, “different”—then the consequence is that no one is responsible for what is happening and for stopping the killings. Because if it is somehow built into this nation, then how could you possibly be expected to do anything about that? In short, the construction of the “otherness” is helping to create the indifference, the tolerance of massacres, ethnic cleansing, the repetition of history. By now, we should have learned one lesson about this war. It has the power to change the destiny of the Continent. Not because it could explode out of the borders of ex-Yugoslavia, but because the rules and principles for dealing with similar situations in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR are being set right there and right now, and if we don't understand this, we don't understand anything about the ongoing war in the Balkans. No one can wash his hands of this war, no one can claim, “I don't know.” There is no excuse for a single European state or nation, or even one person, to do nothing, to in fact become an accomplice to this war, and to the uncertain destabilized future of Europe.

Now let me go back to the story “High-heeled Shoes.” As I said, I was quite puzzled by my own reaction, and then I started to think. I concluded that I somehow subconsciously and automatically put my friend into another category, into the category of “refugees.” And I rejected my own responsibility. I delegated my own responsibility for a human being, for a friend of mine. I put her in an abstract category, and I delegated this responsibility to the Red Cross, to the State, to the Church, to the military; in other words, to the institutions. And in that way I think I betrayed my own friend. And what I recognized in myself is the process of creating “otherness,” and I was very much frightened by it. I will read you the end of the story, because it's very difficult for me to tell you:

Perhaps what I am also witnessing is a mechanism of self-defence as if there were a limit to how much brutality, pain or suffering one is able to take on board and feel responsible for. Over and above this, we are often confronted with more or less abstract entities, numbers, groups, categories of people, facts—but not names, not faces. To deal with pain on such a scale is in a way much easier than to deal with individuals. With a person you know you have to do something, act, give food, shelter, money, take care. On the other hand, one person could certainly not be expected to take care of a whole mass of people. For them, there has to be someone else: the state, Church, the Red Cross, Caritas, an institution. The moment one delegates personal responsibility to the institution, the war becomes more normal, orderly, and therefore more bearable. The person not only relieves himself or herself of responsibility, but also of a feeling of guilt too; the problem is still there, but it is no longer mine. Yes, of course I'll pay the extra war-tax, I'll gladly give away clothing or food to Caritas or any responsible organization, instead of to the suspicious-looking individuals ringing the doorbell claiming that they are refugees. Because what if they are not real refugees—your help might get into the “wrong” hands and you'll never earn that place in heaven that you'd promised yourself at the outset. The moment I thought Drazena ought not wear make-up or patent high-heeled shoes was the very moment when I myself put her into the group “refugee,” because it was easier for me. But the fact that she didn't fit the cliché, that she disappointed me by trying to keep her face together with her make-up and her life together with a pair of shoes, made me aware of my own collaboration with this war.

Now I think I understand what I couldn't understand before: how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn't do anything, didn't help. In Claude Lanzmann's long documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, there is a dialogue with one of the survivors from Chelmno, the place in Poland where Jews were first exterminated by gas, 400,000 of them.

“It was always this peaceful here. Always. Even when they were burning 2000 people—Jews—every day, it was just as peaceful. No one protested. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now,” he said. …

I don't think our responsibility is the same—and I am not trying to equate the victims with those who murdered them in cold blood—all I'm saying is that it exists, this complicity: that out of opportunism and fear we are all becoming collaborators or accomplices in the perpetuation of war. For by closing our eyes, by continuing our shopping, by working our land, by pretending that nothing is happening, by thinking it is not our problem, we are betraying those “others”—and I don't know if there is a way out of it. What we fail to realize is that by such divisions we deceive ourselves too, exposing ourselves to the same possibility of becoming the “others” in a different situation.

The last time I saw Drazena she told me she was okay. She's staying in a friend's apartment until the autumn and freelancing for a local newspaper. Afterwards she will manage to find something else. She also told me that she is writing a war diary since that is the only way she can attempt to understand what is happening to her. “And what I find the most difficult to comprehend is the fact that there is a war going on,” she said. “I still don't understand it. It's not that I expect a miracle to end this nightmare immediately. No, no. I mean, it is just hard for me to grasp that what is going on is the war. Do you know what a war is?” she asked, but I could tell from her look that she didn't really expect an answer.

… We are the war; we carry in us the possibility of the mortal illness that is slowly reducing us to what we never thought possible and I am afraid there is no one else to blame. We all make it possible, we allow it to happen. Our defense is weak, as is our consciousness of it. There are no them and us, there are no grand categories, abstract numbers, black and white truths, simple facts. There is only us—and, yes, we are responsible for each other.

And I also wanted to tell Drazena that she should go out and dance in her high-heeled shoes, if only she could.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Slavenka. Who would like to start asking questions?

[Deborah Solomon]: An obvious question is, what do you think the United States should do about the situation?

[Drakulic]: The question is not so obvious. I'm not a politician, I'm a writer. But there are no simple answers. I can give you only my personal opinion. I think the United States shouldn't do anything on its own. If there is anything to be done, it should be done together with Europe. And both Europe and the United States are too reluctant to do anything. Forgive me for saying so, but I think wherever the United States has gone with force, there hasn't been a very brilliant outcome. So I'm very much afraid of intervening by bombing. A month ago, there were big talks about going in with planes and just bombing targets. Of course, I'm not an expert, but I think it is more important to set rules for the future, because obviously Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, the ex-Federation, with the new states emerging, and nationalism, and the war, may be the first place where this is happening, but it might not be the last one. So I think, if Europe, or the world for that matter, including the United States, doesn't set up very firm rules, the chaos will persist and recur. Europe and the United States should be asking questions like, should we allow changes of national borders? This is a big question. And how do we proceed? Do we proceed with force, or with some other measure? Are other measures, like sanctions, enough? What other kinds of pressures could be used? I think you can't make exemptions. You can't say, “Yes, now for this country, well, let's change the borders; let's divide Bosnia and Herzegovina among Croatia and Serbia, and give the Muslims some little enclave.” What are you going to do then in the ex-USSR? They have nuclear arms, so maybe you are going to treat them differently, I don't know. I'm very pessimistic about the future of Europe. I would like to see a more consistent and more articulate politics towards the whole problem than just bombing, because after bombing, then what?

[Philip Gourevitch]: My question has to do with your idea about the image of the war and the image of peasants and refugees and something that is “other,” because I suspect that a lot of the media has traditionally conceptualized the image of the oppressed as the image of a peasant, and the image of the refugee looks a certain way. In contrast, if you see the image of someone dressed like you or like me, you think, “They're not doing so badly.” Or you think of them the same way as you do in this country of rich people getting sent to jail, or in some way suffering or losing their homes: there is a certain public satisfaction in those images. And so I'm curious how you would suggest that one could effectively project the image of a suffering affluent person, a suffering familiar-looking person.

The problem is that the overaccumulation of these images of “otherness” creates the effect of their being ignored, because you cannot identify with these people, their appearance, their problems. I have written a book where you can find points of identification with the Western world, so the people from the West could see that “this could happen to us.” Out of four and a half million people in Croatia, four million didn't experience war directly. They haven't been bombed. Their children haven't been killed. Somehow the whole region of the Balkans has been cut off. And it was a clear message that it doesn't belong to Europe. The reaction to my book showed that people can identify much more easily when you show them that you are the same as they are, that there is no difference. And in that way you can somehow claim some responsibility, because if there is no understanding there can't be any responsibility. I'm not saying that the majority of the people there are not peasants. Of course the peasants are the ones who have been resettled and moved, who are the refugees. I'm describing the effect of this kind of journalism, though I'm not blaming journalists individually: we have to remember that forty of them have been killed in this war.

[Kurzweil]: I'd just like to add one point. I think that your question itself points to the problem of being presented with images. The presenters, it seems, know a great deal more than what they show us; that adds to the construction of otherness Slavenka talks about. For us, it's at yet another remove.

[Gourevitch]: Remember that extraordinary image of the man who played the cello every day in Sarejevo? It was certainly a European image, I would say. And in terms of stirring a sense of responsibility in the West, I wonder whether that image really was more effective than the images of atrocity which at the same time make people “other” and also stir a greater sense of outrage. I'm just wondering really, I'm not challenging what you have pointed out.

Okay, but have we seen any results of that outrage? What happened with all this outrage? Last year in August, images of concentration camps were projected for the first time, and nothing happened after that. There was the big story about tens of thousands of raped women, and nothing happened after that. So you have these worse and worse pictures projected; you have worse and worse atrocities committed; and the world is getting used to it. This is what I find so troubling, the phenomenon of getting used to it.

[David Sidorsky]: On the one hand, your objection is to the difference, the otherness that we see as the Balkans as savagery. And you have evoked the metaphor of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, to describe what is going on. On the other hand, you say the war should be treated as if it were not singular; that there should be rules for dealing with it, so that we would know how to deal with similar future happenings in, for instance, the former Soviet Union. But if that's the case you're making, then what strikes one as missing is a defensible political analysis that asserts this is a war of a fairly similar, repeatable sort.

As you say, it will repeat itself in Ossetia, in Azerbaijan, in many places. Namely, if you have a federation, and there is a secession which is disputed, and there are minorities who previously lived under a federation, then there is bound to be some sort of conflict. If Yugoslavia existed and a Serb population ruled, essentially, in Yugoslavia, with a Serb minority in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and there is a secession, then there is some need for some sort of solution on the political level. Croatia as an independent country has a solution; Slovenia had a solution. Bosnia-Herzegovina represents a very distinctive problem, and if one wants similarity, then at some point the political analysis comes; you suggested one part of it and dismissed it, that is to say, that there should be a Bosnian-Muslim autonomy. The Serbian population goes to Serbia, the Croatian population goes to Croatia. This, I understand, since you want rules for the future, is one formula of rules. There are others. There could of course be the insistence on the integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a Muslim majority, and no aggression from Serbia, or from Croatia, where the Croatian population is, if I understand the issue.

My point—this is just a logical point, I'm not an expert on Yugoslavia—is that to stress the otherness, to compare it inappropriately to the Nazi-Jewish experience, where there was no ethnic conflict over a territorial issue at all, is precisely to say this is not similar. The similarity among all such issues has to do with the ethnic breakup of a federation, and this is, of course, exactly what you said about rules for what will happen in Georgia if North Ossetia and the Georgians wish to break up: what are the rules? But looking at the problem in this way, one stresses the political solution, or the political aspects of the problem; which, I gather, because of the demands you make on our sense of responsibility and emotional concern, you are not willing to address.

I don't raise the political solution because I don't know what the ideal political solution is. I'm not a politician myself. I see my task as a writer who asks the questions, not one who gives the answers. If you understood me to say that it would be the best thing to divide Bosnia between Croats and Serbs and give Muslims the enclave, I didn't say that; I mentioned it, but it's not what I favor. I would put Bosnia temporarily under some kind of protectorate.

[Istvan Deak]: In your beautiful reading something disturbs me: your analogy about the situation of the Poles, the Jews, and the Germans. I would see it differently. The Poles, in my opinion, are presented and shown in a very prejudiced way in Claude Lanzmann's documentary film, Shoah. Lanzmann was hunting for examples to show Polish anti-Semitism, and he questioned the least intelligent Polish peasants to prove that the Poles were anti-Semitic. Secondly, the Poles were totally unarmed, except for the resistance movement. The resistance movement itself was hunted down and ended up in concentration camps. The picture is not simply that there were Poles outside and Jews inside, because if the peasant Poles had not worked next to Auschwitz, there would have been Poles and not only Jews inside Auschwitz. There were hundreds of thousands of Poles in Nazi concentration camps who died.

So I would say that the analogy that you make with today's situation perhaps is not quite right, because today's situation is absolutely insane, in that the United States and others could intervene. It's not that the Poles could have sacrificed themselves for the ghetto Jews but chose not to because they would have been killed. What makes the situation so difficult for us to understand and what makes us so exasperated is that it would be very easy for the Western powers to deal with Serbian aggression, and they are not doing it. And when you observe that United States intervention never has a positive outcome, I would say that it depends on what period you are talking about. It ended up quite successfully in World War Two, after it defeated Nazism. So that's why I wish you would either find another analogy, or explain to us why you think the situation is the same as with the Jews in Poland, that is, a world that is indifferent. The world's indifference today is far worse than the indifference of the Polish peasants.

Well, I wasn't especially attacking Polish peasants. I was talking about particular things in Shoah, simply because I think that the metaphor of the Jews is a very good one for every similar situation. It is a very good metaphor now for the Muslims, because they are losing territory and they are virtually exterminated in some parts. There are refugees, and what we'll see next is going to be a wave of Muslim terrorism, all over Europe. I think that the metaphor of Jews works very well for the fact that they have been exterminated people, so that regardless of where it occurred, were they Poles or were they in Croatia—we had the Jews being killed in Croatian concentration camps—the point is that people were standing there and didn't help. We see things happening to others, and we think it doesn't have anything to do with us. This is the essence of that metaphor. It doesn't really matter whether we are speaking about Jews and Poles or about Muslims or any other kind of otherness. Each of us could become a part of that otherness, in another situation. I wouldn't like you to take this so literally. I think there's always a Jew and always a community.

[Dimitri Urnov]: You mentioned the repetition of the past, and we cannot but be concrete in talking about the past, and in taking some lessons out of it. What we have today is certainly an outcome of that remote past which repeats itself, but in what ways?

I agree that part of this war in ex-Yugoslavia comes from the past, and it is somehow as if you had returned to the past, and as if it were a war of the living actually fighting the spirits of the dead of the Second World War. But I would say it is not only that, because I have lived in that country for forty-four years, and I know that we all lived in peace for a very long period of time. I see this war as having begun from the very top, not from the people, because in the ethnically mixed places like Vukovar, for example, we were not aware of any hidden conflicts. I would agree that the war began among the people, if it had in fact started five years ago, little by little, people fighting, and ethnic conflicts growing up to the point where the war started. But what I saw happening is just the opposite. I saw it happening at the very top. I saw the war being constructed, the idea of the war, the concept of the war, at a very high level, and then somehow in a spiral motion thrown down to the ground where it was almost impossible, much later on, to stop it, because when the first houses were burned, and the first people were killed, it was already done. I think it has very much to do with the fact that communism collapsed. You can't expect such a mammoth system, which existed for so many years and within which so many millions of people lived, to go away just like that.

Nationalism arose out of the collapse because as we know, historically, there was feudalism and after that communism, with no time in between for the development of a civil society and of the values of a democratic and liberal society. When, as it is popular to say, “the lid was lifted,” you had two basic things that had always existed there: religion and the nation. And so, when the big system started to break down, people instinctively clung to the things that they knew. And this is one of the very important elements to remember, when you wonder how and why all of this nationalism was resurrected. Then, of course, the governments themselves perpetuated this kind of nationalism in order to stay in power. It was quite clear in the case of Milosevic. And I don't think that we have to have any doubts at this point about who started the war and how was it started in ex-Yugoslavia; it's all very well known. What is not known is that it was started at the very top.

[Daniel Rose]: It's an American characteristic to think that for every question there must be an answer; for every problem, there must be a solution, however theoretical. And when the American public considers the events that are unfolding right before their eyes, they are disconcerted at not being able to imagine some kind of rational future for this society. That's one of the American problems; they just can't picture in which direction rational people can head. And we'd appreciate your comments on what you see as alternative futures, or as the prospects directly ahead.

Whenever I travel abroad, one of the questions I am asked is, “What do you think the future is going to be?” Now, the difficult part of it is that this is the hardest question that could be put to us, because the word “future” has been erased from our life. Somehow we don't think about the future. Somehow we don't even conceive, we don't have imagination enough to imagine what kind of life we would even wish. There are several reasons for that. One is the fact that we have been living in a communist society, and in a communist society you have this feeling that this society is eternal; nothing is ever going to change. Of course it was an illusion, but you have been raised with the idea not to question, not to think, and just to let things go, and so the future basically doesn't exist as a concept.

The other fact is that with the war, you learn to live day by day, and you don't invest in the future, not even in your imagination. Not even our politicians are doing that. We all agree somehow deep down in ourselves, subconsciously, that this war is going to go on for quite some time. I was asked at the beginning, “How long do you think the war will go on?” I would say, “Well, at least five years,” and everybody was kind of surprised. There is also political manipulation, because I think that the government we have now, or the governments in ex-Yugoslavia, both the Milosevic and Tudjman governments, are the type of governments that can exist only under the conditions of war, because it suits them very well. They don't even speak about the future. If they were to do so, for example in Croatia, the first question would be, “What kind of government do we want? What kind of democracy are we going to have?” These questions are not welcomed at the moment, because every question about the future is met with the answer: “We have a war. So let's not talk about democracy now, let's first solve this problem.” So in short, the answer is, yes, I like the American way of assuming that for every problem there is a solution. However, if there is a solution it's a long-term one, and it's very difficult to foresee the light at the end of the tunnel. For quite some time we'll have to deal with the problems we haven't solved. We haven't even solved the problem of the minority in Croatia, much less the Bosnian problem, which is a very burning question.

[Phillips]: I gather that some intellectuals and writers behaved very badly in this situation. I wonder whether we're talking about a small number of writers and intellectuals, or most of them? How many behaved badly? I don't mean an actual count.

I would say it's a very curious phenomenon. You will remember that at our conference Hans Magnus Enzensberger talked about intellectuals as bad people [“Intellectuals as Leaders,” PR Fall 1992], and I quite agree with him. We concluded that intellectuals are not people of higher moral standards, and that it's rather dangerous to attribute higher moral standards to them. This is especially so when we are talking about intellectuals in Croatia and Serbia. In Serbia intellectuals actually elaborated the idea of “Greater Serbia” and helped the whole nationalist movement. It is a sad fact that its best writers actually went for all this. But Croatia is no better just because it's in a different position. Croatia is in a defensive war, so every single intellectual there is nationalist, but they believe they are nationalist for good reasons. So there are good and bad motivations. In general, before the war and during communist times we always had state writers; ninety-nine per cent of intellectuals and writers always went along with whatever politics there were or whoever ruled the country. There were very few independent individuals. It's the same now. So the intellectuals in both countries are “bad guys.”

[Elizabeth Dalton]: Your point about making people “other” is a very good one, but one has to recognize also that there is survival value in not getting totally sucked into the disaster next door. Yet I think you're mistaken if you think that in this country there is a feeling of indifference to the problem. The paradoxical side is that the more outraged people feel by the images on television, the more enthusiastic they are for military intervention, which you and many other people feel might well be disastrous. I think that wave has sort of passed a bit, but that feeling of moral outrage did lead President Clinton and many others to say we must bomb.

I have seen that the feelings of the people sometimes are very different from their government's behavior; there is a huge gap between the two. Recently, I read in the International Herald Tribune that there has been a poll in several European countries about how to proceed in this conflict, and whether they should intervene with European forces or not, and in most countries there was a huge number, ranging from forty to sixty per cent of the populations, saying, “Yes, we are for intervention,” while the governments were behaving very conservatively. So there is some kind of gap between what the people and what the governments really see as necessary. Maybe there is something wrong with Western democracy; perhaps people have no power to influence the governments. But I have seen that they are getting desensitized, anesthetized by these kinds of images. There are two sides of the media, of course; one is to bring the story out and to let the world know. But the question is, “What then?” What do you do with information? To inform may not be enough. I am just saying that we—intellectuals, writers, people in general—are not dealing enough with the moral issues, with the moral questions, with the questions of responsibility. I myself am puzzled why European intellectuals are not posing any of these questions. This war hasn't been an issue among European intellectuals at all. Intellectuals next door don't discuss it. They pretend not to understand, but I wonder if they want to understand what's going on. This puzzles me. I see it as closing your eyes, I see it as turning your head away. I am a bit bitter because I come from there. Maybe an insider's look into these problems is different from an outsider's position.

[Kurzweil]: I want to follow up on that. Of course we all want the slaughter to stop. But can it be stopped with bombing? And, if it were to stop with bombing, where do we bomb? Do we know, can we even separate one population from another? After all, there are all these enclaves.

Well, I think nothing could be won without ground troops engagement. I read an article by an expert who said that without two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers nothing could be solved at all, and who is going to put two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers in Bosnia? It's yet another issue.

[Phillips]: You can get two hundred and fifty thousand troops, if the Europeans and the American government combine. The question is, as I see it, people are claiming that intervention wouldn't solve the problem. Now, I don't know the answer to that. You say you're not a politician, but you know more about it than we do. Do you think if America and the European nations send troops in it could stop the slaughter?

Well, I suppose, yes. Someone has to stop it, but the problem is that it's an enormous number of soldiers, enormous sums of money, and the question is, why would someone do it?

[Joanna Rose]: I have heard that there are Muslims, Turks, who are willing to go in with troops, but that the rest of the European countries do not want them to go in. There is money, there are troops, and there is a country willing to go in and help the Muslims in Bosnia. Well, is that a way of solving it?

Yes, of course they would probably solve it, but we should also take a look into their interest in the whole issue. You need a political solution, a proper political solution for that, and without it I am afraid it can't work.

[Rose]: It has to be troops you like, right?

I think without combined forces under the auspices of the UN, nothing much could be done. And as we all know, the UN is a terribly bureaucratic organization, and it's terribly slow. God knows how many people will die before they do something. But as I said, we can have a think-tank about what should be and could be done there. I am very sorry if I disappointed you, but I don't have any political solution, any ready-made recipes, and I don't even see it as my task to do find them.

[Jack Diggins]: You are puzzled about why intellectuals in the West have no response to this issue. I think it's mainly because a number of writers thought that communism was going to solve the problem of religion and nationality, but it has been a squalid failure. Many people felt that with the fall of communism, democracy would be able to take care of these issues, yet that doesn't seem to be able to do so. So everyone is at a loss, and there's nothing in the heritage of Western political thought to deal with these issues. We thought the Enlightenment would take care of it, but that hasn't happened: we thought modern technology and various other institutions would take care of these issues, but they didn't, and so we are at a loss. I also want to say, when you suggest that the problem starts at the top, I am really puzzled. To me, there was no problem while there was a top: there was an authoritarian system which kept a lid on this, and when that collapsed, the underlying problem of human hatred of people toward one another emerged. The elements of human animosity and human sinfulness and aggression can be manipulated, but I don't think they can be discounted.

Yes. I want to answer the last part first, on why it was that when the lid was capped, we had an authoritarian society, and everything was quiet and in order. In Yugoslavia that was not the case, because the pressure wasn't strong enough to keep it under the lid; if there was anything boiling it would have been very obvious. The only thing we had was the Croatian Spring in 1971, and it was really a mild decentralization, not really a proper movement in the sense that Croatia wanted to secede. So I think that if we are speaking about lids and authoritarian pressure in a society, Yugoslavia is not a good example, because people really had started to live together, and there were a lot of mixed marriages, especially in Bosnia, about twenty to thirty percent of the children now are of mixed marriages. They have to take sides today; this is one of the saddest things about this war.

And I wouldn't really speak about hatred, except that I would say we have to be clear; it's not that nationalism didn't exist at all. I think that it was there all the time, but when I say that the war came from the top I mean that there were methods used to stir up emotions. It's not that everyone wasn't aware of what happened in the Second World War, that Serbs were killing Croats, Croats were killing Serbs, and so on, but it is like a disease. Under certain circumstances it develops and becomes an acute disease. Other than that it stays dormant, not necessarily developing into something malignant. This is the best metaphor that I can use for what is happening with nationalism in my country.

What I gather is that you are giving some kind of excuse for intellectuals because they are confused with this situation. Yes, I think they are confused, of course, I am confused myself, but this is not an excuse, because their task is to think about this, and to ask, and to argue, and to try to find some kind of solutions. However, you mentioned one very interesting point which I didn't: you said that communism contained the problems, and that we had hoped that democracy would solve them. Now, what is happening with democracy in Eastern Europe? Each representative of these new governments, and their new presidents, came and said, “Now, this is democracy. We are bringing you democracy.” Democracy is like a gold medal. This is it. And what do you have? You have a democratic constitution, okay; you have a multiparty system, and you have free elections. There are the three institutions that you have.” Yet these are no more than formalities, since all the parties are really working very much within the mentality of a one-party system. Then you say, “Well, this is giving democracy a bad name, it's somehow changing the concept of democracy itself, because they are using this word, this concept, and democracy is not really happening.” So what you have is some kind of a backlash, even a danger that at some point people will say, “Oh, this is democracy? This is what we were fighting for? Excuse me, we are losing jobs, we don't have any security, there's an economic crisis, the people in government are the same people as before—in many countries, literally—so they are corrupt, they are just putting the money in their pockets.”

Democracy is something that people have to take, that they have to build—slowly. And for people in Eastern Europe who have been living all their lives with a totalitarian mentality, it's very difficult. I have seen how it works. They are afraid to even start doing the little things—holding gatherings, forming ideas, citizens' groups—and thus it is going very slowly, because on the one hand you have very authoritarian governments, and on the other hand, the people don't have the feeling that they are citizens, that they are individuals, especially not in mass societies like nationalist ones.

[Daphne Merkin]: You began earlier in the evening by saying that one of the problems with the media representation of the war is its focus on peasants, which reduces our perception of the population to an “other,” other than ourselves, a view I don't particularly agree with. But what surprises me is, I understand American diffidence about intervening;, but why are you diffident as an observer—not as a politician, which you said you are not, but as a writer and observer—about the American impulse to intervene, which is based precisely on the perception that these are not “others,” but humans like ourselves? You did make one rather slighting remark about American intervention not always being successful, but as someone else pointed out, in fact it has been successful in major instances.

In the Second World War, yes.

[Merkin]: Counter-aggression is commonly the only way to stop certain kinds of aggression. So your diffidence puzzles me, more than American diffidence, and I wonder if you're resigned, more than you know—this is a question, or speculation—to the “otherness” of this war, its “in-house” quality. Is your equivocating when you were asked about American intervention in fact a reflection of your own sense that this is a rather insular, ongoing conflict that is not amenable to a dashing international assault? There's a certain resignation in what you are saying.

Well, I have to say that if the message that you get is that this is an insular war and therefore I don't want America to intervene, that goes against everything I have ever written, which says, “We are as you are, and something should be done about that.” So it's not insular. I see it as a European problem. Europe should be first to engage in solving this problem. But the problem with Europe is it thinks it's not part of Europe. So I think it's very important for America to do something, but not on its own. What I think should be done at this point is to find a principled solution for this kind of problem. What I understand is meant by intervention would be the bombing of certain strategic targets in Bosnia—Serbian supply lines and so on. This for me is not the solution. I think the solution should be more complete and more principled, and therefore I don't worry so much about “intervention yes or no,” but “is this something that is going to contribute to the principal solution of the problem, which is in the first place a European problem?” What I'm saying is: bombing is not enough per se. Ground troops are necessary. This is what I understand from the analyses I have read. Because this is a European problem and because this is a problem of principle, we should find, fight for, a principled solution at this point. It's not enough to speak only about intervention. This is the only action that I see as essential to take, apart from stopping the slaughter.

[Rose]: You said that it is not for humanistic purposes that America would go to Bosnia. I have to defend my country. There is no other reason we would enter this situation except for humanistic purposes, because it is against every other interest of ours to enter for any other reason.

But you are not entering it. I would love America to go in for purely humanistic reasons. Great! But it hasn't happened.

[Kurzweil]: Let me interject some kind of explanation, something that I have watched for many, many years going back and forth between here and Europe. Americans are always, as Joanna Rose said, involved in the humanistic principle; ever since Wilson, they've been “making the world safe for democracy.” Every time I've gone to Europe I've heard that America has intervened here and there because it has some imperialistic ends in mind, and this is a kind of clash of opinions, of principles, that is not understood from one side to the other, and we then continue it here in a national discussion.

That is why these conflicts have to be solved as a joint project of America, Europe, NATO, and the United Nations. But it has to be a joint thing, not only the Americans going in. I am sorry if I sound very disappointingly conservative on that issue, but I do really think that if America pushes Europe into doing something and they do something together, fine. Yet in my view this is essentially a European problem. The Europeans have to solve it because they are going to have enormous problems in the future if they don't sort this out.

[Phillips]: Why don't the European countries, in your opinion, want to do anything?

Because they are fighting among themselves. There is this problem of France and Britain and Germany, and they have their own conflicts about the war, how to solve it and who is for what kind of solution.

[Phillips]: Well, they could just stop the slaughter. Why not?

If it would be so easy and simple, they would do it, probably.

[Phillips]: I'm not sure.

[Kurzweil]: I think you're being naive.

It's also very sad and disappointing to see all these big forces fighting among themselves about who should do what and who should send troops and how much money is needed, while people are being killed every day. This is the biggest frustration of all. And this is where you feel you can't do anything about it.

[Phillips]: I don't think that's quite an accurate picture of why America is not doing as much as it should. Let me start by saying that I'm struck by your remark that American intellectuals have done very little about the situation in presenting some kind of united group attitude and demanding some kind of action. Now, somebody said that that's because intellectuals are confused. Well, intellectuals are often confused: it doesn't seem to prevent them from doing things. For instance, they protested the Vietnam War, and they were confused at the time; and they supported World War Two, and they were also confused at that time. So I don't think confusion is the reason. I think that what has happened here is that the Clinton Administration can't make up its mind what to do because it's afraid of public opinion. There's a certain amount of public opinion that's simply isolationist, but there's another sector of public opinion, which seems to be supported by military experts, asserting that no intervention will help unless it's so enormous that it can't be undertaken. And the reason given is that the situation in the former Yugoslavia is so complex that no military action can disentangle the various forces and stop the slaughter. I think that's one reason why many of us have hesitated to take a bold and positive stand. Now, what do you think? Is there any truth in this argument that the situation is so complex that intervention by Americans alone or Americans with European troops won't do any good? Is that a false argument?

I think it's a false argument. I think that a proper number of troops and proper military action could stop it, but I think it has to go along with other measures to solve the problem, to be very simple on that point.

[Sidorsky]: I'd like to support your hesitation about intervention from the United States, but on different grounds, because I agree entirely with Joanna Rose that the only grounds for American intervention is what would be called humanitarian intervention. And indeed it's precisely that, because the intervention would have to be so large that you're speaking about significant casualties. The Serbs are going to fight back; they're going to kill people. And then, too, people pay a price for humanitarian intervention without any national interest—that's usually a compelling reason why people say countries should intervene only where there is a national interest—unless they are part of a large consort of nations, usually the case with humanitarian intervention, in which situation you assume that the casualties would be minimal.

The second comment has to do with your reference to a “principled solution.” There is no principled solution in one sense of the word “principle,” because there are only two principles here, federation and secession. Now, you do not wish, I assume, to force a refederation: you supported the Croatian unilateral secession, you support Slovenia's unilateral secession, presumably you support Bosnia-Herzegovina's unilateral secession. The alternative then is to accept the principle of secession, and never cross boundaries against a seceded state. Someone should have taught this to the Union vis-a-vis the Confederacy.

[Jan Kavan]: I'm not sure if I agree with your explanation that Europe is not going in with a resolution to stop the slaughtering simply because the European powers, Britain, France, Germany and so on, cannot agree among themselves on the solution. I think that's probably one aspect, but in fact in the majority of the meetings among the foreign ministers of the EC, there was a prevailing consensus that, first, they don't have a proper political solution, other than that they have different ones which would clash; and secondly, and primarily I think, they don't want to risk losing the lives of their own soldiers, because that would go down badly with public opinion, again since they don't have a national interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They have an interest as Europeans to keep Europe stable and secure, which is in fact also in the United States' interest. The United States has, obviously, humanistic moral motivation, but that is not its only motivation. It is in the interest of the United States to have a stable and secure Europe, and it has a responsibility as the world's remaining superpower to help. The objection of the Europeans was that Americans offered to lift the embargo, to help the Muslims defend themselves and to bomb certain strategic targets, but they were not prepared to commit American troops, risk American lives, until a peaceful solution could be agreed upon. And once again, the Europeans felt that this would endanger the lives of their own soldiers. I agree with you that bombing alone would not solve the problem but exacerbate it.

I think that, as David Sidorsky mentioned, federation and secession are both principles, but they are far from the only ones. The other one is to find out whether it's possible any longer to have a multinational, multi-ethnic unit, which, after all, Bosnia-Herzegovina was. At that time, the government argued that it was one of the few regions left in the former Communist Europe which had managed to have a functioning multi-ethnic and multinational society. Is that in any way possible now?

I'm grateful that you pointed out one of the essential issues, the hesitation of America and Europe to put the lives of their soldiers at risk, and rightly so. But on the issue of other kinds of solutions, it comes down to the question, “Is it possible for a multi-ethnic state like Bosnia to exist, or does it really have to divide into cantons and provinces, ethnically cleansed in this or that way?” Whether we are dealing with the federation or with secession or with the possibility of a multi-ethnic community, we must address the question of the borders and the question of the minorities. If we are speaking about nation-states, then we have to define the borders and minorities. Of course, the most substantial difference is whether this happens with a war or without war. The problem with the war is that while we discuss and try to find the solutions, it goes on. And in the face of it I, both as a writer and as a person who lives there, feel quite helpless.

[Kurzweil]: Slavenka, thank you very much.