Media Art In The Balkans - history of Balkan region - Editorial

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Karen Vanmeenen

An introduction

The Balkans region of Eastern Europe has been beset in the last decade by a civil war that has generally been claimed by international governments to be grounded in "ethnic hatred." The reality is of course much more complex, with competition for scarce resources throughout a politically unstable century--highlighted by two world wars--long offset by the relative peace enjoyed within a region comprised of cooperative multiethnic communities. As former New York Times correspondent Chuck Sudetic states in Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, "[The Yugoslavs] have no innate propensity to violence. [Their] history is arguably less bloody than the history of the Germans, the Japanese, the Americans, the English, the French, the Russians, the Turks, and even the Belgians." [1] The divisiveness of the last 10 years has been motivated by numerous factors that transcend mere blood lines. The demonstrated level of animosity originated not within the communities of the region, but was fed from governmental and other l eadership sources. The commission of violence in the name of nationalism was fueled by power-hungry leaders with individual political imperatives manipulating a public facing economic crisis, some of whom eventually fell victim to the effects of this fear, and expressed it as loathing. As explained by BBC reporter Katie Adie in June 1999, "fear is infectious." [2] The crisis was further amplified by media blackouts and state censorship coupled with international apathy and inaction. Some analysts and commentators claim that the conflict was not internal, but geopolitical, with manipulation on the part of western nations and NATO intervention stemming from a desire to stabilize the region politically in order to be able to explore oil reserves and extract product in the future. [3]

The atrocities of the war have now been well documented, thanks in part to photographers and photojournalists, 59 of whom died while covering the conflict--the highest number of journalist casualties in a four-year period since World War II. This war was also unusual in its participants' targeting of civilians and the single fact that there were more civilian than military casualties. The brutality of this conflict is also evident in the bombing of such normally sacred (even in wartime) institutions as public markets, civilian heating sources, factories, buses, trains and hospitals. The war resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly of civilians, and created millions of refugees and displaced persons. Although the leaders who fashioned the rhetoric that spurred the violence have been removed from power and the war has ended, the region remains unstable.

What has emerged is a people desiring to return to their homes and rebuild their lives, to set the record straight and to express themselves freely, whether it be through political and economic reform or through artmaking. The intention of this special issue of Afterimage is to explore issues surrounding the production of media art from and about the Balkans region, as created within and influenced by its complex history and present. It is important for readers to begin with some contextualization in regard to this history, albeit greatly abbreviated and simplified here, in order to understand the political and cultural machinations that necessarily influence this artistic production. It must be said up front that it is impossible in this venue--or perhaps in any singular document--to explore the endless nuances that are imbedded in this recent history especially, and that this summation makes no particular claims to read as the ultimate truth of the matter.

A history

The lands of the Balkans region, like much of the rest of the Earth, have been in contention since their settlement by Slavic peoples in the sixth century. The history of the Balkan Peninsula is rife with epic battles and bloodshed, enduring myths and martyrs. In this century, the controversy over political and ethnic borders was reawakened in 1912 when the Albanians of Kosovo successfully overthrew their Ottoman overlords. This led to a Serb uprising that resulted in Serbia gaining control of Kosovo and other lands, Albania becoming independent and Macedonia being divided between Serbia and Greece. Discontent in the region continued as both the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and Serbia laid claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1914 a Serbian revolutionary assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. When Austria demanded that Viennese officials be permitted to participate in the murder investigation and Serbia refused, Austria declared war. Russia came to Serbia's defense, touching o ff World War I.

The outcome of the war included the dissolution of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, which led to a redrawing of the borders in the Balkans that had been set in 1913. The Serb-dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created and included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Vojvodina and the Sandzak of Novi Pazar. The Croat/Serb division over the issue of local rule from Zagreb versus central rule from Belgrade was accentuated by the ethnic, religious, economic, cultural and linguistic differences among the varied peoples of the region. In 1929, King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic declared a royal dictatorship and renamed the country the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was assassinated five years later by nationalist Croat extremists.