A culture of humiliation.

• Author: Cviic, Christopher
• Position: Partition of Yugoslavia

WHY COULD the parting in Yugoslavia--if it had to happen--not be achieved peacefully, through Western-style negotiation (like that, for example between Sweden and Norway in 1905) rather than through bloody conflict costing thousands of lives? As I reflect on this quesion, I keep returning to an incident from my personal experience that, to me at any rate, symbolizes and encapsulates the attitudes that have led to the present disaster. On May 1, 1985, a 59-year-old Serbian farmer by the name of Djordje Martinovic was found in a distreesed condition with a broken bottle up his anus in his own province of Serbia, one with a large ethnic Albanian majority. Almost overnight, this elderly man, who supplemented his farm income by working as a storekeeper for the Yugoslav Army in Gnjilane, became the center of a fierce controversy that quickly grew into a cause celebre.

According to reports claiming to be based on Mr. Martinovic's own evidence and published in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, Mr. Martinovic had been attacked from behind by a group of masked men speaking Albanian, who then allegedly tied him up and brutalized him. The other version, in Kosovo's Albanian-language press and in the media in some non-Serbian parts of Yugoslavia, was very different. According to that account, Mr. Martinovic was a homosexual who had suffered an accident while in the act of self-gratification and, in order to avoid bringing dishonor on himself and his family in a very old-fashioned society, decided to invent the alleged attack.

I arrived in Kosovo shortly thereafter while researching a story on the national question in Yugoslavia for The Economist and was one of the first Western correspondents to write about "the Martinovic affair." The atmosphere I found there reminded me of Kurosawa's famous film "Rashomon" I had seen while still living in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s, in which a single violent incident is told in several completely different versions. I wanted to talk to Mr. Martinovic but could not: he had been taken out of the hands of the Kosovo authorities, whisked off to the Yugoslav Army's Medical Academy in Belgrade and kept incommunicado there pending further clinical and psychiatric investigations.

Meanwhile ethnic Albanian officials in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, kept assuring me that the story of the attack was a complete fabrication and even provided me with graphic clinical details of the incident as recorded by the local Albanian doctors...