Eurasia Press & News
People say “it’s not the neck but the neck”, but that joke is wrong. Because neck and neck are not exactly the same, although they mean the same thing – the part of the body that holds the head. But there are no complete synonyms because the words resonate differently in the ear of the listener.
“Neck” is something neutral, “neck” sounds less valuable. We say “our neck hurts”, but “I’ll twist your neck”. Everything is revealed in language.
That’s why it scares me when we talk about the bloody showdown in Banjska. And when it scares me, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the people in Kosovo who, even before this, carried their heads in a bag.
Kurti says “terrorists”, he says “Serbian green people”, alluding to the “Russian green people” who quietly occupied Crimea back then. He must have been very disappointed when among the killed and wounded attackers he did not find anyone from Belgrade, or at least someone from Wagner.
The fact that local young Serbs took up arms for Kurti looks threateningly authentic. His role as “little Zelenski” would be better suited to expose the “Serbian special military operation”.
Kosovo media and lobbyists readily accept the story of “terrorists”. That sprahregelung dangerously resembles the prescribed terminology of Milošević’s propaganda from the nineties – “Shiptar terrorists”, “NATO soldiers”, “fifth columnists”.
Kurti wants to be a little Zelenski, but in fact he is a little Sloba. He forced long pipes in the north of Kosovo, bullied the people, refused any concession, until some – desperate, naive, crazy, deceived or all of these at once – took up guns.
In imitation of the Serbian regime of the nineties, the only question is whether Kurti will now also get the “Serbian KLA”. Here we are again with language – anyone who is a “terrorist” to someone is a “fighter for freedom” to someone else. Milosevic didn’t understand that, and neither does Kurti.
For Vučić, however, it was simply the “Serbs” who died. If one can find the red thread of his “conversation” – terrifying, because it seemed that he had no idea about anything – it is that he called a rather specific group of armed men who made a stand near Banjska only “Serbs”.
Those “Serbs”, the president notes, have harmed both the Serbs and the country, but that will not prevent him, Vučić, from taking them under the warm wing of Serbia. One might think that the ambush in which the Albanian policeman was killed – I guess he also has a family and wanted to return to it – is somehow a “Serbian thing”.
Vučić was caught in a gap. It seems that he and his spiders from the Serbian List are no longer wondering about anything. He declared a day of mourning. Cynics would say that this is how he postponed the football derby where anything could be heard in the stadium. In the absence of an official line, the tabloids make the front pages reflexively and out of habit – it’s all the fault of overlord Kurti.
The progressives are restrained because they have not been notified of the official opinion, so they are sharing a picture of Vučić with the inscription “Serbia is with you” on social networks. It is as if the first among us died heroically, and not that people died who are the product of both Vučić’s and Kurti’s and international politics.
Allowing proven criminals to rule the North, Vučić always told the “Serbian people in Kosmet” that he would not allow another pogrom, that the army – never stronger and more modern – was tied like a slingshot. It may be that some believed him and expected that “the army will return to Kosovo” when the shooting started. If they believed Vučić, they were really naive.
People from the North say that there is an atmosphere of a tense funeral. That some young men are cursing themselves because they didn’t take guns. That the people who were waiting for the Kosovo police have already been declared “heroes” and “sufferers”. No one will give up their own there.
In that feeling, the Serbs from Velikossalon will strengthen them. One of their prima donnas, Miloš Ković, came forward to speak. He says, someone has to bear the responsibility for “the death of young people”.
On one occasion, Ković revealed that he cannot regret not going to war in the 1990s, so he tries to make up for it with considerations. On another occasion, he exhorted the Serbs in Kosovo to die “for their children, their family, their country”, and to go clean before “the face of their ancestors or the Lord”. Ković is still unable to die, convinced that he is the most useful for the “Serbian cause” in the deep background of Circle Two.
The so-called The international community has steadily watched as the disaster unfolds. Due to some diffuse fears of “opening Pandora’s box”, they never supported the logic of “demarcation”. The political problem – whose is Kosovo – is compressed into a smaller area and the question of whose is the North of Kosovo. The laws of physics dictate that it must burst in that valveless pressure cooker.
We have more questions than answers about the background of the events in the North. How much did Belgrade know in advance, and how much did Pristina? How did the “surrounded” armed persons just walk around the monastery? Did Radoičić lead the attack pretending to be Prigožin, and then he was wounded and taken care of in Novi Pazar? And what will happen to him now?
We cannot count on these issues to be clarified because they have become the subject of the agenda. But the thing is so powerful that it’s not facts that play here, but feelings.
It scares me, I say, how people talk about the bloody showdown in Banjska, because language reveals everything. “Terrorists”, “green people”, “Serbs”, “heroes”, “sufferers”, these are too many conflicting words to describe the same thing. Such a gap is the only guarantee for more blood.
