“Goodbye
10.1177/0888325405284250
East
European
Serbian
Politics
Kennedy”
and Societies
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”:
Zoran
and the New Democratic
Masculinity in Serbia
Jessica Greenberg*
In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran ëin¦ic! enacted politics,
reshaping the relationship between citizen and state during a time of political crisis. The expression of citizen-state relations through public mourning
grounded in intimate, familial loss produced a break between a violent,
nationalist past and a possible democratic future. This process relied on the
deployment of normative assumptions about gender and kinship. The figure of Zoran ëin¦ic! represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity
that evoked a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation in
the Serbian context. In contrast, those held responsible for his assassination
were presented as antifamily and part of a clan structure based on nonreproductive, criminal connections that evoked a contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. Such representations masked ways that current
political institutions and public figures were implicated in past state violence by focusing on a story about ëin¦ic! and his killers as certain kinds of
men, rather than about structural features of politics and government.
Keywords: Serbia; masculinity; kinship; democracy; post-socialist state
transformation
1. Introduction
On 12 March 2003, Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran ëin¦ic! was
assassinated in broad daylight in downtown Belgrade. He was
* The dissertation research on which this article is based was supported by a Fellowship for East
European Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and an International Research and
Exchanges Board Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship. This article
began as a paper given at the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in April
2005. My sincere thanks to all those who gave comments on the initial piece, especially Gail
Kligman, Marko Z#ivkovic!, Sasha Milic#evic!, Elissa Helms, and Kelly Gillespie. Thanks also go
to Eric Gordy for his invaluable feedback on a later draft. Finally, I express my gratitude to
Susan Gal for her extensive comments and guidance throughout the process.
126
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 20, No. 1, pages 126–151. ISSN 0888-3254
© 2006 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1177/0888325405284250
coming out of a government building with a small group of bodyguards when he was shot by snipers lying in wait in an abandoned building next door. Two years earlier, ëin¦ic! had cooperated with international demands to extradite former President
Slobodan Miloševic!, who faced accusations of war crimes before
the Hague tribunal. This made ëin¦ic! a particularly unpopular
figure, despite his long-time association with the democratic
1
opposition, and later the democratic government, in Serbia. The
ëin¦ic! assassination occurred amid widespread rumors and
media reports that ëin¦ic!’s government would crack down on
former state, paramilitary, and security figures from the Miloševic!
regime. For many, ëin¦ic! went from an influential but unpopular
politician to a national hero, practically overnight.
Three days after ëin¦ic!’s death, I spent the day watching his
funeral on Serbian state television from my apartment in Novi
Sad. Like most of the rest of the country, I was glued to every
2
aspect of the service and burial. Those who were not watching
from home poured onto Belgrade’s streets in the hundreds of
thousands. The scenes were strangely reminiscent of the mass
demonstrations of 5 October 2000, the day when dictator
Slobodan Miloševic! was ousted from power, and a day for which
ëin¦ic! would become emblematic. But instead of the noise and
energy of a revolution, there was silence. Interspersed with these
images of silent columns of people snaking through Belgrade’s
streets on the way to the cemetery and somber dignitaries in dark
suits were heartrending pictures of ëin¦ic!’s wife and two young
children. At the gravesite, Ruz#ica ëin¦ic!—elegant even in
mourning and sporting oversized sunglasses reminiscent of
Jackie O—held little Luka’s hand as he stared fixedly at some
point in the distance. Jovana, perhaps old enough to comprehend what her brother could not fully grasp, stood shifting her
weight back and forth, as tears poured silently and torrentially
down her face.
1. Serbia is a member of the two-state union Serbia and Montenegro, which changed its name
from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in February 2003.
2. According to the research firm AGB Strategic Research, the funeral attracted the largest television audience on record in Serbia. “Rekordna gledanost prenosa sahrana,” Danas, 22-23
March 2003.
East European Politics and Societies
127
Only a few days before, I had stood among a crowd in front of
the government building in downtown Belgrade where ëin¦ic!
had been shot. I had joined others in the long lines in front of
Democratic Party headquarters where people waited, again in
total silence, to lay flowers and sign a book of mourning. What
struck me then, and again while watching the funeral on TV, was
the intensity of grief, signaled by the eerie silence. This was a
quiet, personal aspect of mourning that people seemed to hold
deep within themselves. It was as if a member of everyone’s family was gone.
This article is an effort to interpret texts and practices around
ëin¦ic!’s funeral to show how the mediations of such a public
event enact politics. The assassination of Zoran ëin¦ic!, the subsequent funeral, and other actions of the government saturated
Serbian daily life and reshaped political discourse and practice in
the months and years that followed. I ask how the initial act of
public mourning was formulated in the mass media, how it highlighted some aspects of pain and loss while eliding other kinds of
social fracture and political violence. How were normative
assumptions about gender implicated in the process? More specifically, why was public mourning for ëin¦ic! most often
expressed as private, intimate, familial loss and identification
with his young family? I argue that the figure of Zoran ëin¦ic! represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity that evoked
a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation in
the Serbian context. In contrast, the figures held responsible for
his assassination were presented as antifamily, challenging conventional notions of modern, Western European, nuclear family
units. They were portrayed instead as part of a clan structure
based on nonreproductive homosocial connections and organized in military and criminal associations that implicitly evoked
a contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. The two
kinds of masculinity were associated with contrasting kinds of
political leadership. Media representations stigmatized clan kinship and its supposed sociopolitical results as violent, provincial,
and criminal, a barrier to Serbia’s integration into a democratic
Europe. In contrast, the democratic leadership and political mas-
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“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
culinity evoked by ëin¦ic!’s middle-class, nuclear family served
to legitimate Serbia’s claim to being normatively European.
There is much scholarly literature that considers the role of
women’s bodies and the management of their images during
3
periods of social and political crisis. Such work analyzes how
gender categories mediate between citizenship and state forms,
as well as the relations of affect that link citizens to the state. I
argue that the management of masculinity is equally important, if
in different ways. During and after the Yugoslav wars of secession, women’s reproduction was a central site for the nationalist
4
project to produce more, and more properly ethnic, citizens. The
case of ëin¦ic!’s funeral suggests that the right kind of masculinity
was similarly crucial. However, it was used to produce properly
“middle-classed” and “civilized” members of the body politic.
There has also been a good deal of analysis of death and funerals as key mediating events in times of socialist state transforma5
tions. Such events reinscribe categories of national belonging.
They provide opportunities for public display of state power and
legitimacy, especially in times of uncertainty or crisis. However,
studies of such events have not considered how public rituals of
mourning and their media representations enact moralizing
frameworks of gender and class. In the case of this funeral, I
argue that a particular kind of masculinity formed a social scaffolding of heteronormative, privatized, kinship for the mediation
of a public, state crisis.
3. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender
after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lynne Haney, “ ‘But We
Are Still Mothers’: Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary,” in Katherine Verdery and Michael Burawoy, eds., Uncertain Transitions:
Ethnographies of Change in the Post-Socialist World (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
4. See Jill Benderly, “Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav Successor
States,” in Lois West, ed., Feminist Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Renata
Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
5. See Susan Gal, “Bartok’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,” American Ethnologist 18:3(1991): 440-58; and Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of
Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
East European Politics and Societies
129
Significantly, ëin¦ic!’s assassination posed a double crisis for
the democratic legitimacy of the government. First, it revealed
the government’s vulnerability to extrastate violence. Second, it
highlighted the government’s ties to, and reliance on, figures
from the Miloševic! regime. By sharply contrasting ëin¦ic!’s masculinity to that of his predecessors, these representations masked
the ways that current political institutions and public figures were
implicated in past state violence. In turn, intimate family grief
was made accessible to the nation by extending the metaphor of
kinship. By highlighting the private, nuclear-family, and personal-affective aspects of ëin¦ic!’s death, media representations
created a discursive dichotomy with political consequences: they
constructed a break between two contrasting images, each linking a type of state to a form of gendered kinship. Authoritarian/
nationalist was separated from and contrasted with democratic,
6
European and postauthoritarian. The representation of ëin¦ic!
after the assassination made the story of his death, and by extension Serbia’s transformation, seem to be about certain kinds of
men, and the nation that loved or hated them, rather than about
structural features of politics and government in Serbia.
This analysis is based largely on newspaper articles, including
attention to the format and layout of newspapers, and the ways
they created pictorial narratives by interspersing images of public
and collective rituals with private and personal mourning. Within
the context of these articles, I draw on speeches and interviews
6. For more on East/West, European/non-European, modern/primitive dichotomies and their
imbrication in forms of power across the continent and beyond, see Milica Bakic!-Hayden,
“Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917-31;
Gal, “Bartok’s Funeral”; Robert Hayden and Milica Bakic!-Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on
the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic
Review 51 (1992): 1-15; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical
Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe:
The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1994). On the discourse of Europe in contemporary Serbia see Zala Vol i , “The
Notion of ‘the West’ in the Serbian National Imaginary,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8:2(2005): 155-75; and on central dichotomies such as civility/incivility in contemporary
Serbia, see Mattijs Van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1998); and Marko Z#ivkovic!, Serbian Stories of Identity and
Destiny in the 1980s and 1990s (Dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of
Anthropology, 2001).
130
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
with public figures. I also draw from my own observations of the
television coverage of the event. Popular media were saturated
with evidence of links between ëin¦ic!, family, democracy, and
Europe on one hand; and on the other hand evidence linking his
killers with violent clannish behavior, Serbian isolation, and the
undemocratic past. Whatever people’s personal views about
ëin¦ic! as a politician, these media texts and images created a
social field of possible interpretations about ëin¦ic!’s life and
death. As such, these texts provided a widely circulating interpretative framework for the possible positions people took vis-à-vis
ëin¦ic!’s life, his politics, and the state forms with which he was
affiliated. The papers I look at and the speeches I analyze were
largely sympathetic to ëin¦ic!. The rhetoric I examine was uniform across the country’s largest dailies. The exceptions to this
kind of coverage would have been two popular tabloids,
Identitet and Nacional. They were both banned as part of the
government crackdown on organized crime in the days following the assassination and were charged with contributing to the
atmosphere that enabled ëin¦ic!’s assassination. They were also
accused of having direct financial ties to the main suspects in his
murder.
Finally, while the article is organized around these textual
mediations, I drew my inspiration for thinking about the significance of ëin¦ic!’s death from the reactions of many of those
around me at the time. It is significant that the majority of my
interlocutors were young, educated, and urban. Most identified
themselves as proponents of democracy and felt that the future of
the country, and their own futures by extension, lay with Europe.
I remember distinctly when standing in line to sign the book of
mourning on the night of the assassination, an acquaintance of
mine, a young, educated man in his midtwenties, told me that
with ëin¦ic! gone he could no longer imagine raising his own
family in Serbia. Surrounded by people in deep mourning, I realized that ëin¦ic! represented a tremendous source of hope. In
turn, his loss produced real despair and threw many people’s
personal aspirations and future in doubt. I believe many people
saw their experience reflected in the media discourses about
ëin¦ic! and perhaps found a way to express their grief through
East European Politics and Societies
131
7
these discourses. While personal expressions of grief are not the
ethnographic object of this analysis, it is worth remembering that
the family forms and masculinities dramatized through ëin¦ic!’s
funeral expressed a powerful link between people’s deep sense
of loss and a public state crisis.
2. Masculinity part I
The portrayal of ëin¦ic! at the time of his death took two interlocking forms in the mainstream press. Overwhelmingly he was
described as a vanguard of democracy, a man with European
sensibility and sense, who represented the future of Serbia as a
respected, democratic state, a potential member of the European
Union. The other portrait was of ëin¦ic! as a family man with boy8
ish charm, a loving father and husband. This made him a man of
integrity and conviction grounded in a recognizable moral and
social order based on nuclear family ties and an ideal modern
9
European family. The two images came together powerfully on
the front page of the daily paper Danas four days after his
10
death. The front picture is of his grieving family at the gravesite,
7. This experience was reinforced by the book of mourning, in which people’s personal
experiences of loss became part of a widely circulating narrative of collective grief. In addition to signing actual books, available at the Democratic Party headquarters and other sites,
people could also post messages online.
8. This image of loving father was confirmed on the New Year’s 2003 episode of Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire, one of the most popular shows in the country. The New Year’s edition of
the program featured prominent Serbian personalities, including ëin¦ic!, and was widely
watched as part of New Year’s celebrations. ëin¦ic!, during one question about a pop culture reference, used one of his “lifelines” to his young son, who was in the audience. This
was met with much sighing and declarations of sweetness among the people with whom I
watched the program (most especially the women in the room).
9. The linking of ideal family types with political projects in Serbia has precedent. It was
argued in the socialist period, that the existence of the clanlike family form known as
zadruga in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Serbia meant that Serbs were ideally
suited for collective life under socialism. The zadruga combined social and political organization within an extended family form. In a more recent example, popular Serbian discourse about Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s centered on their high fertility rates and large
families. Implicit in this often racist discourse was the argument that such nonnuclear, large
family units were also nonmodern and non-European.
10. My texts are drawn largely from three daily newspapers with national circulation in Serbia:
Danas, Politika, and Blic. Blic has the largest circulation of the three. It is a tabloid-style
paper. Politika, the oldest of the three papers, was strongly associated with the Miloševic!
regime until recent years. It has reinvented itself as independent from the government. It is
the most conservative of the three papers but also carries the most gravitas. Finally, Danas
is a relatively new paper and is strongly associated with pro-European politics. Within days
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“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
11
and the headline proclaims, “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy!” The
parallels with JFK are frequently foregrounded in accounts of
ëin¦ic!’s death, associating him with the beloved Western politician: the beautiful wife; the charming, handsome, and democratic leader; and the young children left behind. But more
important is the identification and semiotic integration of the
grieving masses with this family itself. Interspersed with images
of his family, both in the television coverage and in the print
press, were pictures of the almost eight hundred thousand Serbian citizens winding their way through the streets of Belgrade
on the way to the funeral. Powerful images of people marching
silently with candles, flowers, and tears mapped citizen mourning onto that of ëin¦ic!’s immediate family.
A familial relationship was also implied in the speeches that
followed ëin¦ic!’s death. Addressing Zoran directly, and using
the informal second person singular form of address, ti, Zoran
Z#ivkovic!, a member of ëin¦ic!’s party and soon to be named
prime minister, noted, “Your wife Ruz#ica lost you, your children
lost you, but Serbia has also lost you [Izgubila te je supruga
12
Ru ica, izgubila su te tvoja deca, ali te je izgubila Srbija].” Such
13
intimacies were also expressed among the mourners. One
paper noted that a message was left in a bouquet of flowers at the
14
site of the assassination, saying, “This is a personal loss.” Such
quotes are not only significant for the individual sentiments they
expressed but also for the mediated representation of people’s
11.
12.
13.
14.
after ëin¦ic!’s assassination, and in honor of his legacy, the paper introduced a new
“Europe” section of the paper, separate from its usual coverage of world news.
“Zbogom Srpski Kennedy,” Danas, 16 March 2003. See also “Tuz#na kolona na ulicama
Beograda,” Politika, 16 March 2003.
“Srbija bez prevara, pacova i budala,” Danas, 16 March, 2003.
One could also argue that the familial language in part justifies the sweeping, sometimes
violent operation Saber, which the government—headed by Z#ivkovic!—undertook following the assassination. Within days of the shooting, the government had declared a state of
emergency and used special powers to arrest anyone suspected of ties to the Zemun clan
and other organized crime outfits. The sweeping powers used in the campaign have led to
accusations of human rights violations. As Begoña Aretxaga has pointed out, it is ironic that
a democratic government can use a moment of “antidemocratic” terrorism to justify excessive state violence and the violation of citizens’ rights. See Begoña Aretxaga, “A Fictional
Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain,” in Jeffrey
Sluka ed., Death Squad: Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
“Ostvaric!emo ëin¦ic!ev testament,” Blic, 14 March 2003.
East European Politics and Societies
133
experience of the assassination. They produced an intimate community of mourning with which people could identify.
Another article titled “The Tragedy That Opens Our Eyes”
quoted at length a member of the crowd of mourners, an older
man named Miodrag Pavlovic! from the village of Pudarac:
“I came to pay my respects, to touch his coffin, although I couldn’t get
through. This is for me a family tragedy. I wasn’t a member of his
party, but I thought that he could bring us progress. For me, he was a
great man, and I’m satisfied with what he did for the Serbian nation
[narod]”—said Pavlovic!.15
In this brief text, Mr. Pavlovic! orients himself toward ëin¦ic!’s
death using three different but interlocking forms of affect based
in turn on family, state, and nation. First, he locates himself
within the event as a family member through his desire to physically touch the coffin and pay respects in an immediate and localized gesture of mourning. In describing this postmortem intimacy, Mr. Pavlovic! proclaims ëin¦ic!’s loss as a family tragedy.
Next, he shifts his relationship to ëin¦ic! and expresses another
form of connection based on ëin¦ic!’s positive political role in
bringing “progress.” This relation is mediated not by family but
by the political party and the organizations of state politics.
Although he is not a member of ëin¦ic!’s party, Mr. Pavlovic! connects to ëin¦ic! as an instantiation of the state. He does this by
invoking a relationship between himself as a citizen and ëin¦ic!
as a representative of the state. Finally, Mr. Pavlovic! is careful to
distinguish between this connection, implying a democratic state
form, and one based on Serbian nationhood. At first glance, Mr.
Pavlovic!’s affection for ëin¦ic! as a benefactor of the Serbian
nation seems to fall within a familiar nationalist pattern. Yet he
implicitly separates belonging as abstract citizenship from ethnic
belonging. He locates this democratic, citizen-based belonging
in a postnationalist present through the term progress. Democratic belonging is, for him, a move beyond the nationalist political organization of the past. In this context, “nation” gains a par15. “Tragedija koja otvara o i,” Danas, 16 March 2003. This and all other translations are my
own.
134
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
ticular cast. It suggests an avoidance of nationalist positions that
undermine a notion of democratic progress. Mr. Pavlovic!’s ties to
Serbia are mediated not by ethnic, blood-based kinship, but by
love and respect for an individual man, ëin¦ic!, and for that man’s
democratic convictions and practices. His love of the nation,
here, is also a desire for progress. Mr. Pavlovic! follows a distinction between ethnic and civic belonging often made in contrasting Serbian nationalism with Serbian democracy.
What makes this triad of family intimacy, political respect, and
national identification powerful is that it provides an alternative
relation to the nation that relies on a democratic and European
figure. In 2003 when ëin¦ic! was killed, this was increasingly a
central bind of citizenship in Serbia: to love the nation without
being nationalist or criminal in the eyes of Europe. One could say
that the central question of Serbian politics was, How do we create a viable state organized around affect and desire, around true
loyalty and commitment to citizenship, when the terms of loyalty
have become tainted by “nationalism,” that is, by what the world
considers “bad” affect, the kind of affect that excluded us from
Europe and (for some) led us to violent and bloody wars?
The distinction between good state affect versus bad nationalism is one that was tied to people’s experiences during the
Miloševic! regime and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and later
Kosovo. Many urban, educated people with whom I spoke felt
that their waning political and social influence, combined with
isolation of the country, created a power vacuum that was filled
by nationalists who undermined Serbia as a European space and
by those with rural or suburban backgrounds who threatened
Serbia’s modern orientation. Educated urbanites felt that cities
were dominated during and after the war years by the cultural
forms, political ideologies, and consumption practices of people
from the countryside and suburbs who also had ties to organized
crime, paramilitary organizations, and the Miloševic! regime. The
most famous sign of this conflation of origin, politics, and aesthetics was “turbofolk.” This was a musical and aesthetic genre
that glamorized national folk music (including composition, lyrics, costumes, and modes of performance) and valorized milita-
East European Politics and Societies
135
ristic masculinity; hypersexualized, submissive forms of feminin16
ity; and Serbian national pride.
So-called peasant, criminal, and military cultural forms and
consumption practices became linked in the popular imaginary.
These took on a particularly gendered valence. People said one
could tell a criminal by his expensive car and the woman on his
arm, who was sure to have cosmetically enhanced breasts, a
micro-mini, and pancake makeup. A traditionally well-to-do section of Belgrade that began to cater to such newly wealthy clientele came to be known as silicone valley for the women with
breast implants who frequented its cafes. Young women who
dressed seductively were said to be out to find an older, wealthy
man to support them. They were designated sponsoruše (women
looking for sponsors). Criminality became an expression of
un(re)productive masculinity: dangerous, powerful, and at the
same time “peasant.” The urban middle classes saw this form of
masculinity as corrupting young women’s “proper” sexuality in
the service of desire and the pursuit of material gain. (Silicone)
Breasts became symbols of material consumption and male sexual desire, rather than fertility and “normal” femininity. The forms
of desire implied in these social practices are those of excess:
drugs, sex, illicit money, and conspicuous consumption. For the
urban middle classes, as for those adopting such gender practices, a significant set of distinctions was created: democratic
citizen-subjects versus nationalist, European versus Serbian,
productive versus destructive.
In short, nationalism, isolation, rural/suburban backgrounds,
and “non-middle-class” values were linked to war and the
Miloševic! regime, while democratic subjects were constituted in
opposition to these phenomena. For large parts of the urban middle classes, establishing democratic politics meant disassociating
themselves and the country from the “types” of people to whom
responsibility for the war was increasingly attributed. This
required rejection of social practices associated with Serbian
criminality and war profiteering, which in turn brought international scorn and isolation. The complicated discourse through
16. Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999).
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“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
which urbanites and large sections of the mass media understood
the country’s increasing political instability, war, and interna17
tional isolation was organized around this dichotomy. Over the
past fifteen years, a sharp distinction has been drawn between
the peasants, the radicals, the nationalists, the violent, undemocratic subjects of Serbia on one hand; and on the other hand all
those who supported democracy and the system of values and
social forms it implied. For many urban people, ëin¦ic! was a
powerful symbolic figure of precisely these democratic forms
and behaviors, while members of organized criminal groups
came to stand for everything that had gone wrong with Serbia in
the 1990s.
Given these contrasting political images, how were the key
notions of “kinship” and “Europe” imagined in relation to them
and to ëin¦ic!? How did ëin¦ic!’s European family translate into
Serbia’s kinship ties to Europe? Particularly revealing of this relationship was an article titled “[There Has Been] Enough Brotherly-Hatred,” (Dosta je bilo bratomrz#nje) that quotes at length
Metropolitan Amfilohije’s oratory during ëin¦ic!’s funeral service
in Saint Sava church in Belgrade. The cleric explicitly identified
ëin¦ic! as kinsman to Europe, contrasting this with the brotherly
hatred of the recent Yugoslav wars of secession:
“Zoran ëin¦ic! . . . will be remembered above all for, in the moment of
the deepest humiliation of his nation . . . extending the hand of brotherly peace and reconciliation to Europe and the world. . . . Zoran
ëin¦ic! initiated the renewal of the bloodflow [blood circulation,
krvotok] of the nation, society and social life, the renewal of state
unity and state community of Serbia and Montenegro, of broken ties
with the world . . . ” said the Metropolitan. . . . Metropolitan Amfilohije
emphasized that “the wounds of Zoran ëin¦ic!’s warn us and remind
us that there has been enough brotherly-hate, enough war, that every
murder is the murder of a brother. Evil brings no good to anyone. War
is no one’s brother,” said the Metropolitan, asking God to “heal not
only the wounds of Zoran and his family, but all the wounds of his relatives/kin [rod], and may the evil of brother-hatred be healed in all
countries.”18
17. Jessica Greenberg, “On the Road to Normal: Travel, Democracy and the Moral Serbian Subject” (Unpublished dissertation chapter, 2005).
18. “Dosta je bilo bratomrz#nje,” Danas, 16 March 2003.
East European Politics and Societies
137
In this juxtaposition, the brotherhood of Europe stands in contradistinction to the brotherly hate in (former) Yugoslavia, and
ëin¦ic! is presented as a pro-European leader whose near-blood
ties to Europe produced democracy rather than war. In the shadows, of course, is the “brotherhood and unity” of Tito’s socialism
to which ëin¦ic! is also being opposed. ëin¦ic! stands in for the
new state that (perhaps miraculously) can be simultaneously
father to Serbia and brother to Europe. ëin¦ic!’s democratic policies renew the “bloodflow” of the country and of the social community, linking him to all in Serbia not via nationalist, ethnic ties,
but by the kinship of a universalizing political connection rendered intimate: the wounds of his family are the wounds of the
Serbians who mourn him, but also of all citizens everywhere who
are thereby his kin (rod).
It is important to note that aspects of this speech were cited by
members of ëin¦ic!’s family, his party and many in the political
left as a profoundly inappropriate, nationalist, and irresponsible
representation of ëin¦ic!. Most specifically criticized was the
assertion that “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,”
which was taken by many to imply that ëin¦ic! had somehow
deserved his death. The complexities of this controversy and the
political divides revealed by Amfilohije’s speech are a subject for
another work. Here I highlight only that, whatever the political
leanings of those who spoke publicly in the wake of his death, all
the rhetorical figures functioned to separate ëin¦ic! from the past
and from compromising rural, ethnic, clanlike kinship, while
connecting him to a new narrative of different and modern kin
ties in the collective, democratic, and European future.
If ëin¦ic! was the quintessential modern man, embedded in an
ideal middle-class nuclear family, loving father to his children,
dedicated husband to his wife, and brother to Europe, then it was
through his mediation via such normative and stereotypically
“Western” familial ties that Serbia would become a member of
the European family. Those mourners who felt kinship with
ëin¦ic! would themselves become such Europeans. George
Papandreou, Greek Foreign Minister and then-president of the
138
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
EU Council of Ministers, evoked such kinship relations at
ëin¦ic!’s graveside. His words include an implicit promise to
bring all who identify with ëin¦ic! into the European family. The
Serbian translation of Papandreou’s words found in the newspapers used the informal ti, thereby reading intimacy into the
speech:
It is our desire as the EU, in the name of all my colleagues, I promise
to you and Serbia and Montenegro that you will be a part of the European family. I commit myself, Zoran, that your dream will be real19
ized.
This language was taken up in other newspaper articles as
well. For example, “The heads of states or governments, ministers
and high officials of international organizations expressed . . . their
astonishment and shock by the death of the Serbian premier, but
also their support for the continuance of democratic reforms and
their faith that ëin¦ic!’s vision of a modern Serbia, as part of the
20
European family [dela evropske porodice], will be realized.”
3. Masculinity part II
If familial affection for ëin¦ic! would mediate a new relationship to Europe and democracy, then according to the discourse
around his death, his killers represented a kind of antifamily masculinity rooted in nationalism gone awry. ëin¦ic!’s assassination
was immediately linked to a criminal-military group called the
Zemun clan, named for the part of Belgrade in which they mostly
resided. The group had long-standing ties to both state and parastate criminal activity and state security forces. It was also linked
to paramilitary organizations in Bosnia. Only a couple of weeks
before his death, ëin¦ic! had almost been run off the road in what
was likely an attempted assassination. The driver was a member
of the Zemun clan. He was nicknamed Bugsy after the eponymous 1991 Barry Levinson gangster film. The Zemun clan had
19. “Zorane, tvoj san c!e biti realizovan,” Danas, 16 March 2003.
20. Ibid.
East European Politics and Societies
139
been active at that point for several years, and several of its members had been held under suspicion of criminal charges that
21
included kidnapping, drug trafficking, and falsifying passports.
Knowledge of the involvement of other members of the group in
the murder was open. Only hours after the assassination, in front
of the government building where ëin¦ic! was killed, I heard several young men shouting the demand to “arrest Legija [Uhapšite
Legiju].” Legija (Milorad Ulemek) was the former commander of
Miloševic!’s police unit for special operations, Jedinice za
specijalne operacije (JSO), and was known to be connected to
criminal and mafia activity. He had also been linked to war
crimes in Bosnia as a member of the paramilitary unit the Tigers,
which had been headed by Serbian football club owner and
paramilitary leader Z#eljko Raznatovic!, aka Arkan. In a foreshadowing of the kinship language to come, Arkan himself had been
22
referred to by his men in the Tigers as daddy (tata). Arkan was
assassinated in 2000, and Legija is currently on trial for his role in
ëin¦ic!’s assassination.
The particular version of masculinity associated with the
Zemun clan centered around largely homosocial units through
which solidaristic ties of loyalty were formed. These associations
were first and foremost paramilitary but also included state security and special operations under the Miloševic! regime. Often
referred to in the media as “hard men from the streets” (literally
from the asphalt) (c#vrsti or #estoki momci sa asfalta), those who
made up these associations were thus simultaneously representative of state and extrastate forms of power and violence. Many
had initially been members of football fan associations of the
1990s, which, as Ivan C#olovic! has demonstrated, were also allmale sites of solidarity, producing both nationalist loyalties and
23
violent practices that translated easily into military organization.
The mafia associations emerging from these earlier connections were self-consciously crafted in the idiom of American-style
mafia through nicknames such as Bugsy and Kum (godfather).
21. Miloš Vasic!, “Novi Prilozi za Biografiju Dušana Spasojevic!a,” Vreme, broj 682, 29 January
2004.
22. Thanks to Aleksandra (Sasha) Mili evic! for bringing this to my attention.
23. Ivan C#olovic!, Politics of Identity in Serbia (New York: New York University Press, 2002)
140
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
News coverage of the group after the assassination highlighted
these connections and family-like ties of the men who made up
the clan. Papers had biographies and full-page spreads detailing
the links between members with rows of mug shot pictures. In
one article, readers could learn the kinship network of the
Zemun clan, as each figure was linked to the others through
either blood or fictive kin relations (as kumovi). When there were
no kinship ties between members, the article linked the men
using alternative terms for intimacy, such as inseparable friends
(nerazdvojni prijatelji). Just as the network of intimacies was
carefully detailed, so each figure was accompanied by a complex
24
litany of crimes associated with him and his close associates.
Extending this particular metaphor of extended kinship to the
group as a whole, an article titled the “Pyramid of Crimes”
declared, “According to the words of the minister of internal
affairs, Dušan Mihajlovic!, the head of the family [glava porodice]
from the top of the pyramid of crimes is behind bars, but the
25
other members of the family are hiding throughout the world.”
Yet another article during the period after the assassination
showed a map of Serbia with the number of criminals listed next
26
to each relevant town or city across the country. The map was
also color coded by mafia group and framed by a blank space
outside of Serbia’s borders. The same daily paper, fond of the
map format, also had a double-page spread titled “The World in
27
Belgrade.” The map showed the outline of Europe, from London to Sofia, and including Moscow. Lines drawn out from Belgrade linked pictures of the significant foreign dignitaries attending ëin¦ic!’s funeral, each with a headshot and a description of
the official position and country. In all, twenty heads of the
twenty most important officials in Europe and America were
shown to converge on Belgrade, which was itself located at the
center of the map. These two maps demonstrate two
spatializations of new kinds of belonging for Serbia. In one,
depicting the European family of Papandreou’s promise, Bel24.
25.
26.
27.
“Po inioci Najtez#ih Zlo ina,” Blic, 14 March 2003.
“Piramida Zlo ina,” Danas, 5-6 April 2003.
“Mapa Kriminala Srbije,” Danas, 25 March 2003.
“Svet U Beogradu,” Danas, 16 March 2003.
East European Politics and Societies
141
grade is at the center of the world, but part of a larger European
community. The other is a smaller map that outlines Serbia, but
beyond its borders is a blank space. The country itself is divided,
color coded by a network of criminality consisting of mafia
groups whose form of belonging can only lead to Serbia’s isolation. The two maps visualize the different collectivities possible
for Serbia, and the forms of association, forms of masculinity, and
forms of social reproduction that each implies.
In popular discourse, rumors had long circulated about drug
use and perverse sexual activities such as orgies among the
Zemun clan and its ilk. In the view of urban middle classes, such
nationalist masculine practices and forms of social organization
bypass the forms of affect that are “natural” to the nation, its
healthy social reproduction, and its democratic future. Nationalists who loved the nation in the wrong way were considered a
destructive force rather than avatars of a productive masculinity
in the mold of highly heteronormative forms. The quintessential
nationalist story of romance and family runs precisely counter to
that of ëin¦ic!’s Serbian Camelot. This is the tale of Ceca, Arkan,
28
and Legija. When the famous, young and buxom turbofolk
singer known as Ceca married Z#eljko Raznotivic!, aka Arkan, the
former paramilitary leader, criminal, and owner of the Obilic!
football team in 1995, it was a national event. It was the union of
the two greatest icons of Serbian nationalist values and institutions in the 1990s. When Arkan was killed in 2000, Ceca
remained a beloved and powerful celebrity in Serbia, taking on
the responsibility for Arkan’s football club, and continuing to sing
her heart out, as many felt, for the turbofolk sound and the
nation. However, shortly after ëin¦ic!’s assassination, Ceca was
rumored to have had relations of an undetermined nature with
Legija and the Zemun clan, her house was searched, and a large
stash of weapons was found. Ceca’s reversal of fortunes was
implied in a Politika headline about the weapons in March
29
2003. Hovering over a picture of Ceca looking as glamorous as
28. In addition to the family-state couplings of Ceca and Arkan, and Zoran and Ruz#ica, presentations of Slobodan Miloševic! and his wife Mira Markovic! would be another extremely productive lens through which to examine kinship, the production of state affect and masculinity. Thanks to Marko Z #ivkovic! for suggesting this as a line for further analysis.
29. “Veze sa opasnim momcima,” Politika, 19 March 2003.
142
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
ever, the headline proclaimed, “Connections with Dangerous
Men,” and the subheading declared “a fairytale without a happy
ending.”
In both of the masculinities I have discussed, the key issue at
stake was the production of citizen-state relations of affect, loyalty, and community. Which of the two would be productive of
Europeanness and democracy rather than a source of shame for
the country? Put another way, What kind of state-citizen relation
would produce the right kind of citizens from the perspective of
“Europe,” and democratic Serbia, and what form of masculinity
could both model and produce the right kind of civil, democratic
family network? It is significant that these juxtaposed masculini30
ties played on issues of class as well as rural/urban tensions.
The story of Ceca, Arkan, and the Zemun clan represents a family
born of the “wrong” kind of people. On the other hand, ëin¦ic!
embodied a familiar European masculinity reliant on financial
and cultural resources: well-traveled, educated (in Germany, no
less), and profoundly middle class. Thus, ëin¦ic! could serve
symbolically as the head of a family of citizens, mediating the
production of the “right kind” of political subjects: middle class,
educated, and European. These features have long been linked
31
to civil society and political stability in Yugoslavia. The masculinity of the Zemun clan, by contrast, produced pleasure and
illicit gain. Their practices, rumored orgies, drug use, and criminal and violent behavior are seen by a European gaze as
unreproductive. This is true in a biological sense, but it is also
true politically. They produce subjects on which Serbia cannot
base a viable social or economic future in Europe.
4. A state of crisis
At the time of ëin¦ic!’s death in 2003, questions about the relationship between the past, present, and future of state forms and
of political leaders suffused national politics in Serbia. These concerns unsettled people’s widespread desire for stability after 5
30. For more on long-standing urban/rural tensions in Yugoslavia and Serbia, see John Allcock,
Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
31. Greenberg, “On the Road to Normal.”
East European Politics and Societies
143
October 2000, the day that many felt was the turning point officially marking the beginning of democracy in Serbia. That was
the day on which citizen protests and nonviolent revolution
brought an official end to Slobodan Miloševic!’s decade-long rule
of the country. Just weeks before this protest, Miloševic! had been
decisively beaten at the polls, and the opposition candidate
Vojislav Koštunica was elected the new president of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia. However, Miloševic! refused to honor the
election results and tried to force the country into a second round
election runoff. Finally, on 5 October, hundreds of thousands of
citizens from all parts of Serbia marched in Belgrade. They
stormed the parliament building and the headquarters of the
state-controlled media, Radio and Television Serbia. Instead of
firing into the crowds, Miloševic!’s massive police force stood quietly aside or joined the protest. In later months and years, it
became clear that the peaceful nature of the protests and the
restraint of police and military forces was a result of long negotiations and bargaining between the opposition, particularly ëin¦ic!
and Miloševic!’s security forces, including Legija. By the end of
the day, Miloševic! had conceded defeat, although much of his
political and security apparatus remained in power.
The ruling coalition that emerged from the elections was a
motley group of eighteen opposition parties, known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). In February 2001, they
formed a Serbian government with ëin¦ic! (who headed the
Democratic Party [DS]) as prime minister. ëin¦ic!’s tenure as
prime minister was marked by tension with the other dominant
party, the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), to which the Yugoslav president Vojislav Koštunica belonged. These tensions came
to a head in June 2001, when ëin¦ic! finally gave the order for
Miloševic! to be extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal
for Yugoslavia in The Hague, a move that Koštunica opposed on
what he claimed to be constitutional grounds. Miloševic! had
been arrested earlier in April of that year on domestic charges
including fraud and embezzlement. His extradition came on the
heels of intense pressure from the international community,
including threats to withhold much-needed financial aid to the
144
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
country. When he was finally extradited, it was in the eleventh
hour before the donor’s conference for Yugoslavia was to begin.
Cooperation with the Hague tribunal and extradition of those
indicted for war crimes remained one of the most divisive political issues in the country; ëin¦ic!’s cooperation with The Hague
was not popularly supported. The DOS coalition was marked by
disagreements over extraditions to The Hague, over ideological
approaches to economic change, and by petty bickering linked
to long-standing personal conflicts. In addition, there were accusations of corruption and the continued reliance of political leaders on Miloševic!’s now discredited security forces and his political and business elite. In the months leading up to his
assassination, ëin¦ic! made it clear that former members of the
Miloševic! regime, including former state, paramilitary, and security figures, would no longer be tolerated; cooperation with The
Hague was key for Serbia’s successful integration into Europe. It
is widely argued in Serbia that ëin¦ic!’s assassination was a defensive move among those most at risk in such a crackdown.
As I have shown, media coverage and popular discourse simplified this series of events by formulating them as a struggle
between ëin¦ic! on one side and his killers on the other; between
democracy, Europe, and progress against tribalism, retrogression, and nationalism. Political leaders participated in this simplification. At the time of the assassination, then–minister of justice
Vladan Batic! declared that the day of the funeral should not be
considered 15 March but 6 October, the day after the revolutionary overthrow of Miloševic!. This date was simultaneously identified with the overthrow of Miloševic!, Serbian democracy, and
ëin¦ic!. Batic! presented ëin¦ic!’s death as an opportunity to begin
the postrevolution period again and to rewrite the troubled history of Serbia’s fledgling democracy. Noting that the government
was committed to fulfilling ëin¦ic!’s vision, he stated, “Returning
two years back, we must lead Serbia forward. . . . The killers of
Prime Minister ëin¦ic! didn’t want to kill only him, but also all that
32
he personified [oli avati]—a free and democratic Serbia.” This
reworking of political chronology shows how ëin¦ic! was made
32. Blic, 16 March 2003.
East European Politics and Societies
145
to embody democratic possibility. Erased by this dramatic presentation was the complicated and contested course of politics in
the country between 5 October 2000 and 12 March 2003 and the
history of compromise that preceded the protests. Elided and
invisible were the tensions, difficulties, and embarrassing
imbrications of new with old regimes; the failures of the opposition government; the real durability of Miloševic!’s power structures; and even ëin¦ic!’s lack of popular support.
I argue that the discursive moves that represented ëin¦ic! as a
democratic, European figure who could bring Serbia into a European family were critical to the production of Serbian state legitimacy in the face of the crisis induced by the assassination. The
underlying crisis was twofold. The first problem was the revelation that criminal, nonstate actors had the power to destabilize
the political system. In the days following the assassination,
many people I spoke with were openly frightened about the
implications of this nonstate power for Serbia’s future and feared
that the state itself would plunge into chaos. Claiming and displaying ëin¦ic!’s intimate ties to Europe and his productive, familial relationship to Serbia’s citizens helped to calm an apprehensive population. It provided a symbolic scaffolding for the state,
one expressed through kinship. This produced a framework to
which people could appeal in the face of evidence that the durability of state institutions was endangered. EU officials such as
Papandreou also relied on this language of family and intimacy
to bind Serbia’s future to European institutions in the face of Serbia’s own failed state apparatus.
As I have argued, gendered (masculinist) discourses were significant in Serbia’s postsocialist legitimation crisis. As Gal and
Kligman note, normative gender categories are key frameworks
in struggles for political authority:
Ideas about gender difference and sexuality are often recruited to
construct continuities with the past, with nature, with the general
good. They can thus be used to gain authority for postsocialist political institutions, practices, and political actors where there are not yet
well established rules of the game for political activity.33
33. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 12.
146
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
That is, political power and legitimacy may be organized around
the juxtaposition of different kinds of gendered political subjects.
In the ëin¦ic! case, as elsewhere, this occurs as “politicians make
claims for the rightness of the political structures they favor not
by talking about government itself, but by stating their positions
of questions such as abortion, women’s sexuality, or the proper
34
forms of family life.” Lauren Berlant has written on similar phenomena in the U.S. context, emphasizing not the role of politicians but rather how citizen state relations are negotiated through
(gendered) intimate practices:
The political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. . . .
No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public
life . . . the intimate public sphere . . . renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values,
35
especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.
In short, the reproduction of the right kinds of citizens occurs
through an orientation towards proper familial relations rather
than in a formal public sphere. In the Serbian case, the familial
and kinship metaphors imply a kind of intimacy with the state
36
through the state’s instantiation as a family man. However, as
Gal and Kligman remind us, discourses that authorize politics
through discussions of gender relations can also operate by
implicitly excluding some political possibilities while making
37
others seem inevitable or taken for granted. How have discourses of normative gender roles shut down other kinds of
questions and debates about the kind of state that Serbia is and
was?
34. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 30.
35. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 4-5.
36. It is hardly then surprising that people participated in a mass public act of intimate mourning as a significant part of their political, public life. In fact, widespread voter apathy and
demobilization over the past five years means that this intimate form of citizenship may be
displacing other forms of democratic politics in Serbia. Given the mass political participation on 5 October and throughout the 1990s, such demobilization seems incongruous.
However, as Julia Paley has demonstrated, political demobilization in new (neo)liberal
democracies can be a consequence of democratic transformations, rather than an aberration. Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-dictatorship
Chile (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
37. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender.
East European Politics and Societies
147
What is being silenced and ignored becomes clear when we
consider the second component of political crisis brought on by
the assassination: the revelation of how deeply tied the post–5
October Serbian state was to the power structures of the
Miloševic! era. The rhetoric around ëin¦ic! entails a structural forgetting of the close links between Serbian democracy and Serbian authoritarianism, between the democratic revolution of 5
October and Miloševic!’s military and state apparatus. This
included ëin¦ic! himself, who had ties to the criminal elite. By
rendering ëin¦ic!’s relationship to politics private and intimate
(and based in a morality of normative nuclear kinship), his links
to a violent state could be elided. In personalizing the state via
affect targeted at ëin¦ic! and his story, a powerful splitting is produced, one that separates the good democratic state from the
bad, ëin¦ic! from his killers. This denies the violent connections
that gird the Serbian state and link ëin¦ic! to the past, thereby
effecting a radical break with that past. This is not a process specific to Serbian political rhetoric alone. Begoña Aretxaga first
demonstrated the role of affect in eliding state violence in her
38
analysis of post-Franco Spain. Aretxaga argued that the legitimacy of the post-Franco state depended on de-linking the new
institutions and practices of the democratic state from the violent,
authoritarian practices of the past, despite the obvious continuity
of practices, institutions, and personnel from one government to
the next. Aretxaga calls the process by which this split was made
39
an act of psychotic disavowal:
The fetishization of democracy endowed the Spanish state with a new
aura and a new body, a sacred one that came to replace the
desacralization and profaned body of the Francoist state. The legitimacy of the new state, however, depended on the continuous exer40
cise of an act of forgetting.
The violence perpetrated against ëin¦ic! by his assassins allows
for a similar split: the old authoritarian, violent (Miloševic!) state,
and the new democratic state. Despite the history of being inti38. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 2002.
39. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 60.
40. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 48.
148
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
mately bound together, this act of violence forms a new boundary between old and new, nationalist and democratic, Serbian
and European. These two eras become personified as particular
types of people, periodizing the state via affective attachment to
the men who have come to stand for it.
The communicative genre that creates these divisions
between gendered normativities and creates the image of groups
projected through them is a moral narrative, not a structural analysis or historical-political tract. It is therefore telling that even a
journalistic (and thus realist) report about the assassination
becomes an example of this morality tale. The popular and
widely available book by journalist Miloš Vasic! about ëin¦ic!’s
assassination, Atenat na Zorana ëin¦i a (Assassination of Zoran
ëin¦ic!), details the ties between the paramilitary and criminal
elements of Serbian society with its government, laying bare the
nature of the state crisis. One is led to believe that the book will
be a political analysis or investigative reportage. Indeed, the
opening epitaph, taken from an article titled “Serbia as an Unfinished State,” by Nenad Dimitrijevic!, in the journal Re , eloquently
sets the stage for a political analysis of the Serbian state:
Today, in April 2003 . . . defeat is obvious: that the murder of Zoran
ëin¦ic! [is in] direct connection with the character of statelessness
[bezdrz#avlja] in Serbia, that is with a state [stanje] in which it’s not
possible to precisely identify the state [dr #ava]. In this state [stanje] it
is not known who has, and who doesn’t have the right to use the
instruments of physical force, nor does there exist any confidence in
rules which would separate that which is permitted from that which is
forbidden.41
Yet in the account that follows, Vasic! uses the analysis of statelessness or a criminal state to link crisis not to structures of state,
but to individuals and criminal groups that he assigns particular
kinds of moral or immoral codes. Thus, the imbrications of state
and criminals are grounded in a set of moral characteristics and
failings, linked to specific kinds of people. The honor of the state,
on the other hand, is also personalized, in the figure of ëin¦ic!
himself.
41. Miloš Vasic!, Atentat na Zorana ëin¦i a (Beograd, Serbia: Narodna Knjiga [Politika, B92,
Vreme], 2005), 7.
East European Politics and Societies
149
For Vasic!, as for the speech makers at the funeral and media
representations about the funeral, state organization is bound up
with particular types of people arranged in social forms marked
by the archaic and the modern. This alternative state organization
frames the Zemun clan and organized state-criminal organizations as fundamentally tribal, in opposition to the modernist,
42
democratic state (expressed through democratic masculinity).
The state as a moral and affective site for the organization of citizenship is identified with the qualities of citizen virtue and honor,
while those of the tribal are made up of hard men and scum, a
social organization of ruling men from the past. Vasic! writes,
Such is the elite of vice from which Miloševic! constituted his elite cartel [kartel]: cheaters, unprincipled jerks, greedy newcomers [do¦osi],
heroin dealers, “murderers on the go” . . . “heroes” . . . “tough men
from the Belgrade streets” who really were and still remain small-time
associates of state and public security; slime: street, drawing-room,
business, journalistic, intellectual slime. . . . Such is the moral context
of Serbia on October 5 2000, on the key date of the story which follows. That is the moral character of “statelessness” which we are talking about, because you can not have “statehood” (whatever the “state
builders” think) without morality, without citizen virtue and citizen
bravery, that is, in national terms, without honor [poštenje].43
Vasic! closes the introduction with these words in which ëin¦ic!
(never named, but always present) and his killers are starkly contrasted. Honor and shame become the markers of modern versus
tribal/nationalist states. Thus, even for (or perhaps especially for)
the professional commentator and expert historical witness,
kinds of men and the social networks in which they are embedded, and which they are poised to reproduce, become the stuff of
politics.
5. Conclusion
Zoran ëin¦ic!’s death was unquestionably a tragedy for many
beyond his immediate family, and his loss is still deeply felt. His
42. Citing Dimitrijevic!’s terminology, Vasic! goes so far as to characterizes the criminal elite ideology as one of tribal nationalism (Vasic!, Atentat, 14).
43. Vasic!, Atentat, 15.
150
“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”
death was not just a personal loss; it was a political event, which
came to reshape how Serbia as a democratic state was understood at home and in the world. By considering the mediation of
a public figure via discourses of intimacy, kinship, and masculinity, we can better understand how the conditions for politics are
produced in a particular, historically located state in crisis. The
intense personalization of the death of a public figure produced
certain forms of politics and elided others. In analyzing the media
discussions of ëin¦ic!, his enemies, and his funeral, I have shown
how particular forms of social and state reproduction were tied to
idealized male social types. Textual representations of ëin¦ic!
and his purported assassins produced an interpretative field
through which the morality and immorality of particular categories of people were linked to democratic as opposed to nationalist state forms, to European belonging as opposed to Serbian
isolation.
For readers, listeners, mourners, and citizens hopeful for Serbia’s integration into Europe, choices came to seem dichotomous
and were mapped onto a before-and-after account of political
history and Serbian statehood. The selective forgetting enabled
by these representations contributed to a field of interpretations
through which people aligned themselves politically, vis-à-vis
each other and the state—all through retellings of key events. In
turn, this foreclosed other ways of reading events and their contexts. Notably missing, for example, was any examination of the
content of ëin¦ic!’s pro-European policies and their political,
social, and economic implications and consequences. While of
course there are accounts of ëin¦ic! that have subtler shades, his
memory tends to reproduce the particular dichotomy outlined
above: a moralization and privatization of politics in lieu of structural, political, and economic accounts of conditions in the country. It is striking that the suture connecting the images of states,
nations, morals, individuals, and politics that I have discussed is
the category of gender, and in particular a vision of opposing
forms of masculinity. This linkage between the state, kinds of
men, and the families they supposedly produce reveals new
forms of political power and authority in a transforming Serbia.
East European Politics and Societies
151