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When I met Nemo, I thought he looked so much like a Chicago indie kid, he could've come straight out of a Decemberists concert. He wears thick-rimmed glasses and a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, his gray Chuck Taylors seemingly the only pair of shoes he owns. He keeps his Dunhill cigarettes and lighter in an old army-looking satchel that never leaves his side. If he never opened his mouth, you'd swear he went to Northwestern.
"I learned English from watching cartoons," he explains, "mostly Dexter's Laboratory."
The fact is, Nemo (whose full name is Nemanja Vukovic) has never been to the United States. Instead, he is part of a new youth culture in the former Yugoslavia -- one that is more global, more hardened, and represents the greatest hope for the region's future. Though he's lived in the same house all his life, four different countries have come and gone over that land in his lifetime. Born into Communism, then hardened by war, Nemo and his generation are inheriting a newly democratic nation, still recovering from turmoil.
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To understand this generation, you have to look back on the world they were born into. Nemo was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now a part of Serbia) in March of 1986, just as the 'golden years' of Yugoslavian communism were ending. By setting themselves up as a 'softer' form of communism, Yugoslavia spent over 25 years skillfully exploiting its unique economic position and gained the financial and political favor of both Western liberalism and Eastern communism.
"My dad would tell me how he feels so bad I couldn't see the way the country was at the time I was born," Nemo tells me. He speaks of mountain homes, regular vacations, and a car in every drive, noting, "You could have anything." This success, however, proved unsustainable. As the 1980s wore on and international attention moved towards Germany's Berlin wall and the growing arms race, both media attention and economic investment quickly dried up.
Then, with growing nationalist sentiments, the collapse of communism, economic troubles, and a myriad of other problems, Yugoslavia fell into civil war in the early 1990s. Nemo's hometown of Novi Sad lies less than 40 miles from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the region most devastated by war.
He remembers, at age six, their wartime life. "The blackouts were the most fun," Nemo recalls with fondness, "Where you were a kid, a blackout means fun." He continues, "The electricity shuts off for like 3 hours, you have to sit with your friends and play dominoes, play cards, play Monopoly, something like that." For this generation of Yugoslavs, childhood memories are often surrounded by contexts of war. Despite this, Nemo's recollections are not ones of tragedy, but perseverance and an odd sort of normalcy.
"I don't feel like I had a bad childhood or anything; I had a very decent childhood," he says, "I played just like you guys - I had a basketball and a court, a place to play marbles, and a place to play football." Nemo was lucky. Novi Sad was not severely damaged during this time, but then again, key cities of the prevailing force rarely are. Serbia's role in the conflict was a dominant but cruel one, often marked by brutality, rape, and even genocide. From the remains of the Yugoslav People's Army, ethnic Serbs living in Bosnia formed the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), which was supported both politically and financially by the Serbian government under Slobodan Milosevic. In July of 1995, the VRS killed 8,000 civilian Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, marking the worst European massacre since WWII. NATO intervened later that year, and a resolution was found in the form of the Dayton Agreement.
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The war era for Serbia, however, had not ended yet.
"It was a time of recuperating from the war, but we were still under Milošević," Nemo says, "and while everybody was looking at the mess we made in Bosnia, shit was happening down in Kosovo." Kosovo was and is still today a territory of Serbia whose 90% Muslim majority sets them drastically apart from the Orthodox Christian Serbs. They are primarily Albanian by ethnicity, but have over time come to dominate Kosovo, a land patriotic Serbs claim to be in the heart of Serbia's ancient homeland.
"Serb police there just killed whoever they wanted, and Kosovo became this kind of black hole on the map," Nemo describes, "and the whole world turned their eyes away from Bosnia and towards Kosovo."
From 1998 to 1999, Serbia undertook a massive ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo, "a pattern of human rights and humanitarian law violations on a staggering scale, often committed with extreme and appalling violence" according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Beginning in 1999, NATO launched another peacekeeping mission to end Serbia's aggression in Kosovo, an intense air attack that lasted seventy-eight days. Nemo, now 13 years old, had his first direct experience with the war during this campaign:
It was the middle of the day and we were bathing in the river. There were no air raid warnings or anything. There was a long dock that people walk on out over the river, and past that was a bridge. I think they wanted to hit the bridge, but they only used one missile, and something went wrong. The missile just missed the bridge, went under it, and you could see the red light and know it was a tomahawk missile because they all have these huge red lights on them. I remember that. You could hear it coming and it just went shheeooooooo...BOOM, right on the other side of the big dock. It hit only about 65 meters from where I was standing, and I was blown by the explosion into the water. It just sort of pushed us in the water, and we were shaking -- the whole ground was shaking...It left this huge hole, just demolished everything on the other side of the dock. The whole area was just, no more. It just flattened it out. Nobody got hurt -- that was the good thing -- but my mother never let me go out as long as there were air warnings. Then I got really scared because the war hadn't been really real until that point, and now it was.
His life during these years became immersed in the mentality of war, engulfed by the fear, as he says, "that somebody out there would change their mind and decide to just bomb everything." School was cancelled for the year. They rode bikes on days there were no air raid sirens, hid in their homes when there were. Novi Sad first lost its defenses, then its police, then its water supply, then the television station, then its bridges, then its electricity, and eventually the bombing targets were civilian. One apartment building was decimated when satellite images found a small box believed to be a helipad dock on the roof. Over 50 people were killed in the blast. The purported helipad dock turned out to be a power generator.
It was a time of sacrifice and maturity for anyone of Nemo's age. At 13, they became adults, as important to the family's survival as their parents.
"You started to calculate time differently, thinking how long until the next blackout, how long until the next bomb, how long will our water be good to drink.," Nemo recalls. "I learned, though, how to go without water, how to keep food from spoiling with no ice, how to cook anything to make it edible -- I had to."
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In June of 1999, Serbia ceded control of Kosovo to NATO, thus ending the bombing campaign. The government of Serbia, however, remained the same. Slobodan Milosevic was still in power, loudly declaring the war a victory for Serbia.
"The government and media treated it like it was a real fight, but it wasn't," Nemo recalls. "Two days after the peace signing the media came out saying 'We won!' and everybody believed them...I've seen that kind of thing happen a lot in my lifetime and I hate it."
Much of Serbia, however, turned their thoughts to revolution. Milosevic had been tightening governmental control in the nation, restricting media and manipulating electoral systems to his own advantage, and democratic forces now had the power to overthrow him. Protests built massively in Belgrade, and often ended violently.
"This man's power was all violent power," says Nemo, "military, militia, and police." With each protest, the police, however, were becoming less and less loyal. Nemo said the police "had had enough of beating the people up and were saying 'this is ridiculous, these are my friends'."
Representatives from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition went all over the country, recruiting more protesters to the cause. They even went to high schools, bringing buses to ship young protesters to Belgrade. One time, in early October 2000, Nemo set off on one such trip.
"We almost got to Belgrade, but we got stopped and the police officer dragged me out of the bus and said, 'take these people back' because the government had surrendered," he recalled, "The police was with the people now."
His bus had been headed for what became the breaking point of the revolution, the 5th October Overthrow. This time, the police did nothing to quell the riots, and Milosevic officially resigned two days later, on October 7th.
The fall of Milosevic brought a new Democratic party into power, set on cleaning up the crippled nation. Zoran Ðinđć, a DOS leader, became president of Serbia and set out with an ambitious democratic agenda. He was welcomed by the Western powers as a democratic leader who played a key role in bringing Milosevic to the UN War Crimes Tribunal, and by Serbian citizens as a Western-minded leader who sought peaceful coexistence with the region. In a painful reminder of Serbia's continuing corruption and instability, however, Ðinđć was assassinated in 2003 amidst efforts to crack down on organized crime.
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Today, Serbia is experiencing relative peace. The current government is working closely with the EU to re-connect the isolated nation with the rest of Europe, and the imprisonment of Milosevic has marked a new beginning for the Serbian nation.
"For us, that was the end of an era," Nemo states, "He [Milosevic] was the last of the old backwards regime...All his counterparts had died, and he was the only one left." Still, there's a long way to go before Serbia can become truly stable.
"Today, things are a bit shaky," notes Nemo, "but it has to be shaky and it has to be complicated -- I mean it was a fucked up country for 12 years and nobody did anything but smuggle stuff...Now we think we can do it properly, but we can't; we don't know the way to do it yet, but we will learn." And Nemo's generation is more than willing to learn.
"Living in that kind of place makes you appreciate what you have," Nemo says, "You dream that one day you will want something and you'll be able to just go out and buy it yourself because you want it, but right now it's war." He continues, "In war all you need is a roof over your head, water, and something to put in your mouth." This perspective has created a hardened generation, more than ready to take charge of their own destinies.
"My generation looks at it this way: no one will build us anything," he says, "No one will give us anything, so we have to make it for ourselves...In a way, we're lucky because we got to observe the way the worst system of government worked, so we know the machinery and we've seen the way we ended up there." These students have become empowered by the democratic movement, demanding better schools, cheaper education, safer communities, and the opportunity to travel. This chance to travel is the only reason I was able to meet Nemo, as the laws allowed him to study in Croatia along with Northwestern University's study abroad program.
"The highlights for me are that now I can travel, I can go to college, I can study," he says, "For you guys, this is common, but for us this is the highlight -- this is new." Nemo majored in journalism in school, and hopes one day to teach at a university.
"I want to teach people how not to do what people, journalists, did during the war," he says, "All the deceit, lies, slander, corruption -- I just want to teach them to have free media, to help in that way, not change the world, but plant these seeds in young peoples minds."
If Nemo's generation can continue to learn from the faults of their predecessors and strive, as Nemo hopes to strive, to teach future generations about their experiences, then Serbia may finally be able to triumph over its marred past.
Contact Matt at m.cohlmia@gmail.com.
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