Ben Winters reports
Maybe it was the Gulf War that did it, maybe it was Bosnia, or maybe it was former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's belated admission that our actions in Vietnam were less than perfectly well reasoned.
Whatever the explanation, the cynical suspicions of the radical fringe have emerged as accepted realities: News is entertainment, armed conflict is a video game, unspoken national objectives are ubiquitous and ominous.
But if you want some serious cynicism, if you want impassioned, deep-seated skepticism, talk to Srdjan Cemerikic. One gathers from his name - choked with consonants and unwieldy to the American tongue - that he is not from around here. But you become sure when you hear him speak and what he has to say. Cemerikic speaks slowly, weighing each word, like a man stepping from stone to stone to cross a raging river, carefully choosing the words to express the growing anger he feels toward his adopted country.
Cemerikic is a Serbian-American, and he is pissed. "What they're actually doing with all this media here is brainwashing the [American] people," he says, pronouncing his version of the truth in gruff Eastern European inflections. "They want to tell them they are good, and the Serbians are bad. That's not true. This is not true."
A fundamental challenge exists for someone trying to size up how Serbian-Americans feel about the war: A huge part of what they're feeling is bitter distrust for the media. Repeated visits to the Serbian National Congress on Lincoln are fruitless. At the Serbian Village Cafe, the Serbian bartender sternly shakes his head and turns back to the television, where President Clinton is comparing his countrymen's actions to Nazi genocide.
But Cemerikic is more than willing to talk. Along with his partner, Jovan Stanisic, Cemerikic operates KOKA Electric Company in Berwyn, overseeing a staff of twelve electricians, most of them Serbs. On the third Wednesday of the war, we meet at the Greek Islands restaurant on Halsted, where the owners greet them warmly ("We put in their wiring," confides Stanisic) and set us up with our first round of Remy Martins. Like many Serbian-Americans, Cemerikic and Stanisic find themselves in a situation that most will never experience: Living in one country, loyal to another, and watching the two at war. For Cemerikic, at least, the story is one of disbelief, outrage that the situation has arisen in the first place.
"You know, our kids [in Serbia] are not wearing Russian watches, they wear American watches. They have Nike sneakers and Bulls T-shirts; they don't have Russian T-shirts. Our people really love America," insists Cemerikic. "They did until this started. There is a 200-year-old friendship between [Serbia] and the United States. And one person, I'm talking about Clinton, he gives himself power to declare the war. With what interests nobody knows."
It's not quite accurate to say that nobody knows. The declared motivation for the NATO action is to stop the "ethnic cleansing" - Clinton's term, and Tony Blair's, and CNN's - that they claim is being perpetrated by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic against Albanians living in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Many Serbians in Chicago, which hosts the largest Serbian population outside Belgrade, have their own explanations for American motives. While some hint at nefarious imperialist plots, Stanisic offers what might be called a "Wag The Dog" scenario. "I think the reason is to cover his [Clinton's] problems here. That's not right to do that, to kill innocent people to cover this Monica [situation]."
Like Cemerikic, who left Yugoslavia in 1974, Stanisic cites "economic reasons" as the impetus for traveling from his home in the northern province of Vojvodina to America in 1987, the same year that Milosevic rose to power. While Stanisic lived with relatives in Milwaukee and saved up for the move to Chicago, Milosevic rode a wave of nationalist fervor, much of it centered - in the words of Charles Rudnick, assistant dean for international law and policy development at IIT's Chicago-Kent College of Law - on "his attack against ethnic Albanians and their control of Kosovo province." Soon, says Rudnick, Milosevic "followed that up with the revocation of all the rights that they'd enjoyed."
In the years that Stanisic has been in Chicago building a comfortable living as an electrician (free from the hindrances of Communist bureaucracy and post-Communist chaos), Milosevic intensified his attacks, and relations between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo grew worse. Now that the situation has come to a head, Kosovo's future is unsure, as is Stanisic's.
"Before this happened, I liked America," he says. "I came here with $700, I make some more money here, because I am a hard worker, you know. I make a few hundred thousand dollars; I've got a good job, good company and everything. Now I'm scared."
Stanisic has begun to sell the property that he owns here, accepting the possibility of returning to Serbia, whether to be with his family or to fight. He also has some anxieties about what the quality of life will be for Serbians here, should the war drag on - and it's not difficult to see why. It wasn't so long ago that the U.S. government, motivated by a combination of fear and racial paranoia, herded thousands of Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II.
Cemerikic has related concerns. "I listened today, on the radio, that the FBI put special troops to watch for Serbian terrorism [in the United States]. But we are never terrorists. We are not terrorists." Here he gestures to the Greek bartender. "I will give him a punch in the mouth if he [should] come and tell something nasty to me, but I am not a terrorist. I won't do anything to his family or to his wife. I'd be momentarily angry, maybe I'd apologize after that.
"And nowhere in history did the Serbians do these kind of things. Because we love the family..."
continues...
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.