Blister in the Sun
Pakao 2.0 hits Balkan central
We all baked in the Balkans last summer, like a clichéd pig on a spit. I retreated to my small house near the Begej river in Vojvodina, an autonomous province of Serbia that borders Romania and Hungary – from the concrete hellscape that Belgrade has become in the increasingly slamming heat of July and August. My fantasy was to channel Chekhov, write like a Slav swamp demon (I’d just seen Anton Dvorak’s Rusalka in Vienna, such an opera bomb – and what archetypal lessons for women of influence), and sip iced cherry juice in balmy evenings.
In the optimism of June, friends in Zemun who got out of Kosovo before the 1999 armed conflict exploded gifted me a huge bottle of cherry syrup, handmade from rakija and ruby red fruit from their Fruška Gora vikendica – through the next blistering months, other friends with a commercial orchard at Boleč near the Danube spent hours each day hand-watering stressed and dying trees. This cherry magic sat a little lonely in its bottle while I developed a strangely co-dependent relationship with my air conditioning unit. I slept badly by night and was comatose by day at the swimming pool at the charming Kaštel Ečka, a 19th century Austro-Hungarian estate – the young Franz Liszt played the grand piano at its opening, as locals in the know proudly explain – that’s now a hotel, sitting literally next door. I wasn’t very professionally productive but ate endless palačinke oozing with homemade quince jam, shared by my endlessly hospitable neighbours. Everyone muttered pakao, pakao every time we checked our phones for the weather forecast.
That means hell, hell and indeed it seemed to be every time I swiped left to read the latest difficult news about Gaza and Israel, the Ukraine, Kosovo (again, again?), Biden and Trump (again? still?), never about Sudan of course (not strategic or something enough for you?) and the rising tide of local anger at Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto’s proposed lithium mine in the Jadar valley in western Serbia.
Scroll forwards, it’s June again, I’m back in Vojvodina. Biden’s the key missing element from last year’s mix – replaced in the swirl by Elon Musk (what? how?). The Biden loss/loss of Biden is not much regretted in Serbia due to his hawkish attitude in the Bosnian wars of the 1990s – along with the legacy he carried from the Clintons, Bill Clinton having joined forces with Tony Blair to bomb Belgrade and the rump ex-Yugoslavia in 1999. It’s also fairly widely understood, now, by people who lived through that episode, that the competing ultra-nationalisms that broke up the larger Yugoslavia through the 1990s delivered a form of – pakao. But I don’t think many of us who remember or lived through that time as adults really imagined Pakao 2.0.
It is impossible to do snapshot justice to the events of the past seven months in Serbia, that began with the collapse of a canopy at the train station in Novi Sad (the capital of Vojvodina) and triggered cascading demonstrations and civil society actions across Serbia, that continue against the current Serbian government led by President Aleksandar Vučić. The largest was in Belgrade on 15 March, involving an estimated 500 000 people (official and unofficial sources pushing various agendas put the contested number variously at around 100 000, around 325 000, and around or exceeding 800 000 – the most accurate number tends to be somewhere in the middle. That gathering allegedly involved the use of some kind of acoustic weapon against part of the crowd, speculated to be an American-made LRAD 450XL long-range acoustic device. This claim received some attention in the Western media – but has since disappeared as a focus, despite the only investigation into the matter having been conducted by Russian intelligence officers, who concluded in April that sonic devices were not used.
Beyond forwarding a variety of posts on social media about these demonstrations, I have only made extended comment a couple of times. I have spoken reluctantly, because I have never had any ambition to engage in Serbian political life – as bizarrely complex as the grammar of its language – and I still don’t. Even more bizarre has been the vicious blowback from a few people I know in Australia’s Serbian diaspora, mainly men. These individuals and their frustrations seem profoundly stuck in 1993 (war), 1963 (Cold War, after Tito’s 1948 split with Stalin), 1943 (more war) or the fateful 1389 (earlier war). And they’ve failed to update their farken app, borrowing from Tony the Yugoslav in the classic 2000 Australian movie The Wog Boy. So, most of the people who turn out en masse every January in Melbourne to wave a Serbian flag to support Novak Djoković at the Australian Open, became missing in action around Djoković’s clear support for the students leading the drive for normalising change in Serbia today – and missing in defence of him against a subsequent smear campaign in the gutter media back home in Serbia. Djoković can and does speak for himself. Here’s a sample of slander posted publicly to me after I referenced the Serbian protests. Mainly written anonymously, in the familiar style of pro-Vučić bots:
Nataša, you are a fucking traitor.
People like you Nataša, who try to undermine the security and stability in Serbia with your croat ustaša roots think you can freely walk in Serbia now?! You ought to consider yourself a ‘persona non grata’ … Your mother was a Cro [fact check: my late mother was a fifth generation Tasmanian descended mainly from Irish and Swedish immigrants] and that’s enough for a treacherous ingredient.
You’re on the radar.
This kind of lunacy is no joke. Of course it provoked my hardwired inat, inspiring me to say a bit more – laugh now, my non-Balkan mother displayed that quality more than my Balkan father, she had a bit of an Irish temper (Ireland’s in the EU, right? I sense a genetic conspiracy). And also, to say not so much. To be fair, to some extent I know I’m a bit stuck in 1983 (peak Yugoslavia after decades of rule by Josip Broz Tito, no war, and economically and geopolitically unsustainable – I first visited on a family holiday in 1979, then went to school together with ethnic Serbs and Croats in the Croatian city of Osijek a few years later), which includes a strong interest in Yugoslavia’s leadership role in establishing the Non-Aligned Movement. Much is being made in some quarters today of Tito’s 1968 statement ‘the students are right’ in response to that generation’s protest against his own rule – but there’s less attention to the specifics and the shadow-side of that, specifically to his subsequent retribution against some student leaders.
I’ve commented on the bare bones of Serbia right now, primarily because the Western media has been mainly missing in action – on a story that potentially could trigger the actual World War III that people keep rolling out as the scary cookie monster in discussions of global instability around Ukraine and Gaza. Remember Gavrilo Princip? (hint: an assassination in Sarajevo, 1914, triggering World War I ) and Slobodan Milosević? (hint: Balkan wars of the 1990s, including massive protest movements in Belgrade and beyond against his agendas, that were almost completely ignored by the Western media; second hint: the contemporary situation in Republika Srpska and Kosovo). Last weekend I spoke as a panelist on The Sunday Shot – a broadcast started by Australians who want a differently-angled flavour of analysis from the masthead offerings of our key national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. You can watch it here.
In the past week, the intensity of Serbia’s political crisis has continued and ramped up in different directions. Gatherings of students and citizens against the current government have continued across Serbia. As well as the regular 16 minutes of silence commemorating the deaths in Novi Sad at 11:52 am last November (up from the original 15, as another person died of their injuries), and following the two-week blockade of national broadcaster Radio Televizija Srbije across Easter in Belgrade this April, then the May hunger strike by Novi Sad sociology professor Marija Vasić in relation to a rollover of her prison detention related to involvement in the demonstrations (she was hospitalised and for a period was unlocatable by her lawyer and family, before her release on house arrest), noisier and pushier demonstrations and also the blockade of universities have continued.
These have included demonstrations targeting the offices and leaders of Serbia’s ruling party (the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, which has held power since 2012), often featuring pelting with eggs; demonstrations against ongoing detention of protest organisers in Novi Sad; demonstrations outside the Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade, in relation to a physical attack by an older student (whose motivations were not clear) on law professor Marija Karanikić Mirić and a security guard in her office; demonstrations in relation to a subsequent physical attack on current law student Petar Živković, whose recently-retired father (a former police general) believes was due to his anti-government activism; and the arrest of student protestors for verbally attacking and throwing water bottles at Miloš Pavlović, a medical student who leads the pro-government movement Students 2.0, which runs under the banner Students Who Want to Learn and is widely labeled with the derogatory term ćaci (deriving from an unfortunate spelling mistake in Cyrillic early in their public manifestation).
Pavlović and fellow travellers have based themselves since the mass protest of 15 March in a tent encampment called Ćacilend in front of Serbia’s national parliament in Belgrade, in a public space called Pionirski Park, that is now off-limits to other people – and whose purpose, as well as the identity and ambitions of other occupants, is unclear. Pavlović is now threatening a copy-cat hunger strike if the blockade on universities is not removed by 28 June, an important Serbian Orthodox and national holiday called Vidovdan, which commemorates Saint Prince Lazar and the Serbian holy martyrs who fell during the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389. President Vučić has continued to resist calls by his opponents for early elections, and described the recent attack on Pavlović as a ‘lynching’ perpetrated by ‘fascists’. Across this weekend, a banner appeared near Ćacilend emblazoned BETTER ĆACI THAN NACI, featuring a swastika. The banner itself was attacked by a number of opposition members of Parliament, and has since been removed. A similar banner on the fortress in the southern city of Niš also was taken down.
They’re just the highlights, or lowlights, depending on how you are situated. Another was the public statement this week by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) launching a petition calling for the resignation of President Vučić (now said to be the initiative of individual members, rather than the official position of SANU) with bruising words:
We, the members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts,
Guided by the highest interests of the people and the state, deeply concerned for the future of the Republic of Serbia, hereby publicly demand the resignation of the President of the Republic, Aleksandar Vučić, due to the undermining of the democratic, institutional, and social foundations of our country.
In the past period, we have witnessed:
– The collapse of the electoral process, through manipulation of voter lists, vote buying, and abuse of state resources;
– Control over the prosecution and courts, which has seriously jeopardized the legal certainty of citizens;
– Suppression of free press and media pluralism, with the usurpation of national television frequencies and the transformation of public service into a propaganda tool of the authorities;
– Excessive national debt, without public debate and control, thereby endangering economic stability and the future of coming generations;
– Cover-ups of criminal affairs that shake the public, with the protection of responsible individuals;
– The occurrence of widespread corruption, rigged tenders, and complete non-transparency in the work of state bodies;
– The destruction of the basic pillars of society – education, healthcare, science, culture, and art – which have been brought to a state of chronic crisis and neglect.We demand this resignation not out of political motives, but due to the moral responsibility we feel towards the citizens and the future of Serbia. We believe that no individual, not even the President of the Republic, has the right to destroy the democratic order and jeopardize state and social interests for the sake of personal or party power.
In a time of serious crisis and growing social polarization, we believe that Aleksandar Vučić’s resignation is the only possible step towards opening space for dialogue, renewing institutions, and restoring citizens’ trust in the state.
Belgrade, May 29, 2025
Members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Many people I know across Serbia are somehow paralysed by this situation, in terms of forwards planning for their own lives and businesses. A casual colleague who is a member of SNS, and who’s played the game smartly and to his advantage, recently said – ‘To be honest, things are getting crazy here, we are divided now, [as in] 1945, are you Partisan or you are gone.’ Closer colleagues who aren’t members of SNS, have described their feelings of anguish as their university professor peers now take home monthly salaries of ballpark 27 Euros (in a country where the cost of living now approximates more advanced economies, including Australia), and are begging for different work. More and more, I see other people collapsing into some kind of bubble or microcosm to maintain their own sanity. This generally involves disengagement from what they see as the degradation of their nation, sometimes with (but much better without) escalated aggression towards people on ‘the other side’.
I don’t mind a bubble or a microcosm myself, provided it’s healthy in all directions. On the day of the SANU statement, as the mercury spiked unseasonally and unreasonably to the mid-30s, I took my exploding brain back to the swimming pool next door. As I blistered in the sun, I turned off my phone to stop the surge of difficult news. Then I re-read the epic poem The Ray of the Microcosm by Montenegrin Prince-Bishop and poet Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (written in 1845 and translated into English in 2013) which according to the late Serbian literary historian Pero Slijepčević, ‘attempts to answer the question about the origins of evil in the world and the victory of injustice among people.’ That was a comforting read, and I chose it because my late father – who was born in Vojvodina and died in Tasmania, and who mainly could not and did not read, with easy fluency – was fond of quoting the wisdom of Njegoš:
The calm repose of blessed heaven was changed
Into a scene of frightful spectacles.
Discord unrolled its banners numberless,
The space resounded with blasphemous cries.
The frightful foam of war was rising high,
And thundering motions of the host athirst
For glory, shook the bright celestial plains.
Heaven’s foe was hastening to receive his wages.
[Canto V, 1200]
Next I moved onto a novel called Tasmania by Italian author Paolo Giordano, published in 2022 and translated into English last year. It wasn’t about Tasmania at all. It was about a friendship group of forty-something European academics and culture workers, who move between Italy and France and try to navigate the contemporary collapse of universities, the humanities, science, the rules we used to play by, and their own relationships – with an overlay of climate catastrophe and other threats of global annihilation. The only reference to Tasmania was as a distant nirvana where things might be safer and better, featuring a cameo by Australian musician Nick Cave:
It’s far enough south to escape any excessive temperatures. It has considerable freshwater reserves, it has a democratic government, and there are no predators of humans. It’s not too small, but it’s still an island, so it’s easier to defend. And believe me, people are going to have to defend themselves.
…
After his son’s accident, Nick Cave didn’t play another concert for months. How can you go back to singing and performing after that kind of a crushing loss? But then, recently, he’d started performing again. When he greeted his audience for the first time, he said We’ve been in a strange place … I’m coming out and blinking into the light … and I’ve seen Tasmanians.
For his first return performance, he’d chosen a concert hall in Hobart, Tasmania. The same island where Novelli thought there might exist a shot at salvation for us all.
As I was driving back, leaving the north coast of France, away from the cliff where Arthur fell, and as I was hurrying away from my first and unsuccessful attempt at cheating on my wife, I made a resolution to take Eugenio to a Nick Cave concert.
Finally I turned on the phone, ignored all the gloomy news from everywhere, and sent a message to Brian Ritchie, famously the bass player for the Violent Femmes, whose epic song Blister in the Sun from 1983 (still, always, my favourite year) seemed the only soundtrack for this strangest of days.
I met Ritchie in Tasmania soon after he relocated there in 2008 from the USA – he’s originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin – and established the popular MONA FOMA, the Museum of Old and New Art’s Festival of Music and Art, which ran from 2009–2024 in Hobart and Launceston as part of the pathfinding offerings of this private museum, owned and built by Tasmanian David Walsh. Thanks to Ritchie and Walsh and MONA, I saw Nick Cave play for the first time at that festival and then bumped into him, literally, the next morning at Hobart airport, we had a chat, I felt like a happy groupie. The next time I saw Cave was on stage last year on a hot June night under a big moon in Belgrade. Cave loves the Serbs, and this audience loved him right back in return.
Typing from San Francisco, here came Ritchie’s sweet global perspective:
Every time I get off the plane at Hobart International Airport, I smell the air and look at the radiant sky and feel grateful to be able to live in Tasmania.
Not everyone would agree, and usually I don’t – pakao is a relative concept, even for non-believers – but amen to that.
At least for the moment.
As I’m filing this at the end of this scorching Sunday, where the atmosphere is described as ‘boiling’ at local elections in the regional Serbian municipalities of Kosjerić (now it seems the first free city in Serbia, as the opposition has declared victory) and Zaječar (now it seems the second), despite election irregularities having been reported by the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability observation mission. This extreme heat may be due to break.
[Update – the day after the voting in Kosjerić and Zaječar, SNS claimed victory in both elections. The implications remain unclear.]
Fascinating thank you