Bernard-Henri Lévy

Ex-Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1992.  Civil war rages in Croatia.  Vukovar is effectively razed by the bombs of the JNA *.  Dubrovnik bombed, the highways blocked by columns of refugees trying to flee the war, and at Belgrade the Union of Serbian Writers is holding its annual congress on February 21^st of this year.  Among the foreign writers invited to speak is a certain Bernard-Henri Lévy, French writer, longtime friend of Yugoslavia’s greatest writer, Danilo Kis.

During his speech at the tribune of the Congress, Bernard-Henri Lévy first suggested the adoption of a resolution condemning the war in Croatia and the warning against any military intervention of the JNA in Bosnia and Herzegovenia.  He considered it «the very least one could expect of intellectuals in such circumstances”.  Apart from a minority of writers present, all the others expressed their indignation.   («Apart from an honorable minority, all the Serbian writers are mere phoneys,” wrote Goran Markovic in the daily NIN, in 1992.)

Dobrica Cosic tried to persuade him to abandon his resolution with fallacious arguments:  «This is a congress of writers, not politicians, … he is wrong, as a writer, to mix literature and politics….”  The same Dobrica Cosic, mentor of Milosevic and, in his 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, the architect, among others, of ethnic purification and of Greater Serbia, would become the president of Serbia a few months thereafter.

Bernard-Henri Lévy did not flinch.

The resolution was not adopted and this shameful congress, orchestrated by Dobrica Cosic and Milosevic’s henchmen, ended in a scission within the Union and the constitution by dissident intellectuals of a parallel union called the “Circle of Belgrade”, of which Bernard-Henri Lévy would be named an honorary member that very same day.

A few years later, recalling, with the dissident writer Filip David, these events that made the headlines of all the Serbian papers for a few days, he said, «If God, regardless of whose, had paid more attention to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s words, the war in Croatia would have ended and the war in Bosnia would never have taken place.”

At the end of June and the beginning of July, 1992, Belgrade was the scene of huge student demonstrations against the ruling power, thus against Milosevic.  At least, that is what I believed or wanted to believe and what my friends in Belgrade thought.  They kept me posted from hour to hour about the evolution of events.  “The amphitheatre of the faculty of philosophy is occupied day and night by over 2,000 students, Serbia is closed from the outside by the United Nations embargo and on the inside by the Milosevic regime.  We’re cut off from the world, we cannot leave Serbia, and we have no means of communicating with the exterior.  We need the help of the international community.  You must come here to witness our situation and our combat in the free world….”

*  Yugoslav Peoples’ Army

I asked to meet with Bernard-Henri Lévy to discuss the student strike in Belgrade.  He received me immediately.  I had one question only, one sole request.  Would he leave for Belgrade with me the following day to support the students who had been demonstrating for several weeks against Milosevic and against the war in Bosnia?

Bernard immediately agreed.  He added again that the Serbian democrats were the other victims of Milosevic’s policy and that friends should help their friends.

The next morning, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Gilles Herzog and I left for Budapest and then drove 300 km in a French embassy car to Belgrade, where we arrived shortly after midnight on July 5^th, 1992.

The immense amphitheatre of the faculty of philosophy was full.  Two thousand, perhaps three thousand students who had not slept for weeks.  Most of them looked like they are on their last legs.  Bernard-Henri Lévy would write later, « It’s true that there is a distinct atmosphere on the campus and in the amphi, a mixture of feverishness and quiet reflection, of contained anger and of despondency, an atmosphere at once apathetic and highly charged, one the very least provocation may transform into a riot.” Bernard-Henri Lévy talked to the students, telling them how happy he was to be there among them.  He said he had returned from Sarajevo under bombardment, the bombs of the Serbian militia, these traitors to the Serbian memory and its antifascist tradition, and that they, the striking students, were the honor of Serbia, of Europe, of the West, and that they were continuing the Serbian tradition of antifascism by confronting the Beast in hand-to-hand combat.

The atmosphere in the amphi was glacial, not a single word, not one reaction, as though Bernard-Henri Lévy’s words had not reached them.  At the moment when he told the students that they were «Serbia of today,  what the German antifascists of the 30s were to Adolf Hitler’s Germany”, the room began to move—cries, raised fists, banging on the desks, threats.

At that very moment, I looked up to the amphitheatre balcony and saw the two leaders of the Serbian Democratic Party, the future Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic and the President of Yugoslavia (or what remains of it—Serbia and Montenegro) Vojislav Kostunica.  They did not take part in the discussion, they did not utter a single word, nor did they come to see us, but they remained in the balcony until the end of discussions.

Strange.

When Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke of what was going on in Sarajevo, where dozens of thousands of Serbs had remained in the city to defend their Sarajevo, or when he described the destruction of the old library, the audience yelled, “Lies!  Propaganda!  Provocation!”

«You’d think they were against us,” exclaimed Gilles Herzog.

«No, Gilles.  The problem is not that they are against us, it’s that they are not against Milosevic in the sense that we believed.”

Later on that night, Bernard-Henri Lévy said the students striking were undoubtedly in opposition.  What’s more, they were sincere.  But their opposition was not in the democratic tradition, it was a patriotic protest of identity.  They were not reproaching Milosevic for making war, but for not yet having won the war.  They were not against the siege of Sarajevo, they held against him the international embargo.   These students, and with them a large portion of the Serbian population, had not seen, had not understood that Milosevic had absolute control of all the media, with the exception of Radio B92 and the weekly Vreme.  They had not realized that he had instituted a total blackout of information from abroad, installing a system of disinformation and falsehood so highly perfected that these students were simply not aware of what was happening in Serajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia.

Later on that night, Bernard-Henri Lévy told his friends from the weekly Vreme :  «All of these young people, or the majority of them, will one day, in the not so far off future, I’m sure, know the truth, that Milosevic deprived them of travelling, of reading foreign books, of scholarships, …that he conducted war in their name and that he dishonoured an entire people.  I will fight with all my strength and power anyone who accuses the Serbian people.  The only ones responsible are Milosevic and his criminal regime. “

Years passed.  The war in Bosnia was still raging.  People were dying, and Sarajevo alone counted over 10,000 dead.  It was no longer a war between two armies, it was a war against civilians.  On the front, Bernard-Henri Lévy shot two films met with the intended waves of shock, “Un Jour dans la mort de Sarajevo”  [A Day in the Death of Sarajevo], in 1993, and “Bosna”, in 1994.   Some of the images in these two films were so unbearable that most people, including international political figures, could not believe them.  Then came Srebrenica.  Mladic, the leader of the Serbian army in Bosnia, assassinated 8,000 people in two days.  The entire world was in a state of shock.  In Serbia, the Serbs knew nothing of it.  For several weeks, Serbia was the only country in the world that remained ignorant of this dreadful genocide.  A conspiracy of silence.

Then came the Dayton Accords.

The cracks began to appear inside the regime.  For Milosevic, the problems in Kosovo became increasingly serious.  Would he start a new war to save his regime?  The Serbian opposition finally began to come together.  And in November 1997, peaceful demonstrations against the Milosevic regime broke out in Belgrade and in all of Serbia’s major cities.  For three months in the middle of winter, every day 200,000 to 300,000 people marched silently through the streets of Belgrade.

It was the beginning of the end of the Milosevic era.

Bernard-Henri Lévy was not granted a visa (he was on the regime’s black list, as anti-Serbian) to come march with us, but he sent the message of his support and his regard for the Serbian people through Jack Lang.

Kosovo 1998-1999.  Milosevic began a new war.  Massive destruction of entire villages.  Displacement of the population.  Assassinations, assassinations, assassinations. And then, the bombardment of Serbia and, after three months, the surrender of the Serbian army.

THE FALL

On October 5, 2000, barely five minutes after the official announcement of the fall of Milosevic, I talked to Bernard-Henri Lévy on the phone.  Even today, I can’t say which of us was the happiest at that moment.  Should we compare our feelings?  I saw him at his home two hours later.

“We have to do something immediately.  A document for history.  Maybe a film?  Who could direct it?”

“Goran Markovic, the great Serbian film maker who had opposed Milosevic from the very start.”

“All right.  We should start right away, and we’ll produce it together.  You and me.

And so Goran Markovic’s film «Serbie, année zero” [Serbia, Year Zero], the first film of a free and democratic Serbia, was born.

On December 14, 2001, nine years after his first stay in our city, Bernard-Henri Lévy came to Belgrade to present his film “Bosna”, the film that had been seen in nearly every major city in the world except for Belgrade.  This time, he needed no visa.  Rex, the room of  B92 radio where the meeting with the public after the film took place, was full, and people spilled out to fill the entry as well .  No applause after the projection of the film, no whistles either.

Tolerance was being tested.  Not only towards the film and its author, but also between two groups so far apart.  One of them wanted to open the question of Serbian responsibility in the wars from 1991 to 1999.  The other group wanted to immediately close the question by trying to orient the discussion in another direction, by claiming that it was a falsification, that the author had confused the people with the regime, that the film was full of lies and half-truths, and anyway, who gave him the right to treat such subjects, he who condemned the Serbian people?

“I never confused the Serbian people with the regime of Milosevic, nor did I condemn the Serbian people.

“It’s true, I condemned and combatted Milosevic and his regime that dishonored a great antifascist people, that dishonoured all of you by conducting wars in your name.

“And you, do you wish to look the truth in the face, know it?  I do not believe you have gone down this path yet, contrary to many of the people in this room.”

And then the scathing phrase:

“I have done something, and you, you have done nothing.”

I doubt that anyone present in that hall will ever forget that phrase.

Bernard-Henri Lévy said again that he was ‘happy to have come to a free Belgrade, to have participated with all of you in open, democratic, and tolerant dialogue.  I must tell you that I have waited for this day for so many years, the day when I could present my film, talk with you, reply to your questions and respond to your anger.  For me, this is the moment of truth.  An important date in my life as a man.’

Later that night, in the Writers’ Club located in the basement of the same building where the Congress of the Union of Serbian Writers was held in 1992, I told him, “You see, the words you told your friends at the weekly, Vreme, in 1992 are in the process of coming true.”

“Yes, it’s true.  But as comrade Berthold Brecht would say, ‘We have overcome the difficulties of the mountains, those of the plain remain.’”

PS:  A few days later,  Borka Pavicevic, another great figure of the opposition, wrote in the Belgrade weekly Danas:  «Our true friend, Bernard-Henri Lévy, had to come to Belgrade so that we ourselves would realize that more and more of us have begun this path towards the truth and demanded the truth about Srebrnica, what were those lorries full of Kosovar cadavers that came from the Danube…?”

Zoran Tasic

Zoran Tasic is serbian film maker, producer and he lives in France.

Translation Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : Vukovar, november 91. (c).D.R.
Photo 2 : Milosevic and Cosic. (c). D.R.
Photo 3 : At the Sarajevo morgue. Filming “Bosna!”. Just ahead of Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Ferrari. (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 4 : Srebrenica massacre memorial gravestones (c).D.R.
Photo 5 : Bosna ! film of Bernard-Henri lévy (c).D.R.