Is it possible to think recognition of the independence of Kosovo if you are a Serb?

In order for this to be possible, it is necessary for the recognition of Kosovo to be thinkable, that is, for there to be a politics of recognition. Thinkability implies a thought which would be thinkable, and not necessarily knowable. The question is whether knowledge could capture the being of political thought without itself becoming the thought of one politics. It would then also be a politics of knowledge of the recognition of Kosovo, which is possible only if someone dares to find out what was thought possible when Kosovo declared independence, even if unilaterally.
However, if we emphasize the one before the question was placed, and not only the one who can be read in the statement, then it is clear that there is no one whose opinion could be thought. The politics of recognizing Kosovo does not exist in Serbia and it seems absolutely impossible. No one is leading it, although there are those who will say that there are people who recognize the independence of Kosovo, and sometimes that they themselves are the ones. Few and sometimes in recognition to recognize Kosovo: very few rarely having the opportunity to recognize it. Or it is fairer to say: in mischance to recognize it.
If politics is the skill of the possible, maybe it’s time to ask what would be impossible for one politics. Is that what we demand when we are realistic? The folly of youth or old age’s grief for it? A desire to perturb the public and draw attention to ourselves or a question with which we want to become dead so we can finally ask it?
What you can do in Serbia when you’re dead, we found out after the murder of Zoran Điniđić. Đinđić could thus be the one who did not want to recognize Kosovo at any cost, and because of that he was killed, just as he became the second Aleksandar Vučić out of his political pragmatism. Of course, this is a phenomenon characteristic of the work of the unconscious, and it can be found wherever you want if you are willing to hear and see it. The present and the future change the past more than it determines them, no matter how impossible it may seem to common sense. The fact that we’ve experienced Aleksandar Vučić, at the beginning of his rise to power, as another Đinđić changes the persona and work of Zoran Đinđić on a daily-political basis.
We remember those conspiracies and the impressions they’ve produced, but perhaps we do not see what kind of ploys we are dealing with today, when many conspired against the man and the people to whom he belongs as a member of the political class, including the international community which proposed the politics of ‘constructive ambiguity’ so that the public would not be ‘alienated’ from the process of communication on the way to comprehensive normalization.
Kosovo is the heart of Serbia, its cradle, and that is precisely why no one must question this Truth. It preserves the territorial integrity of a power that we name a country, even though the vast majority of citizens of the Republic of Serbia have never set foot in Kosovo.
Whether it is possible to think the recognition of Kosovo is not a philosophical question, and its seriousness is reflected in the risk of it being understood as immoral and criminal. Criminal in the legal and religious sense, because the Serbian Orthodox Church is in doctrinally strong ties with the state and does not hide this before God or the people. Guilt before God is therefore for the state court also, and the Truth that governs thought in Serbia is open and not hidden as the fascism of the nationalists. Today, Serbian Nazis are anti-anti-fascists, and in that they are ahead of Putin’s supporters because they are now dealing with ‘Ukrainian fascists’, so it would be too much to spit on anti-fascism, as was done on Lenin and his invention of self-determination until secession, which is even to an honest Serbian patriot and a believer a sore spot even under a chamomile bandage.
It is about terror as a way of ruling the truth which is not hidden, which is inexorable and cynical. We all know everything and it is what it is for us: everyone knows why they obey and in obeying they look for a way to manage in the market established by the power because today it has a monopoly on employment. We are made conscientious progressively (by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS)) and know the rules of the game. Even the opposition does. For instance, last night Jeremić said that Kosovo’s entry into the United Nations would be a disaster. It is no wonder then that we smoke the story of peace and stability as if we were the biggest fools, and we are as much even when we think we are being cunned because we agree to it for personal and professional benefit only. Sooner or later it ends at the spinal cord and we are no longer able to stand up straight.
Kosovo is the heart of Serbia, its cradle, and that is precisely why no one must question this Truth. It preserves the territorial integrity of a power that we name a country, even though the vast majority of citizens of the Republic of Serbia have never set foot in Kosovo. Since the return of the Serbs to the territory of Kosovo and Metohija, the power of democratic self-determination has been compensated by state power. The modern Serbian state entered history as a principality and on the very threshold, it became a monarchy, when all European nations were assembling tricolors as a sign of sovereignty of the people, and not the sovereign who was called by God and heritage to rule them (the people). A similar thing happened again at the end of the twentieth century because today’s Serbian state was created in a desperate attempt to maintain the hegemony of the Serbian power – the power that exclusively rules the Serbs – with the collapse of the Yugoslav republic. What was wanted to be preserved was not the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but the hegemony of Serbian power over the Serbs, wherever they may live.
However, the legitimacy of the Serbian power was lost due to the war, but not, as one honest Serbian nationalist and patriot would think, because the war was lost. The war deprived the Serbian power of the legitimacy of ruling over certain territories because it killed people within those territories who made political decisions to leave the union of republics, including the province of one of them. The people who lived and worked in those territories, not the soldiers, voted for the exit from Yugoslavia and separation from the Republic of Serbia, and that is why they, the people, were the target of the power, which by killing civilians became criminal, and not state or military. That’s what happened to us, and that’s the basis of the criminal hypothesis which can perhaps better explain our political problem.
Is it possible to recognize Kosovo in Serbia today?
In order for it to be, you need to have the courage to say it. Then recognition as a problematic word would begin to circulate among people as the truth of disobedience to the power which, by violating and disrespecting our political freedoms, long ago rose above the Constitution, even though it still threatens us with it as a holy word. A letter or a word, and we have known that for some time, is an order, and this always implies execution and, otherwise, sanctions. Therefore, a punishment. Word and punishment go like crime and punishment and you should also be able to say that because the power of speech is more than language ability. It is also the political capacity of people to freely say what they think and join forces in achieving what they think is good and possible for them.
Today, when the majority of the opposition wants to reconcile thinking with those for whom the recognition of Kosovo is a national disaster, we finally see that the matter of political freedoms in Serbia has gone too far.
Will we at least hear the opinion in the Assembly that the recognition of Kosovo is thinkable? Saying that the independence of Kosovo is a fact is not a political statement. Political would be the one that says that it is independent because we think that it can and should be independent. Yes, it should be said that it is wanted and that it is possible – possible to say, just as it was possible to achieve. Only the first is up to the people who live in Serbia, because the Kosovars took care of the second, and I consider Kosovars to be all people who consider Kosovo their political community and the place where they think about their politics.
However, it is not people who sit in the Assembly, but their representatives. People are left to their prejudices, and they are held and nurtured within them, both by those who represent them and by those who do not care who represents them. In order to speak to people, something more than an introduction is needed. But is it permissible to speak to people about the recognition of Kosovo? Can such a thing be uttered?
If not even the state has anything to do with the murders committed on the battlefields, why did it hide the bodies of the victims?
Today, when the majority of the opposition wants to reconcile thinking with those for whom the recognition of Kosovo is a national disaster, we finally see that the matter of political freedoms in Serbia has gone too far. That matter is suppression that is itself suppressed; petrified to the state in which it is possible to drown us and sink us deeper than a refrigerator car with a stone on the gas pedal. That very stone hangs around the neck of each of us as long as we deny the crime by which Serbia lost all legitimacy to decide what will happen to the territory from which the people come, the people whose corpses we tried to hide from the nation and the world.
Inquiring about the details of the agreements that were signed after the war, and then the declaration of Kosovo’s independence, is not in the registry of politics – at least not politics on the side of the people from whom the crime of power and power as the crime of concealment are hidden. If not even the state has anything to do with the murders committed on the battlefields, why did it hide the bodies of the victims? It is clear by nature and society that the victims of crime are in question. Among the corpses are the bodies of women, old people, and children. What kind of information is needed to make a political judgment about the right of Kosovo Albanians not to live with us and no longer share a single political word, a word with which they would establish a different community from the international one? International mediation imposed itself, no matter how much we’ve tried to look for a hegemon behind it or someone whose interest is that we are no longer together. We took care of the disunity ourselves – with murders and the power, which, if it did not commit and order them (which is hard to believe), tried to hide them.
The resolutions and agreements that followed and are still being signed on various ‘technical’, but actually administrative and management issues, issues that concern the power – as much as they concern people’s lives –are not the issues that need to be resolved first. The first issue is the freedom to recognize that recognizing Kosovo is fair and just. This recognition is not only an expression of guilt that is taken on behalf of the power and the state but also a way to move from guilt to responsibility for what was committed in a political sense and therefore in a correctable sense. Politics is thinking that starts always and every time anew and once and for all anew (now I think of Derrida too). This should be known and accepted because in this lays a person’s only way out of the darkness of guilt in which prejudices and states of the soul are hatched which are the object of power and the goal of its authority into which it has also dragged our bodies as an object.
It dragged us in because it needs us, and it needs us because of the crimes it is ready to commit in our name in order to hide behind the legitimacy it gets on the basis of this and such kind of non-thinking. That is why it is necessary to hear political thinking as well. First of all, the thought, because it is not only the legitimacy of power that is ready to commit crimes but also the legitimacy of thought which can be contested and declared a crime. Dveri is not the only one who is ready to arrest, and possibly even something worse to the people who think that recognizing Kosovo is fair and that only by taking responsibility can democratic politics be built in the country we live in and with the people of the countries with which we demarcate ourselves through the territorialization of state authorities.
That darkness is both fear and fear of the darkness into which it is suppressed and from which lurks the belief that it could take free thinking along with it. People do not dare to recognize the recognition of Kosovo not even as an idea, and when the hour of its appearance, and outbreak comes, they will justify it with the weakness they have to do so. But it is a weakness which is counted on and with which is participated in power. People may not have power, but they have the power to recognize Kosovo and the recognition of Kosovo as political freedom guaranteed to them by the Constitution, even though the preamble states that Kosovo is part of Serbia.
English translation: Ivana Purtić