On May 13th, a cyclone dubbed Tamara hit southeastern Europe and, over only a few days, doused it with three months’ worth of rainfall. Relentless torrents swelled rivers and tributaries, breaching banks and bursting levees. The brunt of the surge swept through Bosnia, Serbia, and eastern Croatia, toppling bridges, swallowing up towns, and savaging miles of countryside. The governments of Bosnia and Serbia declared states of emergency and deployed rescue teams to evacuate survivors in the worst hit areas—where floodwaters were lapping at roof eaves. Caught by surprise and inadequately warned, residents corralled family members into boats and toward any available elevation, scrambling to save provisions and livestock and heirlooms and pets. For those who had lived through the region’s wars, it was the second time in their lives that they had lost everything.
While crews worked frantically to save the power plant on the outskirts of Obrenovac, which supplies fifty per cent of Serbia’s electricity, the entire town was completely submerged by the Kolubara river. Current estimates put the death toll between sixty-five and seventy-four, while more than a hundred thousand buildings have been destroyed and about a million people affected. Though shelters have been set up, they are filling fast, and are undersupplied. To make matters more exciting, some two thousand landslides in the region have disrupted miles of minefields left over from the wars—as well as the markers designating them.
The socio-economic repercussions will take time to assess, but there are already estimates that the cost of the damage caused by the floods will exceed that of the wars that split Yugoslavia, and is estimated in the billions. The question is: Who cares?
The answer seems to be no one—at least no one in the major media. On May 17th, after two stupefying days of near-silence on the news front, the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic took the Western media, particularly the BBC and CNN, to task for failing to adequately cover breaking news of the floods. He went on to donate his Rome Masters winnings and establish a dedicated donation channel through the Novak Djokovic Foundation. Since then, outside aid has arrived, with a significant push from Germany, Austria, and Russia, who offered rescue teams and donations of medical supplies, food, potable water, pumping equipment, and clothing. Coverage has gained some traction in European news and on social media, supported by the requisite handful of celebrities and athletes like Real Madrid’s Luka Modrić, who rallied to raise awareness. Last week, the European Union Force prepared to deploy four hundred soldiers—who were already scheduled for training in the area—to assist with relief efforts. The E.U. has announced that it has allocated sixty-five million euros to deal with the aftermath of the flood, and the U.S. has contributed twenty-six tons of supplies, though its financial aid has been relatively small.
As a Yugoslav-born American and now a resident of New York, I find it impossible, in this situation, not to remember Hurricane Sandy—the blow-by-blow coverage of its devastation of the East Coast, the seventy-four hundred National Guard members deployed, the global outpouring of sympathy, the superstar laden 12-12-12 relief concert. And it’s impossible not to wonder why so many friends and colleagues—all of whom read the news and have a strong presence on social media—reached out to ask after the well-being of my family in the Balkans only weeks after the floods. They hadn’t had a clue that any kind of disaster had transpired. And now it’s becoming painfully clear that the window of opportunity for a useful commotion in the Western news media is passing.
This silence points to a sad reality: nonchalance toward the floods is only the latest example of Western hand-washing in a steady progression of abandonment and denigration of the Balkans that began in the early nineteen-nineties and continues to this day.
The former Yugoslavia has never been especially fashionable. Its countries are “somewhere, over there” in the back end of Europe, crouching between the desirable vacation mainstays of Italy and Greece. Sure, the Dalmatian coast is pretty nice, and if you can afford it there are good times to be had on Hvar. These days, Bosnia and Croatia offer inexpensive stopovers for summer inter-railing, Dubrovnik and Belgrade are ports of call on European tours, and Novi Sad has cemented its place in pop culture as the home of the legendary Exit music festival. The former Yugoslavia has contributed legendary athletes, from Vlade Divac to Jelena Janković to Edin Džeko, to a range of sports; meanwhile, in the diaspora, the voices of Balkan doctors, scientists, and professors are taking root in Western institutions. This has been a significant upswing from the kind of associations that plagued the Balkans in the early nineties: shuffling, gaunt-faced refugees; or aviator-masked, machine-gun-wielding paramilitary; the ubiquitous wool-clad septuagenarian leaning on a rake in the foreground of a panorama detailing the ashen remains of his farm and the minefield beyond.
Nevertheless, these stale tropes have been reinforced again and again, hammered into reality by distance and laziness and inscrutability. They have become familiar and inextricable items in the ex-Yugoslavia package. On hearing that you’re from those parts, people at barbecues say “I was over there in 1973, and it was absolutely beautiful—its terrible what happened”, while you nod and brace yourself for the inevitable follow-up: “is it getting any better?” You explain that you go back frequently; that yes, Twitter is totally a thing in the Balkans; and of course, it’s quite safe to travel there now—except, perhaps, like other soccer-happy regions, during major club and World Cup qualification matches. If, like me, you are of mixed background, you explain that your family is full of Bosnians and Slovenes and Serbs alike, completely upending the flashcard facts people employ for making sense of the region: Serbs as nationalistic savages; Bosnians as godforsaken peasants; Croats as the good-looking, rough-around-the-edges émigrés that your hairdresser dated in her early twenties—casually, of course.
This kind of pigeonholing can happen anywhere to anyone. But we rarely get the opportunity to see the cumulative scope of its effects: years of reductive rhetoric, painting the entirety of the Balkans as a place beyond help, beyond hope, have led to a quiet assumption that whatever plight befalls the Balkans is inevitable, even karmic. Because, in case you’ve forgotten, the people of the former Yugoslavia, for reasons too mired in consonant-heavy names and tribal blood-feuds for civilized nations to bother sorting out, could not exercise enough self-control to refrain from engaging in inexplicable, outrageous, and relentlessly brutal civil wars on European soil. They did it to themselves.
This attitude was there in the nineties, exasperated and cold, limiting evacuation possibilities and adequate humanitarian aid until it was too late. It calcified the global capacity for empathy so that, even now, when the Balkan floods manage to scrape onto Google News on the back of Angelina Jolie’s fifty-thousand-dollar donation toward Bosnian relief, the extent of public interest is the equivalent of a “now what?” eye roll. The Western world continues to hold the Balkans at arm’s length, as though its scattered nations were a clutch of badly behaved children that won’t be allowed back to the grown-ups’ table until they have served an adequate timeout.
Though help, from those able to offer it, is crucial, I am not suggesting that readers and concerned citizens have a moral obligation to drop what they’re doing and break for the nearest airport, Balkan-bound, with donation money and a bailing bucket. Natural disasters and economic collapses and horrific gestures of inhumanity plague forgotten corners of this world every day, and most of them come and go with barely a whisper on social media, or ten dedicated minutes on news channels. But in an age of global connectivity and social media, of opportunities to rewrite international relationships and recast identities, the Balkans can’t afford to look back at glazed-over eyes any more.
The issue here is not whether the Western world failed the former Yugoslavia in the nineteen-nineties. It did, but the former Yugoslavia failed itself, too, and plenty. But the Western world must not fail the Balkans now. The light of fellow-feeling toward the Balkans went out long ago, and years of deliberate numbing have kept it extinguished. Isn’t it time, now, to turn that light back on?
Above: Flood waters cover the village of Gunja, in eastern Croatia, in May. Photograph by Davor Javorovic/Pixsell/AP.
