Skip to main content

Тиха вода брег рони

"As a future NATO member and as a country that is very close to EU membership, Croatia will give full support to its neighbours"

Ivo Sanader, Croatian Prime Minister

Last week, in a rather brief statement, Croatia's Prime Minister effectively pledged to support Serbia's bid to join the European Union and other European institutions. Given the bitter and turbulent relationship between Croatia and Serbia over the past couple of decades this extension of a friendly hand towards the latter was, for many, surprising. There is a lot that has been dividing the two countries: the bitter memory of the war of Croatia's independence, the mass exodus of the Serbs of the Krajina, the still outstanding suit -originally filed by Croatia in 1999 - against Serbia for genocide before the International Court of Justice and the public disapproval within Serbia of Croatia's recognition of the independence of Kosovo in 2008.


And although Croatia's own EU bid has been delayed over a border dispute with Slovenia, just as Serbia's application is on hold until it arrests Ratko Mladic, indicted for genocide by the U.N. war crimes court, the gesture is of high symbolic value. As Sanader said the two countries should not "forget the past but not continue to live in it."

As an old Serbian proverb goes - Тиха вода брег рони - it is the quiet water that wears down the shore. It is the quiet, painstaking policy of normalization and reconciliation that will break down the walls that separate the peoples of former Yugoslavia.

Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 23, 2009 at 5:57 PM

    It was high time someone pulled Croatia from the black hole of nationalism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 25, 2009 at 4:36 PM

    For those who emailed me on the proverb Тиха вода брег рони - it literally means 'the quiet water wears down the mountain (брег)' but брег in older usage often metaphorically refers to river banks or lake shores. Spyros

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spyros Sofos: Bulgaria’s Blackmail is Unfair

  INTERVIEW     13.09.23 19 ПРЕГЛЕДИ                                         At a time when Macedonia is under strong international pressure concerning the constitutional changes, and the region is waiting to see whether it will be coupled to the European locomotive, external views become a dire need for the country to position itself on the right coordinates during the geopolitical developments that will not leave us unaffected. After the interview with the German journalist and specialist on the Balkans Michael Martens, we present to you another conversation, this time with  Spyros Sofos,  whose research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has focused, among other things, on social insecurity, identity and collective action, as well as populism in Southeast Europe. He says that Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card poses the...
Post a Comment
Read more

In memoriam or A Kurdish Woman in a Turkish Dystopia

As I came across today a set of deeply disturbing photographs of  Turkish soldiers having stripped off the clothes of a young Kurdish girl after killing her, posing with her naked body, shared on social media, I remembered  Klaus Theweleit's  book Männerphantasien (1977), translated in English ten years later as Male Fantasies . In this unique book, Theweleit, provides an insightful  analysis of the proto-fascist consciousness of the Freikorps fighters who roamed the Weimar Republic during the interwar period to fight communists and 'other' enemies. Their ambivalent but, at their core, deeply misogynistic attitudes were central in their worldview and eventually formed one of the cornerstones of national socialist ideology as it was eagerly adopted by the Nazi party and, later on, by state discourse and policy.  The Turkish state, waging war against its own Kurdish citizens allows and encourages similar fantasies to be enacted at the 'battleground' and but...
Post a Comment
Read more

What’s next for Turkey after local elections put Erdoğan on notice

Published in The Conversation: April 16, 2024, 11.03am EDT The recent municipal elections in Turkey represented a significant defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, signalling  a potential shift in Turkey’s political landscape . For more than two decades, Erdoğan has extended his  control over the Turkish media ,  the judiciary  and the  state bureaucracy , establishing an uneven playing field and skewed elections. This time, though, his Justice and Development Party — known as AKP — and its coalition with the ultra-right wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) lost 15 key municipalities. Mansur Yavas, Ankara’s mayor and CHP presidential hopeful, gestures to supporters in Ankara on March 31, 2024.   (AP Photo/Ali Unal) After  a disastrous and divisive presidential campaign  in 2023, the opposition, led by the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), assumed control of crucial municipal and provincial jurisdictions on March 31, 2024. The CHP, ...
Post a Comment
Read more