Some may have seen it, but just an article from the IHT to
consider in discussing post-communist standards of living.
KJ Khoo
Top Stories from the Front Page of the
International Herald Tribune,
Tuesday, January 20, 1998
In Belgrade, a Descent Into Sordid Hedonism
Serbs Are Turning to Pornography and Violence
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By Chris Hedges New York Times Service
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BELGRADE - Pulsating music thumped through the blue
haze of cigarette smoke and strobe lights of the
Lotus Club. Scantily clad strippers spun around
poles and leaped into two huge floodlit cages with
men and women from the dance floor. The young
couples began to peel off their shirts and simulate
sex with the dancers.
''Stay a little longer,'' a patron shouted. ''The
simulation is just the beginning.''
Under a spotlight, a stripper known as Nina, a star
of Belgrade's violent and frenetic night life,
descended a spiral staircase. Her lover and
bodyguard, a woman with closely cropped hair and a
pistol tucked in her belt, followed her.
A year ago, Belgrade, which saw daily street
protests staged by the political opposition, seemed
on the verge of escaping from the nightmare of war,
ultranationalist ideology and repressive rule by
President Slobodan Milosevic. Today, the city seems
more like Caligula's Rome.
There is a wild abandon in the air, bred of
hopelessness and apathy. The city's best-known
gangsters, sometimes in the company of Mr.
Milosevic's son, Marko, who recently threatened bar
patrons with an automatic weapon, cruise the
streets in BMWs and Mercedeses. They haunt clubs
like the Lotus in their expensive black Italian
suits and leather jackets.
This criminal class, many of whom made their
fortunes by plundering the possessions of ethnic
Croats and Muslims who were expelled from their
homes or killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the
war there, deals in stolen clothes from Italy,
stolen cars, drugs, protection rackets,
prostitution and duty-free cigarettes. They also
control some 70 escort services in Belgrade, three
adult cinemas and 20 pornographic magazines, people
in the industry say.
After midnight, the public television channels show
hard-core pornographic films made in their studios.
The hedonism comes as inflation is eating away at
the local currency, the dinar, which has lost more
than half of its value in the last few months. And
it comes as the political opposition self-destructs
with infighting after Mr. Milosevic, formerly the
president of Serbia and now the president of
Yugoslavia, has reasserted control.
Adding to the pressures, Serbs are also trying to
cope with mounting violence by the ethnic Albanians
in the Kosovo region of Serbia, who want
independence. And in Montenegro, which along with
Serbia makes up all that remains of Yugoslavia,
separatist forces are building under a new
government critical of Mr. Milosevic.
The effects of the social collapse have been
devastating. Distraught teachers say they struggle
to cope with children as young as 11 who have been
exposed to graphic scenes of sado-masochism on
television. Domestic violence, often by men who are
out of work or who have not received their small
salaries for months, also appears to be widespread,
sociologists say. Crime is endemic.
''This stratification of society is part of a
general trend in Eastern Europe,'' said Zarko
Korac, a professor of clinical psychology at
Belgrade University, ''but in this country it has
taken a more sinister form. The sanctions and the
war created a much richer and uglier underworld.
''They are our carpetbaggers who buy up the
property of the Belgrade elite, even the old
communist nomenclature. We have descended into
barbarity, into the crudest forms of life. We live
in a world of moral idiocy. I watch the smiling
face of Milosevic, who seems incapable of remorse
or pity, and wonder if he is not the devil
incarnate.''
The trend Mr. Korac referred to began with the
collapse of communism, which saw a rupture of the
social contract in Eastern Europe and the
discarding of longtime political and social values.
Pornography, along with crime, has been embraced
along with the emerging liberties to engage in
trade, publish freely or build opposition parties.
The violent breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991,
the same year that the government decided to permit
hard-core sex films to be broadcast on public
stations and the first locally made pornographic
film was produced.
While the old communist Yugoslavia did not censor
love scenes in its state-run film industry, it
condemned pornography as the exploitation of woman
and banned its production.
Many say they do not find it coincidental that this
happened as the first graphic pictures of mutilated
and dead from the war, along with the racial
diatribes against Muslims and Croats, hit the
airwaves.
''The war was about the lifting of taboos, about
new forms of entertainment to mask the collapse and
repression,'' said Ljuba Isakovic, a reporter who
is writing a book on the new sexual mores. ''War
and sex became the stimulants used to keep people
from examining what was happening.''
A Belgrade woman, Gordana Lalic, 26, poses for
pornographic magazines and sings occasionally in
night clubs. Her attempt to build a career in the
recording industry has meant cultivating contacts
with Belgrade's most notorious thugs. Mrs. Lalic,
like many young women drawn to the glitter of money
and power, has often been a victim of its darker
side.
''I have been raped many times,'' she said. ''I
tried to escape from one of these gangsters the
other night by running from the disco. I fell and
he pulled out his gun, put it to my head and told
me I could go with him to his apartment or get cut
up into little pieces.
''These are people who do not care about murder.
When some police saw us he pulled out his weapon
and they backed away. The police know the price of
interfering.''
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[Today]