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By Root 1281 0

the presence of Muslims in the sacred land that Serbs had been forced to abandon in 1690 was insupportable. In the 1980s a series of sensational misdeeds were attributed to Kosovar Albanians, and were considered by many Serbs to illustrate the threat posed by these “aliens.”53 One in particular connected directly to the ancient rhetoric against the Ottomans. On May 1, 1985, according to Yugoslav newspaper reports, a Serbian peasant called Djordje Martinović was attacked by two unidentified Albanian men, who “mistreated him, and forced a bottle into his rectum.”54 The bottle’s neck broke in his anus, causing great pain and physical damage. There were suggestions that the motives might be something to do with land, but no satisfactory causes ever emerged. Then it was suggested that it was in fact an act of sexual self-gratification. Martinović, it was said, had put the bottle on a wooden stick and then sat upon it. But that too went against the medical evidence. At least four different (and mutually contradictory) explanations were eventually advanced.

But in time the facts became less important than the symbolism. Newspapers began to call it “impalement” and linked it to atrocities committed “in the time of the Turks.” This was widely taken as a reference to Andrić’s description of such an incident in The Bridge over the Drina.55 The Serbian Academy of Sciences issued a long memorandum that referred to the Martinović case, and said it was “reminiscent of the darkest days of Turkish impalement.” A writer who had researched the case put it more bluntly: “Here we are dealing with the remains of the Ottoman empire … [Albanians] stuck him to a stake, this time just wrapped in a bottle. In the time of the Turks, Serbians were being impaled too, though even the Turks were not the ones who did it, but rather their servants—Arnauts [the old term for Albanians].”56

Albanians in general were implicated in a crime that was at best uncertain. In the end the evidence against them came down to the fact that this was how the Turks had behaved, and the Albanians were their surrogates. Ten years after the event, Julie Mertus observed that “the power of the Martinović case lay in its ability to invoke the primary imagery of Serbian oppression: the Turkish barbarity of impaling.”57

The case illustrates the extraordinary invasiveness of maledicta, which can defy all truth and logic. Indeed, they rewrite and redefine the truth. In 1992 the Bosnian Serbs elected a psychiatrist from Montenegro, Radovan Karadžić, as their leader. Marko Vešović, a school friend of Karadžić, spoke about how his former classmate had become an author of genocide. Vešović blamed Karadžić’s malign deeds on the fact that he was born a Montenegrin. “Serbs are not a mythological people or nation. In this war we have to understand that the Montenegrins are a mythological people. You can say that in this war the Serbs were infected by Montenegrin mythology … The main expressive tool of Montenegrins is hyperbole. In one minute they go to extremity.” Then he mentioned the “greatest words” of the Montenegrin poet Njegoš: “Let the possible be. Let that happen which is not possible.” Radovan Karadžić fancied himself as a poet, in the manner of his heroic namesake. There is unmistakably an echo of this poetic theme in the doctor’s own verse: “When I am in a kind of mad fire / I could do anything.”

Vešović described how it was “an experience par excellence to sit in the winter nights in Montenegro and listen to the stories that were so rich in fantasies … so detached from reality.”58 As a political leader Dr. Karadžić showed how with a lie here and a half-truth there, he could and would do anything. All his stories and maledictions against the Muslims of Bosnia were, in the end, narratives without boundaries. Dr. Karadžić linked old texts to new fears, talked to his audience in terms they knew from their childhood. He made killing seem natural, normal, even predestined.59 Calling up dark memories of an imagined past, he was like some demented Pied Piper:

By means of a secret