Pero Krajišnik’s story

130 a villager reminisced how Stanko, tipsy with rakija, had contemplated his future, with his mother dead and his father maybe soon to follow. Stanko had reportedly envisaged selling the land in Croatia and buying a house in Lower Village from his share of the proceeds, which would probably make him ‘ours.’ Pero dismissed this as idle talk (D, 28.9.2013). He harboured his own reasons why he did not believe in such a future for Stanko, or why he himself did not sell his property. In Pero’s story we can follow the trajectory of people oscillating in and out of the refugee status and moving into other identities linked to family status, occupation, and source of income. I turn to Pero’s life history, collated from diverse sources.

131 employment between 1988 and 1991 in the Croatian town Sisak (60 km from his parents’

home), where he became a transport operator. His rail transport employer “Železar” Sisak was reportedly in Serbian hands, while hiring in the town’s refinery was organised along ethnically Croat lines¹²¹ (for similarly ethnicised local employment patterns in India, see Sanchez &

Strümpell 2014).

At the start of the Civil War in 1991 Pero left Sisak and returned to his home region, which was now part of the unilaterally proclaimed Serbian Republic of Krajina (supported by the Republic of Serbia). Here Pero worked for the local Serbian police force. This situation lasted until the beginning of August 1995. As a result of “Operation Storm” (see above), Pero’s family fled some 600 km eastward on their tractor, until they arrived in Lower Village on 14 August 1995. The Krajišnik’s matrimonial relations were at rock bottom, and Pero’s wife divorced him in 1996. She lived for a while with the boys in a neighbouring locality, and was reported to be with her new husband in Slovenia today. Pero’s sons presently worked in adjacent villages for a riding stable and in horse conditioning, and hardly visited their father. In 1997 Pero found employment in the laundry of the hospital in River City. Here some women cooked for him, and he also had a new sleeping place. Meanwhile, Pero’s parents went to live with his sister in a small town near Šabac. His sister nursed an elderly man (gledala ga), and in exchange the latter wrote over his inheritance to her.

In 2005 Pero lost his job and returned to Lower Village.¹²² He needed a new place to stay, and Zoran Pavlović, the “political man” of the SPS (see Chapter Two), offered him a small old brick house in the creek valley, some way from the village centre. There was no electricity, but it provided a free roof over his head. For half a year Pero received unemployment benefits, but when that ended he depended on work in the village. The focus of Pero’s second life in Lower Village became the shop in the village centre, and the circles of male sociability around it. The shop partly functioned as an informal job exchange, where Pero found day labour e.g. felling trees, cutting firewood, making and bailing hay, or digging graves in the cemetery. However, Pero’s single most important relation became the older metal worker and welder Željko (b.

1949), with whom he teamed up and earned an informal income. Željko became a friend who visited Pero when he was sick, lent him money, or a tool if he needed it. Heating was a constant worry, and sometimes Pero and the “ex-refugee” Mišo cut the acacia undergrowth along the streets, providing a service to farmers who could better access and work their fields. Important

121 I thank Duška Roth for this information.

122 Rajka Janković squarely attributed his unemployment to the corruption of the G17plus party which had “the Health” in its hands.

132 in obtaining firewood were also the shop owners, with whom Pero went into their woods, dividing the proceeds on a friendship basis. The shop owners also gave Pero an extended informal credit line (on je kupio na veresiju).

As a setback, the male sociability around the shop was tied to inviting each other for a round of drinks. In fact, in 2008 Pero’s alcohol consumption reached critical proportions and led to a new turning point in his life. According to former President Duško Buba Janković, Pero “totally cracked (on je totalno pukao). He sometimes only manages to crouch home on his hands and feet, can’t stop drinking. Last year he was in hospital for a while. He will live another year or two, and then he will die” (D, Duško, 18.1.2010). I asked Duško how he could tell Pero’s imminent death, and got the reply: “Just look at his head, how deformed it already is. It will burst like a gourd” (ibid). Duško’s bucolic dystopia of comparing a human head with an overripe gourd tied directly into a local genre of “cracking or bursting” (pući) of people and things. To crack a gourd requires a certain spatial and temporal force. The “total cracking” of such a body/material signified becoming mentally ill and socially ruined as the result of the interplay of external and internal pressures. The concept of cracking was not only applied to the fate of “refugees” or people “leaning to alcohol,” but more generally to people’s moral and economic failures in the societal transformation.¹²³

Hearing the expression that Pero was totally cracked was startling. I remembered how other people, including my fervently Christian landlady Rajka Janković and the elderly agriculturalist Savo (both cited above) had not berated Pero for alcoholism, insinuating that he had started drinking after he lost his job, and therefore as a result of his pain. When I told Duško that I had heard this story of Pero’s alcoholism, Duško laughed it off and said: “No, Pero lost the job because of drinking” (D, Duško, 18.1.2010).¹²⁴ In the case of Pero (and more generally), the moral verdict of “alcoholism” disproportionally met socially unsuccessful men and overshadowed the degree of empathy employed towards them as fellow fathers. In fact, the

“alcoholism verdict” weakened Pero’s moral claim for support. He counterweighed the threat of de-solidarisation with his hard work, professionalism, and gentle calmness. Although Duško blamed the victim, he did not state that Pero should be left alone to die. Indeed, Duško was adamant that the Municipality was responsible for social and health problems, and he was critical of the lack of state initiative and responsibility in these fields.

123 Elsewhere I have analysed the dialectic of cracking and gluing people (bodies), social relations, technical assemblages, and other spatial fixes that I observed in Lower Village agriculture (Thiemann 2014, 35 et passim).

124 From village sources it was hard to verify whether Pero drank when he worked and lived in the urban hospital.

133 Duško’s feelings were shared by many former state persons. Take the answer of the former MZ clerk Pavle when I asked him who should care for people needing help. Sitting at the second village shop in the company of two villagers, Pavle replied that social security and care rarely followed a clear-cut procedure:

That is essentially the responsibility of kin [pada na rodbinu], but also a bit of ‘the Social’

[CSW; Municipal administration for social activities]. First, the family is obliged morally and according to some other... a table-companion interjected: … according to the patriarchal standpoint… The ex-clerk paused for a moment, then continued: Second, that other part is the responsibility of the state, but if that, then nothing [of it]. Here you have to beg for the simplest things (D, Pavle, 4.9.2013).

The ambivalence of the answer was exemplary. It came from a former local state employee who used to be very active in providing help to refugees and villagers in need. Until 2006, for instance, the office of the MZ had regularly directed applications for social aid to the CSW.

When the former clerk and his neighbour stated that better social security was provided by the family, they voiced a practice-saturated critique of the law on social protection. The former clerk knew from experience what could be asked from ‘the Social’ and how it had to be

“begged” for, a pragmatic criticism that he and ex-President Duško shared.

In this and similar conversations a kind of normative dualism emerged, according to which social actors expected the state to fail in its broad responsibilities while they were hopeful (but not confident) that the family could provide for all needs (see Thelen, Thiemann, & Roth 2014).

The odds seemed stacked against Pero, for whom the care by the state was difficult to obtain because his refugee status had long ceased to be protective, while his potentially caring family had dissipated. Would Pero accord to the pragmatic critique of the former local state actors, fall through the safety net, and “totally crack” when hitting rock bottom?

Turbulences and redefinitions in Pero’s life

In 2008, when Pero was drunk and fell again, he did not totally crack. Someone called the ambulance. For a couple of weeks Pero’s alcohol sickness was treated in the hospital of River City in the section for psychiatry. When he returned to the village, he managed to stay sober for a while, later he continued his drinking routine at the shop.

With social worker Dunja, I repeatedly discussed the widely perceived state (ir)responsibility to protect the population in connection to alcohol problems. Dunja said that there was neither a regulation nor a strategy, for it fell between the spheres of Health (zdravstvo), the Social (socijala), and the police (MUP).¹²⁵ When the media headlined drug

125 Throughout the socialist period, Yugoslav psychiatrists developed a “moral panic” about the constantly rising rate of diagnosed alcoholism, which they turned into professionalizing and enhancing treatment options. The

134 abuse during election campaigns, the Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Ivica Dačić (SPS) “busts a couple of drug dealers. That image may be a bit caricatured, but essentially captures the truth (u suštini je to istina)” (D, Dunja, 17.5.2012). In another conversation, on 30.9.2013, Dunja explained the procedure applied to people endangered by alcohol sickness. It was “contraindicative” to put them into a social institution, she said, that was the preserve of Health. Then she conjectured:

Dunja: He [Pero] waits until he falls, then they put him into a hospital, there he sobers up and recovers, and afterwards they contact us.

Me: They didn’t [contact you].

Dunja: Well, that is because they asked him if he insisted on being treated further and to sign that, but if he does not sign they will discharge him without notifying [us].

According to the interpretation of social worker Dunja, no official process of making a local state institution responsible for Pero had followed his release from the psychiatric ward.

Nonetheless, contrary to the widespread image of state non-care and family care, it was state actors and not family that took care of him. First, Pero was employed in Public Works by the SMZ. Second, his refugeeness was renewed by the SMZ in order to legitimate its help in a new

“human security” crisis.

Public works

In 2009 the Serbian State financed a new Public Works programme with a complex application procedure (Anđelković and Golicin 2010, 10–11). When the first call for applications for the new programme was announced in 2008, Vojo Volović was still President of the SMZ. As was generally the case when it came to project applications, it was difficult to find somebody to do the paperwork.¹²⁶ Vojo finally authorised Aleksandra Janković (b. 1984), the newlywed daughter-in-law of the shop owners, to write a project on cleaning the sides of the village streets from undergrowth. It was not legally previsioned that an SMZ could supervise the works, so the official contractor was Vojo’s building and trading company. Beginning in spring 2009, three workers worked for four months, i.e. Aleksandra as coordinator, and two manual workers.

The social proximity between the shop owners and Pero might explain why Aleksandra included him.

predominant explanatory model they promulgated was a pathological one of disease caused by a mixture of personal and societal factors. The enhancement of treatment possibilities was however stymied by the end of Yugoslavia and the outbreak of the war (Savelli 2012).

126 According to my host Slavo Janković, the SMZ had worked through projects for the last 30 years. The problem was to find somebody to do the application. When the minister of infrastructure visited the village some years earlier, he was asked why he had not contributed to the recently finished church. The minister retorted: Did anybody ask? Slavo blamed the absentee priest for failing to do so (D, Slavo, 20.1.2010).

135 In 2010 it was planned to expand the works to six months and to include six workers (one of them Aleksandra’s female friend). Apart from freeing streets from undergrowth, an added task was to repair the drainage ditches. Aleksandra complained that though the new president of the SMZ Bane Erić was “not able to do anything for the village,” he still wanted to choose the workers himself. Aleksandra was especially incensed that the SMZ gave no money to build a children’s playground in the village centre, where 20 small children (including her own daughter) passed daily. Bane chose workers, in Aleksandra’s view, not according to skills but to social proximity. Thus, Bane’s cousin, who had a bad reputation as a gambler (but dug graves) had been suggested (I, Aleksandra, 17.4.2010). While Public Works were funded from the central state budget, the applications were channelled through the Municipal Service of Economic Development and the district (okrug) branch of the Republican Agency of Unemployment. Informal negotiations in spring 2010 revealed that funds were reduced and that the Ministries demanded larger projects. Therefore the Municipality preferred a landscape gardening project in Upper Village arranged by the privatised spa to Lower Village’s project.

Upon consultation with the SMZ of Upper Village, Pero and another Lower Villager were employed there.

In 2011 another entrepreneur offered to host the (unprofitable) Public Works in Lower Village. Aleksandra was the successful project writer again, and Pero was employed once more.

After a falling out with Aleksandra in 2012, the application was given in the last minute by the SMZ to the municipal firm GRADSKO ZELENILO (Public Greens). This time Pero was among four villagers who were employed for landscaping parks in River City (I, Aleksandra Janković, 27.4.2010; tI, Goran Todorović, 17.5.2012).

For the first time in five years, Pero was not employed in Public Works in 2013. However, that year the Municipal authorities, following a suggestion by Aleksandar Brodić and Mladen Veterinar, supported a micro-project to tear down the Old Srez building. The local contractor was the same as in 2011, and Miro Supervizor participated in the works. Miro was especially satisfied about the demolition of this building, in which his grandfather had been tormented during early socialism. The wooden beams, floor and so on were retained for Pero and Stanko as firewood. They were told to cut and remove the 30 m² of fuel in a week. Within three days

136 they had cleared everything (D, Miro, 31.8.2013).¹²⁷ As this shows, Pero was regularly supported by the SMZ, and Stanko sometimes, even under difficult circumstances.¹²⁸

“Our” refugee

During Pero’s turbulent years, Miro Supervizor became instrumental for his social security.

Miro, who had invited his close relation Tina, a refugee from Tuzla, into the SMZ (see Chapter Three), was genuinely concerned about the refugees. Living near the former camp (see figure 4), Miro had long ago fallen in love with a refugee girl, as he once told me performing the frajer mode. By 2009 Miro had integrated his shop-buddy Pero into the running of the football club.

Although admittedly not a big football fan, Pero since volunteered as a pitch steward, securing for himself the benevolence of the new SMZ.

A new threat to Pero’s physical safety arose in the winter 2009-10, as I learned on 15 January 2010, while I pre-tested my research group’s joint questionnaire with him. I found Pero drinking a beer with shop owner Zoran Janković on the benches outside the shop. It had snowed a little, and it was already dark. Pero explained that to sit here was still better than at home where he did not have electricity, light, TV, or a fridge. And it was not warmer there, either. For the interview, we went into the glass annex of the shop, where it was windless and where I had some light for writing. While Zoran disappeared, his wife Mica listened over and joined the conversation now and then. The interview proceeded haltingly, and Pero revealed only what was strictly necessary. For instance, he said that he did not celebrate the family feast slava, and shop owner Mica injected “because he doesn’t have the appropriate conditions,” in order to ease an embarrassing moment. Questions on income and money were evaded by Pero, who had probably experienced that stating his income could lower the propensity of receiving help. Mica suggested I should write he earned about 5000 dinar (€ 50) monthly. Therefore it came to my surprise that Pero answered my question on “general security” with a longer story. Ten days ago he had been almost assaulted, he said. Some people had sneaked to his house, he ran out and yelled: “WHO IS THERE?!” and they ran away. Mica was obviously worried, too.

127 There were critical voices concerning the long-term effects of Public Works. The social policy coordinator of River City thought that prevention of social problems was better than providing for the afflicted afterwards. Yet, the creation of new jobs lay outside the Municipalities’ competence, and the results of Public Works were not entirely satisfactory. Although they had to last six months, the money for the salaries was spent after two months. Furthermore, Public Workers did not get back into insured full employment, yet this was what they needed (D, Social Policy Coordinator, 14.10.2009).

128 Pero did not always manage to use the opportunities his friends from the SMZ and the Football Club opened up. For instance, a former footballer with a construction firm in Belgrade invited Pero to work on site. Pero agreed under the condition that his partner Željko came along. But it was too challenging for the latter. As Pero was too insecure to go alone, in the end neither of them went (D, Željko, 18.9.2013).

137 During spring 2010, Miro casually helped Pero to move to the flat in the SMZ building that Mišo and Dana had used until 2008. Rajka Janković had heard that this was because a couple of days earlier Pero had been attacked by some youths while he was asleep. The rumour was that these were not kids from Lower Village but some “Albanian Roma” (Ashkali). This scapegoating of putative outsiders threatening the imagined “pure Serb” village and “its refugee” was a remarkable expansion of the story Pero had told me three months earlier. The allusion to the Ashkali youths activated entrenched (although often rather benign) prejudices against Roma as creating havoc (Obradović 2008, 25). It also presumed that the culprits were refugees from the Kosovo War in 1999.¹²⁹ The incident was thus linked to a human security problem. To better comprehend the point, we need to make a detour to the recent history of post-Yugoslav displacements.

After the Croatian-Bosnian refugee crisis in 1995, a new wave of displaced persons arrived from Kosovo around and after 1999. The Kosovar exiles, both ethnic Serbs and Ashkali who fled the violence of the Kosovar Liberation Army (Sundhaussen 2012, 379–80) were administratively called “privremeno raseljena lica,” i.e. Temporarily Displaced Persons (TDP).¹³⁰ The different concepts – “refugee” vs. “TDP” – had various legal and moral connotations. TDP were from the outset Serb citizens with legal claims to employment and a state pension if they had held a job in Kosovo. They also generally applied successfully for NGO grants to build houses. It was furthermore possible for the TDPs to immediately ask for social aid at the CSW.¹³¹ In contrast to “our refugees,” the TDPs were better off – sometimes even better than those locals who had lost employment in the early 2000s. This turned the former asymmetric relations of solidarity with refugees on their head and resulted in moral apprehension of the TDPs by local Serbs. The TDPs – whether ethnically Serb or Roma – were often portrayed in local discourse as traitors of the nation who had sold their property in Kosovo to the Albanians and were scrounging on the impoverished mother nation.

It remains unclear whether Miro Supervizor intended to use the story of the Ashkali TDP’s threat to “our refugee” Pero in order to legitimate helping him, or if this story was invented by others. In any case the allusion to the TDPs confirmed to the villagers that Pero was threatened by a human security crisis and that he needed to “flee” from his lone house to the SMZ flat in

129 One Ashkali family with several adolescent children that had fled Kosovo lived in Upper Village.

130 Privremeno raseljena lica tended to live in larger or richer settlements than Lower Village. They were called

“temporarily” displaced because of the futile ambition of the Serbian governments to retain the Kosovo territory within the nation state and to return them as citizens. For the strong links between Serbian nationalism and the Kosovo complex, see Sundhaussen (2007).

131 In contrast to the exiles from the Serbian province of Kosovo, the Croatian and Bosnian refugees needed to apply for a Serbian passport to be registered as Serbian citizens. However, a Serbian passport potentially made their return more difficult. Therefore many refugees hesitated for years to take such a decision.

138 the village centre. Lower Villagers, among them the SMZ councillors, from now on increasingly used the refugee concept to support Pero Krajišnik in his difficulties (although these were increasingly unrelated to his exile of 1995). Larissa Vetters (2014) has recently described a comparable case of an inventive appropriation and re-employment of the relational modality of humanitarianism. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the International Community favoured claims by Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) for support to reconstruct their rural housing, as part of attempts to reverse ethnic cleaning (see Jansen 2011). In Mostar, urbanites appropriated this relational modality to claim Municipal reconstruction of their urban housing, even though some of them had never fled their homes (Vetters 2014, 24).

In Lower Village the relational mode of humanitarianism was re-deployed to help Pero move into the flat in the SMZ house that other refugees had used before. It also seemed safer to live in this “state” house, surrounded by neighbours and frequented daily by the MZ clerk.¹³² It was arranged that Pero could live there for free. The SMZ accepted Miro Supervizor’s unilateral decision and reactivated Pero’s refugee status, as the following statement of the MZ clerk exemplified:

He [Pero] is a refugee person [izbegličko lice], we have to help him. Pero received a small flat consisting of a room, a kitchen and a small WC. An electric meter was installed in the flat and he only has to pay the electricity bill (D, Zlatan, 29.8.2013).

Intially Pero had been allowed to use the electricity free of charge, and his power consumption immediately increased the bills of the SMZ. In this sense his “human security situation” echoed the events of the 1990s, which ultimately led to the closure of the refugee camp in 2002. The new SMZ reacted less rigorously and, as MZ clerk Zlatan alluded, simply asked Pero in 2013 to pay his electricity bills. Pero’s ensuing financial problems were partially redressed as he assumed the identity of a ‘materially endangered person,’ as we will see in the final subchapter.