The life and profession of Mladen ‘Veterinar’ Simić

Mladen was born in Lower Village in 1967 as the first son of the driver Milivoje Simić and the housewife-agriculturalist Jovana Simić. His younger sister Valja, a kindergarten teacher in River City, was born in 1971. Mladen started to play football at an early age and according to my host Rajka Janković was a bright and affable kid. After finishing the village’s primary school and River City’s secondary school, he studied veterinary medicine in Belgrade. There he married his fellow student Lica, a native of Belgrade city. In 1993 they jointly graduated and started an internship in the local state veterinary station of Creek Town, where they treated cattle in a large fattening scheme (which ceased working in 1995). In 1995, they received their doctoral diploma, and Mladen opened a small private veterinary ambulance in Lower Village on his paternal uncle’s land. However, the couple continued living in the urban settlements of Creek Town or River City, moving flats overall for nine times. In 1996 their first son was born. There followed a stint as a co-owner of a poljoprivredna apoteka (a shop which sells agrarian inputs). But when their younger son was underway in 1998, Lica decided they should withdraw from this rather unprofitable venture. In spring 1999, Lica went to visit her parents and to give birth to her second son in a renowned Belgrade hospital. She and her baby left hospital the very day when the three-month bombardment of Serbia by NATO began. During this time, the young family moved to Mladen’s parents in Lower Village. Lica worked since 2000 in large animal fattening enterprises in the region, while Mladen persisted with his local veterinary ambulance. Meanwhile, he became a successful sport activist (sportski radnik): already in 1998 he had started an open-air volleyball club in Lower Village from scratch. By 2002/2003 this club was promoted to the Serbian league and fused with a team from River City that owned a sports hall. However, in 2004 the joint club faltered when the running costs became too high for the parents of the players and the sponsors of the team.

After a break of two years, Mladen and several friends became functionaries of the village football club.

They expanded the youth section and trained three teams, which Mladen’s younger son passed through successfully (by 2013 he played in a first league youth team of River City). Meanwhile, the First Team (young adults) of the village club was complemented by a veteran team, where Mladen and his age group came together. One veteran, a medical doctor from River City who owned a week-end house (vikendica) in the village, was a member of the party G17plus. In 2008, he recruited Mladen to become a party member. The same year Mladen stood for municipal elections, and thanks to his local popularity he gained enough votes to become a member of River City’s parliament and its committees for sports and for agriculture. By 2009 Mladen helped to forge a new SMZ in Lower Village, set up by football club members and their relations, which supported each other in renovating the club and improving other village infrastructures. These football friends also aided Mladen in organizing his second successful municipal election campaign in 2012.

The biography of Mladen suggests that he had a gift as a “relational diplomat.” Hailing from a rural background, brought up in a family of worker-peasants (polutan, ~i), he successfully mastered university studies in the capital. Yet, instead of simply “moving on” in the value hierarchy of post-Yugoslav space, with “rurality” at the low end and “urbanity” at the high end of “civilization” (Simić 1973; Jansen 2005b; M. Živković 2011), Mladen maintained and

67 expanded his close relations to his village. He visited his parents regularly, and at the weekends his sons slept over at their grandparents. His activities as a rural sport activist helped him to (re-)establish ties with former school mates, with other sports activists, the youth, their parents, and the wider circle of fans. As I will show next, two passions drove him – a love of sports and a care for the local economy.

The post-socialist love of sports as expressed in the epigraph accorded to sport the power of generating the values of “community, competition, tolerance and solidarity.” Indeed, the

“shared habits, outlook and daily practices – work, school and sports – united the population”

under Yugoslav socialism (Sterchele 2007, 215). Sport activists like Mladen attempted to reproduce these values under neo-capitalism. He was all but alone – in contemporary Serbia

“sports, recreational and/or cultural associations at the community level” (sic) had the strongest continuity with the past and accounted for half of all Civil Society Organizations (CSO) (Sterland and Rizova 2010, 50). Sports activism operated with more volunteer work than other CSOs, and was largely funded through membership fees (Stuppert 2010, 25, 26). Liberal authors like Sterland & Rizova have criticized these post-socialist CSOs as “old-fashioned organisations in terms of their administration and their approach to stakeholders, particularly the State and government” (sic) and portrayed them as “conservative, socially and politically passive, and with few human resources, organisationally weak.” On the other hand, they conceded that these CSO “do have the necessary capacities to organise activities in the community and to reach their particular target or membership group” (Sterland and Rizova 2010, 12). The normative disqualification of sports activism by liberal authors sprang from the politics of discarding “communist” associations or changing their functioning, “embedded in the neoliberal reforms at the state-civil society interface” (Mikuš 2013, 169–70). However, I argue that sport activism did not merely reproduce but also transformed state relations, by infusing them with dynamism and socio-spatially inclusive practices and values. Mladen believed that he was able to thrive as a local politician precisely because he succeeded in mobilizing his fellow citizens to participate in the revaluation of local sports.

Mladen’s care for the local economy was stimulated by his experience as a veterinarian.

Economic care combined care for the self with that for others, as the following vignette shows.

For the third day of his slava (a family feast dedicated to the orthodox patron saint of the household), Mladen had invited some of his veterinary colleagues into his flat in a high-rise building in River City. At the festive table, a colleague worried that since about 2005, the number of domestic animals had diminished rapidly in the area. If this continued, sooner or later they would all have to find a new job. Others nodded in agreement, and the mood turned downbeat. Then an urban veterinarian who had specialized in pet surgery bewildered and bemused the others telling them how he had recently performed a $600 operation on the fatally ill dog of a notorious local gangster (D, 10.11.2010).

68 The story of the futile and expensive surgery⁶³ highlighted to the listeners how the agricultural downturn combined with the (sometimes shady) transformations of the local economy was resulting in increasing inequality.⁶⁴ The economic changes segmented the market for veterinary services and led to more social insecurity for the majority of the customers, affecting also the professional future of many veterinarians. It seemed advisable to village veterinarians to work with all available customers regardless of class differences or personal liking, and to bind them by offering discount prices. By 2010 Mladen had accordingly worked for almost all households in Lower Village and its surroundings. Through this practice he learnt to accommodate, and often also to empathize with, the discourses, needs and joys especially of the local lower and middling social classes, as I observed when I accompanied him on 10 October 2010. We started at 10 am at the household of his parents, and went in his subcompact car on a six hour tour through three villages. That day, Mladen worked in six households – where he treated pigs, cattle, and sheep – and stopped by at his mother’s for a hearty lunch. Furthermore, we had a forty-five minute break at the village shop, where we talked to Mladen’s neighbour and football club friend Miro ‘Supervizor’ (b. 1965) about upcoming works and events. Miro, an unmarried, self-employed painter and construction worker, was versed in finding useful gadgets for the club, and he was one of the main local state actors at the communal work action with which I started the chapter (see also more below).

A seventh client phoned and brought his recently castrated pet dog for a follow-up examination. Sixty years of age and well groomed, the man had earned a small fortune abroad and owned a weekend house in Upper Village. He talked without cease, especially about his martial arts exploits and his 21 year old girlfriend. Mladen stayed unusually calm while examining the dog. Afterwards Mladen told me that he thought the man “loved to boast” (voli da se hvali). Therefore Mladen had previously rather happily transferred the dog’s castration to his above mentioned colleague in town who specialized in small animal surgery.

In contrast, during the home visits, Mladen had been much more outgoing. For instance, he spent time with an elderly couple who kept two pigs for subsistence to advise them free-of-charge about how to construct a healthier sty. With these and several other small farmers he stayed for a coffee and a chat. Some of his customers were distant relatives – his large extended

63 It cost twice as much as the regional average income of € 300. The nationwide average income, boosted by the higher salaries in the city of Belgrade, lay at about € 400/month.

64 Many villagers had relied until recently on urban jobs, complemented by household agriculture. Amplifying older historical trends, the community became increasingly more unequal and differentiated between the unemployed and the underemployed, local worker-peasants, small and larger agricultural and industrial entrepreneurs, local state actors, weekend house owners, returning guest workers from abroad, pensioners, refugees of the recent wars, long established, and newly arrived families, etc.

69 family stuck together, he told me. Mladen also checked with delight on a medium scale beef-fattening/dairy farm (15 cows and 100 young bulls) run by an extended household of two married brothers. Having in mind such interactions, I appreciated one neighbour’s fond characterization of Mladen as a ludina (a very sociable person, between a “philanthropist” and a “laughter maker”). So how did this sociable veterinarian, who cared for the local economy and sport activism, fare as a politician? To find out, we return first to the football club.