Serbia's culture shock

Slight, in a light denim jacket, Balat blends in with the students and young people drinking coffee and chatting at the other tables and strolling nearby through downtown's main pedestrian thoroughfare. But his documentaries capture searing insights and themes that crystallize the traumatic upheaval this society has experienced over the past decade.

Balat's 1994 documentary, "The Crime That Changed Serbia," profiles the mafia underworld that exploded in Serbia that year as a result of international sanctions, Belgrade's wartime spending and hyperinflation. Three of the underworld figures Balat profiled in the documentary, Bojan Banovic, Goran Vukovic and Mihail Divac, were killed before the film finished production. Six years later, only two of the dozen men profiled are still alive.

His second documentary, "Ethnic Cleansing," looks at the war-crimes trial of a Yugoslav accused of atrocities in neighboring Croatia. His latest, "The Anatomy of Pain," released last spring, delves into the night 16 RTS employees were killed when NATO bombed the RTS building April 22, 1999. Soon after the bombing it emerged that the director of RTS, Dragan Milanovic, had ordered his staff to work their shift or lose their jobs, even though he knew it was going to be bombed, and had informed a personal friend of his to stay away that night. The film is as critical of the RTS and Serbian leadership as of NATO.

The film, Balat said, recounts a moment "when human life was very cheap, and especially cheap in the building of state TV, during the NATO bombing. The regime tried to use that loss of life for its propaganda purposes. But that was the breaking moment for the public," when people began to understand that the state propaganda was absolutely cynical.

After that, he said, RTS propaganda had a strange reverse effect. "Every time they showed a picture of" Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic, who headed her own corrupt left-wing political party, "it was as if they had run five advertisements for the opposition." In a sign of how much things have changed here, Balat's "The Anatomy of Pain" aired on RTS last week.

Balat's next documentary probes the question of individual responsibility for what happened in Serbia through portraits of real people.

"I think for Serbia to have some better future, this question is essential," Balat said. "How did we end up with such an authoritarian system? How did we as individuals allow this to happen? I think I will dedicate the next part of my future to exploring this question."

The question about responsibility, and many people's fear of addressing that question, is at the heart of Serbia's fragile transition from the Milosevic era.

But so far, there is no consensus on just what Serbia is responsible for. There is the question of who is responsible for supporting Milosevic's disastrous rule. And there is another, deeper moral question, that people here are not yet articulating: How responsible are people -- as individuals, and as a nation -- for the crimes Milosevic committed in their name?

For now, Serbia's media is approaching these questions obliquely. Acting director of Studio B Marko Jankovic told me he deliberately altered the actual title of his documentary from "From Gazimestan to the Hague" to just "From Gazimestan to -." The elimination of "the Hague" in the title -- and the war crimes issue it connotes -- is telling.

Kostunica has repeatedly said that the question of Milosevic's guilt is one Serbs should decide, not an international war crimes tribunal. The subtext of what Kostunica is saying is that Serbs, if they choose, should try Milosevic for crimes he committed against Serbs, and that Milosevic -- and, by extension, Serbia itself -- should not be put on trial for crimes its troops, paramilitaries and police committed against others, including the slaughter of 8,000 at Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

But that position may be changing. In an interview for the CBS news program "60 Minutes II" that aired last Tuesday, Kostunica is reported to have admitted for the first time that Yugoslav Army troops and Serbian police killed Kosovar Albanians.

"I am ready to ... accept the guilt for all those people who have been killed," Kostunica said. "For what Milosevic had done, and as a Serb, I will take responsibility for many of these, these crimes." Asked whether Milosevic would ever face trial, Kostunica said, "Somewhere, yes."

But almost as soon as the interview aired, Kostunica's office issued a complaint to CBS, saying those sentences had been taken out of context, and downplaying Kostunica's owning up to Belgrade's role in atrocities.

Like their new leader, Serbs are wrestling in a new public forum with questions about Serbia's role in the world, its governance and its war-time responsibility, as the nation tries to shape a future without Milosevic.

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