Correspondence: A Response to Andrei Simić

Brana Mijatović

UCLA

I wrote a dissertation on the topic of music and 
politics in Serbia, and there I discuss at length 
the complexities and issues involved in the 
demise of former Yugoslavia, including intra-
national, international, and economic causes of 
the problems. I also lived under the Milošević
regime for several years before coming to the 
United States, and thus experienced many of the 
things I wrote about.

However, in such a short article it was not 
possible to address all the complexities and
issues involved in “our understanding of the 
origins of these conflicts,” nor was it the 
intention to do so. My article was about the way 
a popular musician had responded to the crisis 
and how it resonated with a certain segment of 
the population of Serbia. It was not about the 
history of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. 
Furthermore, the editors explicitly asked me to 
limit my discussion of politics to the bare 
minimum, since this special volume was on 
music and dance. Thus, the few historical facts I 
did mention were intended to serve as a context 
for the issues that Balašević critiques in his 
songs. 

Professor Simic seriously misunderstands an 
important matter that I want to clarify here.   
Milošević was the leader of Serbia and, however 
you want to look at it, is responsible in great part 
(as I say in the text, he was “one of the key 
entities” not “the only one”) for what happened, 
as a result of his decisions, on the national and 
international levels, and on the social and the 
economic levels. The Serbs, as a nation, 
however, do not bare the same responsibility, 
and this was what this article tried to bring to the 
foreground.

It was neither my intention nor my explicit wish 
to “call upon the reader to embrace the concept 
of unique Serbian responsibility for the disasters 
that have characterized the past fourteen years in 
the history of Yugoslavia.” Quite the opposite. 
My hope was that this article would show the 
extent and range of Serbian critical attitudes 
towards the wars and the government, ones that 
were very different from those reported in many 

Western media, where Serbs, on the whole, were 
described as completely unaware of what was 
going on, completely supportive of the wars, and 
completely uncritical of the decisions Milošević
made over the years.

The issue of responsibility was actually 
important for many people who lived in the 
country at that time, and opening up a discussion 
on that topic, as well as providing a range of 
questions and opinions, did not automatically 
exclude the responsibility of others [outside 
Serbia] for what happened. These discussions 
illustrated the political self-awareness of 
ordinary citizens, and that is one important fact I 
wanted to emphasize. I also mentioned the 
complexity of that subject and illustrated this 
with several different views. I concluded that 
Balašević’s song encourages a rethinking of 
personal engagement with political activism, 
which is, in my opinion, a worthwhile aspiration 
for a mature, politically aware individual in any 
society.

This response strikes me as a transparent attempt 
to discredit someone with political views 
different from its author. I wonder who was the 
template for such uninformed and inaccurate 
comments about my thoughts, ideas, and 
motivations on a variety of subjects, including, 
most remarkably, “the West” and the tradition. 
While Milošević himself used this approach in 
Serbia whenever he came across opinions he 
didn't like, in this country such tactics serve only 
to undermine the writer’s intent and
credibility.

Jen
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