Violence in Serbia ceases to be just “a form of deviant behavior.” It slowly becomes a kind of behavior pattern of individuals and groups willing to use it to achieve their goals. And these goals are no longer solely materialistic, as they go beyond gun or knife bank robberies or attacks to passersby on the street. Individuals or groups are beginning to use bats and knives in order to establish their own ideology and order which have been surrounding them throughout their youth.
So now we have a group of unidentified young men looking “dangerous” who storm into the Faculty of Philology to teach the local students a “proper behavior”. Perhaps none of these guys is a student himself, but they apparently feel they are in a free and undefended space where they can perform the unimaginable acts to show others that they and their ideology is the pattern that is worth admiring.
The question where these kinds of guys came from has only one answer – from the society that the Serbian intellectual and political elite has been creating for more than 20 years. These guys and organizations that gather them have grown up in a wide area which is already carelessly left by the same elite who forgot the patterns of social and collective behavior are created diligently and persistently, and dissolved easily in massive turmoil and torments.
As the most resent researches show, today we have generations of very young people who don’t remember the war, but “invariably” know that our greatest enemies are Croatians and Albanians. At the very top of the enemy list are also the Roms, even though not even the suburban war stories bear any indication of their “anti-Serb” behavior. They are, in fact, a kind of litmus paper that indicates the roots of neo-Nazi organization which patterns are followed by Serbian youth.
Can hooligans and ultranationalist groups and organizations endanger political system and are they on the track to establish some kind of new form of political behavior? To what extent is their empowerment the result of the shortcomings in the education system, or desire and need of political and other powerful centers to use them for their own purposes? Vesna Pesic and Dobrivoje Radovanovic are trying to find the answers to these questions for the portal of Novi Magazin.