“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran and the New …...10.1177/0888325405284250“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”East European Politics and Societies “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran

10.1177/0888325405284250“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”East European Politics and Societies

“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”:Zoran and the New DemocraticMasculinity in SerbiaJessica Greenberg*

In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassi-nation and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran ëin¦ic! enacted politics,reshaping the relationship between citizen and state during a time of politi-cal crisis. The expression of citizen-state relations through public mourninggrounded in intimate, familial loss produced a break between a violent,nationalist past and a possible democratic future. This process relied on thedeployment of normative assumptions about gender and kinship. The fig-ure of Zoran ëin¦ic! represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinitythat evoked a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation inthe Serbian context. In contrast, those held responsible for his assassinationwere presented as antifamily and part of a clan structure based on non-reproductive, criminal connections that evoked a contrasting and undemo-cratic form of masculinity. Such representations masked ways that currentpolitical institutions and public figures were implicated in past state vio-lence by focusing on a story about ëin¦ic! and his killers as certain kinds ofmen, rather than about structural features of politics and government.

Keywords: Serbia; masculinity; kinship; democracy; post-socialist statetransformation

1. Introduction

On 12 March 2003, Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran ëin¦ic! wasassassinated in broad daylight in downtown Belgrade. He was

126East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 20, No. 1, pages 126–151. ISSN 0888-3254

© 2006 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1177/0888325405284250

* The dissertation research on which this article is based was supported by a Fellowship for EastEuropean Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright-Hays Doc-toral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and an International Research andExchanges Board Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship. This articlebegan as a paper given at the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in April2005. My sincere thanks to all those who gave comments on the initial piece, especially GailKligman, Marko Z#ivkovic !, Sasha Milic #evic !, Elissa Helms, and Kelly Gillespie. Thanks also goto Eric Gordy for his invaluable feedback on a later draft. Finally, I express my gratitude toSusan Gal for her extensive comments and guidance throughout the process.

coming out of a government building with a small group of body-guards when he was shot by snipers lying in wait in an aban-doned building next door. Two years earlier, ëin¦ic! had cooper-ated with international demands to extradite former PresidentSlobodan Miloševic!, who faced accusations of war crimes beforethe Hague tribunal. This made ëin¦ic! a particularly unpopularfigure, despite his long-time association with the democraticopposition, and later the democratic government, in Serbia.1 Theëin¦ic! assassination occurred amid widespread rumors andmedia reports that ëin¦ic!’s government would crack down onformer state, paramilitary, and security figures from the Miloševic!regime. For many, ëin¦ic! went from an influential but unpopularpolitician to a national hero, practically overnight.

Three days after ëin¦ic!’s death, I spent the day watching hisfuneral on Serbian state television from my apartment in NoviSad. Like most of the rest of the country, I was glued to everyaspect of the service and burial.2 Those who were not watchingfrom home poured onto Belgrade’s streets in the hundreds ofthousands. The scenes were strangely reminiscent of the massdemonstrations of 5 October 2000, the day when dictatorSlobodan Miloševic! was ousted from power, and a day for whichëin¦ic! would become emblematic. But instead of the noise andenergy of a revolution, there was silence. Interspersed with theseimages of silent columns of people snaking through Belgrade’sstreets on the way to the cemetery and somber dignitaries in darksuits were heartrending pictures of ëin¦ic!’s wife and two youngchildren. At the gravesite, Ruz#ica ëin¦ic!—elegant even inmourning and sporting oversized sunglasses reminiscent ofJackie O—held little Luka’s hand as he stared fixedly at somepoint in the distance. Jovana, perhaps old enough to compre-hend what her brother could not fully grasp, stood shifting herweight back and forth, as tears poured silently and torrentiallydown her face.

East European Politics and Societies 127

1. Serbia is a member of the two-state union Serbia and Montenegro, which changed its namefrom the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in February 2003.

2. According to the research firm AGB Strategic Research, the funeral attracted the largest tele-vision audience on record in Serbia. “Rekordna gledanost prenosa sahrana,” Danas, 22-23March 2003.

Only a few days before, I had stood among a crowd in front ofthe government building in downtown Belgrade where ëin¦ic!had been shot. I had joined others in the long lines in front ofDemocratic Party headquarters where people waited, again intotal silence, to lay flowers and sign a book of mourning. Whatstruck me then, and again while watching the funeral on TV, wasthe intensity of grief, signaled by the eerie silence. This was aquiet, personal aspect of mourning that people seemed to holddeep within themselves. It was as if a member of everyone’s fam-ily was gone.

This article is an effort to interpret texts and practices aroundëin¦ic!’s funeral to show how the mediations of such a publicevent enact politics. The assassination of Zoran ëin¦ic!, the sub-sequent funeral, and other actions of the government saturatedSerbian daily life and reshaped political discourse and practice inthe months and years that followed. I ask how the initial act ofpublic mourning was formulated in the mass media, how it high-lighted some aspects of pain and loss while eliding other kinds ofsocial fracture and political violence. How were normativeassumptions about gender implicated in the process? More spe-cifically, why was public mourning for ëin¦ic! most oftenexpressed as private, intimate, familial loss and identificationwith his young family? I argue that the figure of Zoran ëin¦ic! rep-resented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity that evokeda new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation inthe Serbian context. In contrast, the figures held responsible forhis assassination were presented as antifamily, challenging con-ventional notions of modern, Western European, nuclear familyunits. They were portrayed instead as part of a clan structurebased on nonreproductive homosocial connections and orga-nized in military and criminal associations that implicitly evokeda contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. The twokinds of masculinity were associated with contrasting kinds ofpolitical leadership. Media representations stigmatized clan kin-ship and its supposed sociopolitical results as violent, provincial,and criminal, a barrier to Serbia’s integration into a democraticEurope. In contrast, the democratic leadership and political mas-

128 “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”

culinity evoked by ëin¦ic!’s middle-class, nuclear family servedto legitimate Serbia’s claim to being normatively European.

There is much scholarly literature that considers the role ofwomen’s bodies and the management of their images duringperiods of social and political crisis.3 Such work analyzes howgender categories mediate between citizenship and state forms,as well as the relations of affect that link citizens to the state. Iargue that the management of masculinity is equally important, ifin different ways. During and after the Yugoslav wars of seces-sion, women’s reproduction was a central site for the nationalistproject to produce more, and more properly ethnic, citizens.4 Thecase of ëin¦ic!’s funeral suggests that the right kind of masculinitywas similarly crucial. However, it was used to produce properly“middle-classed” and “civilized” members of the body politic.

There has also been a good deal of analysis of death and funer-als as key mediating events in times of socialist state transforma-tions.5 Such events reinscribe categories of national belonging.They provide opportunities for public display of state power andlegitimacy, especially in times of uncertainty or crisis. However,studies of such events have not considered how public rituals ofmourning and their media representations enact moralizingframeworks of gender and class. In the case of this funeral, Iargue that a particular kind of masculinity formed a social scaf-folding of heteronormative, privatized, kinship for the mediationof a public, state crisis.


3. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended (Berkeley: University of California Press,1999); Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Genderafter Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lynne Haney, “ ‘But WeAre Still Mothers’: Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hun-gary,” in Katherine Verdery and Michael Burawoy, eds., Uncertain Transitions:Ethnographies of Change in the Post-Socialist World (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Roma-nia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

4. See Jill Benderly, “Rape, Feminism, and Nationalism in the War in Yugoslav SuccessorStates,” in Lois West, ed., Feminist Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); and RenataSalecl, The Spoils of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

5. See Susan Gal, “Bartok’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rheto-ric,” American Ethnologist 18:3(1991): 440-58; and Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives ofDead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press,1999).

Significantly, ëin¦ic!’s assassination posed a double crisis forthe democratic legitimacy of the government. First, it revealedthe government’s vulnerability to extrastate violence. Second, ithighlighted the government’s ties to, and reliance on, figuresfrom the Miloševic! regime. By sharply contrasting ëin¦ic!’s mas-culinity to that of his predecessors, these representations maskedthe ways that current political institutions and public figures wereimplicated in past state violence. In turn, intimate family griefwas made accessible to the nation by extending the metaphor ofkinship. By highlighting the private, nuclear-family, and per-sonal-affective aspects of ëin¦ic!’s death, media representationscreated a discursive dichotomy with political consequences: theyconstructed a break between two contrasting images, each link-ing a type of state to a form of gendered kinship. Authoritarian/nationalist was separated from and contrasted with democratic,European and postauthoritarian.6 The representation of ëin¦ic!after the assassination made the story of his death, and by exten-sion Serbia’s transformation, seem to be about certain kinds ofmen, and the nation that loved or hated them, rather than aboutstructural features of politics and government in Serbia.

This analysis is based largely on newspaper articles, includingattention to the format and layout of newspapers, and the waysthey created pictorial narratives by interspersing images of publicand collective rituals with private and personal mourning. Withinthe context of these articles, I draw on speeches and interviews


6. For more on East/West, European/non-European, modern/primitive dichotomies and theirimbrication in forms of power across the continent and beyond, see Milica Bakic!-Hayden,“Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917-31;Gal, “Bartok’s Funeral”; Robert Hayden and Milica Bakic!-Hayden, “Orientalist Variations onthe Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” SlavicReview 51 (1992): 1-15; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: CriticalEthnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Bal-kans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe:The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1994). On the discourse of Europe in contemporary Serbia see Zala Vol i , “TheNotion of ‘the West’ in the Serbian National Imaginary,” European Journal of Cultural Stud-ies 8:2(2005): 155-75; and on central dichotomies such as civility/incivility in contemporarySerbia, see Mattijs Van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild (Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 1998); and Marko Z #ivkovic!, Serbian Stories of Identity andDestiny in the 1980s and 1990s (Dissertation, University of Chicago, Department ofAnthropology, 2001).

with public figures. I also draw from my own observations of thetelevision coverage of the event. Popular media were saturatedwith evidence of links between ëin¦ic!, family, democracy, andEurope on one hand; and on the other hand evidence linking hiskillers with violent clannish behavior, Serbian isolation, and theundemocratic past. Whatever people’s personal views aboutëin¦ic! as a politician, these media texts and images created asocial field of possible interpretations about ëin¦ic!’s life anddeath. As such, these texts provided a widely circulating interpre-tative framework for the possible positions people took vis-à-visëin¦ic!’s life, his politics, and the state forms with which he wasaffiliated. The papers I look at and the speeches I analyze werelargely sympathetic to ëin¦ic!. The rhetoric I examine was uni-form across the country’s largest dailies. The exceptions to thiskind of coverage would have been two popular tabloids,Identitet and Nacional. They were both banned as part of thegovernment crackdown on organized crime in the days follow-ing the assassination and were charged with contributing to theatmosphere that enabled ëin¦ic!’s assassination. They were alsoaccused of having direct financial ties to the main suspects in hismurder.

Finally, while the article is organized around these textualmediations, I drew my inspiration for thinking about the signifi-cance of ëin¦ic!’s death from the reactions of many of thosearound me at the time. It is significant that the majority of myinterlocutors were young, educated, and urban. Most identifiedthemselves as proponents of democracy and felt that the future ofthe country, and their own futures by extension, lay with Europe.I remember distinctly when standing in line to sign the book ofmourning on the night of the assassination, an acquaintance ofmine, a young, educated man in his midtwenties, told me thatwith ëin¦ic! gone he could no longer imagine raising his ownfamily in Serbia. Surrounded by people in deep mourning, I real-ized that ëin¦ic! represented a tremendous source of hope. Inturn, his loss produced real despair and threw many people’spersonal aspirations and future in doubt. I believe many peoplesaw their experience reflected in the media discourses aboutëin¦ic! and perhaps found a way to express their grief through


these discourses.7 While personal expressions of grief are not theethnographic object of this analysis, it is worth remembering thatthe family forms and masculinities dramatized through ëin¦ic!’sfuneral expressed a powerful link between people’s deep senseof loss and a public state crisis.

2. Masculinity part I

The portrayal of ëin¦ic! at the time of his death took two inter-locking forms in the mainstream press. Overwhelmingly he wasdescribed as a vanguard of democracy, a man with Europeansensibility and sense, who represented the future of Serbia as arespected, democratic state, a potential member of the EuropeanUnion. The other portrait was of ëin¦ic! as a family man with boy-ish charm, a loving father and husband.8 This made him a man ofintegrity and conviction grounded in a recognizable moral andsocial order based on nuclear family ties and an ideal modernEuropean family.9 The two images came together powerfully onthe front page of the daily paper Danas four days after hisdeath.10 The front picture is of his grieving family at the gravesite,


7. This experience was reinforced by the book of mourning, in which people’s personalexperiences of loss became part of a widely circulating narrative of collective grief. In addi-tion to signing actual books, available at the Democratic Party headquarters and other sites,people could also post messages online.

8. This image of loving father was confirmed on the New Year’s 2003 episode of Who Wants toBe a Millionaire, one of the most popular shows in the country. The New Year’s edition ofthe program featured prominent Serbian personalities, including ëin¦ic!, and was widelywatched as part of New Year’s celebrations. ëin¦ic!, during one question about a pop cul-ture reference, used one of his “lifelines” to his young son, who was in the audience. Thiswas met with much sighing and declarations of sweetness among the people with whom Iwatched the program (most especially the women in the room).

9. The linking of ideal family types with political projects in Serbia has precedent. It wasargued in the socialist period, that the existence of the clanlike family form known aszadruga in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Serbia meant that Serbs were ideallysuited for collective life under socialism. The zadruga combined social and political orga-nization within an extended family form. In a more recent example, popular Serbian dis-course about Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s centered on their high fertility rates and largefamilies. Implicit in this often racist discourse was the argument that such nonnuclear, largefamily units were also nonmodern and non-European.

10. My texts are drawn largely from three daily newspapers with national circulation in Serbia:Danas, Politika, and Blic. Blic has the largest circulation of the three. It is a tabloid-stylepaper. Politika, the oldest of the three papers, was strongly associated with the Miloševic!regime until recent years. It has reinvented itself as independent from the government. It isthe most conservative of the three papers but also carries the most gravitas. Finally, Danasis a relatively new paper and is strongly associated with pro-European politics. Within days

and the headline proclaims, “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy!”11 Theparallels with JFK are frequently foregrounded in accounts ofëin¦ic!’s death, associating him with the beloved Western politi-cian: the beautiful wife; the charming, handsome, and demo-cratic leader; and the young children left behind. But moreimportant is the identification and semiotic integration of thegrieving masses with this family itself. Interspersed with imagesof his family, both in the television coverage and in the printpress, were pictures of the almost eight hundred thousand Ser-bian citizens winding their way through the streets of Belgradeon the way to the funeral. Powerful images of people marchingsilently with candles, flowers, and tears mapped citizen mourn-ing onto that of ëin¦ic!’s immediate family.

A familial relationship was also implied in the speeches thatfollowed ëin¦ic!’s death. Addressing Zoran directly, and usingthe informal second person singular form of address, ti, ZoranZ #ivkovic !, a member of ëin¦ic!’s party and soon to be namedprime minister, noted, “Your wife Ruz#ica lost you, your childrenlost you, but Serbia has also lost you [Izgubila te je suprugaRu ica, izgubila su te tvoja deca, ali te je izgubila Srbija].”12 Suchintimacies were also expressed among the mourners.13 Onepaper noted that a message was left in a bouquet of flowers at thesite of the assassination, saying, “This is a personal loss.”14 Suchquotes are not only significant for the individual sentiments theyexpressed but also for the mediated representation of people’s


after ëin¦ic!’s assassination, and in honor of his legacy, the paper introduced a new“Europe” section of the paper, separate from its usual coverage of world news.

11. “Zbogom Srpski Kennedy,” Danas, 16 March 2003. See also “Tuz#na kolona na ulicamaBeograda,” Politika, 16 March 2003.

12. “Srbija bez prevara, pacova i budala,” Danas, 16 March, 2003.13. One could also argue that the familial language in part justifies the sweeping, sometimes

violent operation Saber, which the government—headed by Z #ivkovic!—undertook follow-ing the assassination. Within days of the shooting, the government had declared a state ofemergency and used special powers to arrest anyone suspected of ties to the Zemun clanand other organized crime outfits. The sweeping powers used in the campaign have led toaccusations of human rights violations. As Begoña Aretxaga has pointed out, it is ironic thata democratic government can use a moment of “antidemocratic” terrorism to justify exces-sive state violence and the violation of citizens’ rights. See Begoña Aretxaga, “A FictionalReality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain,” in JeffreySluka ed., Death Squad: Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-vania Press, 2002).

14. “Ostvaric!emo ëin¦ic!ev testament,” Blic, 14 March 2003.

experience of the assassination. They produced an intimate com-munity of mourning with which people could identify.

Another article titled “The Tragedy That Opens Our Eyes”quoted at length a member of the crowd of mourners, an olderman named Miodrag Pavlovic! from the village of Pudarac:

“I came to pay my respects, to touch his coffin, although I couldn’t getthrough. This is for me a family tragedy. I wasn’t a member of hisparty, but I thought that he could bring us progress. For me, he was agreat man, and I’m satisfied with what he did for the Serbian nation[narod]”—said Pavlovic!.15

In this brief text, Mr. Pavlovic! orients himself toward ëin¦ic!’sdeath using three different but interlocking forms of affect basedin turn on family, state, and nation. First, he locates himselfwithin the event as a family member through his desire to physi-cally touch the coffin and pay respects in an immediate and local-ized gesture of mourning. In describing this postmortem inti-macy, Mr. Pavlovic! proclaims ëin¦ic!’s loss as a family tragedy.Next, he shifts his relationship to ëin¦ic! and expresses anotherform of connection based on ëin¦ic!’s positive political role inbringing “progress.” This relation is mediated not by family butby the political party and the organizations of state politics.Although he is not a member of ëin¦ic!’s party, Mr. Pavlovic! con-nects to ëin¦ic! as an instantiation of the state. He does this byinvoking a relationship between himself as a citizen and ëin¦ic!as a representative of the state. Finally, Mr. Pavlovic! is careful todistinguish between this connection, implying a democratic stateform, and one based on Serbian nationhood. At first glance, Mr.Pavlovic!’s affection for ëin¦ic! as a benefactor of the Serbiannation seems to fall within a familiar nationalist pattern. Yet heimplicitly separates belonging as abstract citizenship from ethnicbelonging. He locates this democratic, citizen-based belongingin a postnationalist present through the term progress. Demo-cratic belonging is, for him, a move beyond the nationalist politi-cal organization of the past. In this context, “nation” gains a par-


15. “Tragedija koja otvara o i,” Danas, 16 March 2003. This and all other translations are myown.

ticular cast. It suggests an avoidance of nationalist positions thatundermine a notion of democratic progress. Mr. Pavlovic!’s ties toSerbia are mediated not by ethnic, blood-based kinship, but bylove and respect for an individual man, ëin¦ic!, and for that man’sdemocratic convictions and practices. His love of the nation,here, is also a desire for progress. Mr. Pavlovic! follows a distinc-tion between ethnic and civic belonging often made in contrast-ing Serbian nationalism with Serbian democracy.

What makes this triad of family intimacy, political respect, andnational identification powerful is that it provides an alternativerelation to the nation that relies on a democratic and Europeanfigure. In 2003 when ëin¦ic! was killed, this was increasingly acentral bind of citizenship in Serbia: to love the nation withoutbeing nationalist or criminal in the eyes of Europe. One could saythat the central question of Serbian politics was, How do we cre-ate a viable state organized around affect and desire, around trueloyalty and commitment to citizenship, when the terms of loyaltyhave become tainted by “nationalism,” that is, by what the worldconsiders “bad” affect, the kind of affect that excluded us fromEurope and (for some) led us to violent and bloody wars?

The distinction between good state affect versus bad national-ism is one that was tied to people’s experiences during theMiloševic! regime and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and laterKosovo. Many urban, educated people with whom I spoke feltthat their waning political and social influence, combined withisolation of the country, created a power vacuum that was filledby nationalists who undermined Serbia as a European space andby those with rural or suburban backgrounds who threatenedSerbia’s modern orientation. Educated urbanites felt that citieswere dominated during and after the war years by the culturalforms, political ideologies, and consumption practices of peoplefrom the countryside and suburbs who also had ties to organizedcrime, paramilitary organizations, and the Miloševic! regime. Themost famous sign of this conflation of origin, politics, and aes-thetics was “turbofolk.” This was a musical and aesthetic genrethat glamorized national folk music (including composition, lyr-ics, costumes, and modes of performance) and valorized milita-


ristic masculinity; hypersexualized, submissive forms of feminin-ity; and Serbian national pride.16

So-called peasant, criminal, and military cultural forms andconsumption practices became linked in the popular imaginary.These took on a particularly gendered valence. People said onecould tell a criminal by his expensive car and the woman on hisarm, who was sure to have cosmetically enhanced breasts, amicro-mini, and pancake makeup. A traditionally well-to-do sec-tion of Belgrade that began to cater to such newly wealthy clien-tele came to be known as silicone valley for the women withbreast implants who frequented its cafes. Young women whodressed seductively were said to be out to find an older, wealthyman to support them. They were designated sponsoruše (womenlooking for sponsors). Criminality became an expression ofun(re)productive masculinity: dangerous, powerful, and at thesame time “peasant.” The urban middle classes saw this form ofmasculinity as corrupting young women’s “proper” sexuality inthe service of desire and the pursuit of material gain. (Silicone)Breasts became symbols of material consumption and male sex-ual desire, rather than fertility and “normal” femininity. The formsof desire implied in these social practices are those of excess:drugs, sex, illicit money, and conspicuous consumption. For theurban middle classes, as for those adopting such gender prac-tices, a significant set of distinctions was created: democraticcitizen-subjects versus nationalist, European versus Serbian,productive versus destructive.

In short, nationalism, isolation, rural/suburban backgrounds,and “non-middle-class” values were linked to war and theMiloševic! regime, while democratic subjects were constituted inopposition to these phenomena. For large parts of the urban mid-dle classes, establishing democratic politics meant disassociatingthemselves and the country from the “types” of people to whomresponsibility for the war was increasingly attributed. Thisrequired rejection of social practices associated with Serbiancriminality and war profiteering, which in turn brought interna-tional scorn and isolation. The complicated discourse through


16. Eric Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia (University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1999).

which urbanites and large sections of the mass media understoodthe country’s increasing political instability, war, and interna-tional isolation was organized around this dichotomy.17 Over thepast fifteen years, a sharp distinction has been drawn betweenthe peasants, the radicals, the nationalists, the violent, undemo-cratic subjects of Serbia on one hand; and on the other hand allthose who supported democracy and the system of values andsocial forms it implied. For many urban people, ëin¦ic! was apowerful symbolic figure of precisely these democratic formsand behaviors, while members of organized criminal groupscame to stand for everything that had gone wrong with Serbia inthe 1990s.

Given these contrasting political images, how were the keynotions of “kinship” and “Europe” imagined in relation to themand to ëin¦ic!? How did ëin¦ic!’s European family translate intoSerbia’s kinship ties to Europe? Particularly revealing of this rela-tionship was an article titled “[There Has Been] Enough Broth-erly-Hatred,” (Dosta je bilo bratomrz#nje) that quotes at lengthMetropolitan Amfilohije’s oratory during ëin¦ic!’s funeral servicein Saint Sava church in Belgrade. The cleric explicitly identifiedëin¦ic! as kinsman to Europe, contrasting this with the brotherlyhatred of the recent Yugoslav wars of secession:

“Zoran ëin¦ic! . . . will be remembered above all for, in the moment ofthe deepest humiliation of his nation . . . extending the hand of broth-erly peace and reconciliation to Europe and the world. . . . Zoranëin¦ic! initiated the renewal of the bloodflow [blood circulation,krvotok] of the nation, society and social life, the renewal of stateunity and state community of Serbia and Montenegro, of broken tieswith the world . . . ” said the Metropolitan. . . . Metropolitan Amfilohijeemphasized that “the wounds of Zoran ëin¦ic!’s warn us and remindus that there has been enough brotherly-hate, enough war, that everymurder is the murder of a brother. Evil brings no good to anyone. Waris no one’s brother,” said the Metropolitan, asking God to “heal notonly the wounds of Zoran and his family, but all the wounds of his rel-atives/kin [rod], and may the evil of brother-hatred be healed in allcountries.”18


17. Jessica Greenberg, “On the Road to Normal: Travel, Democracy and the Moral Serbian Sub-ject” (Unpublished dissertation chapter, 2005).

18. “Dosta je bilo bratomrz#nje,” Danas, 16 March 2003.

In this juxtaposition, the brotherhood of Europe stands in contra-distinction to the brotherly hate in (former) Yugoslavia, andëin¦ic! is presented as a pro-European leader whose near-bloodties to Europe produced democracy rather than war. In the shad-ows, of course, is the “brotherhood and unity” of Tito’s socialismto which ëin¦ic! is also being opposed. ëin¦ic! stands in for thenew state that (perhaps miraculously) can be simultaneouslyfather to Serbia and brother to Europe. ëin¦ic!’s democratic poli-cies renew the “bloodflow” of the country and of the social com-munity, linking him to all in Serbia not via nationalist, ethnic ties,but by the kinship of a universalizing political connection ren-dered intimate: the wounds of his family are the wounds of theSerbians who mourn him, but also of all citizens everywhere whoare thereby his kin (rod).

It is important to note that aspects of this speech were cited bymembers of ëin¦ic!’s family, his party and many in the politicalleft as a profoundly inappropriate, nationalist, and irresponsiblerepresentation of ëin¦ic!. Most specifically criticized was theassertion that “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,”which was taken by many to imply that ëin¦ic! had somehowdeserved his death. The complexities of this controversy and thepolitical divides revealed by Amfilohije’s speech are a subject foranother work. Here I highlight only that, whatever the politicalleanings of those who spoke publicly in the wake of his death, allthe rhetorical figures functioned to separate ëin¦ic! from the pastand from compromising rural, ethnic, clanlike kinship, whileconnecting him to a new narrative of different and modern kinties in the collective, democratic, and European future.

If ëin¦ic! was the quintessential modern man, embedded in anideal middle-class nuclear family, loving father to his children,dedicated husband to his wife, and brother to Europe, then it wasthrough his mediation via such normative and stereotypically“Western” familial ties that Serbia would become a member ofthe European family. Those mourners who felt kinship withëin¦ic! would themselves become such Europeans. GeorgePapandreou, Greek Foreign Minister and then-president of the


EU Council of Ministers, evoked such kinship relations atëin¦ic!’s graveside. His words include an implicit promise tobring all who identify with ëin¦ic! into the European family. TheSerbian translation of Papandreou’s words found in the newspa-pers used the informal ti, thereby reading intimacy into thespeech:

It is our desire as the EU, in the name of all my colleagues, I promiseto you and Serbia and Montenegro that you will be a part of the Euro-pean family. I commit myself, Zoran, that your dream will be real-ized.19

This language was taken up in other newspaper articles aswell. For example, “The heads of states or governments, ministersand high officials of international organizations expressed . . . theirastonishment and shock by the death of the Serbian premier, butalso their support for the continuance of democratic reforms andtheir faith that ëin¦ic!’s vision of a modern Serbia, as part of theEuropean family [dela evropske porodice], will be realized.”20

3. Masculinity part II

If familial affection for ëin¦ic! would mediate a new relation-ship to Europe and democracy, then according to the discoursearound his death, his killers represented a kind of antifamily mas-culinity rooted in nationalism gone awry. ëin¦ic!’s assassinationwas immediately linked to a criminal-military group called theZemun clan, named for the part of Belgrade in which they mostlyresided. The group had long-standing ties to both state and para-state criminal activity and state security forces. It was also linkedto paramilitary organizations in Bosnia. Only a couple of weeksbefore his death, ëin¦ic! had almost been run off the road in whatwas likely an attempted assassination. The driver was a memberof the Zemun clan. He was nicknamed Bugsy after the epony-mous 1991 Barry Levinson gangster film. The Zemun clan had


19. “Zorane, tvoj san c!e biti realizovan,” Danas, 16 March 2003.20. Ibid.

been active at that point for several years, and several of its mem-bers had been held under suspicion of criminal charges thatincluded kidnapping, drug trafficking, and falsifying passports.21

Knowledge of the involvement of other members of the group inthe murder was open. Only hours after the assassination, in frontof the government building where ëin¦ic! was killed, I heard sev-eral young men shouting the demand to “arrest Legija [UhapšiteLegiju].” Legija (Milorad Ulemek) was the former commander ofMiloševic!’s police unit for special operations, Jedinice zaspecijalne operacije (JSO), and was known to be connected tocriminal and mafia activity. He had also been linked to warcrimes in Bosnia as a member of the paramilitary unit the Tigers,which had been headed by Serbian football club owner andparamilitary leader Z #eljko Raznatovic!, aka Arkan. In a foreshad-owing of the kinship language to come, Arkan himself had beenreferred to by his men in the Tigers as daddy (tata).22 Arkan wasassassinated in 2000, and Legija is currently on trial for his role inëin¦ic!’s assassination.

The particular version of masculinity associated with theZemun clan centered around largely homosocial units throughwhich solidaristic ties of loyalty were formed. These associationswere first and foremost paramilitary but also included state secu-rity and special operations under the Miloševic! regime. Oftenreferred to in the media as “hard men from the streets” (literallyfrom the asphalt) (c#vrsti or #estoki momci sa asfalta), those whomade up these associations were thus simultaneously represen-tative of state and extrastate forms of power and violence. Manyhad initially been members of football fan associations of the1990s, which, as Ivan C#olovic! has demonstrated, were also all-male sites of solidarity, producing both nationalist loyalties andviolent practices that translated easily into military organization.23

The mafia associations emerging from these earlier connec-tions were self-consciously crafted in the idiom of American-stylemafia through nicknames such as Bugsy and Kum (godfather).


21. Miloš Vasic!, “Novi Prilozi za Biografiju Dušana Spasojevic!a,” Vreme, broj 682, 29 January2004.

22. Thanks to Aleksandra (Sasha) Mili evic! for bringing this to my attention.23. Ivan C #olovic!, Politics of Identity in Serbia (New York: New York University Press, 2002)

News coverage of the group after the assassination highlightedthese connections and family-like ties of the men who made upthe clan. Papers had biographies and full-page spreads detailingthe links between members with rows of mug shot pictures. Inone article, readers could learn the kinship network of theZemun clan, as each figure was linked to the others througheither blood or fictive kin relations (as kumovi). When there wereno kinship ties between members, the article linked the menusing alternative terms for intimacy, such as inseparable friends(nerazdvojni prijatelji). Just as the network of intimacies wascarefully detailed, so each figure was accompanied by a complexlitany of crimes associated with him and his close associates.24

Extending this particular metaphor of extended kinship to thegroup as a whole, an article titled the “Pyramid of Crimes”declared, “According to the words of the minister of internalaffairs, Dušan Mihajlovic!, the head of the family [glava porodice]from the top of the pyramid of crimes is behind bars, but theother members of the family are hiding throughout the world.”25

Yet another article during the period after the assassinationshowed a map of Serbia with the number of criminals listed nextto each relevant town or city across the country.26 The map wasalso color coded by mafia group and framed by a blank spaceoutside of Serbia’s borders. The same daily paper, fond of themap format, also had a double-page spread titled “The World inBelgrade.”27 The map showed the outline of Europe, from Lon-don to Sofia, and including Moscow. Lines drawn out from Bel-grade linked pictures of the significant foreign dignitaries attend-ing ëin¦ic!’s funeral, each with a headshot and a description ofthe official position and country. In all, twenty heads of thetwenty most important officials in Europe and America wereshown to converge on Belgrade, which was itself located at thecenter of the map. These two maps demonstrate twospatializations of new kinds of belonging for Serbia. In one,depicting the European family of Papandreou’s promise, Bel-


24. “Po inioci Najtez#ih Zlo ina,” Blic, 14 March 2003.25. “Piramida Zlo ina,” Danas, 5-6 April 2003.26. “Mapa Kriminala Srbije,” Danas, 25 March 2003.27. “Svet U Beogradu,” Danas, 16 March 2003.

grade is at the center of the world, but part of a larger Europeancommunity. The other is a smaller map that outlines Serbia, butbeyond its borders is a blank space. The country itself is divided,color coded by a network of criminality consisting of mafiagroups whose form of belonging can only lead to Serbia’s isola-tion. The two maps visualize the different collectivities possiblefor Serbia, and the forms of association, forms of masculinity, andforms of social reproduction that each implies.

In popular discourse, rumors had long circulated about druguse and perverse sexual activities such as orgies among theZemun clan and its ilk. In the view of urban middle classes, suchnationalist masculine practices and forms of social organizationbypass the forms of affect that are “natural” to the nation, itshealthy social reproduction, and its democratic future. National-ists who loved the nation in the wrong way were considered adestructive force rather than avatars of a productive masculinityin the mold of highly heteronormative forms. The quintessentialnationalist story of romance and family runs precisely counter tothat of ëin¦ic!’s Serbian Camelot. This is the tale of Ceca, Arkan,and Legija.28 When the famous, young and buxom turbofolksinger known as Ceca married Z #eljko Raznotivic!, aka Arkan, theformer paramilitary leader, criminal, and owner of the Obilic!football team in 1995, it was a national event. It was the union ofthe two greatest icons of Serbian nationalist values and institu-tions in the 1990s. When Arkan was killed in 2000, Cecaremained a beloved and powerful celebrity in Serbia, taking onthe responsibility for Arkan’s football club, and continuing to singher heart out, as many felt, for the turbofolk sound and thenation. However, shortly after ëin¦ic!’s assassination, Ceca wasrumored to have had relations of an undetermined nature withLegija and the Zemun clan, her house was searched, and a largestash of weapons was found. Ceca’s reversal of fortunes wasimplied in a Politika headline about the weapons in March2003.29 Hovering over a picture of Ceca looking as glamorous as


28. In addition to the family-state couplings of Ceca and Arkan, and Zoran and Ruz#ica, presen-tations of Slobodan Miloševic! and his wife Mira Markovic! would be another extremely pro-ductive lens through which to examine kinship, the production of state affect and mascu-linity. Thanks to Marko Z #ivkovic! for suggesting this as a line for further analysis.

29. “Veze sa opasnim momcima,” Politika, 19 March 2003.

ever, the headline proclaimed, “Connections with DangerousMen,” and the subheading declared “a fairytale without a happyending.”

In both of the masculinities I have discussed, the key issue atstake was the production of citizen-state relations of affect, loy-alty, and community. Which of the two would be productive ofEuropeanness and democracy rather than a source of shame forthe country? Put another way, What kind of state-citizen relationwould produce the right kind of citizens from the perspective of“Europe,” and democratic Serbia, and what form of masculinitycould both model and produce the right kind of civil, democraticfamily network? It is significant that these juxtaposed masculini-ties played on issues of class as well as rural/urban tensions.30

The story of Ceca, Arkan, and the Zemun clan represents a familyborn of the “wrong” kind of people. On the other hand, ëin¦ic!embodied a familiar European masculinity reliant on financialand cultural resources: well-traveled, educated (in Germany, noless), and profoundly middle class. Thus, ëin¦ic! could servesymbolically as the head of a family of citizens, mediating theproduction of the “right kind” of political subjects: middle class,educated, and European. These features have long been linkedto civil society and political stability in Yugoslavia.31 The mascu-linity of the Zemun clan, by contrast, produced pleasure andillicit gain. Their practices, rumored orgies, drug use, and crimi-nal and violent behavior are seen by a European gaze asunreproductive. This is true in a biological sense, but it is alsotrue politically. They produce subjects on which Serbia cannotbase a viable social or economic future in Europe.

4. A state of crisis

At the time of ëin¦ic!’s death in 2003, questions about the rela-tionship between the past, present, and future of state forms andof political leaders suffused national politics in Serbia. These con-cerns unsettled people’s widespread desire for stability after 5


30. For more on long-standing urban/rural tensions in Yugoslavia and Serbia, see John Allcock,Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

31. Greenberg, “On the Road to Normal.”

October 2000, the day that many felt was the turning point offi-cially marking the beginning of democracy in Serbia. That wasthe day on which citizen protests and nonviolent revolutionbrought an official end to Slobodan Miloševic!’s decade-long ruleof the country. Just weeks before this protest, Miloševic! had beendecisively beaten at the polls, and the opposition candidateVojislav Koštunica was elected the new president of the FederalRepublic of Yugoslavia. However, Miloševic! refused to honor theelection results and tried to force the country into a second roundelection runoff. Finally, on 5 October, hundreds of thousands ofcitizens from all parts of Serbia marched in Belgrade. Theystormed the parliament building and the headquarters of thestate-controlled media, Radio and Television Serbia. Instead offiring into the crowds, Miloševic!’s massive police force stood qui-etly aside or joined the protest. In later months and years, itbecame clear that the peaceful nature of the protests and therestraint of police and military forces was a result of long negotia-tions and bargaining between the opposition, particularly ëin¦ic!and Miloševic!’s security forces, including Legija. By the end ofthe day, Miloševic! had conceded defeat, although much of hispolitical and security apparatus remained in power.

The ruling coalition that emerged from the elections was amotley group of eighteen opposition parties, known as the Dem-ocratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). In February 2001, theyformed a Serbian government with ëin¦ic! (who headed theDemocratic Party [DS]) as prime minister. ëin¦ic!’s tenure asprime minister was marked by tension with the other dominantparty, the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), to which the Yugo-slav president Vojislav Koštunica belonged. These tensions cameto a head in June 2001, when ëin¦ic! finally gave the order forMiloševic! to be extradited to the International Criminal Tribunalfor Yugoslavia in The Hague, a move that Koštunica opposed onwhat he claimed to be constitutional grounds. Miloševic! hadbeen arrested earlier in April of that year on domestic chargesincluding fraud and embezzlement. His extradition came on theheels of intense pressure from the international community,including threats to withhold much-needed financial aid to the


country. When he was finally extradited, it was in the eleventhhour before the donor’s conference for Yugoslavia was to begin.

Cooperation with the Hague tribunal and extradition of thoseindicted for war crimes remained one of the most divisive politi-cal issues in the country; ëin¦ic!’s cooperation with The Haguewas not popularly supported. The DOS coalition was marked bydisagreements over extraditions to The Hague, over ideologicalapproaches to economic change, and by petty bickering linkedto long-standing personal conflicts. In addition, there were accu-sations of corruption and the continued reliance of political lead-ers on Miloševic!’s now discredited security forces and his politi-cal and business elite. In the months leading up to hisassassination, ëin¦ic! made it clear that former members of theMiloševic! regime, including former state, paramilitary, and secu-rity figures, would no longer be tolerated; cooperation with TheHague was key for Serbia’s successful integration into Europe. Itis widely argued in Serbia that ëin¦ic!’s assassination was a defen-sive move among those most at risk in such a crackdown.

As I have shown, media coverage and popular discourse sim-plified this series of events by formulating them as a strugglebetween ëin¦ic! on one side and his killers on the other; betweendemocracy, Europe, and progress against tribalism, retrogres-sion, and nationalism. Political leaders participated in this simpli-fication. At the time of the assassination, then–minister of justiceVladan Batic! declared that the day of the funeral should not beconsidered 15 March but 6 October, the day after the revolution-ary overthrow of Miloševic!. This date was simultaneously identi-fied with the overthrow of Miloševic!, Serbian democracy, andëin¦ic!. Batic! presented ëin¦ic!’s death as an opportunity to beginthe postrevolution period again and to rewrite the troubled his-tory of Serbia’s fledgling democracy. Noting that the governmentwas committed to fulfilling ëin¦ic!’s vision, he stated, “Returningtwo years back, we must lead Serbia forward. . . . The killers ofPrime Minister ëin¦ic! didn’t want to kill only him, but also all thathe personified [oli avati]—a free and democratic Serbia.”32 Thisreworking of political chronology shows how ëin¦ic! was made


32. Blic, 16 March 2003.

to embody democratic possibility. Erased by this dramatic pre-sentation was the complicated and contested course of politics inthe country between 5 October 2000 and 12 March 2003 and thehistory of compromise that preceded the protests. Elided andinvisible were the tensions, difficulties, and embarrassingimbrications of new with old regimes; the failures of the opposi-tion government; the real durability of Miloševic!’s power struc-tures; and even ëin¦ic!’s lack of popular support.

I argue that the discursive moves that represented ëin¦ic! as ademocratic, European figure who could bring Serbia into a Euro-pean family were critical to the production of Serbian state legiti-macy in the face of the crisis induced by the assassination. Theunderlying crisis was twofold. The first problem was the revela-tion that criminal, nonstate actors had the power to destabilizethe political system. In the days following the assassination,many people I spoke with were openly frightened about theimplications of this nonstate power for Serbia’s future and fearedthat the state itself would plunge into chaos. Claiming and dis-playing ëin¦ic!’s intimate ties to Europe and his productive, famil-ial relationship to Serbia’s citizens helped to calm an apprehen-sive population. It provided a symbolic scaffolding for the state,one expressed through kinship. This produced a framework towhich people could appeal in the face of evidence that the dura-bility of state institutions was endangered. EU officials such asPapandreou also relied on this language of family and intimacyto bind Serbia’s future to European institutions in the face of Ser-bia’s own failed state apparatus.

As I have argued, gendered (masculinist) discourses were sig-nificant in Serbia’s postsocialist legitimation crisis. As Gal andKligman note, normative gender categories are key frameworksin struggles for political authority:

Ideas about gender difference and sexuality are often recruited toconstruct continuities with the past, with nature, with the generalgood. They can thus be used to gain authority for postsocialist politi-cal institutions, practices, and political actors where there are not yetwell established rules of the game for political activity.33


33. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 12.

That is, political power and legitimacy may be organized aroundthe juxtaposition of different kinds of gendered political subjects.In the ëin¦ic! case, as elsewhere, this occurs as “politicians makeclaims for the rightness of the political structures they favor notby talking about government itself, but by stating their positionsof questions such as abortion, women’s sexuality, or the properforms of family life.”34 Lauren Berlant has written on similar phe-nomena in the U.S. context, emphasizing not the role of politi-cians but rather how citizen state relations are negotiated through(gendered) intimate practices:

The political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. . . .No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward publiclife . . . the intimate public sphere . . . renders citizenship as a condi-tion of social membership produced by personal acts and values,especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.35

In short, the reproduction of the right kinds of citizens occursthrough an orientation towards proper familial relations ratherthan in a formal public sphere. In the Serbian case, the familialand kinship metaphors imply a kind of intimacy with the statethrough the state’s instantiation as a family man.36 However, asGal and Kligman remind us, discourses that authorize politicsthrough discussions of gender relations can also operate byimplicitly excluding some political possibilities while makingothers seem inevitable or taken for granted.37 How have dis-courses of normative gender roles shut down other kinds ofquestions and debates about the kind of state that Serbia is andwas?


34. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 30.35. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-

sity Press, 1997), 4-5.36. It is hardly then surprising that people participated in a mass public act of intimate mourn-

ing as a significant part of their political, public life. In fact, widespread voter apathy anddemobilization over the past five years means that this intimate form of citizenship may bedisplacing other forms of democratic politics in Serbia. Given the mass political participa-tion on 5 October and throughout the 1990s, such demobilization seems incongruous.However, as Julia Paley has demonstrated, political demobilization in new (neo)liberaldemocracies can be a consequence of democratic transformations, rather than an aberra-tion. Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-dictatorshipChile (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

37. Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender.

What is being silenced and ignored becomes clear when weconsider the second component of political crisis brought on bythe assassination: the revelation of how deeply tied the post–5October Serbian state was to the power structures of theMiloševic! era. The rhetoric around ëin¦ic! entails a structural for-getting of the close links between Serbian democracy and Ser-bian authoritarianism, between the democratic revolution of 5October and Miloševic!’s military and state apparatus. Thisincluded ëin¦ic! himself, who had ties to the criminal elite. Byrendering ëin¦ic!’s relationship to politics private and intimate(and based in a morality of normative nuclear kinship), his linksto a violent state could be elided. In personalizing the state viaaffect targeted at ëin¦ic! and his story, a powerful splitting is pro-duced, one that separates the good democratic state from thebad, ëin¦ic! from his killers. This denies the violent connectionsthat gird the Serbian state and link ëin¦ic! to the past, therebyeffecting a radical break with that past. This is not a process spe-cific to Serbian political rhetoric alone. Begoña Aretxaga firstdemonstrated the role of affect in eliding state violence in heranalysis of post-Franco Spain.38 Aretxaga argued that the legiti-macy of the post-Franco state depended on de-linking the newinstitutions and practices of the democratic state from the violent,authoritarian practices of the past, despite the obvious continuityof practices, institutions, and personnel from one government tothe next. Aretxaga calls the process by which this split was madean act of psychotic disavowal:39

The fetishization of democracy endowed the Spanish state with a newaura and a new body, a sacred one that came to replace thedesacralization and profaned body of the Francoist state. The legiti-macy of the new state, however, depended on the continuous exer-cise of an act of forgetting.40

The violence perpetrated against ëin¦ic! by his assassins allowsfor a similar split: the old authoritarian, violent (Miloševic!) state,and the new democratic state. Despite the history of being inti-


38. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 2002.39. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 60.40. Aretxaga, “A Fictional Reality,” 48.

mately bound together, this act of violence forms a new bound-ary between old and new, nationalist and democratic, Serbianand European. These two eras become personified as particulartypes of people, periodizing the state via affective attachment tothe men who have come to stand for it.

The communicative genre that creates these divisionsbetween gendered normativities and creates the image of groupsprojected through them is a moral narrative, not a structural anal-ysis or historical-political tract. It is therefore telling that even ajournalistic (and thus realist) report about the assassinationbecomes an example of this morality tale. The popular andwidely available book by journalist Miloš Vasic! about ëin¦ic!’sassassination, Atenat na Zorana ëin¦i a (Assassination of Zoranëin¦ic!), details the ties between the paramilitary and criminalelements of Serbian society with its government, laying bare thenature of the state crisis. One is led to believe that the book willbe a political analysis or investigative reportage. Indeed, theopening epitaph, taken from an article titled “Serbia as an Unfin-ished State,” by Nenad Dimitrijevic!, in the journal Re , eloquentlysets the stage for a political analysis of the Serbian state:

Today, in April 2003 . . . defeat is obvious: that the murder of Zoranëin¦ic! [is in] direct connection with the character of statelessness[bezdrz#avlja] in Serbia, that is with a state [stanje] in which it’s notpossible to precisely identify the state [dr #ava]. In this state [stanje] itis not known who has, and who doesn’t have the right to use theinstruments of physical force, nor does there exist any confidence inrules which would separate that which is permitted from that which isforbidden.41

Yet in the account that follows, Vasic! uses the analysis of state-lessness or a criminal state to link crisis not to structures of state,but to individuals and criminal groups that he assigns particularkinds of moral or immoral codes. Thus, the imbrications of stateand criminals are grounded in a set of moral characteristics andfailings, linked to specific kinds of people. The honor of the state,on the other hand, is also personalized, in the figure of ëin¦ic!himself.


41. Miloš Vasic!, Atentat na Zorana ëin¦i a (Beograd, Serbia: Narodna Knjiga [Politika, B92,Vreme], 2005), 7.

For Vasic!, as for the speech makers at the funeral and mediarepresentations about the funeral, state organization is bound upwith particular types of people arranged in social forms markedby the archaic and the modern. This alternative state organizationframes the Zemun clan and organized state-criminal organiza-tions as fundamentally tribal, in opposition to the modernist,democratic state (expressed through democratic masculinity).42

The state as a moral and affective site for the organization of citi-zenship is identified with the qualities of citizen virtue and honor,while those of the tribal are made up of hard men and scum, asocial organization of ruling men from the past. Vasic! writes,

Such is the elite of vice from which Miloševic! constituted his elite car-tel [kartel]: cheaters, unprincipled jerks, greedy newcomers [do¦osi],heroin dealers, “murderers on the go” . . . “heroes” . . . “tough menfrom the Belgrade streets” who really were and still remain small-timeassociates of state and public security; slime: street, drawing-room,business, journalistic, intellectual slime. . . . Such is the moral contextof Serbia on October 5 2000, on the key date of the story which fol-lows. That is the moral character of “statelessness” which we are talk-ing about, because you can not have “statehood” (whatever the “statebuilders” think) without morality, without citizen virtue and citizenbravery, that is, in national terms, without honor [poštenje].43

Vasic! closes the introduction with these words in which ëin¦ic!(never named, but always present) and his killers are starkly con-trasted. Honor and shame become the markers of modern versustribal/nationalist states. Thus, even for (or perhaps especially for)the professional commentator and expert historical witness,kinds of men and the social networks in which they are embed-ded, and which they are poised to reproduce, become the stuff ofpolitics.

5. Conclusion

Zoran ëin¦ic!’s death was unquestionably a tragedy for manybeyond his immediate family, and his loss is still deeply felt. His


42. Citing Dimitrijevic!’s terminology, Vasic! goes so far as to characterizes the criminal elite ide-ology as one of tribal nationalism (Vasic!, Atentat, 14).

43. Vasic!, Atentat, 15.

death was not just a personal loss; it was a political event, whichcame to reshape how Serbia as a democratic state was under-stood at home and in the world. By considering the mediation ofa public figure via discourses of intimacy, kinship, and masculin-ity, we can better understand how the conditions for politics areproduced in a particular, historically located state in crisis. Theintense personalization of the death of a public figure producedcertain forms of politics and elided others. In analyzing the mediadiscussions of ëin¦ic!, his enemies, and his funeral, I have shownhow particular forms of social and state reproduction were tied toidealized male social types. Textual representations of ëin¦ic!and his purported assassins produced an interpretative fieldthrough which the morality and immorality of particular catego-ries of people were linked to democratic as opposed to national-ist state forms, to European belonging as opposed to Serbianisolation.

For readers, listeners, mourners, and citizens hopeful for Ser-bia’s integration into Europe, choices came to seem dichotomousand were mapped onto a before-and-after account of politicalhistory and Serbian statehood. The selective forgetting enabledby these representations contributed to a field of interpretationsthrough which people aligned themselves politically, vis-à-viseach other and the state—all through retellings of key events. Inturn, this foreclosed other ways of reading events and their con-texts. Notably missing, for example, was any examination of thecontent of ëin¦ic!’s pro-European policies and their political,social, and economic implications and consequences. While ofcourse there are accounts of ëin¦ic! that have subtler shades, hismemory tends to reproduce the particular dichotomy outlinedabove: a moralization and privatization of politics in lieu of struc-tural, political, and economic accounts of conditions in the coun-try. It is striking that the suture connecting the images of states,nations, morals, individuals, and politics that I have discussed isthe category of gender, and in particular a vision of opposingforms of masculinity. This linkage between the state, kinds ofmen, and the families they supposedly produce reveals newforms of political power and authority in a transforming Serbia.


“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran and the New …...10.1177/0888325405284250“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”East European Politics and Societies “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran

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