TDR Comment Theatre of War in the Former Yugoslavia Event, Script, Actors Branislav Jakovljevic Ed. note: TDR invited Branislav Jakovljevic, a dramaturg from the former Yugosla- via, to write this issue’s Comment. In the early s he worked as a theatre critic for the Belgrade independent daily Borba and the independent weekly Vreme. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the daily !DOSTA!, published during the two-month-long Belgrade University student demonstrations in May/June . Jakovljevic is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. I am convinced that the dangers of acting are far outweighed by the dangers of not acting—dangers to defenseless people and to our national interests. —Bill Clinton () Our reality, that is the problem. We have only one reality and we have to save it. Even under the worst slogan. “We have to do something, we can’t afford to do nothing.” But, doing anything for the only reason that we can’t do the right thing has never been the principle of action nor free- dom. It is only a form of vindication of one’s own impotence and compas- sion for one’s own destiny. —Jean Baudrillard () In January Akademie Theater in Vienna opened Rolf Hochhut’s play Sommer . ein totentanz (Summer . A Dance Macabre). The thesis of Hochhut’s play was that unlike a beast, war cannot burst out. War does not erupt, claimed Hochhut, it is always designed as industriously as it is desired. His analysis of the preparations for WWI resonated strongly with the political turbulence that was going on less than a hundred miles south of Vienna, in the former Yugoslavia. A year later, I used Hochhut’s thesis to talk about theatre and war on the pages of the Belgrade independent daily newspaper Borba. It was the interim between the two wars, or between the two acts of the same war. The war in The Drama Review , (T), Fall . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760347289 by guest on 27 September 2021 TDR Comment Croatia started the previous summer, raged for six months, and then suddenly stopped. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was desired by many and feared by many more. The epoch recognized itself in theatre, and, even more impor- tantly, theatre recognized itself in the current epoch: the ongoing events seemed at the same time well-organized and chaotic. There was nothing that could stop the ongoing performance of politics and war. Now, seven years after the publication of my article on the theatricality of war, I am in New York, and the article still has an eerie relevance to the on- going events. It is the third week of NATO air raids on Serbia-Montenegro and the eighth year of war in the former Yugoslavia. If I were in Belgrade at this moment, I could not publish the article that I easily published in . The media opposed to Slobodan Milosevic’s government have been shut down. My friends from Belgrade tell me that theatres are still open and giving performances free of charge. Once the stronghold of political opposition, the- atre became a part of the war effort. The small gains that opposition parties made over the years have been erased in one night of bombardment. At one point, liberal and democratic parties from Belgrade and liberal and democratic parties of Kosovo Albanians started negotiations, which opened up the possi- bility of a joint effort of Serb and Albanian opposition parties. The votes of ethnic minorities, mostly Albanians, had a profound influence on recent po- litical events in Macedonia and Montenegro, and that could have been the case in Serbia too. Now, one more chance for the peaceful removal of Slobodan Milosevic has been lost forever. The virtual war in Western mass media does not even acknowledge that such an option once existed. The television news networks would like to see a rerun of the Gulf War. Complaining about the lack of live footage, a CNN reporter observes that this war is “perfect” for the internet. In the daily news briefing, a NATO spokesman calls reporters’ attention to spectacular shots made of missiles approaching their targets. This kind of footage turned the Gulf War into a high-tech spectacle. Finally, Yugoslavia is a virtual place. The name of that country does not exist in, say, the United States Postal Service database, nor in the United Nations Organization phone book. A letter ad- dressed to Yugoslavia cannot reach its destination, but a NATO missile can (Yugoslavia is listed as Serbia-Montenegro in the U.S. Postal Service database). However, the theatre of war in Yugoslavia resists virtualization of events. It has been around for too long, and it is too real. The Yugoslav theatre of war is neither a metaphor nor a media event. It did not erupt, it could not erupt, and it is not going to cease by itself. In order to be stopped, it has to be ana- lyzed within its real, not virtual, time and space, with its underlying script and the human performances involved in it. Event and the Theatre of War According to Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare the term “the- atre” slipped from the vocabulary of performing arts to military language through geography: there was “one short step” from the Renaissance collection of world maps Theatrum Orbis Terrarum () to the military concept of theatrum belli (war theatre), first used in the th century (Margiotta :). In the age of reason, the theatre of war was limited to the arena of the battle- field. There were no spectators. In premodern warfare civilians were auditors who heard the tales and distant echoes of the battlefield (in this way the Battle of Kosovo, which occurred on June , became an ever-present event for peoples of south and central Balkans). Contemporary military doctrine sees a theatre of war as “a large geographic section (i.e., land, sea, and airspace) in which major military activities are carried out by large bodies of troops, such as Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760347289 by guest on 27 September 2021 TDR Comment the Pacific and European theaters of war in World War II” (:). The modern theatre of war is not limited to the battlefield. It is a total experience, participatory theatre, in which the demarcation line between front and rear combat zones has been blurred and erased. Civilians are involved in this kind of war not as distant auditors, but as participants and victims. According to Baudrillard, postmodern war preserves this participatory qual- ity of the modern theatre of war, but the event itself has been lost. The battle- field has been displaced by or to a large degree absorbed into the simulacrum of live or recently replayed television broadcasts. Using the example of the Gulf War, Baudrillard challenges the corporeal/incorporeal duality of events. Promoting this understanding of what an event is, Foucault says that it is non- material, “neither substance, nor accident, nor quality, nor process,” while at the same time always remaining on the level of materiality: “events have their place, they consist in relation to, coexistence with, dispersion of, the cross- checking accumulation and the selection of material events” (:). Postmodern warfare is exemplified by the Gulf War as the media event which completely effaced the material side of the event and turned it into a non- event, a nonwar, a game of deception and the complete eradication of the ac- tual by the virtual (Baudrillard :). The limits of the war in time and space have been lost; the depth of duality has been reduced to the flatness of the television screen and logorrhea of talking heads. One of Baudrillard’s favorite allegories of simulacrum is Borges’s story of ambitious cartographers who devise a map that matches exactly the territory that has been mapped. The object disappears in its representation. When President Clinton appeared on national television on March pointing to the map of Serbia-Montenegro, he disclosed his membership in the club of Balkan cartographers who had been zealously remapping the former Yugosla- via since the end of the Gulf War. In his address to the American nation, he emphasized that the conflict in Kosovo “is not war in the traditional sense” (Clinton ). Later, he repeated in his address to the citizens of Serbia- Montenegro that NATO is not at war with them, that this is not a war. That is precisely the attitude that Slobodan Milosevic maintained during the con- flicts in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Baudrillard, Milosevic, and Clinton know the power of nonwar. They all learned from the Gulf War that nonwar is more destructive than “war in the traditional sense.” On March , the first day of NATO air strikes, Serbian-Montenegrian au- thorities proclaimed a state of war. In the twisted language of postmodern warfare, it meant that Milosevic wants peace. Military and political analysts have asked in vain what is the endgame and objective in the theatre of war in Serbia-Montenegro. The endgame does not exist because, perhaps, the objec- tive already has been achieved. Script and Objective So the space and time limits, the geographical and historical boundaries of the war in Serbia-Montenegro have been displaced to match the proclaimed objective of NATO intervention. According to a scenario widely circulated, the Kosovo crisis escalated in the spring of . One year later it reached the proportions of a humanitarian disaster, which prompted NATO to intervene. The intervention was supposed to be yet another “clean war”: NATO mis- siles would cleanse Serbia-Montenegro of ethnic cleansing.