July 5, 1996
Serb Artists Confront the War and the World Around Them
By CHRIS HEDGES
ALE, Bosnia-Herzogovina -- As Militch Stankovic put the finishing brush strokes on his newest work, "The Trial of the Disemboweled Heart: Mladic and Karadzic Accused," it was clear why he has earned renown as the artist-of-choice among Serbs indicted on charges of war crimes.
"The heart of Serbia is laid out on a table in the courtroom in The Hague," he said, gesturing with one of four brushes he held between his fingers.
On either side, "painted as statues, because they have already become legends to the Serbian people," he said, were Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, who have been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. "On the ceiling of the court are the faces of the Serb victims whose cries of anguish are being ignored. When I get back to Belgrade this work will be painted as a massive mural. It expresses the rage of the Serb people at the martyrdom of its leaders and its people."
As the painter, whose works are displayed in Karadzic's and Mladic's homes, spoke, about a dozen other men in blue smocks toiled over their canvases. The smell of oil paint and cigarette smoke lay heavy in the air.
The artists, 15 from Serbia and 15 from the self-styled Republic of Srpska in Bosnia, have gathered in an old hotel in Pale, 10 miles from Sarajevo, for 10 days to show solidarity with the beleaguered Bosnian Serb leadership. The artists, many of whom enjoy a wide following in Serbia, said that they plan to auction off the works they paint here to raise money for medicine and humanitarian aid for local Serbs.
But the gathering was more than the effort by a few painters to back the Bosnian Serbs. It was a sign that, culturally and politically, the Bosnian Serbs remain intent on locking themselves inside a bizarre universe where they stand alone against the outside world, serve on the front lines in the battle to save Western civilization, and suffer demeaning persecution.
"We are the vanguard in the fight against Islamic primitivism and barbarity," Stankovic said, "but because the world is blind we have been left to carry on the battle alone."
The 60-year-old surrealist painter, who was one of the most famous artists in the former Yugoslavia, handed over two photos of what he said were volunteers from Saudi Arabia who fought for the Bosnian Muslims. The bearded soldiers were holding the decapitated heads of Serbian men.
"These photos were given to me by my good friend General Mladic," he said, "and I have painted the heads in the box here in front of the courtroom."
Bloody scenes and mutilated bodies are not new themes to Stankovic, who goes by the name Militch of Matchva. When he was 7, Nazi soldiers attacked his town and slaughtered nearly all the adults. The children left behind, he said, watched the dogs and pigs devour the dead.
This memory, he said, drove him to painting, and this terrifying scene from his childhood creeps into many of his works. A mystic, he lives in a medieval tower in his town of Matchva with a colony of artists and dabbles in the occult.
The contorted and mutilated corpses, flaming red skies, and thick gobs of dark, metallic colors plastered on his canvases attest to an anguish and hatred that shows little signs of ebbing with the current Bosnian peace agreement.
Most of the painters dealt, in varying ways, with the themes of Serb nationalism, Serb heroism, and the perfidy of the outside world. A pamphlet handed out by the painters displays a curse against the four greatest evils in the world: the United States, Germany, Austria, and the Vatican.
But the most disturbing works were being painted by Borko Mocevic and Branislav Kovacevic, two former soldiers who spent the war on the front lines around Sarajevo.
"As painters, we came here as part of our battle against the forces of darkness arrayed against the Serbs," Kovacevic said. "But the destruction begun by war makes it hard for us to create. We are haunted by demons."
Mocevic said that when the fighting in Bosnia began in 1992, when he was 17, he found himself shooting old friends and neighbors and watched for more than three years as his comrades died from gaping wounds inflicted by bullets and shell fragments.
"I hate all politicians, all leaders," he said softly as he sat before his easel. "They wanted to be gods. We believed in them, so we were destroyed. I don't believe in anything now."
His painting, which was untitled, showed a yawning tunnel leading to a graveyard. Earthmovers plucked decayed bodies out of the ground. In the storm-dark sky, were three versions of a face turning into a skull.
"I began the war by painting what I had always painted, flowers, landscapes, things like that," Mocevic said. "But the more I was in the trenches the more I could only paint about carnage and death."
"The faces above are being pulled down into the morass of battle; no one can escape," he said. "My trenches always vanish in the horizon because war leads to nothingness. My dead cannot rest, they must be dug up and carried away from the Muslims. In the corner of the cemetery I have painted a rooster calling for my friends to wake up."
