The Earth Day cry of a Serbian ecologist: Poisoned body and soul
A ravaged homeland is like a raped mother: you can’t condemn her but you can’t quite entirely love her either. These words belong to the Yugoslavian songwriter Djodje Balasevic and for the Serbian ecologist, Dejan Zagorac, they represent “the perfect synthesis of the moment we are living. We are the most polluted country on earth, poisoned in our minds and our air, in our water, our food, even in our hopes.”
Zagorac incarnates the amalgamative archetype of the post-war Yugoslavian male: a perfectly dosed mixture of dismay, desperation, poverty, and bewilderment. Perhaps the look in his eyes, however, is even more desolate than most, since his own personal tragedy is inseparable from that of his country.
After a recent visit to the refinery at Novi Sad, which was bombarded by the allies 21 times, he predicted the prospects for biological interaction. “It’s a catastrophe that has no end. This country was once an endless succession of natural oases and now it’s a carpet of poisons.”
For Zagorac this natural paradise has been forced
down the path toward “the
only type of globalization that has ever reached
Eastern Europe, that of environmental disasters.”
The cover of the latest recent issue of the magazine he edits -- “Zastita” or “Protection,” the only magazine in Yugoslavia dedicated to ecology -- showed a green forest from which huge radioactive flowers were blooming. Recently, the secretary general of NATO admitted that 31 missiles charged with impoverished uranium were launched onto Yugoslavian territory. The ecologist has been trying to determine what the long-term effects of such uranium might be on his country. “A radioactive load potentially more dangerous than that of Hiroshima for which no one has of yet explained the real danger.” Zagorac has sought the straight answers he is looking for, but to no avail. His government exaggerates and the West minimizes. “No one wants to know the truth. For opposite reasons no one wants a precise evaluation of the risk.”
During the last few months Zagorac has sought, through his publication, to trace an adequate balance of what has happened to his country. Not in terms of politics, which isn’t his field. Nor in human terms, since that is something that every Serb has had to determine for himself. His assessment regards what is left of their common property, of what will live beyond this generation:
“I’ve reached a conclusion that eliminates all of the others and that renders ridiculous any and every idea of protection: The first form of environmental pollution is human poverty. From those who have been brutally brought back to prime necessities, to pure survival, it is absurd to ask that they respect the environment that surrounds them, not to cut the trees that fill their stoves, not to fish the cyanide-tainted fish from the Danube, to drink only mineral water, or not to buy fresh vegetables the rare times they even appear on the market.”
“It’s crazy to expect the government to find either the will or the funds to limit environmental pollution or to even attempt a first recovery of the waters of the Danube.” The ecologist acknowledges that there are no laws for such things, and above all, there isn’t a single dinar. It would take years of work and billions of dollars. Zagorac’s outlook is bleak. “It’s useless to even dream about it. Serbia today is politically enfeebled, economically annihilated.”
In his youth Zagorac liked to listen to heavy metal music. Never could he have imagined that those “heavy metals” would become such an important element in his life in such a diverse manner: through the water he drinks, the food he eats, and the air he breathes.
April 2000
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