How have these places managed to transform from monuments to atrocity and resistance into concrete clickbait? The story told by Spomenik is that these strange structures must have just been dropped onto these rural areas, most likely by the Big Man, the dictator, Tito himself. According to Gal Kirn, who has written several articles on “partisan art” and whose book Partisan Ruptures was recently published in Slovenia, the opposite is true. “For these, let’s call them modernist monuments, you would be surprised to see that the financing many times came as a combination of republican (Yugoslavia was heavily decentralised into its six constituent Republics) and regional funds, and also self-managed funding, meaning also that enterprises and factories contributed — while much less was given from the federal-state level.” There were competitions and “some public calls which had juries — but the existence of these progressive sculptural objects tells us that more conventional representations-resolutions were not favoured.” That is, in many cases these “UFOs” were commissioned, funded and chosen locally.
united nation of Yugoslavia was not easy prey for imperialist intentions like we see taking place today. It is a fact, that after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became something of a European success story. Between 1960 and 1980 the country had one of the most vigorous growth rates in the world: a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72 years. To my knowledge, not one of the Balkans states that were created can claim half this prosperity.
Not a single politician, diplomat or senior soldier saw fit to resign over the betrayal of Srebrenica. It will be interesting to see if anything approaching an apology - let alone a reckoning - by Britain, America or France is spoken next weekend. Most of those involved were promoted or moved on to lucrative positions. After he had left the government, the former British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, who had chastised attempts at intervention to help Bosnia, along with Neville-Jones, famously beat a path to Belgrade to engage Milševic - just before he was indicted for genocide - on behalf of the NatWest markets bank.
The reaction of Akashi to the killing, as it began on 13 July, was to assure that the UN “should not fear an international outcry as at no time have Unprofor drivers or vehicles assisted in the evacuation”.
Toby Gati, the US assistant secretary of state for intelligence, told the current US ambassador, Samantha Power, for a book: “Ethnic cleansing was not a priority of our policy. When you make an original decision you are not going to respond, then I’m sorry, these things are going to happen.”
The then UN secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, told the BBC on 11 July 1995, when Mladic entered Srebrenica: “We have been humiliated and duped. We will have to live with it. But in several days, it will belong to the past.”
Bildt, in his memoirs, insists that: “They [the Bosnian leadership] knew that the peace settlement would mean the loss of the enclave. So from this point of view what happened made things easier.”
In Yugoslavia in the 1980s, computers were a rare luxury. A ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 could easily cost a month’s salary, and that’s if you could even get through the tough importation laws. Then in 1983, while on holiday in Risan, Voja Antonić dreamt up plans for a new computer, a people’s machine that could be built at home for a fraction of the cost of foreign imports. The Galaksija was born, and with it a computer revolution.