‘We Defend Western Civilization’: Serbian Representations of a Cartoon Conflict

Abstract

This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals interpret and further recontextualize the global reactions to the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. On the basis of in-depth interviews and critical discourse analysis, we show how the Serbian mainstream discourses frame the ‘cartoon crisis’ in a specific way—Muslims are labeled as ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘terrorists’. The article argues that this provides a historical excuse to justify and legitimize the violent Serbian policies against the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims during the 1990s. Furthermore, the informants appropriate the Muslim reactions by using an analogy: they draw parallels between violent global Muslim demonstrations caused by the publication of the cartoons and violent Muslim military attacks against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Notes

1. For example, demonstrations were organized on 8 February 2006 in Sarajevo, where approximately 300 Muslims protested against the publication of the cartoons, and burned Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Croatian flags.

2. Within the former Yugoslav region, the cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, that depicts him with a bomb in his turban, was published by the Slovene Mladina and Žurnal and the Croatian National weeklies.

3. It is important to point out that we do not see Serbian reactions as an isolated phenomenon, either in the Balkans or in the rest of Europe. At the time, this was a prominent topic of public discussions in most European countries (see more in Anderson, 2006).

4. See Woodward (1995) for more on the historical context.

5. We follow here Tabeau and Bijak (2005), though they carefully argue that the number of war-related deaths in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone can be estimated at 102,622 individuals.

6. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague is the first international criminal court. It is an agency of the United Nations, with a staff of nearly 1,200, drawn from 77 nations. Its aim is to secure the foundation of an international jurisprudence on war crimes and crimes against humanity which can be brought to bear globally.

7. Re-telling the story of Kosovo poses a lot of serious problems for any scholar. Kosovo appears to be one of those stories that contribute to the re-shaping of society, and its status presently occupies historians of the conflict, politicians, and the public alike. It has to be emphasized that disputes over Kosovo do not remain isolated within academia, but entail broader political struggles over the meaning of the past, and the shaping of the future. The problem of Kosovo has generally been subjected to simplistic interpretations, fabrications, and mystifications by all sides involved.

8. The burning of the American embassy and looting in downtown Belgrade have been widely condemned by international and Serbian authorities.

9. See Poole (2002), who analyses the British press and argues that Muslims continue to be associated with the issue of freedom of speech. She also illustrates how the Rushdie affair is exploited and used to support the idea of a threat from irrational Muslims to British liberal values.

10. In the mainstream Western media, there is a lack of contextual understanding of Islam, and Muslims and their religion are often posited as anti-modern. Another problem of this kind of stereotypical depiction lies in how some scholars simplify their explanation of Muslims by putting them all into one homogeneous category whose beliefs are always predicated by their submission to Allah. The category ‘Muslim’ is internally diverse. It is the insistence on overlooking the complex process in which Islam is interpreted, reinterpreted and negotiated beyond the visible expressions of religious extremism, which represent only a fraction of Muslims worldwide, that is highly problematic, yet very powerful.