Back from Belgrade.

Mixed feelings. The city has stagnated since I was last there a few years ago. Some snazzy new buildings, but most of the place looks to be gloomy, poor and crumbling. The authorities have utterly failed to mobilise national business energy and SMEs, and instead are busy squeezing anything which still moves to eke out some more tax to pay for dismal state sector under-performance.

As one senior Serb gloomily put it, the taxpayer gets more value from the ash-tray in his office than from many of the people on his part of the public payroll. But he can’t bring himself to fire the dead-weights – how would they live?

So much of this misery is self-inflicted. As in many other parts of the world, great areas of life need an official ‘stamp’ of some sort to be legally acceptable. Worse, lawyers are not allowed to issue these stamps. So a stunning amount of time and energy is wasted queuing up for the court system to issue these official stamps, eg for someone’s Will.

A reform to end this madness has meandered around for a few years. The word on the street is that it will go nowhere until the ruling elite find a way to empower a narrow clique of party loyalists to issue the stamps. Simply abolishing the need for all these stamps does not occur to people, or if it does it quickly recedes. Stamps = state power = money.

The costs of this folly compound upwards. The public dimly sense that things are all back to front, but the reform energy which accompanied the early post-Milosevic period has vanished.

Basically, when communism ended there was an abrupt reform tsunami which swept away a lot of the worst processes in many European countries. Alas for Serbia, Milosevic clung on to power through the 1990s and that reform energy potential in Serbia ebbed away. When he fell in 2000 there was not enough momentum to turn things round in a decisive fashion.

The judicial sector is a priority for major reforms on many counts simultaneously. I was in Belgrade to look for ways to help. Yet it is horribly ironic or even grotesque that the European Union is pressing Serbia to speed up its tortuous legal processes when various people being tried for war crimes at ICTY have languished there for years without a verdict. Most notably Vojislav Seselj.

Seselj has a brilliant mind, warped by nationalism in general but (more particularly) by communist/Muslim torture in the 1980s when he was a political prisoner in Bosnia. He was without question a vociferous cheer-leader for the most virulent Serb ambitions and associated excesses during the Bosnia/Kosovo conflicts, but that does not mean that he is guilty of war crimes. 

Seselj is now petitioning on various grounds to be freed from prison, not least the fact that he was held for several years without the substantive trial starting. 

Smart opinion in Belgrade believes that Seselj soon will be freed, as ICTY just can’t muster a winning case against him. If so he will enjoy a triumphant return to Belgrade and then set about creating amazing embarrassment for just about every current political party, as only he knows how. Another lurid distraction from the reform agenda.

All of which said, when you go to Belgrade you are charmed all over again by Serbs’ wit and zany flights of imagination, which lead them to think and do things which surpass any normal limits. For better or worse, and usually both at the same time.

Here is a startling Serbo-Japanese footballing example. The fury of Serbian football genius turned Japanese club manager Piksi Stojkovic leads him as manager to volley the ball into the goal from the half-way line – and get a red card! A sensational sporting moment which reveals the pitiful inadequacies of the UK’s preening elite football manager caste when compared to their magnificent Serb counterparts.

Who cares about crumbling shops and roads, when Serbs and only Serbs do things like this: