Mass shootings won’t change Serbia’s gun culture

Two mass shootings in Serbia have left seventeen people dead, many of them children, and there are protests on the streets of Belgrade. Demonstrators blame Serbia’s populist president, Aleksandar Vučić, and so Vučić has his own series of anti-gun rallies planned and has ordered a swift crackdown on gun ownership, a “practical disarmament.”

But Vučić has his work cut out for him. Weapons are embedded in Serbia’s culture and it’s hard to imagine a significant number of Serbians simply handing them over. In Serbia, the gun is a way of life.

‘It’s part of our tradition; in villages they fire in the air to celebrate a wedding or a baby’

When I worked in the Balkans as a journalist, a man felt underdressed without a Kalashnikov. Provincial streets thronged with men with AK-47s loosely draped over them. In the more sophisticated Belgrade, apart from the Kalashnikov-ed heavies hanging around the Hyatt Hotel (home of the press center and gangster central), the weapon of choice was a pistol, generally worn with jeans, T-shirt and leather blouson.

That was, to be fair, during the wars of the 1990s, but the gun culture predated those wars, and it has survived them too. In 2018, the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey found that Serbia had the third highest rate of guns in civilian hands in the world — at thirty-nine per 100 residents, topped only by the US and Yemen.

‘The gun is a status symbol,” said Predrag Petrović, research director of the Belgrade Center for Security Policy. “If you have a gun, you are mighty and powerful and protected in your neighborhood.”

Ivana Jeremić, editor of the Balkans Insight website, says: “Every family in Serbia and all over the Balkans owns a gun — or used to. It’s not used to kill or threaten people; it’s part of our tradition. In villages they fire in the air to celebrate a wedding or a baby.”

During the war, it was often hard to differentiate between a firefight and a post-soccer match party. Marcus Tanner, former Balkans correspondent for the Independent, remembers crowds shooting in the air to celebrate the election of the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church.

Serbs love guns because Balkans culture celebrates brigands and a spirit of heroic defiance. Their fertile plains and rugged mountains were once densely forested, teeming with hajduks (resistance fighters), and hillmen: all battling enemy occupation — Ottoman, Austrian, German. Hajduk Split (founded in 1911, when Croatia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) is one of Croatia’s top soccer teams.

“The Serbs had a lot of guns in the nineteenth century — they got rid of the Turks in the 1820s on their own,” says Tanner. “They didn’t have to wait for Lord Byron or the British Navy like the Greeks.”

In the 1930s Tintin Balkan adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre, almost every cartoon features a man wielding a mustache and a gun. Even communist Yugoslavia did not clamp down on gun ownership – unlike, say, neighboring and culturally similar Soviet-influenced Bulgaria. Gun ownership there stands at only 8 percent, and was a tenth of that at the end of communism. But in Non-Aligned Yugoslavia little effort was made to disarm the people, and in the 1990s President Milosević of Serbia was heavily dependent on his gangsters and warlords — Arkan with his Tigers, Vojislav Šešelj and his White Eagles.

In Sarajevo, the gangsters who defended the city at the start of the siege in 1992 were heroes, although the Bosnian government did crack down a year later: most of the gang leaders were “shot while trying to escape.” Arkan survived in Serbia as a folk hero until his murder in 2000. Šešelj, despite being convicted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, is back at liberty and is now a Serbian politician.

What’s alarming about the latest shootings, though, is that Serbs have begun to turn their guns on each other. Some people suspect that the widespread coverage of US school shootings is influencing young Serbians; others blame violent video games and television.

Gun ownership in Serbia, although widespread, is already strictly controlled, and despite the potential for disaster, even members of Belgrade’s liberal intelligentsia show no real enthusiasm for controls to be tightened. Petrović thinks any attempt from the government will fizzle out: “They always do. No one wants to give the guns up.”

The AK-47 — by far the most common celebratory weapon — is already illegal, yet openly used. “Everybody knows each other and the local police in the communities,” says Petrović. “They know if they can celebrate with an AK. People do get wounded sometimes, but the authorities don’t mind because they know it’s not intentional.”

Probably the closest I came to death in my four years in Bosnia was miles from the front lines, on a summer’s evening in a pizza parlor. The owner had a row with her boyfriend, who stormed off, returning ten minutes later with his Kalashnikov. He started spraying bullets all over the terrace. Along with the rest of the guests, I hit the deck.

There was a blizzard of broken glass, bullets pinging off the walls. The police chief soon came and calmed the broken-hearted suitor, who was led away weeping — probably for an understanding glass of slivovica in the local nick. We returned to our pizzas. No one had been hit. But there was a bullet hole in the windscreen of our car, and the bullet had gone through the passenger seat where I’d been sitting minutes before.

Petrović recently found a bullet on his roof terrace in a smart area of Belgrade. “It must have been a celebration,” he says. “But if I’d been out there, I’d have been shot.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.