daring to walk through the streets of one weak-minded nation’s screwed up place, the place where there is no hope and no Jo'Annas ...

riding in over-crowded

 public transportation in belgrade is like 

"running the gauntlet" 

where you have no clue who did what,

who hit you in the nuts from behind,

who spat at you, etc.

we are talking a very mindless nation, the one that had designed its concentration camp for torturing mainly their own kind even though its location was in croatia. presently, this cultural trauma continues on the streets of belgrade where serbs were urged to give me a highly traumatic experience (symbolically one victimized being is enough to maintain this serbian undemocratic tradition of exposing and torturing individuals without a due right to defend themselves.) in public, when I am passing by some belgraders - the torture sometimes pretty much resembles the practice at concentration gulag of goli otok as very aggressive and hateful citizens use my openness and goodness to attack me. 

i believe serbs derive orgasmic pleasure from harassing me, endogenous morphine is a potent drug, so in 14 years they never ceased to molest especially since the aim of torture is to prevent solidarity.

as I exit belgrade this practice continues to a lesser degree throughout serbia which practically means that entire serbian land is one torturous gulag. by contrast when couple of years ago I went to croatia for two weeks I recorded none such incident.

“Goli Otok found its place in Croatian cultural memory as an example of human rights violations in totalitarian regimes, as a place of individual sufferings and traumas.:

 “The Croatian toponym “Goli Otok” literally means “bare island”, which corresponds to the island’s lack of vegetation. Goli Otok was not an ordinary prison, but a concentration camp. People were imprisoned there without a trial and punished with so-called “community service labour” (Cro. “društveno koristan rad”, abbreviated as DKR) which in effect meant hard labour. “Gauntlet” meant that each newly arrived detainee had to walk between two rows of detainees who would flog, spit, punch or throw rocks at a new arrival in order to avoid being forced to run the gauntlet themselves. “Boycotting” implied the hardest labour, smaller food portions, sleep deprivation and communicational isolation. Mental torture conducted by guards as well as physical torture conducted by both guards and other inmates become a hallmark of the prison.”


"The persecuted became the persecutors," Isakovic said. "Just try to imagine what someone's mind must have gone through if he would report on a friend who had tried to be kind to him."

These character-destroying techniques were one reason for the silence that later surrounded Goli Otok. Neither prisoners nor guards wanted to talk about their experiences in public. Some inmates became so dependent on their captors that, in later life, they were almost incapable of taking even trivial decisions for themselves.

A lecturer at Belgrade University recalled the case of a friend from Goli Otok who would anxiously ask the security police if he should take out a loan or get married. "Finally they got fed up with him and told him to go away . . . Yugoslavia had changed but he hadn't."


"America overcame the experience of Vietnam by talking about it. Had it not done so, it would not be a democratic country -- but a concentration camp. We too have to tell the truth about our past,"