Srpkinja Redemption

There’s a woman I met a few months ago. She lives in the north and in active in a peace group there. My friends in that organization don’t like her very much & I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, whenever I see her, she asks me which new Serbian curses I have learned, which is annoying, but that doesn’t seem reason enough to shun her.

Last week, the story came out. She used to be a turbo-folk singer. She sang songs that praised Arkan. She even toured in the US spreading her messages of nationalism.

And now she says she has changed her views. She was young then, and easily manipulated. Not to excuse her, but how many teenagers wouldn’t sing hateful music if they thought it would bring them stardom? She is active in the peace group and her celebrity status brings them attention that they wouldn’t otherwise get. The leader of the group likes this, but not everyone else. They wonder if she has changed. The rumor is that she is dating a Dutch former-peacekeeper, a Srebrenica-denier, after all.

But what is the point of working for peace if you are unwilling to forgive people? How is there supposed to be progress if people with questionable pasts are excluded from the movement. She and I shared a long conversation last week in which she told me that she regrets the lyrics that used to escape her lips. To me, this is more powerful testimony than that which comes from livelong activists, the people who tell me stories about activist life in the early ‘80s.