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Bojana Piškur works as a curator at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her work relates to the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav context and the Non-Aligned Movement. In 2019, she curated Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned (Moderna galerija: Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova), which was exhibited in Gwangju, Rijeka, Ramallah, Podgorica, Skopje and London. 

In her landmark essay, ‘Troubles with the East(s),’ Piškur explains how the Western bloc has perpetuated violence in the East(s) under the guise of 'spreading democracy' — citing both the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia and the unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people.  

Issue #73 looks at this interconnected history of Yugoslavia and Palestine, especially during the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In this excerpt, Piškur reminds us of the threads of solidarity interwoven between the two states, through which Yugoslavia played a significant role in supporting Palestine politically, culturally, and materially, providing aid as well as diplomatic support for its right to self-determination.

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, NAM was founded in Belgrade. In retrospect, we can say that its inauguration represented the first significant disturbance in a world geopolitical arena dominated by the two hegemonic blocs. NAM functioned as a social movement with the aim of changing then current global structures to bring about a more just, equitable and peaceful world order. As such, it was anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist: it also supported the National Liberation Movements across the world fighting for independence from colonialism and various forms of occupation, and the Palestinian case was no exception. As the majority of its members were pro-Palestine, NAM strongly promoted Palestinian interests at the United Nations. At the 1973 NAM summit in Algeria, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was given observer status as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and their struggle, and at the 1976 Colombo summit the PLO was given full participant status. Support for the Palestinian cause has been expressed at all NAM summits and conferences. In the communiqué of the preparatory meeting for the Colombo Conference in 1964, for example, the members declared the following: ‘The Conference condemns the imperialistic policy pursued in the Middle East and, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, decides to: endorse the full restoration of all the rights of the Arab people of Palestine to their homeland, and their inalienable right to self-determination; declare their full support to the Arab people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation from colonialism and racism.’

As one of the founding members of NAM, Yugoslavia was fully committed to Palestine, supplying material and logistical support to Palestinian organizations (arms and medical supplies, medical treatment of Palestinian fighters in Yugoslavia, education grants for Palestinian students) and helping to legitimize the PLO’s position as the legal representative of the Palestinian people. Following the Six Day War in 1967, Yugoslav officials expressed strong support for the Palestinian right to self-determination and the establishment of an independent state, and were more in favour of the Palestinian armed struggle than in previous decades even though they explicitly condemned terrorist acts such as plane hijackings. In 1967 Yugoslavia severed diplomatic ties with Israel.

Relations between Yugoslavia and Palestine were significant not only politically but also culturally. Manifestations of various kinds – art exhibitions, translation of Palestinian authors (Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad) and rock concerts in solidarity with Palestine – took place around the country. The Yugoslav people were in general very supportive of the Palestinian liberation movement, and even schoolchildren regularly participated in solidarity actions such as fundraising for their peers in Palestine. The affection was mutual: documents in the Archives of Yugoslavia reveal that many young Palestinian fighters were so impressed by the Yugoslav national liberation struggle in World War II that they nicknamed themselves Tito.

In the late 1980s, Yugoslav aid and support for Palestine declined, partly because of the changes in Yugoslav foreign policy after Tito’s death but also as a result of a deep crisis within the federation.

In 1989, Palestinian artist Kareem Dabbah donated his work Composition (1989) to the collection of the Art Gallery of the Non-Aligned Countries in Titograd. The work, one of the copper engravings for which the artist was known, includes lines from a poem by Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri. At the bottom of the engraving, the line, ‘Long live the Palestinian–Yugoslavian friendship’ stands as a statement of political and collective resistance and of solidarity between the two states – one that, at that time, was already history and one that was still future.

The events of the 1990s reshaped the political, economic and cultural landscape in the East(s): the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Eastern bloc; the break-up of, and wars in, Yugoslavia; the Gulf War and the subsequent conflicts and wars in the Middle East. NAM had become an anachronism in international politics; in permanent crisis and unable to resolve any armed conflict or war between its members, including the wars in Yugoslavia. The radical changes of this decade were so profound that their consequences continue haunt us to this day.

So what is left of the idea of Eastern Europe, more than thirty years after the end of the Cold War? Eastern Europe has all but disappeared from the geopolitical map of the world, replaced by Global East, Central Europe, the Baltics, Southeast Europe or the Western Balkans. The overturning of one system (communism) in order to copy another (liberal democracy) left most of the region with ‘decades of rising social inequality, pervasive corruption and the morally arbitrary redistribution of public property into the hands of small number of people’, as Krastev and Holmes put it.

It is accurate to say that there is no longer just one Eastern Europe, but many. And if there is no more Eastern Europe as such, what has become of the East of the former East?

Even if there is no European East, so to speak, the centuries-old hostility towards the other East(s) has not disappeared, but is still present in various guises. Many leaders from the eastern part of Europe, for example, repeatedly use migration as a populist mantra, emphasizing how the region stands as a bastion ‘to protect the rights of the threatened white Christian majority who are in mortal danger’.

The West has been accused of double standards; its ‘indifference to the suffering and annihilation of those deemed inferior or not human enough’ for Western civilization has been pervasive.

One argument is that while the Western world reacted immediately and unequivocally to the invasion of Ukraine with sanctions against Russia, its reaction to the siege of Gaza could not be more different: The West has clearly sided with Israel, supplying arms and resources to the occupying force; Palestine is deemed a threat to the outpost of the ‘civilized’ world in the Middle East.

After World War II there were alternatives to domination and oppression; anticolonial, emancipatory movements inventing new political languages of liberation. All these past alternatives seem to have failed us. Even though Palestine is still a member of NAM, ‘the biggest peace movement in history’, it was not until 29 November 2023 that a relatively unnoticed statement was passed on to the UN by the delegation of Azerbaijan on NAM’s behalf. What made this statement particularly cynical is that it came via the representatives of the country responsible for 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh being forced to leave the region just a month before, in anticipation of ethnic cleansing.

In contrast, South Africa is the first state to launch a case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid. South Africans have learned from their history; the rest of the world has not.

These questions remain: How to understand these complex histories and demand change that would actually produce a new politics of rupture in this deeply unjust world? How to finally exorcise the demons of war? To paraphrase the title of Eric Maria Remarque’s classic novel, nothing is new on the Eastern front. In Gaza, people cannot bury their dead as there are no longer any graveyards. And as we wait for the alternatives, it looks unlikely, tragically, that change will come any time soon.

Excerpted from 'Troubles with the East(s)' first published in L’Internationale. Used with the permission of the author. 

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