A Taste of Serbia

I recently returned from a trip to Belgrade, the capital of former Yugoslavian country Serbia. If I'd been hoping for a relaxing, cheery holiday I would most definitely have been disappointed. The museums were lacklustre, the streets lined with rubbish and very few restaurants used the Latin alphabet making trying to decipher the Cyrillic words of a menu the biggest activity of my visit (as a vegetarian this was especially difficult).

My trip was certainly an interesting one, however. I spent an afternoon with two men who work in the sex industry. While the two men were friends (often working together as a safety measure) their circumstances were very different. One man, we'll call him Tomas, was very confident with his role and, he explained to me through an interpreter, very much enjoyed having sex with his male clients. He even proudly showed me intimate pictures of himself dressed in revealing women's clothing (and one of him not dressed at all). The other sex worker - whom I shall refer to as Raz - did not feel happy with job he did for a living. As a man from the Roma community, Raz feels utter shame with what he does for money. That he still lives with his parents brings this shame to him everyday. So while Tomas experiences many of the difficulties that all sex workers face: occasional abuse from clients, persecution from arbitrary laws and practices towards those perceived as 'prostitutes' on the streets of Belgrade, Raz endures this and more. Tomas's parents know that he is gay, even if he hasn't explained to them how he pays the rent each month. Raz could never tell his family that he sells sex. When he was imprisoned for soliciting sex, he lie to his family about why he was there: 'It would be less shameful to tell my family I murdered someone than admit I am a prostitute.'

What my encounter with Tomas and Raz taught me was that I, despite considering myself open-minded - had been completely blind to the wider picture about sex workers. Not only are they not just women: they're not just exploited and they're not just victims. There are a whole complex set of reasons why a person sells sex ranging from those who are trafficked for sexual exploitation to those whose economic situation pushes them there through to those who have an active desire to sell sex for no other reason than that they want to. This is not a perversion and it does not necessarily mean they have been abused, or forced into doing this.

My meeting with Raz was also my first encounter with the difficulties faced by the Roma community in Serbia. For while Serbia's overall unemployment rate is 40%, discrimation is such that the figure is probably double for Roma people who, as far as a I could see, live in what amounts to small-scale shanty towns dotted around the city.

Above all Belgrade was a miserable place to be. The abandoned construction works, bombed buildings, and extremist graffiti were the biggest factors in this. But the largest contributor to this feeling of malaise was in the people I met. Above all they were pessimistic about getting jobs, pessimistic about the ability of their government to make any changes for the better, pessimistic about the upcoming elections, pessimistic about any improvement in conditions for the vulnerable when (or if?) Serbia joins the EU and pessimistic about any imminent economic recovery. For Serbians, the future is most certainly not bright.