Expired places and forgotten people: Spatial and temporal practices of Military Homeless People in Serbia

Introduction: Warning! Falling objects and sensitive subjects

Moving skilfully around a small, cluttered room, Zoran and Sofija alternately repeated two sentences: ‘It is hard, but we are used to it (Teško je, ali smo navikli)’ and ‘You somehow have to manage’. Shortly afterwards, we had coffee and they explained a lot about why they live where they live; what they get used to (or not) and why they have to (want to, supposed to or hope to) manage and what they are waiting for. We were sitting close to each other because the table at the same time occupies a central place of the kitchen, living room and bedroom; so close that no emotions could be hidden from strangers. The small space of the older couple, Zoran and Sofija, who came to Novi Sad in 1991 from a small city in Croatia, was arranged in a very thoughtful way. At 20 square meters, there was a place for a table with chairs, a small kitchenette, a sofa bed and an entresol with a divan bed downstairs.

On the map of Belgrade and Novi Sad, one can find more buildings, in which small, separated housing units, such as the one that Zoran and Sofija have lived in, were created in the early 1990s. None of them have been renovated for several decades. Even the so-called military hostel in Belgrade, where I visited another interlocutor – Dragoslav, which in comparison with other buildings was to be a deluxe category, left many doubts. Deluxe meant only (or so much) that rooms about 20 square meters had bathrooms. Many rooms were unusable. Falling plaster, broken windows, cartons patching a hole in the door or a decaying structure seemed to confirm their limited expiration date. The warnings of ‘falling objects’ become essential elements of this housing landscape. As it seems, for more than two decades, people like Zoran, Sofija or Dragoslav were more condemned to survive than to live their lives.

An uncertain future is still a constant element for almost 600 families (about 2700 people), who for many years had to get used to living in such conditions. In 1998, some of them founded the ‘Association of FRY Military Retirees from Detached Republics Without Housing’, and six years later, they changed its name to Military Homeless People (MHP). They are former officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA – Jugoslovenska narodna armija), who were relocated from the former Yugoslav republics to Serbia and Montenegro during the post-Yugoslav wars in 1991 and 1992. Many of them have been temporarily placed in ‘collective centres’, where they wait for ‘temporary housing issue’ to be resolved. ‘Collective centres’ are simply rooms in barracks, abandoned surgeries, ex-military buildings, offices, small-sized houses built of asbestos located in the ex-sports and recreation centres, laundry and drying rooms, trailers, military prisons, stables, former dormitories, shops or warehouse, which used to be property of the Yugoslav People’s Army. Yet, none of them was designed as a residential building.

In this article, I draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on social, spatial and temporal aspects of ‘home-making’ and yearning for ‘normal life’ in the context of the long-term waiting of MHP. Therefore, I focus on ways of waiting for home, normal life, social recognition and possible futures among people who are ‘stuck’ (Hage, 2009b), ‘misplaced’ (Jansen, 2008) and ‘displaced’ (Bammer, 1994; Brun, 2015; Dunn, 2017) or rather ‘dis/misplaced’ (Jansen, 2008).

How do MHP make ‘home’ while experiencing the ongoing displacement and ‘chronic waiting’ (Jeffrey, 2008)? Initially, the question of ‘how’ concerns the skills and agency of organizing temporary spaces, where one could not only survive, but also somehow live there. Yet, even more promising than day-to-day practices of homemaking seem to be multi-layered explorations of strategies of struggling for home during the limbo state, which in turn, gives MHP the ‘impression of a fixed, locked and consequently static situation’ (Brun and Fábos, 2015: 10) of protracted waiting for ‘normal life’ (Jansen, 2009b). In the case of MHP, the notion of ‘normality’ seems to be deferred in the future as an expected and possible ‘normal life’ (Jansen, 2014a; Mikuš and Dokić, 2015), which often is associated with a longing for specific patterns of well-being and consummation, and is manifested in attempts to achieve material standards of living (Dzenovska, 2014). Yet, the discourse of ‘normality’ does not merely concern the living standards, but also a feeling of ‘loss (and possible restoration) of a historically specific form of citizen agency’ (Greenberg, 2011: 89) and ‘dignity of having “a place in the world” that characterized socialist Yugoslavia’ (Jansen, 2009b: 827). Thus, ‘normality’, as I will attempt to show, refers primarily to the loss of what one has ‘had before’ in different times of stability, predictability and certain social status.

MHP have been ‘caught/stuck’ in the middle of temporal transition; they are between and betwixt the time of socialism and the post-Yugoslav transformations. As a result, their waiting is not just ‘a passage of time to be traversed’ (Schweizer, 2008: 2), but also a form of life they have experienced. Focusing on waiting, not only as a concept, but also as processes and social practice, enables us – as Janeja Manpreet and Andreas Bandak underline – ‘to explore ethnographically what forms action, thought and social relationships acquire in diverse engagements in, and with, time’ (2018: 2). Therefore, the article seeks to show how ‘temporal relations, gaps and intervals shift from being temporary phenomena’ (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018: 2) to a long-term and open-ended process of waiting, which concerns ‘completed and meaningful experience’ (Gasparini, 1995: 31). In other words, by exploring and problematizing causes, practices of everyday life, struggles for home, claims for full rights of citizenship, and politics of waiting among MHP in Belgrade and Novi Sad, I aim to reflect on how ‘waiting is done’ (Hage, 2009a).

‘Waiting’ is a ‘ubiquitous, multifaceted, spatiotemporal activity’ (Bishop, 2013: 135), which ‘must be scrutinized in relation to the central figures of hope, doubt and uncertainty’ (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018: 1). This involves parsing the ‘politics of waiting’ (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018), which reveals that waiting time is shaped by both, the state’s official institutions, which have ‘power over other people’s time’ (Bourdieu, 2000) and social actors, who are waiting (Auyero, 2011; Hage, 2009a; Khosravi, 2014). Consequently, waiting can be described as an ambivalent state – as passive and hopeless resignation (Crapanzano, 1986; Hage, 2009b) as well as an ‘open-ended’ activity (Bendixen and Eriksen, 2018), agency (Khosravi, 2014) and strategy ‘to fight apathy and despair’ (Rethmann, 2015: 481). Hence, waiting ‘as a category that allows people’s doubts and uncertainties to coexist with potentials of hope’ (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018: 5) becomes an essential element in my anthropological endeavour.

It is difficult to explain the phenomenon of MHP and their waiting and struggling for home and normal life without the context of forcefully displaced people who are characterized, as Elizabeth Dunn points out, ‘by their long-term liminality, by endless waiting and a never-resolved ambiguity surrounding their social status’ (2017: 62). It is thus necessary to explore both, spatial and temporal aspects of a long-term displacement, which results in ‘simultaneously split and doubled existence stretched across multiple ruptures between “here” and “there”’ (Bammer, 1994: xii). In the case of MHP, the ruptures concern not only physical places, but also time. They live in a spatial and temporal state of ‘in-betweenness’, that is ‘between different places and, more importantly, between different times’ (Brun, 2015: 21). As such, they are ‘dis/misplaced’ (Jansen, 2008), which means that spatial and temporal aspects of MHP lives intersect with their social position and struggle for recognition.

In the following sections, I first present my methodological approach, my positioning and emerging predicaments in the ethnographic field. Second, I introduce the current social situation of MHP in Serbia and describe the intricate context of the JNA and its role in post-Yugoslav wars. Next, I explore the strategies of home-making and their yearning for normal life while being stuck in the ‘waiting room’. By referring to MHP experiences of being dis/misplaced, I argue that their prolonged and chronic waiting concerns not only material aspects of having a home, but also a sense of living in the wrong time and thus not being recognised as part of Serbian society. I conclude by reflecting on the question of agency in relation to waiting, which can be both, passive, full of doubt and resignation, as well as active and hope-driven.

Ethnographic fieldwork

I met MHP for the first time in 2016 in Novi Sad while collecting material on the situation of post-war migrants in Vojvodina. Our meeting coincided with the official date of closing of ‘collective centres’ in Serbia. In 1996, as a result of post-Yugoslav wars, there were 700 ‘collective centres’ in Serbia, created for the refugees and displaced persons from former republics of Yugoslavia. Today, officially, it is reported that all of them were shut down by the end of 2016. Yet, ‘collective centres’ still exist and MHP continue to be spatially stuck and ‘out of time’.

The article draws on my seven-months fieldwork, which included participant observation (fieldnotes), 12 in-depth and recorded ethnographic interviews and informal conversations with former JNA officers and members of their families. The research was conducted in collective centres, during informal meetings outside the centres in Belgrade and Novi Sad, as well as during the formal assembly of the Military Homeless People’s Association. Throughout my fieldwork, I had a feeling I was doing something that I was not supposed to do; something that was forbidden for the ‘outsider’. I was told that since I was not Serbian, I should not dig into it and that ‘this is a very sensitive topic’.

My position as a foreigner and outsider certainly hampered personal access to people and their stories, especially in the case of dealing with the sensitive issues that I was often facing during my fieldwork. Yet, my personal background, which I eventually decided to use, turned out to be helpful. I became known as a daughter of an officer in a former socialist country in Eastern Europe. Since then onwards, every meeting started with the phrase ‘Magda’s father was a colonel. She is ours’; it was also known to each of my interlocutors. Moreover, thanks to biographical similarities some people expected from me not only the wide knowledge on the subject but also complete understanding and sharing of beliefs. Somehow, this complicated my views and ultimately my critical attitude towards the violence or legitimacy of the army itself.

During my research, I had witnessed many situations and conversations that must remain silent for ethical reasons and the protection of my interlocutors. I have decided to ensure anonymity to all my interlocutors, although some of them agreed and even insisted on using their names. Yet, I have also met those, who due to their current positions in the structures of military administration, were afraid to reveal their stories.

Setting the scene: Present pasts

For several months, 10 disobedient families of the former JNA officers from the hotel Bristol in Belgrade live under the pressure of forced eviction. Heating and electricity were turned off, the elevator is not working and fire-fighting equipment was taken by the representatives of the Ministry of Defense, who also sealed all the rooms. The ‘empty’ hotel has been taken over by the Belgrade Waterfront development investment, connected to the ongoing gentrification project in Savamala district. Families of MHP, who lived there ‘temporarily’ for almost 30 years, had to face the neoliberalization of Serbia. They refuse to leave because instead of a new set of keys, they were served with lawsuits and relocation to another ‘collective centre’. They spend days watching the entrance door, sitting among packed boxes with a banner ‘Military Homeless People in Serbia. Where are our apartments?’ All of them are afraid of losing their few square metres of their whole life and ‘ending up’ in the street. Today, they are precariously or marginally housed, tomorrow they could be roofless.

Paradoxically, the case of the gentrification of one of the districts of Belgrade gave a little publicity to the situation of the former JNA officers and their homelessness. In the public discourse in Serbia, the notion of ‘homelessness’ is practically not used, discredited or made invisible, which is related to the socialist past and the idea that no one should be left without a home. However, homelessness has different meanings in different societies. In Serbia, MHP are homeless and not needed (Höjdestrand, 2009) not only because their ‘temporary’ residence in ‘collective centres’ and poverty continues to be unresolved, but also because they are perceived as undesirable members of Serbian society. MHP have a rather inconvenient status as former JNA officers, which pose a threat to Serbian political narratives and memory. They are confined to specific physical spaces and become ‘excluded from state representations of the future’ (Frederiksen, 2013: 6).

The role of JNA in post-Yugoslav wars is an intricate one. It is argued that JNA was one of the actors that could solve the crisis, since its goal was to protect the constitutional order and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. Yet, at the same time, there is also a contradictory narrative that JNA officers are the perpetrators of the post-Yugoslav wars (Niebuhr, 2004). The complexities of JNA are shaped by popular beliefs and considering opinions attributed to them as profiteers of the former socialist system in Yugoslavia and their role in the post-Yugoslav wars. Yet, the dominant among them is the image of them being the enemy of the society, which eventually has several dimensions and seemed to be directly linked to strategies of dehumanization and victimization.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia is a complex phenomenon, which goes beyond oversimplified explanation of the ‘Yugoslav problem’ and its ethnic, religious and cultural divisions (Cohen and Dragović-Soso, 2007; Halpern and Kideckel, 2000; Ramet, 2002). Nevertheless, the Jugoslav People’s Army formed in 1951 to serve the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as an actor whose clear goal was to protect the constitutional order and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia ultimately did not fulfil its task and led to its downfall. In the late 1980s, the state of Yugoslavia slowly began to dismantle and ‘the collapse of the political order, the disintegration of the multiethnic spheres and the loss of the state’s monopoly of power created a dangerous vacuum’ (Calic, 2019: 291). The rise of nationalistic parties in the republics, the introduction of privatization and the abolishment of the system of socialist property rights had an impact on the Yugoslav People’s Army.

As one of the essential pillars of Yugoslavia, JNA based on the principles of ‘brotherhood and unity’ (Petrović, 2010), sought to take the place of late Tito and resolve conflicts between the leaders of the republics. This led to internal contradictions within JNA, between its perception as the ‘guardian’ of Yugoslavia’s unity and the lack of a coherent plan to respond to all the challenges that have arisen (Cohen and Dragović-Soso, 2007; Niebuhr, 2004). Since mid-1991, JNA was involved in the post-Yugoslav wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the army was no longer able to maintain its unity. Rather, it had begun to be perceived as a deeply ideologized tool, and defenders of Milošević’s regime. Ultimately, on 23 November 1991, and under pressure from the international community, an agreement was signed in Geneva, which relocated JNA units from Croatia. Another agreement, signed in Sarajevo in January 1992, stated unconditional cease-fire, and in May 1992, JNA was dissolved.

For some of the former officers going to Serbia in 1991 and 1992 was not a return at all. Not all of them or their family members were Serbs. Most of them came here from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia because of respecting orders, loyalty to their military units, fear for the life of their family; eventually, in some cases, it was also about ‘naive’ and sincere beliefs in Yugoslavia – for some of them, Serbia seemed to entail Yugoslavian heritage. It looks like everyone has their version and story. As Bojan said: ‘You go where you were told. You were a soldier, wore the uniform and fulfilled your duties’. Therefore, at the beginning of the 90s, they believed that their situation was only temporary and would be shortly dissolved due to their status as officers and their service to the state. Nonetheless, when the wars ended and they still have been accommodated in minimally habitable facilities originally designed for temporary accommodation rather than long-term occupancy, they understood that there was no way out – that they are trapped in the present.

What is interesting in this case is the fact that the former JNA officers seem to be used to being displaced in some way, often deployed between cities and units according to the imposed allocation. Being a soldier is primarily based on the readiness to be mobile, as Bojan explained to me: ‘I’ve identified myself as a military professional, which means that today you are here, tomorrow elsewhere. My home is where I feel good’. However, their dwelling and locations in ‘collective centres’ are substandard, and they cannot call them home and feel good in them. Moreover, their displacement seemed to happen under slightly different circumstances and had different meanings and consequences. This time, waiting with the absence of a deadline, they find themselves in a situation that Hage calls ‘stuckedness’ (2009b), ‘characterized by invisibility, immobility, uncertainty and arbitrariness’ (Khosravi, 2014; 66–67). Hardly anyone knows about their long-term liminality and conditions of endless waiting in which they have lived since the beginning of 1990s.

Ambiguities regarding their social status continue to be unresolved. The state, military authorities and some fellow citizens in Serbia do not treat them as representatives of ‘types’ of displacement. ¹ They are also not recognized as “purposive actors” embedded in particular social, political and historical situations’ (Löfving and Jansen, 2009: 8). All those generalizing opinions, complemented by demonizing narratives, seem to be helpful in justifying exclusion and marginalization practices. MHP themselves could not feel their consequences. ‘We were, we are, and we will be enemies. They regard us as parasites of society’, said Zdravko one day, with whom I repeatedly met in Novi Sad. To be called a parasite meant not only to be rejected or excluded, but also suspicious and reluctant to share intimate stories with others.

Awaiting normality in ‘Waiting Rooms’

Vladimir’s story is just one of the stories of homeless officers living in ‘collective centres’ in Serbia, who experience prolonged abnormality of everyday life. In the case of MHP, the concept of homelessness, resulting from their temporariness, concerns not only unresolved property rights or the lack of ‘dignified’ living conditions, but also ‘normality’, as they emphasized during our conversations. Most of the former JNA officers and their families had to organize their limited living space of ‘collective centres’. They had to create a new liveable space by adapting the corridors, and using the bathrooms and kitchen in a specific manner. Therefore, corridors, staircases, small rooms or yards inhabited by residents of ‘collective centres’ resemble theatrical scenography where each object has a specific purpose. Today, after nearly 30 years of ‘turning around in a circle’, they spend long hours doing nothing. In some buildings, where tables and armchairs are set in the corridor or in the yard – and form ‘extensions’ of the residential area – they spend long and empty time together. Some people just sleep or watch TV. However, the problems of MHP are not just residential. While some are waiting to be evicted from their only living space, others are protesting against unconstitutional government practices, which was aimed to decrease military pensions by 11%. Many of them live on the verge of poverty, what deepens even further their ‘social marginalization’ (Frederiksen, 2013). Only a small group remained in active military service and those who went on early retirement, tried to find ‘any kind of job’. With nothing to own, nothing to do and nowhere to go (Dunn, 2017), MHP, abandoned by the state – ‘struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives’ (O’Neill, 2014: 25).

When dwellers of ‘collective centres’ complain about the extraordinary difficulties of their lives, they are trying to make sense of the fact that they are no longer efficient agents, capable not only of managing their lives but also of performing a specific social role. Thus, the Ministry of Defence becomes an important state’s agent who performed and regulated spatiotemporal being of this particular group of people and controlled the distribution of the ability to lead a ‘normal life’ (Dzenovska, 2014). In the repeated phrase ‘we just want to live normally’, former officers JNA, as post-socialist citizens, express the will to move linearly forward, in the sense of a satisfactory and smooth course of life that can be embedded in the continuous development of society towards goals such as stability, predictability and ultimately, material living conditions (Jansen, 2014b). In other words, the desire for ‘normality’ among MHP refers to the assessment of the functioning of institutions and public structures in relation to their expectations and experiences.

Abnormal conditions of everyday life make the former officers of JNA and their families feel homeless at ‘home’ as in the case of Slavica, who adopted an abandoned shop in the former military hotel: ‘I put screens in the windows. I have two small windows, which I call Lufthansa and the bars that resemble a prison’. Moreover, imposed restrictions on the use of places or visits have caused social isolation and limited the ‘normality’ of their residents. Many things – even the obvious one like renovating or repairing – are either forbidden or controlled by the Serbian military, the owner of ‘collective centres’. ‘The walls are falling off; some furniture rots from moisture. We cannot renovate this place’, Slavica said to me. Uncertainty, anxiety and sense of injustice, not only enhance the sense of being in limbo, but also potentially create an impression of a prolonged stay in the ‘waiting room’ among former officers of JNA and their families (Bishop, 2013). Caught in a particular situation, which might be described as ‘politics of waiting’ (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018), they are essentially stuck in a specific temporal regime with relevant experience, practices and hierarchy, where both time and space are constitutive social factors (Rethmann, 2015).

Stories of Slavica and Vladimir are just examples of symbolic and material practices applied by the government, indicating not only their attitude to a particular group of citizens but also, as it seems, the insignificant value of them and their waiting. The specific imprisonment of someone in the ‘waiting room’, and more precisely in the ‘hierarchies of waiting’ also draws attention to power over temporalities. MHP become those, who are at the mercy of someone else’s schedule. The state forces them to run around with bureaucracy and keeps them waiting. Meanwhile, the threats of attempts to being expelled or the expiration date of destroyed buildings, practically every day hang over their heads. After more than two decades of waiting, MHP have learned to be ‘patients of the state’, using a phrase of Javier Auyero (2011). Life in ‘collective centers’ depends mainly on the relations between those who distribute services and manage places – the Serbian Ministry of Defense and the recipients of these services (MHP). The central problem here is the issue of control: who is able to act on another people’s time, and who needs to wait, or rather is made to wait (Gasparini, 1995). Similar to other social groups waiting for the decision of state bureaucracies, they fall into the system of power relations and are made to wait as ‘welfare clients’ (Auyero, 2011; Seefeldt, 2015).

Some of my interlocutors spend long hours describing in detail all their procedures to deal with bureaucratic system: moving up and down in the housing rank list, writing letters and petitions, visiting offices and courts. Yet, mostly they just wait. Despite the unpredictability of this ‘game with time’ (Bourdieu, 2000) and perception of bureaucratic institutions as ineffective, confusing and slow, the majority of MHP are forced to engage in this ‘hope-generating machine’ (Jansen, 2014a). To describe her actions, Slavica used a metaphor ‘we are turning around in a circle’ (vrtimo se u krug). Stef Jansen, from the same spatiotemporal metaphor heard during his fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, attempted to construct an ethnography of ‘pattering in place’ to describe the specific valuation of forwarding movement (Jansen, 2014b).

The ‘politics of waiting’ adopted and practiced by the state generate feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability (Khosravi, 2014). Yet, at the same time, this specific spatiotemporal context of the daily life of MHP can provoke attempts to rebuild the normal situation, and ‘reassembling the fragments of existence into a structure that creates meaning, affect, and place’ (Dunn, 2017: 63). Bojana, who lives in the non-commercial part of the Hotel Bristol recalls conditions in her room: ‘we could not have a heater, because the electricity was weak, […] so we connected to the electricity in the corridor and prepared food there’. They invented ways of repairing things without leaving any traces and marks. Everything seems to be temporary, but at the same time well-thought, organized and resulted from a collaborative effort and agreement. It creates a specific familiarity and community, as described by Zdravko:

We drink coffee, hang out together. We collected money ourselves and put a new brick. People, who are living here are from Slovenia, Bosnia, and Croatia and all of us have the same fate, all our problems have brought us together. We help each other with preparing weddings and funerals. Almost, none of us have a family or relatives in Serbia. Your neighbour is your closest relative.

Places of ‘Lost Ranks’

The stories of MHP are primarily stories about loss, as in this one of Branislav’s: ‘we have lost a lot; we have lost ourselves, our status, we lost everything. We are still here, but we are invisible’. Waiting, therefore, offers them both, ‘a perspective from the margins and a perspective that is itself marginalised’ (Bishop, 2013: 135). The state has adopted and applied a policy of making them invisible as a specific group of citizens and ignores their claims for material and symbolic recognition. Being forcibly relocated to Serbia in the 1990s, they lost the ‘roof over their head’ (paradoxically, also most often temporary), material property and sometimes also their loved ones. As time goes by, it turned out that the losses are much more significant and do not only concern the material property, stability and secure housing, but also something more important and valuable – their ‘ranks’. The ‘ranks’ go far beyond the military hierarchy and in the context of on-going displacement to ‘collective centres’ refer to their high position within the hierarchy of society and belonging to a privileged social group. Thus, ‘ranks’ has become a metaphor for visibility, recognition of social and political subjectivity and citizenship that give opportunities and dignity (Appadurai, 2013). It sounds especially in repeated statements about their current position in Serbia’s civil society: ‘we are nobody; we feel like second-class citizens, we do not exist; the state is ashamed of us’. Thereby the former JNA officers became new Others in society, which resulted in being located to the margins of the official political discourse (Buchowski, 2006).

It is impossible to look at the condition in which former JNA officers live without taking into account the context of post-socialism, which had a long and extremely uneven course (Lazić and Cvejić, 2007). According to Lazić and Cvejić (2007: 60): ‘Serbia was characterized by the existence of several antagonistic value patterns: socialist (command collectivistic values as well as “self-managerial” consciousness); traditionalist and authoritarian; nationalistic; but also liberal’. In addition to the elements of the old system, new forms emerged, mainly related to political pluralism and the removal of legal obstacles for private ownership in the economy. The transformation had consequences in all social subsystems – economic, political, social and cultural – which meant creating new forms and proportions of economic inequalities, distribution of social goods or access to housing. For example, the old approach that ‘apartments must be provided to everyone’ has been transformed into the new market-driven idea of ‘housing as a commodity available only for some’. Thus, MPH ‘are stuck’ in a ‘death point’ and ‘not moving well enough’ (Jansen, 2014b), because the private ownership that becomes the dominant ‘regime’ in the country. As expected, MHP in such ‘housing scenario’ lost their position in the social hierarchy and they become losers (gubitnici tranzicije) as Maja, a daughter of a former JNA officer, described them.

Many former JNA officers nostalgically recall their lifestyle and social position in the context of previous life in the socialist Yugoslav federation. They have been ‘caught/stuck’ in the middle of this temporal transition; between the time of being the citizens with property, work, particular entitlements and privileges and the total loss of this position. Living in a situation of loss, perceived as dispossession has, according to Frederiksen, ‘a distinctly temporal aspect in that one of the things lost was the idea of how the future might turn out and what one’s own role in it would be’ (2013: 13). The nostalgia, present in the stories of former JNA officers about life in the ‘other order’ becomes a longing for another future, which takes the form of a return to an earlier time (Frederiksen, 2013). The paradox, however, lies in the fact that today, in public discourse, this nostalgia can be perceived as a weakness, and followers are stigmatised as ‘losers of transformation’ or being ‘maladjusted’ to new socio-economic and political circumstances (Buchowski, 2006).

It appears that former JNA members have become ‘losers’ and ‘maladjusted’ and being stuck in long-term liminality for one more reason. A major role is played by the fact that in Serbia, there is an effective policy of dispersal of responsibility. Therefore, their positioning and recognition have been very doubtful and complicated due to denial of the Serbian government that officially waged post-Yugoslav wars, instead of referring to them as to ‘armed actions’, ‘conflicts’ or ‘military manoeuvres’ (Mikuš and Dokić, 2015: 396). The shortage of legal acts concerning wars and a specific policy of concealment leads to ambiguous situations, which Bojan and Branislav described: ‘Officially we have never been to war, no documents indicate that I participated in war… It looks that we’ve never served in any army’. MHP are treated as people ‘out of place in the social order’ because they played a role in the processes of uncertain transformations (Brun and Fábos, 2015: 12).

Being in the wrong time

Over the course of my fieldwork, MHP told me time and again that they just want what they deserve – a ‘normal life’. Often recalled in conversations, normalan život was not about the place itself, but rather about Yugoslav times, ‘where’ and ‘when’ they had privileges, social acceptance and recognition. In the context in which they find themselves today, the notion of ‘normal life’ concerns something that is very desirable because it is absent in their spatiotemporal ‘stuckedness’ (Hage, 2009b). What ‘normal’ entails is difficult to determine by my interlocutors, but most often refers to how ‘it should be’ because they know how ‘it used to be’ before, in the past times. According to Stef Jansen, the emic category of ‘normal life’ ‘functioned as a consensual and normative label in a backward- and a forward-looking sense’ (Jansen, 2014a: 242). Simply, the temporal reasoning of ‘normal life’, according to him, is shaped at the intersection of past futures (recalled from lives in socialist Yugoslavia) and projected futures (Jansen, 2014a, 2014b). One can assume that among former JNA officers, we are dealing with a similar procedure. MHP recalling the ‘normal life’, which is, on one hand, a hope directed towards the future, but at the same time, it is embedded in expectations that people developed earlier in their lives and used to assess their current predicament (Greenberg, 2011; Mikuš and Dokić, 2015). For most of them, past futures refer to a remembered past that was normal, certain, steady and was going forward (Jansen, 2014b). Thereby, when the former JNA officers recalled their previous ‘normal lives’ in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia or Macedonia, they did not recall a place where they stayed before at all, but the specific time which, they hope, will return in some way. Interestingly, none of whom I met and spoke with wanted to return to physical place. Such ‘return’ would not ultimately solve the problems, because it would only concern the spatial issue and not the temporal one.

In certain situations, during the state of chronic waiting, people ‘often come to labelled or label themselves as “failures” or “people left behind”’ (Jeffrey, 2008: 955). They have experienced ‘not only displacement, but also, in their own eyes and those of others’ something, what Stef Jansen calls – ‘misplacement’ (2008: 193). To be more specific: they have experienced the sense of dis/misplacement, using Jansen’s term. Combining these two dimensions, Jansen notes that people who are displaced not only lost their own places, but also feel the loss of their personhood and social status that they had in those places. Hence, their misplacement concerns the need to ‘engage in processes of formal and informal mutual recognition with others’ (Jansen, 2008: 194). Thus, they are failures and not being in-time with others, because they are assigned a wrong social position: as professional military, formally educated and relatively highly socially located citizens and as strong, masculine men-soldiers. In the past, it was them who provided a decent life for their families and a roof over their heads and took care of the future of their children. In the present, in the post-Yugoslav reality, they have lost those opportunities resulting from prior status and social meaning, being subjected to bureaucratic policies of the state. From the mid-90s, they have perceived themselves as engaging in mundane processes of formal recognition by the state and public opinion. Their ongoing dis/misplacement and predicaments made them aware that they ‘used to live in other times’, as explained by Bojan, who carried out his military service in Sarajevo. Their feeling of disjuncture between the place they stay now and the place they were before, does not only concern the spatial dimension but also their sense of being ‘out of tune’ with the time. Then, this is not a place that they left behind, but much more time in which other social structures functioned, and they played different roles.

One may assume, that while being dis/misplaced, the former JNA officers are also distimed, to use Stef Jansen’s words (2009a). Being distimed could be described as a condition that characterizes not only the disturbed relations between the past, present and future but also the related issues of social recognition. Put it simply, MHP are dealing with finding themselves ‘in-betwixt and between’ the recognition and oblivion, a previous social position and today’s marginalization (Brun and Fábos, 2015). Most of them, as in Bojan’s case, feel ‘out of sync with time’ in reference to their experience of a disjuncture between today and a time when JNA existed:

We are people out of time. We’re not refugees. We’re not those, who came back, but we are also not from here. I don’t know how to call it. We are somewhere between – we do not belong here or anywhere else.

Their current marginalization is mainly a temporal one. Former JNA officers and their families seem to be those, ‘who live in a situation where they do not have access to the future’ (Frederiksen, 2013: 11).

‘Waiting Them Out’ as a double strategy

Temporariness of dwelling, unresolved status and social invisibility transformed the experiences of time of the former JNA officers. For some of them, time not only passes and seems to be beyond measurement – it does not change anything. They ‘feel trapped in the present […] that they do not want to inhabit, awaiting a future they cannot reach – a future that is often unpredictable and uncertain’ (Brun, 2015: 19). Furthermore, some MHP become ‘passive’; they are just ‘waiting out’ without any positive solution (Hage, 2009b).

For some former officers, uncertain and harsh current living conditions make the past appear to be a ‘safety net’, while the future remains unknown, unpredictable and even meaningless, and waiting becomes unbearable. It is also strongly triggered by the politics and strategies of the military authorities, which from time to time (practically once a year) try to get rid of unwanted tenants. In the absence of positive scenarios about the near future – the temporality of dis/misplacement might be translated into protracted uncertainty, which includes alienation, frustration and depression. Their stories are full of fear, anxieties and resignation, resulting from powerless waiting (Auyero, 2011). As Bojan told me:

They have been trying to get us out of here for years. We are collateral damage. They would like to sell it. We’re losing our hope, will, and patience. We don’t know what will happen. I’m an optimist, but as time goes by, I have no more optimism or hope. I let it go.

‘Letting it go’ and ‘waiting out’ is something that government and officials use as a strategy and possible tool for solving the ‘problem’ of MHP. The idea is to ‘wait them out’ and the ‘problem’ (naturally) will disappear. This official strategy is manifested in the most brutal way. When somebody dies, the officials seal the room and do not allow anyone to use it. They send a clear message to other residents communicating what their fate is. Natural death is the solution. In many cases, this will happen. Zoran and Sofija admitted that not only the former military buildings are close to the expiry date, but also people who inhabit them. ‘They are mentally damaged and slowly die one by one’. The members of the JNA are in a state of ruin, cut off from society, scattered like buildings that they temporarily inhabit (Frederiksen, 2013). Unfortunately, that visible passing generation, poor housing conditions, paradoxically high bills for ‘beds’ in ‘collective centres’, humiliation by state bureaucracy and its inhuman representatives pushes some of those who are extremely vulnerable to suicidal acts of resignation from that ‘inert waiting’.

However, while collective centres as specifically designed waiting zone or ‘waiting rooms’ ‘can be viewed as technologies attempting to impose spatiotemporal control over daily rhythms, it is suggested that waiting can also provide political, creative, and existential opportunities’ (Bishop, 2013: 135). In some cases, the dissatisfaction of MHP went hand in hand with their ability to play the possibilities available to them. It means, the dynamics between hope and hopelessness, ‘agency-in-waiting’ and protracted uncertainty, or present and future, is never static. Rather, it is relational, contextual and might shift from one to another during the on-going waiting (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018). In a scenario, where hope is used as a vehicle for struggle and muddling through, the waiting time becomes a perspective time, which might be translated into ‘agency-in-waiting’ (Brun, 2015: 20). Thus, hope can also be seen in terms of a ‘fighting vision’ and as a strategy ‘to fight apathy and despair […] to inspire a movement capable not only of interpreting our present but of shaping our future’ (Rethmann, 2015: 481). It does not concern restoring what once was, but rather animating the ‘desire for what might be possible, of what might become’ (Rethmann, 2015: 488). The approach to the future on a ‘wait and see’ basis is no longer acceptable. Waiting that is ‘numbed, muted, dead’ and inducing ‘paralysis’ (Crapanzano, 1986: 44) and resignation becomes active and, as one might see in the example of MHP, could be uncomfortable for officials who permanently ‘deny that…they exist’ (Herzfeld, 1992: 150).

Active waiting gives a form of control over uncertain situations. As Zlatan told me: ‘I fight to restore what was taken from me and forbidden. I worked for the state and did my work as best as I could. I want dignity, I want to go everywhere and say who I am’. This kind of resistance and disobedience take various forms – from collective claims to individual acts of agency in waiting (Bandak and Manpreet, 2018). Some of MHP act together and form an Association of Homeless Military People. As a formal organization, they have been trying for the last few years to change the official image about them present in society and labels of ‘enemies’, ‘failures’ and ‘losers’ assigned to them. They have adopted the rhetoric of human rights and try to use it to obtain state responsibility. Every year, on the Day of Human Rights, representatives of the Association of Homeless Military People go to the main square or the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence. They stand up against the current dehumanization of military families and want to be visible as citizens with rights.

Being distimed or ‘out of time’ causes many problems, such as economic insecurity, political invisibility, social stigmatization and psychological anxiety. Bojan and others from the Association of Military Homeless People help those in need – they organize meetings with psychologists and lawyers, appeal to the courts and reach out to journalists and media. As he points out: ‘We fight in all possible ways. [.] People lose hope, and when they are falling, we try to grab them and lift them’. Together, they try to block attempts to throw residents out onto the street without a court order.

They also try to oppose the unequal distribution of property by applying various acts of individual disobedience. Bojan, systematically films his living space that falls into ruin, due to presenting and talking about the fate of former JNA officers living there in the public sphere. Marko, who lives in Novi Sad, a few years ago decided not to pay any bills for accommodation in a ‘collective centre’. The case of Marko is not isolated. Many people living in military buildings in Novi Sad and Belgrade do not pay bills, mostly because they are too high compared to the conditions.

All those practices and strategies show that attempts to completely control those who remain inside the ‘waiting room’ and wait rarely end up with complete success. Ongoing dis/misplacement, inequalities and waiting ‘can also create sites of struggle and contestation around daily spatial-temporal rhythms as well as the performances and meanings that circulate through such “waiting rooms”’ (Bishop, 2013: 139) or various attempts ‘to rebuild senses of agency’ (Auyero, 2011).

Conclusions

MHP were never told how long they must wait. For them, waiting to die, increasing bills and taxes for temporary houses, reducing pensions, making efforts to throw out residents, maintaining their homelessness, forbidding repairs and renovations, as well as banning guests in military property buildings, are not only practices of controlling their lives but also attempts to deprive them of the right to structure their own time or even to participate in the pre-structured temporality of the modern work regime (Bendixen and Eriksen, 2018: 91). Hence, the idea of ‘home’ and struggling for it translates into struggling for dignity, being visible and recognized as political agents who can also manage the time of their waiting. Former JNA officers and their families are ‘being made to wait’, what ‘illustrates the structural constraints and complex relations of power manifested in the relationship between those that have the power to enforce waiting and those who endure it’ (Ferrie and Wiserman, 2016: 13). The paradox is that their time is running out.

This article shows that many members of the Association of Military Homeless People, while trying to achieve the anticipated ‘normality’ in ‘abnormality’ lasting almost 30 years, take the multiplicity of various kinds of spatiotemporal practices: long- and short-term decisions, making home, struggling for it or overcoming individual sense of fear and despair. Looking at them closer, one can see that some of the MHP have been more successful in trying to solve their waiting problems than others, ‘and more importantly, some were less dependent on others, and therefore less condemned to “survive” and more able to “live”’ (Jansen, 2014b: 75).

Today they are uncomfortable for the policy of remembering and forgetting; the state prefers not to remember them. ‘We do not exist (Mi ne postojimo)’ – says Zlatan – ‘the biggest problem in Serbia is that according to the government, we do not exist’. That is why they call themselves ‘forgotten people’. MHP are not the only ones in post-socialist Serbia who are struggling with a state and at the same time locate their hope in the state (Jansen, 2014a) that operates and under which they have full and equal civil rights (Greenberg, 2011). The situation of ambiguity after post-Yugoslavian wars caused a situation in which many social groups perceive themselves as ‘victims’ and ‘forgotten’ and even compete with each other for a place in the hierarchy of victims, on the basis of their particular abnormalities fighting for the granting of civil rights and state protection (Mikuš and Dokić, 2015). In a similar situation, there are Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars, who position themselves on the margins of the social and political life, as excluded and invisible as a part of civic society (Dokić, 2017).

In both cases, the struggle for social membership that implies social recognition and dignity becoming increasingly political and also supported the formation of their political (re-)subjectivation (Dokić, 2017). All their practices and strategies seem to be expressions of ‘a collective self-understanding centred on victimhood’ and possibilities to establish ‘a temporality of hope and future autonomy’ (Bendixen and Eriksen, 2018: 101).