Who wouldn’t you want in any circumstance next to you: a Serbian solider from Bosnia, a fat Swiss banker, a loaded Italian DJ, a black woman selling leather items, a young artist with HIV, a Hungarian Roma just out of prison, a nationals form Basque who travels often to Russia, a German rapper living an alternative life, a blind piano player from Austria, a student from Ukraine without a visa that doesn’t want to go home, a middle-aged Romanian woman with a year-old baby in her arms, an aggressive Dutch feminist, a drunk Swedish skinhead, a wrestler from Belfast heading for a football game, a Polish prostitute working in Berlin, a French farmer who speaks only French and carries a basket of smelly cheese or a Kurd refugee living in Germany who was recently in Libya.
This seemingly unimportant game actually isn’t naïve at all – it is within the educational package of the Council of Europe for the education of young people on the importance of multiculturalism and tolerance.
The game is simple – you have 17 stereotypes and students are expected to deal with them. I participated in some ten trainings on this subject and the results were interesting.
Some chose Polish prostitutes as the least favorite, some aggressive feminists, but in all the situations the Serbian solider would be on the first place of the hated ones. Some will say “It is just a game”, and wave its hand. Is it really?
There is no need to talk any more about the bad image we have in the world, and most of us has felt it first-hand. A few years ago I was invited to be a guest at a wedding of an editor of a big European magazine for which I worked as a correspondent.
The bride’s parents, warm and friendly, but not that educated – as we would say, everyday people – were terribly proud of the fact that I came. They told their friends, in quiet voice, that I came all the way from “Grosnia”.
Later I realized – they were trying to say that I was coming from a terrible place, a combination of Grozny and Bosnia. For them Grosnia was a symbol of the most terrible horror.
That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised when we see shows on American television like we did a couple of weeks ago. In most cases those people have nothing against us, they just simply don’t know and do not want to let us in their compartment.
In this edition the New Magazine is starting a question why literally nothing is being done on the change of Serbia’s image. The children’s game form the beginning of this story will become a way of conduct for the young people in the EU and that is something that should be worrying our authorities.
As the former owner of CNN said “it is much easier to change a bad image than to creat a completely new one”. Let’s use our drawbacks.