Đorđe Martinović (also spelled Djordje Martinovic; ; 19296 September 2000 Čitluk,ĐorđeMartinović Serbia) was a Serbian farmer from Kosovo who was at the centre of a notorious incident in May 1985, when he was treated for injuries caused by the insertion of a bottle into his anus. The Martinović affair, as it became known, turned into a cause célèbre in Serbian politics. Although the facts of the incident remained in dispute for years afterwards, it played a significant role in worsening ethnic tensions between Kosovo's Serb and Albanian population.
The incident
On 1 May 1985, Đorđe Martinović, a 56-year-old resident of the Kosovo town of Gnjilane, arrived at the local hospital with a broken bottle wedged in his rectum. He claimed that he had been attacked by two Albanian men while he was working in his field. After being interrogated by a Yugoslav People's Army colonel, Martinović reportedly admitted that his injuries had been self-inflicted in a botched attempt at masturbation. Public investigators reported that "the prosecutor made a written conclusion from which it appears that the wounded performed an act of 'self-satisfaction' in his field, [that he] put a beer bottle on a wooden stick and stuck it in the ground. After that he sat 'on the bottle and enjoyed'." Community leaders in Gjilan subsequently issued a statement describing his injuries as the "accidental consequences of a self-induced [sexual] practice".
He was transferred to Belgrade for further investigations at the prestigious Military Medical Academy, but a medical team there reported that his injuries were not consistent with a self-inflicted wound. The team, which included two doctors from Belgrade and one each from Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Skopje (thus representing four of Yugoslavia's six republics), concluded that the injuries had been caused "by a strong, brutal and sudden insertion or jamming of a 500 ml. bottle, or rather, its wider end, into the rectum" and that it was probably physically impossible for Martinović to have done this to himself. The team argued that the insertion "could only have been carried out by at least two or more individuals".
A second opinion was sought and provided a month later by a commission under Slovenian Professor Dr. . The Milčinski team concluded that Martinović could have inserted the bottle by positioning it on a stick, which he had pushed into the earth, but had slipped during masturbation and broke the bottle in his rectum under the force of his body's weight. The Yugoslav secret police and military intelligence reportedly concluded from this that Martinović's injuries had indeed most likely been self-inflicted.
In the end, the federal Yugoslav and Serbian authorities did not pursue the case, even after Serbia revoked Kosovo's self-rule in 1989, and no serious attempt appears to have been made to find Martinović's alleged attackers.
Reactions
The case was met with a flood of nationalist and anti-Albanian statements in the Serbian press. This was, in itself, a significant development. The Yugoslav government had for many years made open nationalism a taboo subject, and Yugoslav media outlets had previously systematically downplayed ethnonationalism. The collapse of this taboo in the coverage of the Martinović case heralded the growth of nationalism that was to lead to the country's collapse in 1991.
The Serbian newspaper Politika asserted that the individuals who had allegedly attacked Martinović were members of a local Albanian family who wanted to purchase land that Martinović refused to sell. The claim had considerable resonance in Serbian politics; the steady exodus of Serbs from Kosovo was seen as being the result of deliberate persecution of Serbs by Albanians seeking to drive them off their land and seize their property.
Many analogies were made with the Ottoman Turks, who had ruled Serbia until 1833 (and Kosovo until 1912). The incident was widely compared with the Ottoman use of impalement as a means of torture and execution. This link was explicitly made in poetry commemorating the incident, which invoked "Ottoman" themes; for instance:
With a broken bottle
On a stake
As though through
a lamb
but alive, they went through Đorđe Martinović As if with their first and heavy steps into their future field they treaded ... When out of the opium and pain Đorđe Martinović came round As if from the long past Turkish times He woke up on a stake.
Such comparisons were given added impact by the legendary nature of impalement as one of the most dreaded punishments inflicted by the Ottomans, and the role that impalement as a metaphor for Ottoman oppression played in Serbian culture.