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PROF. DR. VLADIMIR BOŽOVIĆ, ACTING RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTENEGRO
And It Happened, What Men Thought Could Never Be
It was necessary to unite the processional political potential, that complex political-chess operation. But everything would be null and void without the fundamental ingredient of victory – miracle and God’s providence. That cannot be measured by earthly measures. The main tailors of the bureaucratic ”new identity” are distraught, defeated, and continue to fire Kumrovec mantras. The nationwide resistance with love led to the new baptism of Montenegro. However, nothing is over yet. Temptations are before us

By: Mišo Vujović
Photo: Archive of the interviewee

He speaks fluently and accurately, without long pauses or bywords. Melodically and poetically, he composes words into palatable sentences, like Professor He remembers almost all the details from his early childhood in a rented room in Aleksa Backovića Street, the ”ironworks” building, across from ”Alehouse”, in Nikšić.
”My parents, a Russian language teacher and a young professor of mathematics, wove the constellation of love and hope for the future life into those ten squares. It was modest, but everything exuded happiness. The whole building in which we lived was home, which is otherwise a well-known and prominent feature of that time. I would run out into the street with the first rays of the sun. I have never been a sleeper. And from the morning fog imbued with the smell of beer yeast that spread from ”Trebjesa”, from the end of my street, which was also the ”end of the world”, came the ironworkers from the third shift and a dilapidated horse-drawn carriage full of happy gypsies. Children, the elderly and women in the bright colors and voices of life. We had a really special relationship. I collected some iron trinkets for them, and they rewarded me with a ride in that merry car”, begins his confession for our magazine Acting Rector of the University of Montenegro, Professor Dr. Vladimir Božović, a quiet and modest, handsome and educated man of lordly eloquence, unpretentious and conciliatory, respectable among the people and the academic community, just like most gifted citizens of Nikšić, versatile, with a serious social and educational pedestal.
”Under the influence of black, ’Grundig’ radio, my musical choice developed, as well as my own repertoire, which I used to introduce myself to the ”domestic audience” since the early morning, walking around the building. It was then that I felt the first, ’corruptive’ delights in life, because the schoolchildren, not at all enthusiastic about these pop music performances, used to buy the ’silence of Saturday and Sunday mornings’ with candies.
 We moved to Podgorica when I was five years old. It was also the first big, ”dislocation” from the existing environment – an encounter with a new mentality, accent, different habits. It was a harsh welcome, all the way to defending integrity and affirming one’s rights, in the usual way at the time. From that moment, memories start, childhood in Podgorica”.
He remembers the elementary school ”Branko Božović” ”over-decorated with social realism” for typical blue school aprons, for bright-eyed, lively and skillful children, for his cheerfulness and carefreeness, for his first prizes at city literary competitions. That is how he ”earned” for his summer vacations and books.
”I started high school in Podgorica, but we returned to Nikšić in 1990. The high school in Nikšić was a serious and hard school. However, it encouraged and nurtured many good things in me, and it became a very rich repository of memories. From that period, I remember some awards in mathematics, physics, chemistry, but also those in athletic and basketball competitions”.

GALLOP WITH GRIŠKO MELEHOV

This quiet and above all modest intellectual, unlike his violent and somewhat pretentious environment, is reluctant to talk about his successes.
”What is recognized today as a success is most often an unhealthy steroid of pride and selfishness. That is why, in principle, I steer clear from being at all enthusiastic about success. Except for one, which, with a smile as I say this, I cannot resist. I was proclaimed the best student of the Nikšić high school, and it is unlikely that this experience will surpass anything. Nikšić is a city that has a sophisticated ’intellectual underground’, exceptional people with unusual knowledge, pure thoughts and high spirituality. And for the most part, all of these brilliant people have grown into what they were in the high school yard. Because of such people, I am especially proud of the said award.”
The first musical hits, melancholic ballads, first books, movies, and comics are unavoidable while leafing through the album of memories.
”The book with which I stepped into the post-Tom Sowyer areas of literature was Andrić’s Tower and Other Short Stories. I especially remember one wonderful sentence from the story Children:
’Little people, whom we call children, have their great pains and long sufferings, which they later forget as wise and grown-up people’.
In it, stepping inadvertently into the world of psychology, I found an explanation, and even consolation, for the indifference of adults towards all my silent childhood sorrows. On the wings of this sentence, with which I somehow ’unlocked’ the rest of the book, I dived dizzily into the depths of the power of Andrić’s language, but also of language in general.
Ivan Galeb’s Springs is a book that miraculously influenced my worldview, my emotional development. It somehow ’revealed’ to me the purifying, noble suffering. And almost sacral melancholy. At the same time, it dispelled the illusions of invincible and eternal youth. Only later did the classics come, one of which, And Quiet Flows the Don, through the main character, left a special mark. Grishka Melekhov, a fearless warrior, my Grishka, in a violent movement, in a constant gallop towards the ideals of love and humanity. He is an ancient hero of the sky, someone who is constantly at war with the ’earthly’ in himself and around him. I suppose I recognized in his personality, and especially in the constant search for ’surrealism’, something of Njegoš. Njegoš’s value and idealistic life framework is what Griška Melehov, until the war fragmented his soul beyond recognition, aspired to in his (literary) life. I believe that this ’Njegoš’s clasp’, which I found ’somewhere’, bonded me especially to that literary character.”

THAT DISHEVELED AND LOUD YOUTH

He remembers, like most of us from the streets of Nikšić, the films with Bruce Lee in the lead role. In Nikšić, Lee’s films broke all ratings records, and group fights according to the scenes of these cult films were not uncommon.
”I don’t remember the first film, but I do remember the atmosphere in the Nikšić cinema. If I had to bet with my prudent biographer, it would be a film from the ’Bruce-Lee edition’. All the time, the audience was ’talking’ to the characters on the screen. They were arguing and throwing remarks. And then those waves of laughter, which ended somewhere deep in the gallery.
The film that left a strong impression on me in my youth is The Dead Poets Society. That is how I imagined my high school environment. In a sense, I had it.”
Early youth is not forgotten, just like the strict rules of life on the streets of Nikšić as a training ground for hardening, the first love verses, caresses with the eyes...
”Some boys, high school students, who grew up in a city that prescribed rather harsh ’standards of masculinity’, often wrote elegiac, love poetry. Thus, in complete silence, in notebooks that do not exist today, they wrote to girls who danced provocatively, gracefully on the edge between two worlds – our ideas about them and the coarse reality. Precisely because of that anxiety, which would not subdue the disheveled and loud youth, our hopes and fantasies became more seductive and vivid.”
After graduating from high school, he graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, where he is now a favorite professor.
”The love of my life, ’revealed’ itself with the touch of a palm of the hand, in one dream. Literally. Reality then just helplessly ’subdued’, and God then gave us three warm stars of life – Nastasja, Aleksa and Oleg. That palm, the lines of which I have been studying for years, in which the days imprint their little fires, the palm between reality and dreams, is still the helm in my life today.
For most parents, the most memorable event is the birth of the (first) child. In our case, it all had additional ’spices’. Namely, at that time I was in doctoral studies in America and we did not experience almost any of that warm traditionalist taste of that event. Grandmothers, aunts, friends were on Skype... so they were happy with a few hours of delay... According to the strict protocol of the hospital, the nurses escorted us to the exit and checked if the baby was properly buttoned in a special car seat. When we came out of the hospital, I stopped, Marina and I looked at each other and silently, with a trembling, nervous ignorant smile, asked – now what? What about this lump of life now?! Instead of a grandmother, aunt or an experienced and skillful neighbor, we had the book What to expect when you’re expecting and a relentless internet search for the ’right’ answers. Fortunately, it all somehow went with the angels, so soon the children and their parents of all races and nations, who gathered in the nearby park, learned the meaning of the words – ’Slowly, Aleksa, slowly!’”

AESTHETIC VALUE OF SCARS

Along with good deeds and a successful career, disappointments, petty human desires, galloping vanities are inevitable. The knowledgeable claim, and the wicked accuse him of being one of the biggest culprits for the victory over the Đukanović regime. And that, of course, is not forgiven by a part of the former comrades. But Vladimir Božović does not pay attention to the tripping and maliciousness of the shadows on the foggy political stage of passion.
”From the depths of my memory came the sentence of my professor, and then my colleague from the Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics: ’Remember, no good deed can go unpunished!’ It is actually a paraphrase of: ’Do not expect any evil from those to whom you have not done any good’. Even then, that sentence seemed very seductive, but the meaning was elusive to me. Today, perhaps fortunately or yet unfortunately for my future understanding of people and relationships in life, I fully understand it. And that understanding is the ’herb’ with which I treat some of the disappointments of adulthood. Of course, this is not a postulate that encourages heartlessness and selfishness, but only a preparation for, it seems, this common life circumstance – that the most heartless intrigues are prepared by those to whom you have done the most good. When this is ’axiomatically’ accepted, then there is actually no more disappointment. That is why I feel much more mature today, and the resulting scars now have aesthetic value.”
He is hurt, like any true patriot, by the incurable wounds of ’his people’, scattered in several pens, dismembered within themselves, torn by his own and other people’s troubles. The image of today’s Montenegro, traumatically distorted from internal bloating expanded to the brink of explosion, does not leave much room for indifference, especially during the rule of the ”nationalistic media” of the transition of power and attempts to establish collapsed institutions.
”Montenegro still suffers from tragic dismemberment. In terms of politics and identity. It is a mistake to assume that one side will, under any circumstances, eradicate the other. In a metaphorical sense, these two sides are the south and north poles of Montenegro, the alternating forces of magnetism, depending on historical circumstances. And that is the constant of historical destiny, one of the key features of the physics and spirit of Montenegro. There is also a deep vein of absurdity that grew between the (un)reconciling identity sides of the same name and surname, and often the same parents. The bad and long-lasting administration has fed and encouraged all that for decades.”

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE MAFIA FEUD

”Montenegro has a serious Orwellian potential in the essence of its mentality, practically expressed in unreal statistics of Goli Otok. When the inherited tools of the totalitarian communist system of government, mafia malice and modern marketing techniques of shaping consciousness are grafted onto it, then we get the result of decades-long and multi-layered slavery. And in that slavery, in which at least half of the citizens lived in the so-called ’anti-state ghetto’, a specific experiment of identity engineering was carried out. A ’new Montenegro’ was being created, as they often stated, which they tried to get us accustomed to. An anti-Serb ’social agreement’ has been established, very firm and operational. On the other hand, a bureaucratic ’identity’ was built, designed according to an extremely banal pattern – by negating the original, the historical. Since it is naturally pale and lifeless, then local ’geneticists’ pumped it with forgeries. Thus, the shameless lie became the most important DNA element, the backbone of that new identity. One of the caricatured expressions of that policy is the ’legal’ establishment of historical ’facts’. Namely, in the law that regulates the rights of the descendants of the Petrović dynasty, the position according to which Serbia had occupied Montenegro in 1918 was included. We have an abundance of such examples of endemic madness in Montenegro.”
Despite decades of continuous stomping over Serbian identity, the spirit of ancestors was resurrected through the resistance of young generations, born in a time of brutal rewriting of history and sowing carcinogenic hatred of the nationless regime, which placed its defensive strongholds in the very bowels of the mafia system.
”Speaking without euphemisms, Montenegro has long been a mafia feud, with all the characteristic elements of such ’social order’. On its Potemkin-like screen, we had a smiling photoshopped life, and in the dark corridors of real life there is repression, fear, complete collapse of the value system, corruption, unprecedented crime...
However, after decades of systematic suffocation of the Serbian identity and narrowing of living space (media, education, employment policy...), something happened that cannot be measured by earthly measures.
Just when the creators of the new Montenegrin identity order thought that the story of the changing of Montenegro’s ’wardrobe’ was successfully rooted in the generation born and raised during their rule, some ’details’ appeared that have shaken the zombie scene. Our children found their way to spiritual, intellectual freedom outside the educational program, overcoming the torture of the nationalized media.
The magnificent ’procession spirit’ arose’, seemingly out of nowhere, but with fullness and strength for which there is only one word of the Serbian language – miracle! That river appeared out of nowhere, but it is known where it flows. A decades-long project that has crudely and aggressively molded reality through patterns of identity engineering has experienced a complete breakdown.
The main ideologues, as well as the operatives of that ’new identity’, are distraught, defeated. Without freshness and talent, in a trance they repeat the obsolete Kumrovec mantras, in which the place of the former absolute ideological enemy has been taken by ’processions’. And the processions, that spirit of New Testament love, uniting believers and the disenfranchised, are a nationwide resistance with love. Those with more epic sentiment say: The Mountain Wreath of the 21st century – live. The processions were a miracle of the new baptism of Montenegro”

THE MOUNTAIN WREATH LIVE

Like most modest people, he minimizes his performance in the fight for the establishment of democracy, but part of the new winning structures, dissatisfied with the ”rebellion” of Prime Minister Krivokapić, points the finger at Božović that he is the gray eminence of the new government.
”Whoever has any, even ’tangential’ contact with the public, inevitably faces accusations. And they imply some ’guilt’. The one I accept without hesitation is that I really did everything to establish a coalition ’For the Future of Montenegro’ in the previous elections. According to all rational analyzes, the unification of the ’processional’ political potential was a necessary condition for them to reach the zone of realization of thirty-year long aspirations in general, and for the Church to defend itself from the rage of the former regime. The obstacles to that were many diverse interests, inheritance and negative inertia... and much more. Therefore, a sophisticated political approach to all subjects was necessary, but also a specific architecture of the coalition, stable enough for all its very, ’reactive’ components. However, all those chess-political efforts that took out of the sight of the public for weeks would have been null and void if it had not been for the fundamental ingredient of this victory – the miracle and providence of God. It enabled that what men thought could never be – has happened. Despite all this, considerable skill was required to cover up individual damage and lack of principles by general interest. On the other hand, the canvas of that ’general interest’ is in some places both thin and porous. And that had to be taken into account. Of course, I gladly accept the guilt for that act, sharing it with Bishop Joanikije and Father Gojko Perović.
No, I am not the creator of the concept of expert government. Those who were involved in the post-election process know that I advocated a different approach. Therefore, it is clear that I had absolutely no influence on the formation of the cabinet, namely the personal choices of Mr. Krivokapić.
The situation on the political scene is toxic. The political earthquake created cracks from which various poisons are spewed in a geyser. Now we are facing a flood of all those traits that actually kept us in slavery for thirty years: selfishness, invertebrateness, meanness, bestiality, unscrupulousness... It is fortunate for socio-psychologists, philosophers, but also for psychiatrists that the protagonists of these ’values’ are strutting like exhibitionists, thus research material is not lacking.

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Biography
Vladimir Božović (Nikšić, 1974) completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and computer science at the Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics in Podgorica, and his postgraduate studies in algebra at the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade, where he also defended his Master’s thesis. He completed his doctoral studies in mathematics and cryptography at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), USA, defending his dissertation ”Algebraic and Combinatorial Aspects of Group Factorization”. Until June 2009, he was also a lecturer at the same university. He also worked as a researcher at the Center for Cryptology and Information Security (CCIS), Boca Raton, USA. In June 2020, he was elected tenured professor at the University of Montenegro. He has participated in a number of international research projects and published several scientific papers in the field of algebra, cryptography, graph theory, bioinformatics... He is the president of the organizing committee of the Montenegrin Symposium on Graphs, Informatics and Algebra, as well as the Mathematical Meeting of Serbia and Montenegro. He is the founder and first president of the NGO ”Academic Alternative”.

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Metropolitan Amfilohije
”In His time, this rocky Montenegrin desert became a Temple, and the people became a Church. He illuminated their faces with words and drove the cold from the hearts in which darkness, fear and hopelessness were settled. His steps paved the way for many of our victories. Well, also the recent ones, processional. The Metropolitan was first resurrected, and then made modern and strong the values ​​that seemed irretrievably lost. The faces of those young people, tens of thousands, who peacefully follow the Metropolitan is the biblical image of the resurrection of beautiful and noble Montenegro.”

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Radiate Light Far Away
Vladimir Božović is the first president of Matica Srpska in Montenegro, ”an organization that in a convincing and modern way brought the most beautiful fruits of Serbian culture and science closer to young people, breaking the stereotypes that had been deposited over the years through primitive media installations of the former regime”.
”I am proud to have created such an organization that ’radiates light far away’. Confirmation of that are great people and even better works related to Matica Srpska in Montenegro. In over ten years of existence and work, we really have something to be proud of. Our bookstore in the center of Podgorica has become one of the cult places by which this city is recognized. It is inhabited by light and youth, literally and symbolically.”

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Fighting Medium against Occupation
”Infors was created as a cry of despair in the conditions of media and political occupation. It was created as a fighting medium for the survival of an identity that was trapped in the jaws of totalitarianism. My friend Gojko Raičević is the romantic titan of that fight. I have been with Gojko from the very beginning, but I am immensely sorry that I did not occasionally record the events from the epic he marked. It would have been the script of an exciting, ’genre-diverse’ film. There is no form or intensity of torture that Gojko did not experience, but he responded to all this with examples of bravery and heroism. Due to the gravity of the key scandals it initiated, Infors was forced to work almost illegally. Journalists and associates were deployed in different geographical locations. It was a truly magnificent, tenacious and brave struggle, in which the intelligence was needed to ’escape’ all the regime’s traps. Using the fluidity and power of the Internet, the monolith of the local mainstream media was demolished. The merits of IN4S for the won freedom are enormous.”