Pictures from Wartime Belgrade

"Fellow-Citizens, We Wish You Good Shelter"

A part of the population of the capital is not coming out to get a breath of fresh air even when the air-raid alert is off, a part is fleeing to Budapest, some are not leaving their TV satellite antennas, and the rest are at the central city square singing "Airplane, I will break your wings" with one of their favourite pop singers.

AIM Podgorica, 1 April, 1999 (By AIM correspondent from Belgrade)

Jasna has come out of the maternity hospital on 23 March, a day before NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia began. The first she did when she arrived home was to take the cradle down to the basement. She took along toys for her five-year old daughter. The first thing they bought for the newly-born baby was a gas-ring - to enable her to boil water and bottles if electric power supply is interrupted. Nina is a self-supporting mother employed in a state agency which has introduced 12-hour shifts. She does not know whether to leave her children (a daughter of 14 and a son of 7) with her neighbour while she is at work, to listen to the siren announcing air-raid alert and flee to the shelter without her

• or not to go to work and be sacked, and then lose the source of their only income which they live on. (Schools in Belgrade are closed since bombardments began, and the situation in kindergartens is best described by Glas javnosti of 1 April: "After the siren is heard, kindergarten teachers move to the shelters with the kids where they continue their normal activities"). Mira, also a mother of two, has run away from the family house in Rakovica to a small uncomfortable weekend cottage near Ljig because she could not stand the detonations and the siren any more. She called her friend and bridesmaid to tell her that she would never invite anybody to this cottage in normal conditions, but if it became unbearable in Belgrade - to come with her children at any time of day or night.

INDIFFERENCE

These and thousand other pictures of wartime Belgrade will hardly ever be seen by the world. American president, British prime minister, leaders of NATO, endlessly repeat phrases about destroying "Milosevic's war machinery", "Milosevic's slaughter machine" and similar - that is, about the Army of Yugoslavia (VJ) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia (MUP). The distracted citizens - those who are in other circumstances called "innocent civilians" - are practically not mentioned at all. They will probably not be mentioned even if their mass killing begins. Noam Chomsky, one of the most severe critics of American foreign policy, in an analysis of NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia, reminded of the comment of state secretary Madelaine Albright who in 1996, when asked by national TV about the death of half a million Iraqi children during the five-years biological war waged by the USA against this state, answered: "It was a very difficult choice, but we believe that the price was worth it". Chomsky says that five thousand children still die every year in Iraq

• but that this is still "worth it".

For official propaganda of those who are bombing it, and therefrom for a large part of the world in Iraq there is only Sadam Husein - just as it is nowadays presented that in Yugoslavia there is only Slobodan Milosevic. And even if there are any people, they deserve nothing better because their president is - Slobodan Milosevic. In a recently broadcast BBC show on air-strikes against Yugoslavia called the Talking Point, an American of Croat origin explained that suffering of civilians could not be avoided because the Serbs voted for Milosevic, and Milosevic had caused Srebrenica and other atrocities.

PSYCHOLOGY

Belgraders, mostly aware that their destiny does not concern anybody, react in different ways. One, not at all small group, has completely succumbed to the war psychology. A few days ago, a man from the part of the city near Autokomanda complained to his neighbour: "I have a serious problem. I can't persuade my family to come out of the basement". A mother with her four-year old son from a six-storey building in Vidikovac refused to leave the shelter even when the siren sounded the end of danger. She would not come out even for meals, she and the child ate bread and bacon in the shelter, until members of her family gathered from other parts of the city and took them out.

The citizens in shelters already have their "own" seats, they leave their blankets and other necessities there. It is amusing only for the children: all the kids from the surrounding streets gather there, they play for as long as they wish, there is no fixed bedtime. The adults suffer because of fear, because of the stench, filth, rumours. In a shelter in an elementary school on Banovo brdo, a "well-informed" individual first whispered into a motorolla about 4 o'clock in the morning, and then to his half awakened fellow-citizens broke the news that the American ambassador was caught in a tree in the vicinity of the Sports Centre in Kosutnjak signalling to NATO air-planes, and when he saw that he was discovered - he committed suicide. In a shelter at Dorcol, a part of the city near the Danube, an amateur radio operater asked another at the moment when the city civilian protection staff reported that after an explosion toxic clouds lifted over Sremcica and Batajnica (at the outskirts of Belgrade) "whether there had been nuclear action". One of his neighbours in the same shelter wondered after a powerful detonation - was the Branko's bridge gone. Her friend half jokingly asked her whether she knew that it was fobidden to spread panic, the former answered quite seriously - this was no panic, these were information.

As a half-drunken citizen complained from the bottom of his heart in front of a shop near Red Star football team stadium: "If NATO fails to kill me, Opi's mum certainly will. Man, she is seventy years old, and is an expert in missile fuel!"

INFUSION FROM THE SATELLITE

Those who are not in shelters all day long (the alert lasts between two hours, which is rare, to 10 or 12 hours) can be classified in a few sub-groups. Some are linked to their TV and radio sets as to an influsion. The extreme addicts watch satellite program of TV stations (mostly CNN, BBC, SKY) and domestic media, during the whole night even, exposing themselves at the same time to endless statements of Robin Cook and Javier Solana, and the mascot of the city information centre, Avram Izrael ("Fellow citizens, we wish you a good shelter!", "Those who have decided to indulge in staying at their homes should go to their shelters, the enemy is shooting at Belgrade from several directions"). A father would not let his three-year old son Nemanja watch his favourite cartoon film in fear that he might miss something important on a satellite TV program.

The second group occasionally listens to the news, but regularly attends midday concerts at the central city Square of the Republic - where several ten thousand people gather every day to sing with the known singers of all genres - from pop singers Bora Corba and his hit "Air-plane, I will break your wings" and Bajaga, to stars of falk-dance Ceca Raznatovic (Arkan's wife) and Era Ojdanic. For the first time in Belgrade on the first day of the concerts, an American flag was set on fire.

DREAMING

The absolute hit song of all the concerts titled "The Song Has Preserved Us" is the gypsy song "For Belgrade" from the film "Who is Singing There" (the song played on the accordian with the following refrain: "If this were just a dream, if this were just a dream"). Since air-raid alert is mostly sounded at the time when the concerts are held, those present pin black-and-white target signs somewhere on themselves and carry all sorts of banners - so far the most popular one is - "Sorry, we did not know it was invisible" occasioned by the shot down famous F-117 plane, but there are also a lot of vulgar ones referring to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Although the atmosphere at the concerts is positive and for a couple of hours raises the spirit of the people, they have their dark side, too. The mother of eight-year old Vanja was pale of fear when - having stepped out of the city bus in Knez Milosa street - she came face to face with a mob of unruly young men who on their way back from the concert, stoned embassies standing side by side in this street: American, German, Croatian, Albanian, Canadian... Broken glass shattered all over, people encouraged and cheered them from buses and cars... Downtown Belgrade, the British, American and French cultural cetres were demolished, windows were broken on all until just recently so popular McDonald's restaurants. Mostly unnoticed by the Belgrade public - probably due to the fact that it concerns a small segment of the population who are slightly better off than the rest and with better international contacts - buses full of mostly women and children leave for Budapest. At one moment, a journalist from Dorcol phoned her colleague from Topcider and gave the following information: "I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that I have read in today's American press that they have definitely decided not to shoot at the house in your neighbourhood. (the White Court, Milosevic's residence) They say there is nobody in the building, and that it is a cultural monument in which there is a Rembrandt's painting. And the bad news is - that you do not have a Rembrandt's painting". She left this message at the answering machine, because her colleague had used the just announced interruption of the state of alert to take her children out to the park for a ride on roller skates.

Belgraders are awaiting the ninth day of bombardments between euphoria and depression. The former is caused by the news on destroyed NATO planes carried by the official media, which nobody wishes to doubt for the simple reason that they want to survive. The depression begins in early afternoon when the city becomes eerily deserted, and the only choice is whether to wait for the air-planes at home or in a shelter. An increasing number of people are leaving Belgrade, and the only way out is Budapest or Bosnia, or the insecure inside Serbia.

VESNA VUKIC

(AIM)