CONFLICT-YUGOSLAVIA: NATO Attacks Achieve Unity Among Serbs

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 31 1999 (IPS) - Apart from the material damage, the most visible results of a week of NATO air raids against Yugoslavia are the growing unity of Serbs, a massive refugee crisis in Kosovo and the destabilisation of the Balkans, Yugoslav observers say.

The hope of a settlement brought by Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov Tuesday, quickly vanished when his plane left Belgrade and the sirens started blowing its chants of fear again all over the country.

“Besides causing casualties and enormous material damage, the only thing that NATO has accomplished is unite all Serbs”, says Ognjen Pribicevic, a researcher at Belgrade’s Institute of Social Sciences.

“In a deeply divided (Serbian) nation, NATO succeeded in doing one thing: it erase all differences between rightists, leftists, conservatives and liberals, pro or anti (president Slobodan) Milosevic,” he said.

“The worst assessment of the US administration was that Serbs would agree to do anything under pressure or with force,” he adds.

The Yugoslav reaction seems to have taken NATO strategists by surprise, and are now facing a dilemma, with the situation increasingly getting out of hand and threatening with a massive refugee crisis all over the Balkans and towards the Italian peninsula.

Reports of tens of thousands of ethnic-Albanian refugees fleeing to neighbouring Macedonia and Albania represent a social and political time-bomb in those countries.

The only western alternative, for now, seems to launch more bombs and missiles, apparently in the hope that destruction, death and fear will break the Yugoslav leadership’s resolve.

There are no official statistics on number of people killed in seven days of NATO air raids. Unofficially, IPS learned that the number of civilian casualties is estimated at several dozens all over Serbia, Kosovo excluded, as communications with the southern province have been cut off.

Primakov had previously estimated the number of Yugoslav civilian casualties at 2,000, according to international press reports.

As NATO attacks against the country continues, Serbs have become increasingly angry at the West.

In line with their dry sense of humour, Belgradians no longer greet each other with the classic “Dobar dan” (Good morning). They now say “Bombar dan”.

Over the week-end, protesters marching by US, French and Canadian embassies hurled stones and bottles, smashing the windows at the deserted buildings. Some of them are now painted with graffiti with harsh anti-Western messages.

Even Belgrade’s historical McDonald’s restaurant -the first to be opened in an Eastern European country, in 1988- was pelted with eggs, its windows smashed by youngsters who grew up adopting a US-like lifestyle, the trademark being hamburgers, chips and ice cream.

The flags of Western states are burned on a daily basis at rock concerts held in Belgrade’s central Republic Square since Sunday. Dozens of thousands of people attend the concerts, dubbed “Songs Keep Us Alive and United”.

Band players and spectators wear target practice symbols on their chests, to denounce the attacks and defy them at the same time.

Not long ago, those flags were for many a symbol of prosperity, freedom and friendship. “We believed in the West so much two years ago. We carried those flags in 1997, claiming Serbia was part of the West, not an eastern European tyranny” Milena Stanojevic, a Belgrade bank clerk says.

She was a regular Belgrade protester in 1996-97 when up to 300.000 people took to the streets for 88 days in an anti-Milosevic campaign.

“Now we feel betrayed (by the West)” she adds. “Don’t they know that we do not care about Milosevic or even Kosovo? People want peace, normal lives… Now innocent people are getting killed and the West is helping Milosevic to enforce his grip on everything here.”

The nation practically burst in triumph when a US F-117 Stealth plane, the most advanced in the US arsenal, was downed last Sunday close to the town of Ruma, some 50 kms west of Belgrade. Ever since, the expensive plane is no longer being risked in the raids, according to Italian media reports.

Peasant women danced on the wings of the plane that crashed onto a muddy field. Spectators at daily Belgrade rock concerts still carry a banner saying “Sorry we thought it was invisible”. “We are smarter than those Americans, aren’t we” says a teenager carrying the banner.

Bitterness against the West is fuelled also by countless hours spent in more or less improvised air-raid shelters, hearing or just fearing the explosions.

The bombing of a factory and a nearby rocket-fuel depot, that caused leaks of toxic gas last Friday in a Belgrade suburb, only spread fears that NATO would kill civilians and not just aim at military targets as its commanders claim.

“There is no such thing as ‘surgical bombing”‘ Milan Markovic, an engineer says. “Remember what the bombings in Baghdad did ?”

On Tuesday, six hours of talks between Primakov and Milosevic meant also a quiet day for Belgradians, as there were no air raid sirens until the Russian left. Then they wailed again announcing a new NATO attack that lasted for several hours.

But while Primakov was trying to hammer out a compromise in Belgrade, NATO military officials in Brussels were announcing “around-the- clock offensive operations,” against Yugoslavia.

Contrary to rumours that Milosevic was due to address the nation later in the evening, following the meeting with Primakov, only an official statement was released from his office, saying that “the people of Yugoslavia remain firm in showing their determined effort to defend their country, as long as they can, faced with the brutal aggression of NATO.”

“There can be no political solution as long as thousands of tones of bombs are falling all over the country,” the statement said

“The highest officials of Yugoslavia are willing to accept the proposal of Russia, when (NATO) bombardments stop, to start the reduction of military presence in Kosovo and Metohija to the level preceding NATO aggression,” the statement added.

“However, it also stressed that ‘NATO should stop giving its air support to the Albanian terrorists (Kosovo Liberation Army) in the field.”