ROBERT FISK writes from Belgrade
MichaelP
War in The Balkans - Proud? No, but there's still defiance in the air
By Robert Fisk in Belgrade
NIGHTS FALL early in Belgrade and I am used to my little room with its
worn red carpet and ghastly oil painting of a full-bosomed Serb mother,
her arm round a child whose ear is weirdly poking from the top of his
head.
Now the government has ordered restaurants to close by 7pm, I squirrel
myself away by the old wooden shutters and read Anna Karenina for the
second time, or watch Belgrade television's interminable 15-year-old
serial about Vuk Karadjic, the Serb epic poet and language reformer, and
the First Serbian Revolt. In last night's episode, two of Vuk's friends
had their heads chopped off by the Turks, while a priest called Hadziruvin
was slowly garrotted under the approving eye of the local vizier. He took
a minute to suffocate. After half an hour, you can see why Serb viewers
might come to hate Muslims. Tolstoy has nothing on this.
So some evenings, I just wander the Kneza Mihailova, the pedestrian
precinct where the young - before the next night of bombing - make their
idu ruku pod ruku, their arm-in-arm walks past the 19th- century
buildings, sandblasted into beauty 15 years ago when Belgrade thought it
might become a tourist resort. There are plenty of pseudo-19th-century
street lamps, though it's doubtful - as the Rough Guide to Yugoslavia
points out - if the capital of Serbia ever truly looked like this.
It's an odd sensation walking down this street, being British and speaking
English in a city under nightly bombardment by Britain and America. So I
don't speak. I avoid Serbs who might ask me for a light or wish to express
their views on the vandalised British Council offices halfway down the
street. Instead, I wonder what they would think - especially the
black-dressed skinheads with their tiger badges, who worship Vojislav
Seselj and his chums - if they knew that the man in the tatty brown coat
had a passport, which proclaims that "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of
State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it
may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance".
When the air raid sirens whine, I don't think the "let or hindrance" bit
counts for very much. So I prowl the bookshops. There's plenty of Ivo
Andric, and several books by Vlada Urosevic, the Skopje writer, and I spot
a Serb translation of my old friend Anna Karenina in a window full of
coffee-table volumes on Serb monasteries. Each of the latter has stuck to
its cover the symbol of the black-and-white target that is now worn by
half the Serbs of Belgrade. Nato is trying to bomb every human being in
the city, if you believe these badges. It is trying to bomb every
monastery. It hopes to destroy every bookshop in Kneza Mihailova, if you
accept the message of the target banners taped to the sides of buildings.
Some of the shopfronts have already been destroyed, though not by Nato.
The American Cultural Centre has been smashed up. On the wall of the
French embassy, someone has written "Les Couchones" - which doesn't say
much for the influence of the French Cultural Centre, also vandalised,
down the road. In the Air France office, someone has painted "Non
Passaran" behind the ticket desk. Belgrade is now civil war Madrid. And
the Serbs are all victims. Who will Nato bomb tonight?
In the abandoned restaurant of my hotel, a table stands on the spot where
a German bomb fell in 1941. "We didn't defuse it - we left it buried here
and wrote the date on a stone above it," the waiter eagerly tells me. How
typical of the Serbs, I say to myself. They don't destroy bombs; they
cover them up. Outside, a Yugoslav soldier passes me, a bandage round his
head, tiredness in his eyes, hunched under a kitbag.
I have found a pretty little chemist's shop in the Kneza Mihailova, and
spotted a shirt I might buy later this week if I can persuade my
translator to do the talking. And having managed to avoid reading it so
far, I'm tempted to buy the English edition of David Owen's Bosnian
memoirs, which I have spotted in the window of another bookshop. But what
happens when the shop assistant asks my nationality? Or when the other
shoppers take notice?
I am being too hard. Most Serbs are kind to the novinar, the foreign
journalist, though they are convinced that editors change our reports or
threaten to fire us if we don't condemn Serbia. There's a military press
centre where polite colonels bid good morning to the citizens of Nato
nations. I even have accreditation as a correspondent from Velika
Britanija, with "War Press Card" printed beside my name. In the foreign
ministry, in restaurants, in interviews around Belgrade, I am treated not
as an enemy but as a guest who has been misled by Nato propaganda. And the
thought crosses my mind - how would a Serb journalist be received in
London if the Yugoslav air force had just fired missiles at the Home
Office?
Of course, we are not slaughtering the people of Kosovo - even if our
behaviour in 18th-century Ireland had a lot in common with the MUP's
activities in Serbia's southern province - and we don't have the
reputation that the Serbs acquired in Bosnia. When she heard the name
"Srebrenica", my translator had no idea what it was; or where it was. She
was not being dishonest. Yes, there are those who know what is happening
in Kosovo. "It is true, and I am truly sorry for this," a Serb friend said
to me when I asked him about the "ethnic cleansing" of the Albanians. But
he lowered his voice when he said that. Some people know. Some people
don't want to know. Others cannot believe the truth. Others have never
heard it.
I cross the road at the end of the Kneza Mihailova into Kalemegdan Park.
Two old men are playing chess with massive wooden chess-pieces, watched by
friends. Children are chasing each other in a dirty plastic "jungle"
playroom near an empty fountain. A couple - she high cheekboned, he a
little haughty (I cannot help but think of Anna Karenina and Vronsky) -
walk past the statue erected in honour of the French Army in the 1914-18
war. "Shame" is written over a frieze depicting frozen-faced poilus, stone
bayonets fixed back in the age of Verdun.
Of course, this is not the First World War. Nor the Second. The Luftwaffe
spent hours flattening square miles of Belgrade and killing more than a
thousand souls. Nato comes just before dawn, for just a few seconds,
computerised and alien, gobbling up a barracks or an empty ministry or a
bridge, even before the sirens pick up the incoming missiles. On the news
the other evening, they showed a clip of videotape that caught the very
split-second when a Yugoslav anti-aircraft shell hit a Tomahawk over the
suburbs of Belgrade, blasting it to pieces in the night sky; and you could
see how proud the Serbs felt.
They don't look proud on the Kneza Mihailova. But there is a kind of
defiance in the way the couples walk through the park, the determination
of the old men playing chess. At one end, the smell of freshly cut grass
drifts around the old Austrian fort, but I can smell smoke too, the same
oily breeze that has drifted over Belgrade since Nato bombed the thermal
heating plant across the River Sava. Two tall men in white socks are
walking back down the Ulica - perhaps because of the socks, I suspect they
are plain-clothes cops - and I avoid the crowd reading the long political
tract on the pavement, another condemnation of "Nato-pact aggression".
Yes, for the people here, that is what the war is; unprovoked, bestial,
vicious. If Albanians are fleeing Kosovo - and how many of those
coffee-table books show Serb Kosovo monasteries on their covers? - they
are not doing so because they are the victims of Serb atrocities, but
because Nato is bombing them too.
Not once - ever - does it occur to anyone that the Serbs might be driving
the Albanians out of Kosovo. The Serbs are victims. Victims of Hitler.
Victims of the brutal Turks who sliced and garrotted their way through
18th-century Serbia. Victims of Nato. Does a society like this have to be
reconstructed? Or does that democratic seed planted in the great
demonstrations two years ago live on beneath the ice?
I smell the grass again and look in the grey evening light across the Sava
and the mirror of the Danube to the start of the great Vojvodina plain.
What was it they used to sing two years ago, the tune they still hum
sometimes in the Kneza Mihailova, and which I think of more and more as I
wander about this dingy, stubborn, grimy city? "It is spring - but alas, I
live in Serbia."
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