Surrealism from ``socialist'' Serbia
Green Left Parramatta
Sunday 4 July 1999
After the bombing, playboy Milosevic launches funpark
By Branislava Milosevic
MARKO MILOSEVIC, the playboy son of the Yugoslav president, will today
launch Bambipark, an extravagant amusement
complex.
While the Serbian economy has been reduced to ruins during Slobodan
Milosevic's decade in power, Marko, 25, who has a penchant for fast
cars and tall women, has been building an entertainment empire with the
backing of his father's gangster cronies. The glittering ceremony takes
place just three weeks after the war in Kosovo ended, and Marko boasts
that the fighting that
created thousands of refugees failed to delay the building of his
latest venture.
However, one casualty of the war was the name of his theme park -
originally it was to be called Bambiland, but Marko threw
out the English word "land" in protest at the Nato bombing campaign led
by America and Britain. Instead, he opted for "park", which is also a
word in Serbian. "Bambi" comes from the Bambi holding company, the
biggest manufacturer of biscuits in Yugoslavia, which is backing the
project.
The sports and leisure complex in the family's home town of Pozarevac,
south of Belgrade, joins Marko's other business
ventures, which include a futuristic open-air discotheque and radio
station. Bambipark features courts for volleyball, sand
football, street basketball and street football; ramps for roller-
blading, skateboarding and BMX biking; a maze, swimming pool and
boating. But the extravangance of the scheme has angered
local people who get by on average salaries of L30 a month - if they
are paid at all. And opposition leaders have also criticised the
grandiose project.
"While the bombs were falling and while ordinary citizens were having a
terrible time, Marko Milosevic was building this," said Slobodan Orlic,
vice-president of the Social Democracy Party.
"This regime has not built a single building or a single house where
the refugees, who fled from territories where Serbs lived
for ages, could be settled.
"What this government is doing to the spirit of Serbian people is a
tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of young people left the country in the
last 10 years. We are left with the likes of Marko Milosevic as role
models for the young of this country."
But Bambi's company chairman, Miroslav Miletic, who has repeatedly
declared public support for the Milosevic family, said:
"At the moment when the world's most powerful men were raining down
bombs on us, we were giving a beautiful present to
the children of the world - Bambipark."
Marko Milosevic, whose wife gave birth to their first child last year,
added: "This project is the best possible way to take care for the
future of the young generation."
The opening, initially scheduled for Marko's birthday on May 23, was
also postponed because of the Nato bombardment. The new
date coincides with the Day of the Warriors, a communist-era public
holiday commemorating the partisans' fight against the Nazis during the
Second World War. Despite the commercial motivation for the scheme,
Marko has chosen a date that will please his mother, Mira Markovic, a
staunch communist.
Branislava Milosevic is a freelance journalist from Belgrade