April 12, 1999
IN BELGRADE
An Orthodox Easter, a Respite From War and Scarcity
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Belgrade's markets were stuffed full with
meat and vegetables of all kinds for the Orthodox Easter
celebrations on Sunday, with formerly scarce items, like cooking
oil and sugar, plentiful in state stores at cheap prices.
Wartime regulations, instituted a few days after NATO's bombing
campaign began 19 days ago, have kept prices down. After a few
early days of shortages, as worried residents bought up
imperishables, the state funneled new supplies into the shops.
Cigarettes and gasoline remain very scarce and expensive on the
black market, when available at all, although the official state
media on Friday promised that new supplies of cigarettes would
arrive soon.
Cooking oil and sugar in particular, which had been hard to find
in the weeks before the war, suddenly filled the shelves at
reasonable prices: cooking oil is about 11 dinars a liter, or about
63 cents; sugar is about 9.5 dinars per kilogram, or about 54 cents
for 2.2 pounds.
The dinar has been losing value against hard currencies, now
trading on the black market at about 17.5 dinars per dollar and 10
per German mark, making prices expressed in dollar terms seem
absurdly low. But salaries and pensions are also much lower than in
the West, roughly averaging $60 and $40 a month, respectively.
Springtime in fertile Yugoslavia is always marked by plentiful
greens, spring onions, radishes and other vegetables, but supplies
of fresh fruits, even imported varieties like kiwis, are available
from Greek suppliers, shop owners said Sunday in Belgrade and
nearby Zemun, where the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church,
Patriarch Pavle, came to preside over Easter services.
Aleksandara Vucic, a 26-year-old mother of two small children,
said the filled shelves were reassuring in a difficult time. "I
know the government is doing this to raise our spirits, but I'm not
unhappy about it," she said. "Why should I be?"
But the amount of Greek produce coming into the capital is less
than before, the shop owners say. There are no flights to Belgrade,
its airports damaged and airspace closed by NATO. NATO attacks on
Yugoslavia's oil refineries and fuel supplies, designed to hobble
its military campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army in Kosovo,
have meant extreme shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel for truck
transport, let alone private cars.
But authorities in Belgrade have been trying to negotiate with
the army for more gasoline so that the city's shops, many of them
private, can get new stocks of food and other consumables, said
Deputy Mayor Milan Bozic.
The newspapers are full of stories of war profiteers arrested by
martial-law authorities. Western cigarettes are about 25 to 30
marks a carton of 10 packs, or about $14.30 to $17.15, with locally
made ones, which few people favor, at about $11 a carton.
Despite early worries, bread and flour supplies are also
plentiful. Flour is only 4.5 dinars a kilo, or about 25 cents for
2.2 pounds, and milk is only 20 cents a quart. Decent cuts of pork
and beef cost from $2.57 to $3.43 a kilo, with good salami roughly
double that. A good ham for Easter is roughly $6.30, a decent
chicken is about $1.43 a kilo. And coffee, virtually an essential
in Belgrade, is about $6.80 a kilo for whole beans.
Gordana Perazic, chatting outside the Church of the Holy Mother
of God in Zemun, where Patriarch Pavle conducted services Sunday,
said that this Easter had sent the Serbs special tribulations.
"But our tables are full, thank God," she said. "Not even
Hitler could scare us, so Clinton won't manage to do it. We have a
heroic heart."
Mrs. Perazic, who works with Russian tourists here, said she
hoped that no one would learn to hate the people bombing them, and
that the Americans, too, would understand that the Serbs were a
generous people. "One person does not make a nation," she said in
a clear reference to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"We know that the American nation does not hate the Serb
people. It is a matter of one or two people, not the rest," she
said.
In his Easter message, Patriarch Pavle did not shy away from the
war. "We pray for peace and good will among people, but now we are
suffering," the statement said. "All just proposals for a
peaceful solution for the Kosovo problem based on respect for all
people have been rejected. NATO has offered only a cynical
explanation about the necessity of bombing to prevent a human
catastrophe."
He seemed to be responding to an unusual Easter statement made
Saturday by the Yugoslav army's chief of staff, Gen. Dragoljub
Ojdanic, who said, "In this difficult and fateful historic moment,
the Yugoslav army expects a strong contribution from the Serbian
Orthodox Church to unity, strengthening belief in the justification
of the defense of, and love toward the fatherland."
Milica Sabinovic, a 29-year-old obstetrics nurse, lives near the
Yugoslav air force headquarters blown up by NATO in the center of
Zemun. "I was walking my dogs when it happened," she said. "It
was terrible that night," she said, then stopped, suddenly
speechless, brushing back her hennaed hair.
"This Easter is a celebration, like always, but even more holy,
more precious, because of everything the people from the outside
are doing to us," she said.
"It's the same, but with more temptations that the Lord sends
us." Asked what she meant, she said: "Oh, the hatred, the anger
toward the enemy. These are temptations that must be overcome. As
Christ said, 'God forgive them for they know not what they do.' If
they did know," she said with a sweet and fervent smile, "I'm
sure they wouldn't do it."
Ms. Sabinovic always comes to this church, and was in the third
row when she began to faint from the press of the worshippers, the
heat and the incense. She was helped from the church by Vojislav
Cavic, 43, a driver at a factory making animal feed.
Cavic, too, said this was a special Easter, but said he was
"100 percent sure that NATO and the Americans would be vanquished
in this war." If the war does not stop soon, he said, echoing the
state media, "we will enter a grand alliance with Russia and
Belarus and then the United States will have to make concessions."
Then he dropped the belligerence and said: "We all live for a
better time. War is a dark time for us. Will the bombs hit here or
there? We live with this fear every day."
Ms. Sabinovic, who is still without telephone service after the
bombing of Zemun, said that she had managed to surmount her fears.
"I prayed with all my heart before the fear went away," she said.
"Prayer is better than any sedative."
Asked if she thought Serb forces were committing atrocities in
Kosovo, she said: "If ethnic cleansing were going on, I would
speak out against it. But it's not true," she said sweetly. "Half
my family is from Kosovo, and the problem in Kosovo are all the
Albanians that Tito let in, who don't even have Yugoslav papers."
She smiled again. "We should pray for everyone of every
religion," she said. "And for our enemies, we should probably
pray even more."
