April 19, 1999
CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: IN BELGRADE
A Family Revisited: Bombs a Wrenching Routine
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
IJEVO, Yugoslavia -- Little Sara, nearly 5, gets to watch her
beloved "Ninja Turtles" on television, and "Power Rangers,"
too. But NATO bombs and missiles keep striking targets in Rakovica
and Zarkovo, near this southern Belgrade suburb. So she has been
sleeping in the basement every night for the last 25 nights -- and
counting -- of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia's President
Slobodan Milosevic.
She no longer huddles in a corner, hugging herself, when the
bombs go off, said her mother, Biljana, talking in the family
living room, whose walls are now cracked from the shaking of the
earth when the bombs thud home.
Biljana and her husband, Mile, 37, described the first night of
NATO's bombing in an interview with The Times the next day, March
25, her 32nd birthday. Despite the air-raid sirens, no one believed
that bombs would actually fall, and Sara insisted that night on
watching "Ninja Turtles" until the sky exploded and she told her
mother that she wanted to die.
Nearly a month later, Biljana says, family life under the bombs
has settled into a wrenching, nerve-racking routine, where the
coming of each day brings both surprise and a new set of anxieties
that the adults try to hide from the children.
"I try to make it a game for Sara and Nemanja," Sara's
6-year-old brother, Biljana said. "At night, after dinner, we
watch cartoons or read tales, Disney stories, and then when the air
raid sirens go off, about 8:30, we go down to the shelter. I have
books down there for them, and I sit with them until they fall
asleep."
She pulled Sara to her and plastered her perfect cheek with a
kiss. "I try to protect them somehow," she said, "so they won't
remember too much later, when it's finally over."
The children hear the sirens and see the air-raid warning symbol
superimposed on the television screen. "But I don't think they
actually know much about the bombing," Biljana said. "They just
know that when they hear the alert they have to go to the
shelter."
The whole family -- the two children, Biljana and Mile, and his
parents, Aleksandar and Duka -- sleeps in the tiny concrete
basement, originally built for storage.
"It's pretty crowded down there," said Mile. "We all sleep
together, like pigs in a sty." But he can hear the booms and feel
the earth shudder, and he has trouble sleeping. "I get up and
prowl around, and if it's peaceful, I go upstairs," he said. "I
turn on the television, to see what's being bombed."
He normally rises about 4 a.m. and leaves for his job at an
electrical-engineering plant at 5:45. If the bombs are nearby, he
sleeps just a couple of hours, consumed with anxiety.
"The day is shorter now," Biljana said. "The night is always
early and the morning always seems to come late. You lie there,
wondering if you will survive until the morning." She grabbed a
racing Sara and hugged her. "It's the end of the 20th century and
it's like living in a village," she said. "When the sun goes
down, it's over, the air raid siren goes and that's it for the
day."
Mile now calls his homemade plum brandy "Tomahawk," after the
American cruise missiles, because he says it's a "precision
weapon." The future may be opaque and bleak, he says. "But I've
got enough Tomahawk for one year, and that's got to be enough!"
But he, too, has grown sadder and more angry in the last 31/2
weeks of war. He admits, shamefully, that when he goes off to work
at dawn, it's with relief. "I'm somehow free, because I don't see
the kids and worry about them," he said. "But when I come home
and see them, I feel terrible, so guilty, and I get worried sick
about them."
He grabbed at another cigarette. "Why are the children
guilty?" he demanded, angry. "What for? What did they do? Who did
they abuse?"
Asked if he has noticed changes in his own personality -- if he
is more short-tempered, is smoking or drinking more -- he laughs
hugely and raises his glass. "No," he said. "I'm drinking
normally!"
Everyone laughed, and then he paused. "I am smoking more, at
least when I can find cigarettes," he said. "Actually, it feels
like I'm dreaming, that my life is not real."
Biljana said: "It's the lack of a future. You can't plan. You
can't know about tomorrow, or next week. How long will it last? How
can it end? All you do is think about how to save the children, to
spare them."
Biljana also works, now on the afternoon shift. She is at her
factory from noon to 8 p.m., while her in-laws and neighbors take
care of the children. "The whole day disappears," she said. "I
come home and make a quick dinner before the alert, and then get
the kids downstairs."
Mile broke in. "I can't see the end. I watch the news, just to
look to see if there's a sign that it's ending."
"I'm an optimist," Biljana said. "I hope it will end soon. If
I wasn't an optimist I'd go crazy."
Asked what she misses most, Biljana gave an involuntary sob,
looking away, wiping at her eyes. "I adore the spring," she said
softly. "My parents live nearby, just two bus stops away, and I
like walking to visit them, or going to Kosutnjak," a nearby park.
"But I can't now," she said. "I can't know what will
happen."
Here Mile broke in, angry again. "How many lives must we lose
before NATO can declare a victory?" he demanded. "What
satisfaction will the Americans get? How many of us must die to
keep NATO's reputation?"
When asked about the fate of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, Serbs
generally bluster, or repeat the themes of the state-controlled
media: that the Kosovo Liberation Army is the cause of every
difficulty; that the Serb forces cannot allow themselves to be
"shot in the back" by civilian sympathizers of the rebel army;
that Albanians in Macedonia are pretending to be refugees from
Kosovo; and that NATO's propaganda effort is simply more effective
than Belgrade's.
Pressed on the Albanians, Mile echoes each of these themes, then
cites the purging of 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina, in Croatia, in
just a few days when Croatian forces recaptured Serb-held territory
there in 1995. "The Americans did nothing," he said.
"So where were the Americans when the Croats were killing Serbs
in Krajina?" Mile asked. "Why didn't NATO bomb Zagreb? It just
looks like someone's plan to dismember a great country."
He insisted that Biljana describe the fate of her uncle, Milan
Svilar. He was a Serb married to a Croat, living in Stuttgart. When
the civil wars were raging in 1992, he traveled to Croatia to
rescue her mother. "The last time we heard from him was when he
called his wife from Croatia," Biljana said. "He was crying, and
he told her he thought he would be lucky as a Serb to survive that
night. After that, we heard nothing. We still don't know what
happened to him."
Their friends, Aleksandar and Aleksandra, known as Sasa and
Saska, stop in. Saska, 31, a former ballet dancer, describes a
newspaper article about a Russian fortune teller who says that
President Clinton is a Satanist and who predicted that Yugoslavia
would be bombed at the end of March.
"He says that after the first snow of spring melts, and then
after the second snow, there will be good times for Yugoslavia,"
she said. "He says that the Yugoslav passport will become more
valuable than the French one."
Her husband snorted. "And then Santa Claus will come," he
said.
They have two children, Luka, 7, and Damijan, 3, whom Saska
describes as a little devil, like his namesake (Damien) of the
American horror movies.
"Damijan hates the shelter," Saska said. "He wants to sleep
with us, to be anywhere there are people."
Biljana said: "You know, it's only when the kids are in the
shelter that I can relax at all."
Luka, though, gets silent, his father said. "When there are
explosions, there is real fear in his eyes. They get oily and big,
but he doesn't cry. When there are explosions in the night, I tell
him, 'We are shooting at enemy planes.' And he said: 'Or are they
shooting at us?' ''
Sasa, a sensitive man of 37 who works with computers, said: "I
try to explain to him not to hate, not to hate Americans and
American things, that American people are not bombing us, but their
leaders. He asks, 'Why do people elect these politicians?' And I
say, 'I don't have influence on Milosevic, and the same is true of
Americans.' "
Does Luka understand what is happening? His father thought for a
long moment, then said: "I don't really know. There are a lot of
voices in his head." He stopped again, then said: "He knows more
than we expect."
Sasa watches CNN and Sky News and reads widely on the Internet,
including NATO's own web site. Yet he, too, regards a considerable
part of the story of Albanian suffering as propaganda. "You
wouldn't know from Western channels that the K.L.A. is fighting a
war," he said. And he pointed to a CNN report about 40,000
Albanians suddenly appearing one night in Macedonia and said:
"Impossible. In one night? We know the Albanians in Macedonia
organized this like a show, to elicit sympathy."
"Every side makes propaganda," Sasa said, and then he cited
Churchill, saying: "When war begins, the first victim is always
the truth."
Sasa, who has marched for democracy here, sees the war
foreclosing his children's opportunities. "Like every father," he
said, "I want the best in the world for my children, from anywhere
it can be found -- the best movies, the best books, the best
clothes.
"But what I really fear is that we will end up isolated, like
Cubans," he said. "We are being screwed from both ends, from
Milosevic and from NATO, which is helping Milosevic screw us even
more, and now he's dragging us closer to Russia."
He, too, took another precious cigarette, lit it, then said
slowly: "NATO is pushing us under the ice."
