April 22, 1999
BELGRADE
Nato Raids Send Notice to Milosevic: Businesses He Holds Are Fair Game
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- When NATO struck hard at Yugoslavia's
political and media elite early Wednesday morning, it sent a clear
message that after weeks of hesitation, the alliance would now hit
the business interests of President Slobodan Milosevic's family and
friends.
The three cruise missiles that set a 23-story building aflame
knocked three television stations off the air and destroyed the
offices of the political parties of Milosevic and his wife.
It was NATO's first attack on the Yugoslav mass media in
Belgrade. The main state network, Radio and Television of Serbia,
was not hit and remained on the air.
The building, formerly the Central Committee of the Yugoslav
Communist Party, contains the offices of Milosevic's Serbian
Socialist Party; the offices of the Yugoslav United Left party of
his wife, Mirjana Markovic; the studios and transmitters of radio
and TV Kosava, or Wind, which belongs to their daughter, Marija;
the studios and transmitters of TV Pink, which belongs to a family
friend, Zeljko Mitrovic, a prominent member of Yugoslav Left; the
studio and transmitter of the main sports channel, SOS, and the
main transmitter of BK TV, which owned by four brothers named
Karic, one of whom, Bogoljub, is a Yugoslav Left minister without
portfolio in the Serbian government.
All the stations were knocked off the air, except for the
entertainment channel, Pink, which can be seen in one area of
Belgrade because Mitrovic also has a small transmitter on the roof
of his house in the elite residential and diplomatic area of
Dedinje. Late Wednesday evening, BK was back on the air in
Belgrade, although with a weak and blurry picture.
An attack on the northern city of Novi Sad hit transmitters that
left the city of 400,000 without any television reception at all,
including the channels of state television.
The last of Novi Sad's three bridges over the Danube was also
badly damaged, closing it to road and rail traffic. While the
Zezeljev bridge still stands, it is safe only for pedestrians now,
officials said. On Wednesday afternoon, NATO bombed a railway
bridge nine miles west of Belgrade.
At a news conference in Belgrade on Wednesday, Robert Nemecek, a
program director for Pink, bemoaned the loss, in the conflagration,
of 123 episodes of "The Simpsons" and new episodes of "Chicago
Hope" and "Friends." "It is all burned," he said sadly.
NATO officials said Wednesday that the building was a military
target, because it was part of a link in the city's coordinated air
defense system of radars and communication. But few here took the
NATO disclaimer at face value.
The Serbian prime minister, Mirko Marjanovic, condemned the
attack as having no military purpose. "This is yet more evidence
that the criminals target civilians," he said.
A senior Serbian journalist said: "I'm now a lost cause for
their propaganda messages. All I can think of is that they just
killed some poor people who were on the night shift."
While there were no official reports of casualties, local
journalists said that at least 15 people had been working in the
building at about 3:15 a.m. when the first missile hit.
In an interview with BBC World Television, the Yugoslav deputy
prime minister, Vuk Draskovic, a relative liberal, said again
Wednesday that the official news media were "hiding" casualty
figures and "I don't know why." He said, also vaguely, that "a
few thousand people, almost all of them civilians, are killed or
injured" in NATO's attacks.
But the spokesman for the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry, Nebojsa
Vujovic, has said on the record that more than 300 civilians have
been killed and up to 3,000 wounded since the NATO attacks began.
Serbs here also say that NATO is dropping Serbian-language
propaganda leaflets in larger numbers. Oddly, a leaflet dropped
last week, which advertised radio and television frequencies on
which NATO information might be heard, included the frequencies for
Radio Kosava (102.2), which was not off the air until Wednesday
morning, and for B-92 (92.5), which has been taken over by the
government but remains on the air.
Other frequencies listed, under the NATO logo and the headline
"We want to speak with you," include 106.4 and 1003 medium wave,
as well as television channel 21. NATO has been flying radio and TV
transmitter planes over Yugoslavia, but few Yugoslavs have seen or
heard the relatively weak transmissions.
Another leaflet attempts to describe events in Kosovo, saying:
"For the last week Serb armies and police, under direct orders of
Slobodan Milosevic, have emptied the villages and towns of Kosovo"
and "burned or destroyed thousands of houses."
The leaflet asserts that "heads of families were torn away from
their wives and kids and killed" in what it calls, in boldface,
"Milosevic's pogrom." It continues, "There is a fear that
thousands of innocent people have been killed."
It concludes, in boldface, "Do not allow misguided patriotism
to connect you to his misdeeds," and then ends with a sort of
advertising slogan: "NATO defends the defenseless."
The leaflet fails to mention the fundamental NATO demand, which
Milosevic has firmly rejected, that Kosovo be occupied by an
international security force with a core of armed NATO troops. Most
Serbs interviewed strongly oppose an armed foreign force in Kosovo.
The effectiveness of such propaganda leaflets, which remind many
educated Serbs of the leafletting efforts of the Nazis in World War
II, is impossible to know. Many Serbs in larger cities have access
to Western satellite television in any event.
Many of those interviewed over the last month who have such
access, or access to the Internet, nonetheless regard Western
assertions of Nazi-like atrocities as exaggerated and hyperbolic.
The more damage NATO does to ordinary Serbs on behalf of the ethnic
Albanians, one senior Serbian journalist said, "the less people
worry very much about them."
Another Serbian journalist said, "There's a feeling that we're
all collateral damage now."
