April 26, 1999
THE SERBS
Once NATO's Friends, Now Furious Victims
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- A year ago, Yugoslav government ministers
and the policy elite seriously pondered joining NATO's Partnership
for Peace program, a sort of training ground and waiting room for
alliance membership.
While American officials were dubious, there was talk of
Belgrade's becoming Washington's partner for stability in the
Balkans. Even the Yugoslav defense minister, Pavle Bulatovic,
talked of NATO as an instrument for collective security.
Today, rather than welcoming the Yugoslav military into its
councils, NATO is trying to destroy it.
As NATO celebrates its 50th anniversary in Washington, the
alliance is bombing Yugoslavia every day and night, waging war on a
European nation because of its abuses of human rights in its
sovereign territory, the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.
The daily Politika, a government mouthpiece, called NATO "a
criminal organization, celebrating its 50th anniversary by dropping
bombs, destroying civilian objects and killing innocent people."
Dusan Kozic, who writes a normally amusing Sunday column, said,
"NATO has cut its birthday cake with hands bloodied to the
elbows."
To many Yugoslavs, who feel the unity of their country is at
stake, and especially to those old enough to have been steeped in
Tito's doctrine of nonalignment with either East or West, NATO's
war smacks of old-fashioned superpower aggression, not some new,
post-Cold-War doctrine of human rights and shared sovereignty.
However defensively, they believe that NATO's talk of
humanitarian intervention is selective and hypocritical, as its
warplanes bomb bridges, television stations, power stations, the
presidential residence and, by accident, passenger trains and even,
apparently, columns of the very Albanian refugees NATO is trying to
protect.
Taking their cue in part from official media, many Serbs believe
that NATO's real aims are to dismember Yugoslavia further, to
create an independent Kosovo and even to cut off Serbia's northern
province of Vojvodina and the largely Muslim, southwestern region
of Sandzak from what would be a rump Serbia.
Bogdan, a 31-year-old volleyball player, thinks that America
wants this weakened, shrunken Yugoslavia, no matter what American
officials say.
"They say Kosovo is part of Serbia and then use the Albanian
pronunciation -- Kosova -- like some form of political correctness,"
he said.
"They support the KLA openly and talk of arming the KLA, which
wants independence," he said, referring to the ethnic Albanians'
Kosovo Liberation Army.
He bemoaned how far Yugoslavia seems to have fallen. "I thought
that we were a part of the same world," he said. "I thought one
day we'd be in Europe and NATO. But the roots of the Serbian people
are in Kosovo, and I will go to defend it if necessary."
Ivana, a 36-year-old child therapist, becomes livid. "I can't
stand this NATO and the West anymore," she said, dressed in blue
jeans and white Reeboks. "The hypocrisy is unbelievable. They let
the Russians kill the Chechens and the British kill the Irish, and
the Americans created one of the biggest ethnic cleansings in the
world against the Indians."
Asked whether any of those acts justified Serbian actions in
Kosovo, she said: "Of course I know that the Serbian police have
done a lot of bad things to the Albanians in Kosovo. But it is not
the police who suffer now. I hate NATO because it is driving
innocent people crazy and making little children crazy. I saw the
paintings of one small girl full of horrible things, and NATO did
that to her."
Vera Obrizovic wrote an open letter to NATO, published in
Politika, in which she said, "Gentlemen, I wish your celebration
takes place with screeching air-raid sirens followed by an
orchestra of 2.5-ton drums." She then gave her e-mail address --
double odrenik.net -- in case any of the alliance's leaders
wished to reply.
The Yugoslav media has been rabid on the subject of NATO's
anniversary. Politika fumed about "this festival of evil," where
"the American fuehrer, Clinton, managed to top it all, with his
mouth full of democracy in order to justify the hysterical killing
of the citizens of Yugoslavia."
Tanjug, the official news agency, called Clinton's address to
the summit leaders "a harangue against a country and its people
that are preventing him from accomplishing his goals in the Balkans
and Europe and from arranging the world in the way he envisaged
it."
Politika also mentioned "the ethnic cleansings and pogroms
against the Indians" and told readers that "until a couple of
years ago, blacks and whites were forbidden to go into the same
schools and restrooms."
Referring to the massacre at Colombine High School in Colorado
last week, the daily noted: "In honor of Hitler's birthday, two
young men, taking after their president, massacred 25 of their
classmates." (Actually, 15 people, including the two suspects,
were killed.)
Given that "commemoration" in Serbian is a ceremony for the
dead, there were numerous puns on how NATO's birthday commemoration
really represents its funeral. The alliance has moved from one of
collective defense, Politika said, "to a cruel and deceitful
policeman, licensed to kill all across Europe and later in other
parts of the world."
The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nebojsa Vujovic, said:
"The alliance which is supposed to be the best on earth is jumping
over boundaries and borders in an effort to justify its existence.
This is dangerous, and the world will not be the same. The U.N.
secretary-general cannot speak the same way after this aggression.
Yugoslavia is not the only victim. The victim is also the United
Nations and the common European home."
President Slobodan Milosevic, in an interview with the Slovak
daily Praca, said that "NATO, instead of celebrating the 50th
anniversary of its foundation, will die in Yugoslavia," which he
said is defending the post-1945 order of the United Nations against
the will of Washington.
"The new world order, imposed by the United States, has been
attempting to subjugate the entire world," he said.
Even a relatively liberal scholar and adviser to Deputy Prime
Minister Vuk Draskovic, Predrag Simic, said, "NATO has run through
a lot of red lights here." NATO had a "spotless record until
now," he said, and even the Russians recognized it as a purely
defensive alliance. "But now this new NATO scares the Russians and
everyone else."
He said he would dedicate his new book, on NATO and the Yugoslav
crisis, to Milica Rakic, a 3-year-old girl who died from shrapnel
wounds last week in her bedroom in Batajnica, a city north of
Belgrade that has an air force base.
