Unconquerable People

First Week of War

The first week of war by a Western Alliance and a separatist movement against Yugoslavia appears as an upward headed spiral.  On Monday, March 29, 1999, when this text was well on its way, low flying planes appeared above Belgrade, planes that are unfamiliar to this author.  On Belgrade's Square of the Republic, the second concert of protest began, aptly called "Singing Keeps Us Going."  In the previous week we learned everything about darkened cities, detonations, bomb shelters and Anti-Biological and Chemical Defense (this became current on the evening of March 27 when a tank carrying rocket fuel was hit west of Belgrade and when it was announced that the contaminated cloud is moving toward the suburb of Zarkovo).

There was heavy noise in Pristina where two hours after midnight the administrative center of the Police was hit, and according to Yugoslav state media reports, the conflagration engulfed the neighboring dentistry clinic.  Before this, around 10 fierce explosions shook the hill of Goles, only three kilometers away from the center of Pristina.  According to Radio Television Serbia (RTS) reports from that area, which ought to be very close to military sources, the main target of the attack was probably Ajvalija, where the police used to have its barracks.  What happened to the barracks was not reported, but explosions were perhaps targeted against the village of Gracanica.  That is a Serb village in the vicinity of Pristina which suffered damage in the previous days, with the ancient Gracanica Monastery having succumb to the bombs.  According to footage released thus far, it appears that some projectiles damaged the walls of this fourteenth century Serbian Monastery.  Broadcasting the report on this, RTS reminded its viewers with footage of Richard Holbrooker visiting this ancient Monastery.  He is seen looking at the roof of the Monastery and saying "Beautiful."  On the same night that the center of Pristina was hit, targeting of our police positions began, according to reports by our reporters in Vranovac and Dragodan.  Results of this clash have not been reported on.  For several days already this has been a usual occurrence in the war condition nights above the cities of Kosovo.  In Prizren, where the barracks of "Mighty Kind Dusan" was also hit, there appear to have been night casualties, with footage indicating that the Museum of the League of Prizren has also been hit, a place of great symbolic significance for the Albanian separatist movement in Kosovo.  Some TV footage shows police patrolling in front of broken shop windows.  An elephant entered a glass shop in which there was already some fighting going on.  NATO announced that in the second phase it will concentrate its attacks on military and police targets in Kosovo.  The Yugoslav side is not revealing its defense tactics, but it can be supposed that Yugoslav armed forces dispersed their equipment and people, and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between equipment, military people, civilians and historical monuments.  When alerts are sounded and when explosions go off, KLA (judging by numerous domestic reports from Decani, Gnjilane, Prizren, Pristina) exploits the opportunity by attacking the Yugoslav Army and the Police in the hope that they will greet them with tea, huddled in bomb shelters.  The fact that the KLA is trying to exploit the NATO attacks is beginning to come through in the western media also (according to Reuters, KLA is bragging in one of its bulletins that it destroyed four Yugoslav tanks), with this question being posed in some press conferences held by western spokesmen in this war, to which the answer is uniform: "We told them not to provoke us."  The meaning of this is, as Albanian leader Azem Vlasi put it once when speaking about Milosevic at a time of far greater peace, that he is "playing with fire on very hot ground."  Serbian state media announce predictions that KLA might attempt to concentrate its people on the Macedonian border, and by trying to provoke an incident, to force the aggressor's intervention from the ground.  A game is being played between hundreds of thousands of heads.  The intervention has clearly hit a dead end.  The engagement of western media for arguing that the intervention is a means for "avoiding a catastrophe" has began to prove like adding gasoline to a burning fire.  KLA, which is presently in a difficult situation, is putting the stress back on "genocide" and a "human catastrophe," but the intervention is simply forging ahead into escalation, which is evidently resulting in further bloodshed.

General Philip Morillon, former Commander of UN Peace Keeping Forces in Bosnia, stated for Reuters that one thing is certain - that the war cannot be ended with air strikes, that there is no clean war ("What kind of soldier is ready to kill, but not to die?"), but the problem is that General Morillon ("Morillon is his usual selfe," states one the Bosnian Serb generals who recently saw the UN General in answer to the question how does General Morillon look these days) openly supports the sending of ground troupes under the UN flag.  One other general who knows the Serbs well, Sir Michael Rose, states that the morale of the Serbs is higher and that in war morale always wins out.  Sandy Berger, Security Advisor to the American President, energetically answers all nervous question regarding the sending of ground troupes that no such plans exist.  On Sunday, he stated for the BBC that he does not believe that the sending of several hundred thousand American soldiers to occupy Serbia for the next five or 10 years represents the right way out.  "The right way out," according to Clinton's logic is to increase the destruction of Serbia.  However, the weekly Time Magazine reports that the so-called "phase one" did not go quite as planned - they intended to destroy Yugoslav defense potentials so that they could rush in their tanks and artillery with reduced risks of casualties.  The greatest number of rockets remains hidden, while the majority of radars remains turned off, observes Time Magazine.  The Pentagon was especially interested in destroying some 30 SAM-6 rockets, but admitted that they did not come across the better part of these.  They fear that the Serbs will deploy these rockets once they begin flying lower.

This strategy speaks very ill about its planners, implementors and propagators.  Asked whether the intervention is spurring on violence, Clinton's answer is "Absolutely not!"  Mr. Clinton is fabricating more in this instance than in the "Lewinsky case".  During last summer when the police intervened against the KLA, the western press manipulated with figures approaching 250,000 people who left their homes, while this time,  after the beginning of "Decisive Action" which has been inspired by "the moral imperative," it operates with figures approaching 500,000!  Western media report with no small amount of excitement that the situation in Kosovo is approaching a humanitarian catastrophe.  It is reported that 11,000 refugees fled to Albania during last week, that these are mostly women and children, and that men have not been permitted to flee.  On the Yugoslav side (Vice-President of Federal Government Vuk Draskovic, Yugoslav Ambassador to the UN, Vladislav Jovanovic, and Serbian Commissar for Refugees, Bratislava Morina) they report that people are fleeing from the war zone and that the humanitarian catastrophe can only be stopped if the military intervention is stopped, and if the KLA is ordered by western leaders not to attack the Yugoslav armed forces from behind while they find themselves in a difficult situation.  It should have been clear that in cities and villages, in streets and squares, that the situation would be confusing and tragic while the state of war continues.  On the first night of the intervention, it was already known in the Pristina Media Center that the planes have taken off, and the attack was being expected.  Cellular phones rang constantly.  As night approached, the working section of the building was being evacuated for the bar section in Grand Hotel.  Deki, the waiter, is serving drinks and charging immediately for them.  Our reporter testifies that the CNN reporters who are present are visibly nervous - during the day they were attacked by some residents of Pristina who broke their camera.  At dusk, some armed civilians entered the Media Center...  Lights went out in the whole city.  Grand Hotel, which was home to many witnesses of local conflicts, demonstrations, people's movements, terrorists and anti-terrorists since 1981, and which even in normal times hardly looks cheerful, now appears completely ghostly.  Waiters gather around journalists and inquire into the situation.  Someone says: "It'll start now!"  By fateful coincidence, the muffled sound of an explosion can be heard.  Everyone leaves the building to guess where it has fallen.  Some shout "Ajvalija", some shout "the airport."  In the second wave of bombing, journalists count five dots in the sky, which expert journalists decode as certain types of planes - convinced, almost to the point of knowing the pilot personally.  Those were moments in which the last lamp was put out in that Balkan restaurant made famous by Krleza.  Traffic lights continue to send their signals in darkened Pristina.  Our reporter observes that passengers in passenger cars are armed to the teeth.  At the entrance to the city, the army is directing traffic.

Time Magazine quotes John Hilen, from the American Center for Strategic and International Studies, who quotes three rules for intervention in a civil war, rules which were defined by historian Michael Howard: "First - don't!  Second, if you do, choose your side!  Third - if you choose the side, choose the one that will win!"  Time Magazine concludes that NATO broke two of the above three rules last week.  Why only two?

In the same article a KLA commander is quoted who nervously complained over the phone: "We are surrounded, Serbian forces are everywhere - at least 30,000 thousand soldiers and over 200 tanks.  We are not in a good position!"

The predictions that this mission of aggression against our people, one of many throughout history, will have the effect of striking fear in us did not come true.  In such an atmosphere, when it can clearly be seen in Serbia that America has taken the side of the KLA, Medelin Albright takes time to remember that she grew up in Belgrade and that she speaks the Serbian language, and that in this language she sends a message to the Serbian people, who are listening to that message on March 27 (the same date when in 1941, Belgrade sent a message to Hitler: "Better war, than a pact!") from the safety of bomb shelters, while there are explosions in Belgrade's suburbs of Rakovica, Bubanj Potok, Surcin, Pancevo...  It is a pity that our government is rigid about quoting such propaganda - an entire festival can be organized around this.  In any case, that is exactly what happened in Belgrade on Sunday, March 28, at noon.  A youth passed in front of the broken windows of the American Cultural Center, spitting on the broken glass.  He headed to the Square of the Republic where during the bombing alert a concert called "Singing Keeps Us Going!" was organized, whose participants included the same people who in 1997 carried signs that read "Belgrade Is Part of the World!", as well as some representatives of the ruling party, who swung clumsily to the rhythms of rock music.  There was shouting in support of Vlade Divac.  When the popular rock star, Rambo Amadeus showed up, the M.C. shouted: "Rambo is on our side!"  To the M.C.'s message that those above are watching and that they ought to have something to look at, a thousand hands were instantly raised toward the sky, with their middle fingers stiffened.  That night, above Srem, Yugoslav antiaircraft defense downed the famous F-117, the pride of the American Air Force, a plane that changed the way war is conducted.  On the occasion of that downing, the most popular sign being carried in the Square of the Republic read: "Sorry, We Didn't Know It Was Invisible!"  The Srem variation on this is: "Sorry, We Feel Ever So Sorry!"  That day in Belgrade it was clear that spite and despair were intermixing - the memorial expressing gratitude to France ("We Love France the Way She Loved Us in 1914-1918"), now in red, loud letters it reads "Love Germany the Way She Loved You!" and "Eternal Glory to France Which Is No Longer!"  And on the white Neuman designed building which used to be the French embassy, now it reads, beside the entrance: "Republic of Corsica."  The majority of graffiti deals with comparisons of 1939 and 1999, between Hitler and Clinton, and there are many variations of the fact that "Serbia is not Monica."  On TV screens it can be seen that this detail is repeated in demonstrations across the world which protest the intervention: in Moscow, Athens, Toronto, Bonn, Vienna...  That evening in the yard of "Mihajlo Petrovic Alas" school (former "Pera Popovic Aga"), kids were angry at the rain ruining their plans to play basketball that evening.  While they were waiting under cover, they discussed the modalities of autonomy in Kosovo.  In Knez Mihajlova Street, a battle graffiti was being rained on: "Serbs, You Are Either Heros, or Pussies!"  Our correspondent from Valjevo reports that in the main street, right in front of the community center, kids are playing street soccer.  The goal posts are marked with pictures of Albright and Clinton.  The ball reached Clinton first.  Sirens went off.  The majority shouted: "Keep playing!"  But it was impossible in the dark.  The residents of Valjevo keep cracking jokes that by saying no to the enemy they have executed a tactical withdrawal: "Those who have family, decisively withdrew to the country, those who didn't, withdrew to the bomb shelters and rat on those who failed to turn off their light to the Community Headquarters for Civil Defense and - to the media."

As soon as the bombing began, Belgrade's disco club "Underground" stopped its operations and, dug as it is into the old fortress of Kalemegdan, was quickly transformed into a bomb shelter.  Our reporter observed a group of fairly confused Ukrainians from a passenger boat docking for customs.  When the sirens went off, they were shown the way to the nearest bomb shelter.

In Kragujevac thousands of workers gathered at a meeting from which the message was sent that they will act as a living shield, holding a round-the-clock vigil in their factory.
Having chosen the Albanian side for its ally, the Western Alliance wrecked many bridges in Belgrade, like a cowboy who barges into a theater with his wagon, and that was the principal source of despair here.  As for what is happening in peoples minds, there will be time to speak about that.  What there is little time for is that from hour to hour, in the night, in the fire, in the flash from an explosion, people are losing their lives from small, bright dots which approach at a high rate of speed.

With a strange coincidence of dates (these days carry associations with March 27 and April 6, Day of Serbian Statehood) on the third day of the NATO intervention, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic placed a wreath at the Monument to the Unknown Solider on Avala.  What are our chances that this former unknown soldier wont have company in the near future?

Serbian Patriarch Pavle called on the governments of all countries on Monday, March 29, to stop the bombing of FR Yugoslavia and for a just solution to the crisis to be found through negotiations.  He directed his appeal to the Yugoslav and the world public, calling on the military and civilian authorities of Serbia and FRY to do everything that they can in order for peace to be achieved.  "We and the rest of the world are always faced with the same question: Is there such a thing as a just war?  The evangelical answer is: The war of aggressors and conquerors is unjust.  The war of defenders is just."  Instead of analyzing the words of Patriarch Pavle, we quote them here in their entirety: "In the calamity which befell our fatherland with the attack and the bombing by NATO, I address the governments of all countries for the bombing to stop and for a just resolution to this crisis to be reached through negotiations.

I call on the military and civilian authorities of Serbia and FRY to do everything that they can in order for peace to be achieved.  We and the rest of the world are always faced with the same question: Is there such a thing as a just war?  The evangelical answer is: The war of aggressors and conquerors is unjust.  The war of defenders is just.  In the conscience of our people, Kosovo is not merely a territory and a land in which our greatest holy relics lie.  It is the lesson which those relics teach us - that the Holy Duke Lazar went to Kosovo to defend their own land, not to take away the land of others, to defend their own freedom, not to take away the freedom of others, to defend their own fate, and not to impose their fate on others.  That Esau has the right and the duty to defend himself from Cain.

I call on all bishops of all eparchies, here and abroad, on the clergy and on all believers in these hard times that have befallen us to multiply their prayers to God, the Emperor of Peace, for the suffering of our people and for all those who in the name of justice are suffering persecution and abuse, for badly needed peace to come back to us and to all other peoples with different faiths and beliefs who live along us."

Yes, that insanity must cease, that insanity must be put a stop to.  This magazine has the legitimacy to call on the moral obligation of the most powerful to be the first to stop and to withdraw from the Balkans on their toes, and to ground those dangerous implements of execution.  As the first week has shown - there is no clean war, on the contrary, proof is evident that this American "clean war" is extremely dirty and dangerous in the long term.

VREME Team of Reporters