Shorts

Victory

A combined Serbia-Montenegro police team played a soccer game against their Bulgarian counterparts last week in Belgrade in some kind of Balkan league and proved that we can count on them in more ways than one. Besides allowing us to sleep peacefully on their watch they managed to get together a winning team. The Bulgarians went home after a 7-0 defeat.

The spectacle was reported on Studio B's SOS channel. The report included something very unusual for soccer games here: the national anthem (carried over from the former Yugoslavia) was played with no whistles and in dignified silence and the two teams were applauded by all 500 soccer fans after the game.

The FRY team got together in the center of the field for pictures. Someone brought in a flag but they turned it upside down by mistake,. Luckily it didn't have the Croatian coat of arms.

Paper

The paper factory in Berane could resume work in the next couple of months. The restart of operations at the Montenegrin loss-producing plant, which wasn't closed down because of the sanctions, was initiated by the local authorities and won the support of both republican governments. The method of operation at the plant (which destroyed all life in the Lim river) shows that this is a wise business move: lumber will be taken from Montenegro to the Matroz plant in Vojvodina for processing into cellulose which will then go back to Berane

Belgrade Bombers Attacked

We don't know yet if Aleksandar Gajic (34) and Milan Dobrilovic (33) are guilty of the latest two attacks on the Bajrakli mosque in central Belgrade but they were arrested for planting bombs in Belgrade earlier. They were charged with causing several explosions in Belgrade from 1992 to 1994 with the help of Dragan Grmusa (38) and Dragan Cepic (41). All of them are refugees who came to Belgrade with a large amount of explosives and weapons.

The Belgrade police did not say whether they took part in the war but they waged war in Belgrade against non-Serb shrines and people by throwing explosive devices and then running before they blew. They are suspected of bombing the mosque on December 8, 1992 and the St. Ante Catholic church on May 26, 1993 and throwing an explosive device into the apartment of Fehmi Abdurahmani.

The police found almost two kilos of plastic explosives with detonators, three hand grenades, three pistols, a machine pistol and a large amount of ammunition in their homes.

Avramovic Meets Cosic

"How does your Time in Power and the suffering of the people end," a faithful reader asked Dobrica Cosic recently.

"The same way as your dinar," Cosic replied, revealing the identity of the questioner to reporters at a promotion of the book.

"Then there's no problem," National bank Governor Dragoslav Avramovic replied, laughing. He disappeared later as discretely as he had appeared while Cosic was engaged in a literary conversation with reporters. Literary because the editor of Cosic's novel, Rajko Petrov Nogo, asked reporters to keep everything within the confines of literature. That was not narrow enough to keep him from complaining that "the central media are keeping this novel hidden". Cosic also set the tone for the promotion when he said journalists hadn't shown much interest in his writing over the past 10 years. He then asked reporters to show mercy for his work because he won't be able to satisfy all their curiosity.

Perhaps it was a real feeling that bases itself in the writers' skepticism and pessimism, but the course of the talks turned that request into a rhetorical figure. Cosic spoke openly about his novel, future books, his poetry and the novel as his philosophy of life. "I never managed to write a short story although I always wanted to." He also wanted to write poetry but never managed. "There's only one fact in this novel that is conditionally autobiographic", he said of the book which covers the 1960s. He stressed that he didn't use documents from the time and that he's not interested in documents.

"I invented as many documents as you believe are true," he said but added that some of his experience as FRY president will probably be used in a future book but that he didn't write when he was president. "I experienced meta-power," he said and wondered whether it was real or imaginary.

Djukic in Belgrade

The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague decided to provisionally release Bosnian Serb Army General Djordje Djukic so he can join his family in Belgrade but under strict conditions. He will have to inform the Tribunal of his address and report to it regularly. The charges against him weren't dropped. He was released because he has prostate cancer in the terminal stages.