The Daily Telegraph May 31, 1999
SUFFERING TURNS SERB BULLIES INTO MARTYRS
It may be that civilian population in Kosovo is about to
crack. It is just that it doesn't look that way here.
By Boris Johnson
Something went bang very loudly and the alarms went off.
Dogs started barking. "Cleenton, Cleenton!" said the old fellow
with the scar, waving his hands skywards.
Actually it turned out it was only the sonic boom of a NATO
jet, easing back to Aviano perhaps after re-demolishing some
suburban radio mast, and Belgrade got on with Sunday morning.
"Cleenton criminal," said the codger and carried on with his brandy
and coffee.
In the National Museum, highbrows were listening to the
crashing chords of Serbian classical music. The postcard sellers got
on with hawking views of "Belgrade By Night" (tracer fire). The
passers-by hardly glanced at the remnants of the foreign ministry
and other buildings, where the Tomahawks have left 20ft entry
wounds.
It may be that the alliance is right in claiming the civilian
population is about to crack, and that they will rise up and
demand an end to the reign of Milosevic. It is just that it
doesn't look that way here. If anything, it looks as though
NATO is merely strengthening Serb resistance.
Vuk Draskovic, once touted as the democratic alternative to
Slobo, told this newspaper that "since the beginning of the
NATO aggression, European and American bombs have killed
128 members of my party who, two years ago, demonstrated
carrying American and European flags. That is how NATO
helps the democratising process in this country".
When civilised Serbs think of sufferings caused by the Kosovo
war, they think of premature Serbian babies snuffed out in
maternity wards when NATO cuts the power, of vaporised make-
up girls and sackfuls of body parts from bombed trains and buses.
"Serbs are for NATO what the Jews were for Hitler," says Mr
Draskovic. "Targets." That is why the miseries of the Kosovo
Albanians are not uppermost in the Serbian conscience. We who
watch the BBC know there is incontrovertible evidence of ethnic
cleansing, murder and rape by Serb forces in Kosovo. That is not
quite the picture presented here.
Over the weekend a convoy of journalists was taken to see how
the destruction of the Zastava car factory had wrecked the
economy of Kragujevac, about 90 miles south of Belgrade. An
Albanian family was produced, led by Idris Dahiri. He had in fact
been laid off by Zastava in 1991, but was dependent on the firm for
his dole.
"This NATO pact with their attacks took the bread from our
table," said Mr Dahiri, through a Yugoslav interpreter. To make
matters worse, he now has to support his daughter and two of her
children, who had fled Kosovo. Why did they flee? NATO attacks,
of course. "Yes, we ran away from NATO. We did not run away
from the Serbs," parroted Nedzmija Dahiri, the daughter. "Yes, our
house was destroyed by NATO. It was destroyed completely.
"No, we did not see any ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, we
received much help from the Serbian army." A British reader might
greet this account with suspicion, and there are many Serbs who
will acknowledge, privately, the dark things done by their people.
Outside the Dahiri flat, where young people were mooching
around and playing with dogs, Zlatko, 22, made a chopping motion
with his hands and said: "I don't want to talk about Albanians. I
think there should be ethnic cleansing." Mario, 13, exclaimed: "We
should do ethnic cleansing here."
There may very well be Serbs who would be appalled by such
attitudes. But any sense of guilt has been all but extinguished by the
Serbs' own sufferings. Any sense that they have been bullies is
replaced by their own martyr complex, of this tiny nation against
the world. That is the flaw in the NATO strategy - one of the flaws,
anyway.
