Dragana and Vladimir have put on a jazz evening in the basement club of the Hyatt Hotel to publicise their latest video spots. The atmosphere is smoky; the conversation edgy. Dragana in her black micro-skirt and scarlet lipstick, and Vladimir in head-to-toe black casual chic, look exactly what they are: creative advertising people in their late 20s. Bombing is bad for business, so they have lost the accounts they had to promote western consumer products. They now use their creative energies to denounce western policies.
Their target audience is “the west”, and they know the language: one advert features a Spitting Image-type puppet of Clinton playing the sax, another has Robin Cook as Tony Blair’s toy. They overlay powerful images of babies injured by Nato bombs with dramatic music and the pumping, booming, repeating legend: “Stop the bombs!”
Dragana and Vladimir are modern people, who consider their cosmopolitan way of life as the alternative to the time-warp insularity of Slobodan Milosevic: capitalist not communist, democratic not despotic. So why, I ask, do your anti-war spots give exactly the same message as the government propaganda? One video spot on Kosovo shows a mound of cocaine, scraped by a razor-blade into the acronym KLA, while another has a heroin injection drawing blood – the message is that the Kosovo Liberation Army is nothing but a bunch of blood-sucking drug mafiosi. Three spots about KLA involvement with drug-running are the only reference to Kosovo in Dragana and Vladimir’s presentation of more than 20 video shorts about the war.
What about the Albanian refugees? I venture. “CNN and Sky are the advertising agency for the refugees,” replies Vladimir.
Maybe you should air a short message about ethnic cleansing, I suggest. “Can you prove it’s happened?” asks Vladimir. “I have no proof.”
And so the shutters come down. I have hit the blind spot, the point where modern, educated, technologically sophisticated Serbs, with access to satellite TV and the Internet, refuse to see what is being done in their name. They complain that they are treated as the pariahs of Europe. They object to the anti-Serb prejudice which they perceive when they travel. They feel that they are blamed for everything Slobodan Milosevic has done, but they maintain that it is the Serbs who are the real victims, both of Nato and of Milosevic.
“We want to indict Milosevic for crimes against Serbs,” says Dusan Batacovic, one of Serbia’s leading historians of Kosovo, the day the War Crimes Tribunal announced the indictment of the Yugoslav president for the expulsion and murder of Kosovar Albanians. “We’re victims of the worsening relationship between the west and Milosevic.”
The indictments of Milosevic and four of his closest aides are meant to individualise guilt, and Nato leaders reiterate the tired mantra that they “have no quarrel” with the people they are bombing, only with the government. It is the modern, legalistic way to look at the world. There are no bad people, only bad leaders.
Yet the way the people I have spoken to here view their world raises uncomfortable questions. Those who oppose Milosevic do not appear to be outraged by his policies in Kosovo, nor by his previous sponsorship of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. They say Milosevic’s greatest crime has been to prevent Serbia from becoming an accepted part of the new Europe like Hungary or the Czech Republic. Their concern is the price Serbs have paid in the past decade of sanctions and international isolation, even though the hardship of life under air-raids in Belgrade is nothing compared to life under siege in Sarajevo.
President Milosevic conducts his wars at arm’s length – even Kosovo feels a long way from Belgrade – but Serbs, it seems, prefer to concentrate on problems near at hand. As a representative of the “Nato aggressors”, a foreigner from a country that is enthusiastically bombing Serbia, I struggle to overcome my sense that it is bad manners to raise the issue of Kosovo. Conversations in Belgrade become a parody of the old line: don’t mention the war! Whenever I ask what someone thinks about the cruel expulsion and killings of Albanians, I am told either that this is beside the point because the bombing is the only real issue, or that Serbs suffered more during the war in Croatia, or that we can believe nothing that Albanians say.
At first I thought people were afraid to talk, but in private people speak forcefully of their opposition to President Milosevic and his hated wife, Mira. When it comes to Kosovo, I am beginning to think that people here do not want to know, because if they did know they would have to do something.
“I can believe that some Serbs have done bad things in the war,” says a young Serb man who works as a translator. “But I cannot believe that it’s a policy. If I believed that . . .” He pauses: “Well, I just can’t believe it.” After seeing burnt, deserted, Albanian villages in Kosovo, he tells me that it is impossible to know who did it. “It might have been the KLA,” he says.
Serbs who would not describe themselves as nationalistic nonetheless show a strong sense of collective identity and history. To this way of thinking, the pattern is set: Europe betrays Serbia time and again, so the Serbs stand alone. “Generations before me have gone through the same thing,” says Dr Sanya Pavlovic, a senior doctor at Belgrade’s Emergency Centre. More than others, she sees the impact of war, because she has to stitch up the wounded when Nato bombs and missiles go astray. “This isn’t the first time we’ve been betrayed . . . but we keep our hardships to ourselves. We’re a different culture. We don’t like to talk about our misery,” she says.
A sense of collective, historical experience, however, does not translate into a feeling of collective responsibility. “There is only personal responsibility. I have never personally wronged anybody,” says Dr Pavlovic.
The idea that as a citizen you have a responsibility to find out what is being done in your name seems to have little currency. I frequently ask people how they explain the war to their children. “I explain that every generation here has seen war. These things have to happen,” replies Dr Pavlovic, who has daughters aged 14 and nine. “My family has been more than 600 years in the Balkans. I am defending my home and I’m not afraid of anything. The children accept these explanations.”
Children tell me that Nato wants to conquer the Serbs, to take their land. “They do an evil thing. They are bad people,” says Danilo, a 14-year-old boy. As for Kosovo, the children tell me that Serbs and Albanians lived in harmony there until now.
The Serbs had their chance to get rid of President Milosevic in 1996 when, during a cold, clear Christmas, they came out on to the streets of Belgrade, Nis and other cities to call for the reversal of rigged elections. It was a heady time, and briefly anything seemed possible. President Milosevic would go, the curse would be lifted, Serbia would take its rightful place in modern Europe.
But the opposition leadership quarrelled and fractured, the momentum was lost, snow turned to slush and everyone went home.
“It just disappeared,” says one young woman. “I don’t know where it went.” Nato hopes that the Serbs will revive that mood of defiance and topple Milosevic. Maybe they will, but it won’t be for the reasons Nato wants, and it won’t necessarily pave the way for a less nationalistic government or one that cares about the human rights of Kosovar Albanians. In the years to come, one of Milosevic’s crimes in the eyes of Serbs may not be that he expelled Albanians, but that he lost Kosovo.
Recently Nato bombed a barracks in the centre of Belgrade. Wandering around looking at the damage, I go into a front garden to see a house being repaired. A slim, young woman in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt comes out to talk to me. Vladana is 18. She has just finished high school and is preparing to study philosophy at university. She tells me that she hates American culture, and that the bombings are a manifestation of the illness of the whole world.
I ask who is to blame. “I don’t think the blame is entirely on Nato; the blame is here, too,” she replies. I ask the difficult question about collective guilt. “People here are very guilty,” she says. “They have no courage. They have been manipulated. My people are very strange. There is too much patriotism and they don’t look at things broadly. It’s some kind of megalomania.”
It is the first time I have heard someone in Belgrade accept the idea that responsibility might rest not just with Nato and Milosevic, but with the people, too – and struggle with the question of why the Serbs had allowed such terrible things to be done in their name.
“We always think we are great and can fight. We think the whole world is against us, but we are great. But I don’t think so,” says Vladana, and she goes back to helping her father collect shards of glass from the lawn.
Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for “Channel 4 News”
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