Poor Babies 10 June 1999

2:50 PM: The war is over, the war begins...

The street lights came on in downtown Belgrade on Wednesday night for the first time in 10 weeks. By midnight cars swarmed around Republican Square, lights flashing and horns blaring and music pumping from their sound systems. Girls and soldiers in uniform hung out of the car windows or rode on the tops of cars, holding their fingers out in victory signs. "We came to celebrate victory," said one lanky conscript from Western Serbia. "We got through nearly 80 days of bombing. No one else can survive that except us. That is a victory." Asked who won the war, NATO or Yugoslavia, he paused to think. "We never lost the war," he said. Asked if people saw them as heroes, he said: "In a way, when you resist the whole world." "I came here tonight to celebrate our victory, to show how great Serbia is," said one man driving a car full of friends. "I have two children and they had to sleep with a pillow over the window because of the bombing. Can you imagine what it is like for children and their parents?" he said.

In Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi's door came at 1 o'clock in the morning of the night NATO started bombing. "We will kill you if you do not open in five seconds," the Serbian police shouted, his wife, Nedima, recalled. Five uniformed policemen burst in, forced the family to lie on the floor and demanded money, one warning, "If you are lying, I will kill the little children." They took away Kelmendi, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his two sons, age 30 and 16. They told the elder son, Kastriut, "Kiss your wife and two children because this will be the last time you see them," the elder Mrs. Kelmendi said. The family found the three bodies by the side of the road two days later. On March 30, in a chilling display of force, the Serbs began systematically emptying Pristina's neighborhoods -- Vranjevci, Tashlixhe, Dardania, Dragodan -- marching the Albanians along streets lined with gantlets of masked gunmen draped with weaponry, refugees said. "I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black masks and big guns," said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as she crossed the Albanian border with her elderly parents the next day. "In every house they broke the doors," she said, speaking in English. When we went out, everyone was in the street walking between men with black masks and big guns." Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for two months, hiding in five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old retired policeman was standing in line to buy bread when Serbian policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both men under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Berisha said he had seen two people gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless men being led away was too much. "You can't even buy bread," he said.

The Serbs are not going to ... assume the role of new Jews without a big battle.
- Mira Markovic, President of the Yugoslav Left (JUL) party Directorate, AKA Mrs. Slobodan Milosevic

Air drops of antipsychotic medication, you think?

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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All names are fake, most places are real, the author is definitely unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep. © 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne.