Since foreign media houses still report that “huge numbers of people” gather to honour Milosevic, i had to go and see this with my own eyes. Once i got there, it wass all pretty clear to me. Number of something over 1000 people doesnt seem so large, but when they all line up, they make a cue that’s couple of hundred meter long, that does seem like a “huge number of people”.
(the pictures are on my flickr profile: http://flickr.com/photos/beograd/tags/milosevicfuneral/)
This is the end of the cue. Police is controling the line making sure that the incidents (such as the one that happened yesterday when group of people broke the glass at the entrance door) dont occure.
Bit later, i was approaching the beginning of the cue.
Meanwhile, the candle and flower sellers were having a great sale day. Milosevic books and pins were also selling very well i was told.
As i approached the very beginning of the line, the police stopped me and said that i cannot go any further unless i have reporter ID, which of course i didn’t have.
It would be stupid to let the silly thing like that stop me from getting to the museum, so i found the other way around.
Numerous TV and news crews were interviewing people standing in cue, asking why they want to pay tribute, and most of the replies sounded similar: “We were living happy and content during his rule, we had enough food, everything was cheap, we could go to doctor for free, it was peace, yada, yada, yada…” Almost convincing enough to believe all this, right? Well, i would if i wasn’t actually living here during this time, and it wasn’t quite like that for the most of us.
Well, remember when i said couple of posts earlier that i never was closer to the dictator? This is actually even closer. The building on the picture is the Museum of Yugoslavian revolution. The director didn’t approve the museum being turned into a memorial center, so this means that he is breaking law and constitution even when he is dead. I also found out that this is the first time in world history that a museum is being used for something like this. Also, it is not legal in Serbia for person to be buried in a backyard. But hey, he broke the law so many times, not to mention the constitution and was generally a very naughty person, so i am willing to let him go with this one.
One more thing in news today:
Since the counter-burial is no longer necesarry, a counter-obituary in a newspapers with the biggest circulation, “Politika”, seemed like a good idea.
For those few people that don’t understand Serbian cyrillic (are there such people anyway?) here is the translation:
Thank you for all the lies and thievery, for blood of thousands innocent people, for fear and dubiousness, for lost lives and insecurity, for dreams which were never fulfilled, for horrors and wars which you lead in our name, without our agreement, for all your sins that you transferred to us!
We remember the military tanks and blood on Belgrade streets. We remember Dubrovnik. We remember Knin and Krajina. We remember Sarajevo and Srebrenica. We remember the NATO bombardment. We remember Kosovo. We are yet to remember it. And to dream about it.
We remember the dead, wounded, misfortuned and refugees. We remember our ruined lives.
The citizens of Serbia who remember
Nada (hope), Srecko (happiness), Zivko (life), Sloboda (freedom), Vesela (joy) and Mile Curcic
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
okay your article just isn’t fair to the man. of course he was no angel but he wasn’t the devil everyone made him out to be. Serbs in Serbia hated him because under him 200,000 were forced to flee from Croatia without him ever even lifting a finger, they were forced to endure 10 years of the harshest sanctions and 78 days of nato bombings that completely destroyed the economy and kosovo was stripped away with another 200,000 serbs fleeing there. But he is most certainly NOT guilty of these things. It is NATO, Croatian forces, Bosnian forces and Albanian terrorists that are. Serbs simply hated him because he claimed to fighting to protect these when in the end he lost everywhere. He was a man in probably the most difficult position anyone could be. But in the last years of his life he spent it defending himself in the hague and if you watch the trial you can listen to him destroy all the lies that were thrown against him and the serbian people. He most certainly was not guilty of Srebrenica, he disproved the supposed “genocide” in kosovo and lots of other lies. After all in 2007 the ICJ ruled that Serbia did not conspire to commit any sort of genocide in bosnia which effectively declared him innocent of the greater serbia every claimed he wanted. Again he certainly was no angel, but he wasn’t the devil everyone made him out to be