When coming into Belgrade from the airport, the chances are you’ll see couple of bombed and destroyed buildings in the big street leading into the city, Kneza Milosa. In a way these buildings have become the landmark of Belgrade, since there is no telling when and if they will be torn down or (less likely) repaired.
Seeing these images undoubtfully triggers the following question with the newcomer, directed straight forward to his or her host: “What it was like during the bombing?”
Since the author of this site has recieved and answered this question about a million times, putting some interpretation on the web seemed like a logical thing to do. And what better day to do it than today, the 7th aniversary of the bombing.
Well, as easy this may appear to give the answer, it’s not that simple. It appears that every one had it’s own version and impressions from bombing period, with one thing in common: feelings are very strong when it comes to this subject whether the person has spent the bombing in the shelter or not. So this point of view is as subjective as it gets too.
The feeling of helplessness perhaps the strongest of all. Some people choose to fight it with humour, some with cursing the planes above, some didn’t know how to fight it at all. Nobody came out of the bombing untouched in some way.
In the beginning, the first few days, it was scary because nobody knew what to do in this situation. This was the kind of things you only see on movies. The sirens go off – from that moment, you are on your own. Go to the shelter and you’re safe, but then you have to listen to all the crying babies and children, weeping grannies and mumbling old guys. So you choose to stay out and see what happens. Luckily, except for the few whistling sounds and planes breaking the sound barrier, not much happens. So you decide after a couple of days that this bombing is not so terrible after all. Schools are out, university too, almost nobody goes to their jobs. It’s a big party on the streets. The biggest problem seems to be the smokers bitching and wining about the lack of foreign cigarettes. Traffic is low, so you can ride a bicycle on the streets with ease. After first couple of weeks, it’s like everybody is used to it, even the number of the people going to shelters is less. It’s very very weird situation. You get to learn what the bomb sounds like when it flies over you and when it explodes. You learn to recognize the various types of planes. You learn really a lot about propaganda, both foreign and domestic.
But after a while, it starts to get boring, and towards the end it really gets intolerable. Not even the pirated films on the TV and endless arguments over the internet represent much joy to you. So you are really glad it’s over.
To this day the number of civilians and soldiers killer and wounded is not officially confirmed. It is estimated that the nubmer of casualities is somewhere between 1500 to 2000 people, either way the loss of human lives was enormous.
All in all, it seemed as if NATO teamed up with Milosevic against the little guy. After the bombing, Milosevic power was even greater than before, and the oposition was practicaly non existant. Maybe this desperate situation caused the last revolt in the people that helped to overthrow the dictator one year later, but if this is the case, the price was too high.
One thing the NATO bombing did help was putting the stop to all the attrocities that were taking place in Kosovo by the Serbian police, the thing almost nobody in Serbia was aware of, couldn’t do anything about it or didn’t care about it. Unfortunately, this intervention also triggered the start of Albanian extremist attrocities towards the Serbian minority, so this spiral of hatred continues to this day.
The buildings in center of Belgrade are not there as a remainder or a monument to the bombing, as some media like to represent it. It is simply the case of not having enough money to repair them / tore them down. But until someone thinks that it’s better to make tourist attraction out of them and starts charging for it, it is free to take photos of them as the souvenire.
Subjective and biased history lesson
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I’m just wondering where you learnt about atrocities in Kosovo-CNN or BBC. I’m sure all sides committed atrocities but only one, Serbian side had been accused. To independently understand situation as one Greek philosopher once said “We must be military equal to properly discuss about history”. I hope you understand what it means.
Good luck with your Blog and in search for the real truth
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