BELGRADE (40 page)

Yesterday was a beautiful day, with no electricity, no water. People had despair in their eyes, as if they had no idea what to do with themselves. It’s not just the bombs, it’s this pointless passing of time which destroys us. There are problems with the children, the small ones cry all the time, the big ones are angrier and more spoiled than ever.

The effects of the bombing can still be seen at some places on Belgrade’s streets. Buildings associated with the army, police or government lining Knez Miloš Street were hit and, while many have been reconstructed, a few ruins still stand as memorials. There was fear that the NATO bombers would try to destroy the bridges in Belgrade, as they attacked all the bridges over the Danube in the northern town of Novi Sad and elsewhere. Bridges were assumed to be legitimate military targets as communication facilities that could be used by the Serbian army. But, these facilities in Belgrade were left intact.

There was some opposition to NATO’s policy, evident in the many demonstrations that took place in cities around the world. The mistakes when civilians were bombed instead of military installations caused an international outcry. The Chinese Embassy in New Belgrade was struck with some lives lost, explained by NATO as the result of using out-of–date maps. In the early hours of 23 April NATO aircraft attacked the television studio at Tašmajdan, causing extensive damage and killing the technicians and others working inside at the time. A commemorative stone has been placed in the park nearby. It is inscribed with the names of those who perished and at the top it bears the one word
Zašto
(Why).

Many novels have been written and films made relating to wars in which Serbia has been involved during the twentieth century. The same can be said for any other culture, as wars evoke strong feelings and have an impact on our lives like few other events. They are central to the collective memory of a society, giving a sense of destiny and greater purpose to the community. They act as markers in an otherwise undifferentiated passage of historical time by which a people can divide up its legacy as either prewar or post-war. Novels and films about war also perform important functions in relation to the social imaginary. They help to form a specific shape of the war through which the conflict will enter the national imagination and leave a testimony of that experience. This shape is an important part of commemoration and mourning, of national or community re-building, memorializing victories and defeats, heroism and destruction.

Stories and films began to appear almost before the bombing was over. They share certain elements of the conflict, providing a recognizable set of details that immediately tell an audience the place and time of events. These motifs go further, giving form to that conflict and helping it to ease its way into the mythic structure of the national narrative. One of the first films to include the war as its main theme is
Wounded Land
(Ranjena zemlja, dir. Dragoslav Lazić, 1999), which contains images that are not uncommon in depictions of bombing as it affects a civilian town, but which are also specific to this particular war as experienced in Belgrade. The first sign of an impending attack is given by air-raid sirens, followed by columns of people lining up to go into an underground shelter. It could be a scene from the Blitz in London, except that the entrance to the shelter is next to the apartment block in which the families live and was constructed at the same time for such an eventuality. People make the best of their predicament with humour and resignation, while barbed comments and jokes are made at the expense of the British and American political leaders who support the NATO campaign. Most of those in the shelter are women, children and older men—brothers and other young men are away fighting the enemy. The mention of certain targets hit by NATO, such as the Chinese Embassy, is a reminder of the specific Belgrade scenario. Most films refer particularly to the attack on the television studio and typically include newsreel footage of the damage inflicted. The use of archive footage could be almost classed as a motif in itself. One of the strangest scenes shows people not only sitting through the bombing, but also watching it reported both on Serbian and western television stations. This mixing of first-hand and reported experience introduces a note of distance into critical moments, almost asking whether the bombing took place here or somewhere else. Another motif is a general fascination with the colour of the night sky illuminated by semi-circular bursts of orange on the horizon and the firework display sent up by anti-aircraft fire from the ground. This image is influenced by the spectacle of war as broadcast on television. Such scenes are sometimes observed from the tops of tall buildings by ordinary people treating the event as a performance, sitting in deck-chairs and watching through binoculars.

An altogether more complex portrayal of the war and its effects is given in the film
Land of Truth, Love and Freedom
(Zemlja istine, ljubavi i slobode, dir. Milutin Petrović, 2000). The focus of the main story falls on a patient in a mental hospital. He is a young man by the name of Boris, who worked as a film editor for Serbian television until traumatized by the NATO attack on the studio where he was working. He is taken to a doctor who begins a therapy session by showing him ink spots and asking for his immediate reaction to what he sees. The patient takes control of the session and from his professional expertise as a film editor makes up another story by selecting the ink spots and using them as story boards.

His story reflects the reality of 1990s Belgrade under sanctions. Two hitmen are hired to kill someone else. On completing their task, one of the assassins, Đorđe, goes on a rampage, killing his partner and then turning on other people. In the final scene of this film-within–a-film, Đorđe is visiting Belgrade zoo where he meets his former accomplice’s widow, Mirela. They begin to talk and the two of them walk off together down a path in the zoo, as if a romantic episode between them is about to unfold. This embedded narrative alternates with scenes from 1999, presenting NATO’s military campaign as part of the historical process in which Yugoslavia disappeared and Belgrade was subjected to sanctions. At the end the film returns to Boris in the hospital. He is standing by a wall in which a hole suddenly appears, through which he makes his escape into another world full of light. He has survived the pains and trauma of history, and is now prepared for a new story to begin.

When hostilities came to an end in June 1999 President Milošević tried to present the conflict’s outcome as a victory that he had engineered. If anyone believed him at the time, they did not a year later. At presidential elections in September 2000 the electorate voted against him. He tried once more to steal the votes, pretending that he had not lost and that there would have to be a second ballot as no candidate had won more than fifty per cent of the vote. The opposition, led by candidate Vojislav Koštunica, called for mass demonstrations on 5 October. This time the Belgrade crowds were joined by large numbers from outside the city. Police tried to block roads into Belgrade, while security forces attempted to contain the demonstrators, even resorting to the use of tear-gas. These attempts failed and a revolution unfolded on the streets. The main media offices, some police stations and finally the National Assembly building on King Alexander Boulevard were taken over by angry protesters. The army made it clear that it would not intervene.

The president recognized defeat on 6 October and stepped down. Belgrade, and the rest of the country, was jubilant that Milošević had finally been forced to resign. The following year he was arrested at his home and in June 2001 sent to The Hague to face charges at the International War Crimes Tribunal. He died in prison on 5 March 2006—leading to claims by some that he committed suicide and by others that he was poisoned. The government refused all requests that he be given a state funeral and his body was buried in his home town of Požarevac.

Koštunica became president and, shortly after, Zoran Đinđić (1952–2003), another of the main opposition leaders, became prime minister of Serbia’s new coalition government. Đinđić was popular, especially in Belgrade, but he also earned many enemies for himself and it was clear that the gangland culture that had appeared in the city during the 1990s was not completely eradicated. He announced that he would act against organized crime and corrupt officials in the civil service. Taken together, these forces represented a powerful consortium and he was assassinated on 12 March 2003 by a sniper as he left the main government building. He was leaving through the back of the building, which stands on the corner of Knez Miloš and Nemanja Streets, on his way to get into his official car when the gunman fired. The shot came from an upper storey of one of the houses at the top of Admiral Guépratte Street, from a window with a clear view of the area below. It soon came to light that the plot involved former and current members of the state security services, Belgrade’s criminal community and senior government officials.

Đinđić was eventually succeeded as prime minister by Koštunica, who has continued to lead a shaky coalition of more or less democratic parties with the Radical Party in opposition. Boris Tadić took over the leadership of the Democratic Party in 2004 and was elected president of Serbia in the same year. A new election for the office of president was held at the beginning of 2008 following constitutional changes after Montenegro’s independence. Tadić’s main rival was the leader of the Radicals, Tomislav Nikolić. One of the main issues concerned relations with the EU as it was suspected that the EU would support a Kosovan declaration of independence which Russia had opposed in the UN Security Council. Nikolić advocated closer ties with Russia, but the electorate by a narrow majority supported Tadić’s more pro-western sentiments and he took the presidency for another term.

Belgrade went through a state of emergency in 1999, almost did so again in 2000, and then once more in 2003. Its status also went through changes in the same period when Montenegro voiced its unhappiness at its relationship with Serbia in the framework of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. So, on 4 February 2003 the Federal Assembly finally approved a new constitutional charter officially renaming the country as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. The term Yugoslavia was finally dead and would no longer be in use on maps and in atlases.

It was only a matter of time before Montenegro sought to go its own way. The country continued to be known under this unwieldy title until the referendum held on 21 May 2006 in Montenegro on secession from the state union. The vote was carried by a narrow margin and Montenegro became an independent state. Tito’s Yugoslavia was now divided into six sovereign states, the culmination of a process which began fifteen or more years earlier.

Over the last one hundred years Belgrade has been the capital city of the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Serbia under German occupation, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and now the Republic of Serbia. It still faces some political and diplomatic issues, particularly with respect to the future of Kosovo. The city rarely looks back over its various incarnations, although some of its older citizens have lived in as many as six or seven different countries, on a street with three of four different names, without ever having moved from the apartment in which they have spent the greater part of their lives.

It is a city with a vibrant atmosphere, perhaps because of all these sudden and dramatic changes. Investment is arriving in Belgrade, infrastructure is being improved, and foreign visitors are returning in large numbers. It has festivals of music, film and theatre throughout the year and a lively artistic life of its own. Literary circles organize readings and discussions between writers and critics. It gives the impression of a place that is not waiting for all problems to be settled before taking the bit between its teeth and setting off again, thinking of the future and what can still be accomplished rather than what has gone before.

Belgrade has experienced many drastic transformations of such a nature that they have barely allowed the town and its inhabitants to define their own identity before another disruption brings new challenges and new identities. It seems to possess holes and lacunae in its history that hinder those who seek a pattern of development to explain its evolution from one period to the next.

Belgrade was taken by Karađorđe and given its first taste of urban development by Miloš Obrenović. It was visited by the European Enlightenment in the shape of Dositej Obradović and given its language by Vuk Karadžić. The city’s political culture has been formed at the meeting point of different civilizations. It lies in a border region between East and West, the Balkans and Europe. It is situated at the point where two rivers meet below the fortress that has sheltered Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Ottoman and Serbian troops. Taken over by the Partisans in the 1940s and subjected to communist ideology, it was over time restored to something approaching normalcy. In the 1990s Belgrade succumbed again to an alien force, one which applied its criminal rules to the life of the city.

It has been severely damaged in the two world wars of the twentieth century, only on each occasion to rise again and become successful at the head of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Its urban contours give a visual reminder of these meeting points. It has two large Orthodox churches, one of them wrapped in a western architectural design, the other topped by a more characteristic cupola. The centre of the old town is a complex jigsaw of traditional Balkan style, the classical monumentalism of European architecture, Modernist fusions and Postmodernist experiment. New Belgrade contains all possible examples of contemporary urban design and planning.