Memories of the 1999 NATO Bombing in Belgrade, Serbia

Pre Bombing: ‘Are You Going to Bomb Us, or Shall I Renovate My Flat First?’

The months building up to the beginning of the bombing are quite fuzzy in the memories shared with me. People remember a sense of confusion, of anticipation that something bigger or terrible was about to happen—a sense that ‘something was in the air’. I even heard reference to a graffiti that appeared in the city some time before the bombing, which posed the question, ‘Are you going to bomb us, or shall I renovate my flat first?’ But mostly people seemed unable to believe that there would really be airstrikes. As one participant recalled:

‘None of the ordinary people that I knew believed that the bombing was going to happen. My mom went to see a theatre show that night [the first night of the bombing campaign], even though it was stated that it was going to happen.’^[35]

The experience of war after all, as some respondents explained, had never come this close to home before: the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo were waged somewhere far afield, not in Serbia proper.

Prior to the bombing campaign, there had been debates among some in antiwar circles—those against and those in favour of foreign military intervention. Antiwar and antinationalist activists still remember the months leading up to the bombing campaign as an important time. As tensions rose in Kosovo in 1998 and as momentum seemed to be building towards an intervention, threats against activists from groups such as the Women in Black in Serbia became stronger. As one Woman in Black recalled:

‘Šešelj [Vojislav Šešelj, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party] threatened that in case of a military intervention they would kill one Woman in Black for each NATO plane—jedan avion nato-a, jedna žena u crnom.’^[36]

According to her, this act of intimidation, as stated in Šešelj’s speech in parliament, was a real threat, directed towards not only the Women in Black but also members of other antiwar groups such as the Humanitarian Law Centre, the Helsinki Committee, and the Belgrade Circle, and towards independent journalists who were then marked as the greatest enemies of the state.^[37] In the period building up to the bombing, some of the leaders and founders of the Women in Black and other opposition groups had to leave Belgrade, because they risked becoming targets not just of the regime, but also of ordinary people who blamed them for purportedly non-patriotic actions. Yet others decided to remain. The decisions to stay in the city or leave, and to support the bombing or oppose it, would number among the main points of contention and internal conflicts among antiwar groups and the individuals within them.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

To stay in Belgrade or leave: this was a matter reflected upon in all my interviews with individuals who were adults during the bombing, even though I didn’t always raise the issue myself. Being able to leave was (and still is) perceived as a mark of privilege, for the holder of a Yugoslav passport needed a visa to enter any other country at that time.^[38] As one interviewee, then a journalist for Blic remembered,

‘people who had already been marked as traitors, independent journalists,^[39] people from B92 or antiwar NGOs, had the privilege to leave Belgrade and watch the bombing from Montenegro or from Budapest’.^[40]

Some who left said that they then felt guilty for not staying. For others, though, leaving was not really an option. As one respondent explained:

‘It was a dilemma for everyone, and we immediately decided to stay in Belgrade. I had too many students, friends, family members; I could not just pack up and leave. We were also naïve to believe that NATO was not going to target civilians but only military targets. This was probably the intention but how do you differentiate when a military target is near a hospital? What they called “collateral damage” […].’^[41]

Staying was also a statement of preference for those who had arrived in Belgrade as refugees from earlier wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia. One participant, who was a sixteen-year-old teenager in 1999, had fled as a nine-year-old from Sarajevo to Serbia with her mother and sister when the city was besieged. She recalled what was for her an unforgettable moment:

‘I had already been living then [in 1999] in Serbia for seven years […]. My parents decided to move back to Sarajevo [when the bombing started] because Belgrade was not safe anymore. I remember my mother asking me what we should pack, and me thinking to myself, I cannot be a refugee all over again. I told my parents that I was not going […]. It was the first time I stood up against a decision of my parents, and I had it my way, they listened to me.'^[42]

For some, leaving was the only way to avoid the military draft.^[43] One participant in the study, who was an undergraduate student at the University of Belgrade at the time of the bombing, explained how he, along with most of his friends, found a way out:

‘I got a letter from the local military office with instructions to show up the next morning on site […]. I then heard that once you show up, they immediately send you to Kosovo. I was able through family connections to get a special permit to leave the country and go to a “music festival” abroad, which in fact never took place. My permission [to leave] was [only] for seven days but I stayed for two months.’^[44]

This sort of act was also seen as a matter of privilege: resisting the draft remained a personal act, as resistance or conscientious objection did not grow into a political movement.^[45] To leave the country to evade the draft or to escape the madness, one needed to have the right connections, and access to sufficient funds

Support the Bombing? Or Stand Against It?

Leaving, choosing not to participate in the war, or not to stay and live under such conditions was most often supported by a fierce resistance to Milošević, his regime and his policies. But towards the NATO bombing campaign, opinions varied. As Jasna Dragović-Soso has explained, ‘even non-nationalist Serbs who were long-time opponents of the regime saw Rambouillet as a stark choice between foreign occupation and bombing’.^[46] The question whether to oppose or to openly take a stand in favour of the intervention generated major internal disagreements within antiwar and anti-nationalist circles. One such divisive moment occurred after the bombing had begun, when a group of self-described ‘concerned citizens’ signed and published the statement entitled ‘Let Civility Prevail’.^[47] The text was an appeal to President Milošević, to the representatives of the Kosovar Albanians, NATO, and the EU, and to US leaders to immediately cease all violence and military activity and to engage in a search for a political solution to the conflict. Twenty-seven intellectuals, including prominent figures and leaders of antiwar civil society in Serbia, signed—but others did not. This became a sensitive issue and remains so even today, as there were those who supported some form of intervention to stop the madness but harboured reservations towards military involvement and resisted supporting such an action, especially because they had to live with the intervention’s consequences. While some gave their support and signed the appeal, others criticised it and made it evident that they objected to it being addressed to the international community or to the Kosovar Albanians. Those who signed made a point of publicly opposing the violence inflicted on all citizens of Serbia by the international intervention.^[48]

As one of the signatories, a leader among Serbia’s feminist antiwar circles, reflected fourteen years later,

‘What I was looking for in the statement was a clear assertion not only against the bombing in Belgrade, but also against what the paramilitary forces, army and police forces were doing in Kosovo […]. Only now when I read it again, did I notice the word aggression, a word that I do not agree with […]. That word was and still is a buzzword of the Milošević regime.’^[49]

For some of the signatories, the initiative itself represented an important, even a brave step. In the words of the late antiwar activist Jelena Šantić, who signed the appeal and later participated in a rally in Berlin against the bombing:

‘I talked [in Berlin] about why the NATO intervention could not bring about democracy, [about] what destruction and the killing of civilians in the name of ever-changing goals really means, about our understanding of the tragedy of Kosovar Albanians, about the fight of non-governmental organisations against the war and the great responsibility of Slobodan Milošević.’

In an interview with a German newspaper, she added:

‘Milošević first destroyed civil society, then the NATO bombs shocked intellectuals in the country who supported human rights and democracy, and pushed them towards anti-Western sentiment which has in the meantime enveloped the entire society. Those who worked for tolerance, who explained that human rights were rights of individuals, had to face the fact that Western democracies exposed ten million people to bombs so that they could punish one politician […]. The West is mistaken to only focus on Milošević. Even when he is no longer in power, influential and networked democratic forces will not automatically appear. Instead, there will be an empty field, devastated by NATO bombs.'^[50]

The position against the bombing is still very clearly articulated by antiwar activists as well as non-activists,

‘not only because it fostered national homogeneity but because we were in principle against military means and military intervention, we were against bombing, against anyone being bombed’.^[51]

The extent of the bombing’s harmful consequences for civic values and the civic struggle for human rights among activists in Serbia became clear in retrospect. At the time and in the aftermath of the events, antiwar activists felt betrayed by the international community, which was reluctant to show any support for the opposition to Milošević, especially during the 1996-97 student demonstrations against the regime (sparked by the stealing of local elections). The international community stuck to the argument that Milošević was a guarantee of the Dayton Peace Accords, which had ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.^[52] As Jasna Dragović-Soso has explained, Milošević was indeed considered by the United States and the bulk of the international community as a potential partner for peace in the Balkans throughout most of the mid-1990s, not as an intractable foe of democracy and stability. In fact, coercive Western diplomacy had the effect of rallying the Serbian public behind the flag and of undermining those forces that had tried, during the 1990s, to engage in peaceful dialogue with representatives of the Kosovar Albanians.^[53]

And yet, by 1999, not everyone was opposing foreign intervention, and not everyone was rallying behind the Serbian flag. Individuals in interviews I conducted in 2013 as well as back in 2004 revealed the presence of certain views, albeit unpopular at the time, that held that Serbia deserved to be punished—thus understanding, if not supporting, the so-called rationale behind the bombing campaign. Some even admitted feeling to some extent relieved when the intervention finally came, stating that it should have occurred much earlier—that way, the Milošević regime’s atrocities could have been stopped earlier (in reference to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina). Privately supporting, or at least not opposing, an intervention was one thing. Supporting it publicly was something else, and certainly a risk: but this viewpoint did exist and was voiced.

The founder and then the director of the Humanitarian Law Centre and the director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia were among those who did not add their names to the appeal and even criticised it. As the former stated:

‘I refused to sign the letter. I thought it should have been sent to Milošević because everything was in his hands. He could have stopped the bombing by negotiating and signing an agreement but he refused. While people in Serbia were looking at the sky waiting for bombs to fall, the situation in Kosovo was different; Serbian forces used the NATO campaign to expel Albanians, to kill, torture, and imprison them.’^[54]

The former director of the Humanitarian Law Centre was among the few from those circles who were actually present in Kosovo during the bombing in order to document the crimes committed against the Albanian population.

‘I travelled to Kosovo then to see what was happening […]. I saw it with my own eyes, and I could not understand how it was possible that people [in Serbia] did not want to see the truth. Everyone in Serbia spoke about the victims of the NATO bombing but no one would speak about Serbia’s victims […]. Milošević wanted and succeeded to create more fear, and to have people feel more like victims, to show everyone that Serbs are victims—to put pressure on the people here […]. The problem was that people did not see what was going on only 300 kilometres away [from Belgrade].’^[55]

The Bombing and the War in Kosovo

What emerges quite strongly from the data collected is indeed the distance and lack of awareness among ordinary people in Serbia with regard to the events that had taken place in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. Many in Serbia felt the bombing campaign had no connection to the war in Kosovo and the crimes committed against Albanians. As one interviewee explained,

‘The NATO bombing in Serbia is often addressed as if it had nothing to do with [the war in] Kosovo. Trying to contextualise the whole event, you immediately risk being attacked. For me the NATO bombing is not an isolated conflict, but rather, it was part of a long conflict that began already in the late 1980s.’^[56]

I argue that this gap in perceptions and in the narratives of the war events continues into the present and is key to understanding the current mnemonic battles in Serbia, as well as postwar Serb–Albanian and Serbia–Kosovo relations.

More than anything else, the differences in age group and in political and civic engagements among the study’s respondents at the time of the NATO campaign are most fully crystallised regarding this matter. Those collected memories offer evidence of almost diametrically opposed groups: those who, on the one hand, knew nothing about what was happening in Kosovo, about the war, and war crimes and ethnic cleansing—or in some cases knew of these things yet framed the bombing as being completely disconnected from the war in Kosovo; and those who, on the other hand, possessed a greater awareness of the events that had taken place in Kosovo, either through direct witness or via the reports of the free media. The raising of awareness among some of the young participants of this study resulted in several of them taking firm positions against the war in Kosovo, which then resulted in the bombing being framed in a completely different light.

Then and now, Kosovo has remained a distant, unfamiliar, even unimportant place for many people in Serbia.^[57] The study participants who were teenagers during the bombing spoke openly about not only their lack of knowledge but also about lack of interest in Kosovo. One stated,

‘I cannot say that in my mind the Kosovo story can fit into the [story of the] NATO bombing. I do know people there [in Kosovo] see it [the bombing] as liberation, it must be nice to feel liberated, and yet for me bombing is an unacceptable way to deal with [contested] territories.’^[58]

Another participant who came of age after the NATO campaign explained that he had then believed that Yugoslavia was being bombed only because of Milošević and his regime. He did not know what had happened a few years earlier in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo. The events were confusing, and only later, after the 2000 regime change in Serbia, did he become more informed:

‘The moment when I realised what was happening in Kosovo [during the 1990s] and why we were bombed in the first place only took place a number of years after 1999. I was then working with one NGO in a project assisting IDPs [internally displaced persons] and refugees in Serbia getting their documents and gaining civic rights. I then met people who worked on investigating war crimes in Kosovo. They were all very informed about what had been happening in Kosovo since 1998 […]. I only then realised that these were war crimes. Prior to that I was very supportive of and influenced by the student demonstrations in 1996-97. They were against Milošević and his regime, but not quite clearly against his policies. It was a melting pot of ideas, you could see a rainbow flag, a US or British flag and even a Četnik flag, but they did not protest against war crimes.’^[59]

Some participants who were of adult age during the bombing spoke about the difficulty of staying informed. As one participant, at the time a university student, recalls:

‘We did not have internet [access] and we did not have enough information about what was really going on in Kosovo. The media here only reported about the attacks of the KLA against Serbian police, military, or civilians. After I learned about the killing of the KLA leader Adem Jashari^[60] and his family, I remember feeling shocked […]. I did not like him but when I heard the police killed children and old people, it made me wonder “what were the police doing there anyway”.'^[61]

One participant had visited Kosovo during the war as a journalist working for a Belgrade-based independent media outlet. Even as an informed reporter, she admitted how difficult it had been to follow or grasp what was exactly going on. Her first visit to Kosovo was after the Jashari massacre in March 1998, about one year before the NATO bombing began. To her surprise, Serbian journalists were prohibited by Serbian security forces to leave Pristina and were, in fact, confined to the Grand Hotel in the city centre. ‘Denial’ was the word she kept using in reference to the entire period, from before the bombing to well after. She also problematises the silences she encountered:

‘My friends and family completely disregarded the fact that I was there [in Kosovo], they were not interested. There was no silence because I spoke about it all the time, but it was like I was talking to deaf people. You could see that people simply could not take it anymore. They were focused on their daily survival because the economic situation was so bad […]. It was not just their lack of interest, people were already exhausted and over their heads with what was happening [over a decade of crisis and war].’^[62]

Silence

While I was searching for participants for the study, for people who would be willing to speak about their memories of living through the bombing, my requests for an interview were met with either surprise and eventual acceptance, or polite refusal. When placing these memories in the context of current public mnemonic battles in Serbia, as discussed above, the voicing or silencing of the experience of the bombing brings up almost opposing practices. The bombing campaign is either overemphasised for the purpose of gaining political points in the ongoing competition over victimisation and suffering, or the memories of this period are completely silenced.

Silence seems to take various forms for this study’s participants. Self-imposed silence is most informative for understanding another layer of the dynamics among activists working on projects related to dealing with the past in Serbia. As one participant framed it,

‘Civil society actors say “you have to remember we were bombed because of all the crimes we did in Kosovo” […] which immediately shuts down the conversation among us. I risk being labelled a nationalist if I say that the NATO bombing was an act of violence […] as if I am negating what Serbs did to Albanians in Kosovo.’^[63]

Other explanations also help shed light on the silence. According to some participants, people do not speak about the bombing because they are overwhelmed with coping with other events or crimes. For others, silence helps to ensure distance from the question of responsibility. This contested question of responsibility is at the heart of the mnemonic battles currently being waged in Serbia. As Ivana Spasić has noted,

‘Serbian responsibility in initiating the wars in former Yugoslavia is only sporadically identified; war crimes are still too often something that “has to be proven” or “was done by all sides.”’^[64]

Placing responsibility solely on Milošević for Serbia’s involvement in the wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia, as well as blame for the failure to prevent the NATO airstrikes, has become a prominent sentiment within the hegemonic collective memory about the era.^[65]

Some participants also explained why they were hesitant to speak about the bombing campaign, which, they believed, was not the worst thing that happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, especially when compared with the shelling of Sarajevo, besieged for more than three years. One individual, an undergraduate student in 1999, was rather direct and critical.

‘What makes me angry is that now everyone is acting like we [in Belgrade] spent three months in shelters with no food and no water, like we were champions of the siege of Sarajevo. But at the time we were going out, dining in restaurants, listening to rock concerts for free in the main city square.’^[66]

And yet even if there are such critical voices, some events and days are remembered as being filled with fear. These recollections have emerged to constitute another important theme of remembrance.

Fear

Fear, and the memory of the experience of it, point at some differences between the generations chosen to participate in this study. Almost all of those who were coming of age during the bombing campaign did not discuss fear, or at most scarcely spoke about it, while those who by then had reached adulthood discussed it at length when recalling how they had felt. They spoke of fear as a sense of not being able to guarantee the safety of their own kids and other loved ones, and they recalled their fear of the unknown, their fear of exhaustion resulting from a decade of crisis, and their fear about the way the NATO bombing strengthened the Milošević regime, which benefitted from the ways it fostered national homogeneity.^[67]

In particular, most participants recollected feeling fear and a sense of threat in response to the bombings of the RTS (Radio Television Serbia) building^[68] and of the Chinese embassy. Some spoke about fear when using public transportation on the bridges or when passing by the Generalštab building.^[69] According to the participant who avoided the draft, there was greater fear among young men of the military draft (and of being sent straight to Kosovo) than of the NATO airstrikes.^[70]

Additional Themes Remembered

In this section, albeit briefly for reasons of space, I will highlight several additional themes that have emerged in the collected data, which provide a broader view of the scope of memories regarding the bombing campaign. Each of them can and indeed should be further analysed in the possible future development of this study. Most participants highlighted the uniqueness of the interpersonal relations among their families, friends, and even neighbours during the months of the bombing. Younger participants remembered those months as an extended vacation, because there was no school and plenty of time to play, watch films (participants mentioned great films shown in the wee hours of the night on Serbian TV), or attend plays at the theatre and films at the cinema for only one dinar! While participants spoke about remembering a sense that the city sustained its routine ways of life during the daytime, they recall nighttime as the time when most of the bombings took place (though there were airstrikes in Niš during the day as well as at night, as one resident living there at the time discussed at length). Some recollected the nights of the bombing as a time when there were great parties in Belgrade, though others were slightly cynical about highlighting this as their main memory. Only two participants took part in the demonstrations on bridges, whose participants wore T-shirts decorated with a target symbol. Those who were teenagers at the time now remember the demonstrations and the use of target symbols mostly as a bizarre experience, while the antiwar activists of the period remember it as a form of public manipulation perpetuated by the regime.^[71]

Conditions in Belgrade varied by location, and the study’s participants pointed to the differences in experiences between residents in the city centre and those on the centre’s outskirts (in some cases nearer to military targets). Hence, alongside the memories of experiencing daily life without water or electricity, respondents also highlighted their memories of feeling as if they were living inside a movie or a video game, especially when recollecting their views of the city from their living-room windows when bombs were falling.