-Caveat Lector-
>From IrishTimes
Thursday, April 1, 1999
The fine line between military and civilian targets
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The aerial bombardments have united Serbs in their detestation of the NATO
forces, writes Lara Marlowe, in Cacak
Before he let the journalists from Belgrade approach the wasteland of the
factory where he worked for 25 years, Radomir Ljujic, the general manager
of Sloboda ("Freedom") household appliances, wanted to tell us a thing or
two about NATO's war on Yugoslavia.
"Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of this factory. On March
30th, we received the biggest congratulations from NATO," Mr Ljujic said
with bitter sarcasm. "The factory is finished."
B-52s fired at least seven AGM 86 cruise missiles from Hungarian airspace
at the factory early on Tuesday morning. In a sloping valley surrounded on
three sides by hills, the industrial zone the size of several city blocks
looked as if an angry God had picked up warehouses, workrooms and assembly
lines, shaken them violently and hurled them to earth in a hail of stone,
wood, corrugated steel, machine parts and cardboard boxes.
The cruise missiles hit their targets with stunning accuracy, and the
craters they left were gaping chasms 40 feet deep and 100 feet across. The
windows broke in the redroofed chalets just a few hundred metres up the
hillside, but they were otherwise untouched. Because the missiles were
fired between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. the factory was empty and no one was
killed.
Mr Ljujic was aware of the rumours and before we left he gave us orders.
"Don't turn vacuum-cleaners into grenade-launchers, and don't minimise the
damage," he said. "The damage is terrible. We hope that one day someone
will have to pay for this."
So why would NATO target the factory that supplied half of Yugoslavia's
vacuum-cleaners, cookers, hair-dryers and refrigerators? Independently of
one another, three reliable sources confirmed that it also made munitions,
though not in sufficient quantities to justify such an attack, one added.
Can damage to Yugoslavia's economy be compared to the suffering in Kosovo?
The question seems absurd, but in a murky way it sums up the Serbs' claim
to victimhood in this war. The material damage we were shown yesterday in
Cacak and Kragujevac, two cities 100 kilometres south of Belgrade, was
dramatic. But in both cases NATO struck without loss of human life. "I have
to admit, as a military man, that NATO are being honourable, that they are
hitting military targets with precision," a Yugoslav officer said.
"Obviously, if you live next door to a barracks, you are in danger."
In its war with the Kosovo Liberation Army, Serbia has argued that because
the guerrillas live in villages with their families, it is impossible to
distinguish between "terrorists" and civilians. NATO's moral separation
between military and civilian targets appears to have broken down in mass
bombardments in Kosovo, where the interior ministry police have moved into
civilian housing.
The distress of the Sloboda civilian factory workers shows what a fine line
divides the civilian and military, especially in Yugoslavia, where
virtually all the country's industry was dual-use. After all, Serb
journalists said yesterday in Cacak, the Boeing company that made the
cruise missiles that destroyed Sloboda also makes civilian airliners.
Mr Ljujic's factory employed 5,000 people and supported an estimated
20,000. The factory was worth $700 million. "This is a tragedy for Cacack,"
he said. "This factory was known throughout the world. We produced
vacuum-cleaners under licence from the German company Progress and
refrigerators under licence from Ignis in Italy. We received
congratulations from Aviano [NATO air base in northern Italy], too. We used
to produce 300,000 vacuum cleaners every year."
As he spoke, a woman in blue overalls and a pink anorak stood nearby,
weeping. Other workers carried red vacuum-cleaner casings and aluminum
baskets, plastic tubes and hair-dryers from the mountains of rubble,
stacking them in orderly piles. Faded pinups and images of football stars
were still taped to one of the few walls remaining. "Orders can be
delivered by post," a sign noted. "Quality guaranteed by Sloboda, Cacak."
But there was a very strong police presence for a damaged appliance
factory. They stood scowling, feet wide apart and hands behinds their
backs, in front of plastic ribbons, cordoning off the areas we could not
visit, allegedly because they had not yet been secured. And the choking
dust smelled odd, like gunpowder.
"That's enough questions," a plainclothes man shouted when I spoke to
workers on the far side of one of the ribbon markers. They refused to speak
any more. As we walked away at the request of uniformed policemen, another
plainclothes man gave me a hard shove in the back, and for a fraction of a
second I thought I could imagine what it might be like to be a Kosovo
Albanian.
Yet the information and defence ministries had chosen to bring us here. By
showing the damage sustained in NATO bombardments, they were trying to be
open. The tension between our official guides and the local police was
palpable; Yugoslavia is not so much non-aligned as it is pulled in opposite
directions, between nostalgia for communism and a desire to be in Europe,
between two kinds of attitude and education.
Fifty kilometres to the east at Kragujevac, we were shown three military
garages on the edge of an army base, flattened in a NATO bombardment, again
with no loss of life. There is only one business in Kragujevac, the Zastava
car factory, which also happens to be Yugoslavia's main producer of
sidearms, assault rifles and machine-guns. The Zastava factories run for
miles in a swathe of giant warehouses through the centre of the city of
180,000.
Zastava's automobile workers have gained a great deal of publicity in
Serbia for their "heroic stand against NATO aggression".
"If our factory is destroyed, we have no more life. So we decided to be a
human shield, so that Clinton and his pilots would have to bomb our
bodies," Jusic Dorovic, the director of the car bonnet plant, told us. The
decision, like the "peace" rally where we met him yesterday, was
spontaneous, he insisted.
"Workers work their shifts, and while they do, the others wait in the
factory," he explained. But how had they notified NATO that it risked a
massacre if it bombed this particular dual-use target?
They flooded the Internet addresses of President and Mrs Clinton,
Vice-President Al Gore and other NATO notables with messages: the tactic
appears to be working.
Kraguvevac is famous throughout former Yugoslavia as a martyred city. On
October 21st, 1941, German occupation troops murdered 7,000 of its
inhabitants in reprisal for the killing, by Tito's partisans, of 70 German
soldiers. When the Germans ran out of Serb men to execute, they took
schoolchildren. The vivid memory of this atrocity gave the town a
reputation of hostility towards foreigners.
Some of yesterday's demonstrators were old enough to remember the bodies
stacked in neat piles, with straw placed between the layers. None, it
seemed, saw any parallel with the bodies of Kosovar Albanians discovered at
Racak in January, or in Drenica last October.
Ten thousand people participated in Kraguvevac's "peace" rally yesterday,
and not by chance, the marchers carrying daffodils and wearing "Target?"
stickers wended their way up the hillside, past the museum dedicated to the
second World War martyrs and to the mass grave where they are buried.
However inappropriately, the Serbs seem convinced that they are reliving
the second World War, or the Cold War. President Clinton is constantly
compared with Hitler, and NATO is alternately called "the fascists" or "the
imperialists".
Ljiljana Kostic was five years old when the Nazis massacred the Kraguvevac
7,000. "The Germans lived in the barracks in the market," she recalled.
"Every morning I looked on the ground in the stalls for something to eat.
There was a German soldier who gave me a piece of white bread and butter
every day, and I ate it because I was hungry. "He wanted to touch my hair
but I would not let him. We Serbs do not like to be touched by our enemies.
We Serb people always take, but we never give up."
One of the most striking things about Serbia is the uniformity of opinion
on what is happening in Kosovo, and the eerie disconnection between the
Serbs' own sense of martyrdom and the persecution of the Albanians. Mrs
Kostic, a retired economist, was no exception. The US encouraged the ethnic
Albanians to rebel, she said, so that it could gain a foothold in the
Balkans.
Yes, she knew of the mass exodus of Albanians, but that too was NATO's
fault. "They are fleeing from the NATO bombing," she said with absolute
conviction. "Otherwise they would not flee from anything. How could 90 per
cent of the population flee from the 10 per cent who are Serbs?"
Like her fellow Serbs, Mrs Kostic is not optimistic. "The war will last for
a long time," she said. "Because we are not going to surrender, and they
[NATO] are not going to give up."
Thursday, April 1, 1999
Non-military targets
bombed, claims Serb
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Elaine Keogh
A Serbian woman who left Belgrade last Thursday said NATO has bombed
non-military targets in Kosovo. Ms Tamara Tomic-Brennan (24) and her Irish
husband, Paul, were in the Brazilian embassy in Belgrade at 9.45 a.m. last
Thursday when the air-raid siren sounded.
They succeeded in leaving Belgrade that day but Ms Tomic-Brennan fears for
the lives of her mother, father and younger sister. "We are Serbs and are
one of the 22 national minorities in Serbia. The (news) reports fail to say
that people are running from NATO bombs, the bombs do not choose to hit
Serbians or Bosnians or Albanians . . . "
On March 19th, Ms Tomic-Brennan and her husband left Belgrade for Pristina
to visit her family, who moved there after the Bosnian war. En route they
were stopped 40 kilometres from Pristina by Serbian police, who said the
KLA had attacked police and army personnel. As they took an alternative and
longer route to the city, the couple said they did not see any burning
villages or fleeing Albanians.
"All we saw were masses of trenches on the sides of the road but there was
nobody leaving. In Pristina the Albanians are in a majority. They run shops
there but are also under the KLA curfew. When we were there two Albanian
cafes open after four o'clock were bombed by the KLA and people were
killed, but the reports in the West placed the blame on the Serbs."
Ms Tomic-Brennan continued: "In the winter of 1996-97, there were massive
demonstrations against Milosevic but the West did not help the people then
to knock him and have the sanctions removed. Nobody ever raised a voice
then when we asked for help."
The NATO bombs "are making people suffer and doing this all because of one
man. There are Croatians, Bosnians, Yugoslavians . . . we can't keep
running. There is nowhere else to go. The fear felt over the NATO bombs is
awful. We thought the ground would open under us, but it is so easy to bomb
when you are thousands of miles away."
Ms Tomic-Brennan and her husband say NATO bombs hit non-military
accommodation within the army barracks in Prokuplje. The barracks is in the
centre of the town. Bombs also fell on the left bank of the River Sava in
Belgrade. "It was bombed because the largest reservoir supplying over two
million people is there. Then last Sunday NATO bombed the civilian airport
at Surcin, which is 10 kilometres from the military airport at Batajnica."
Ms Tomic-Brennan and her family are from Sarajevo and left the city for a
weekend in April 1992. The city was cut off and they could not get back in.
"Two days after we left Bosnian soldiers broke into our flat. They had put
a gun to our neighbour's father's head demanding the key to our flat. They
were looking for us because we were Serbs. I believe we would have died if
we were there. People who are still in Sarajevo have told us not to return
as there is no life there for us. The antiSerbian propaganda was
horrendous."
Her family lost their home and property and well-paid jobs. They ended up
in Scotland, where Ms Tomic-Brennan and her sister returned to school.
By the summer of 1993 the family had returned to Yugoslavia but to
Belgrade, where there was hyper-inflation because of sanctions imposed by
the West. Ms Tomic-Brennan took up the offer of further education in
Scotland and left her family.
They later set up home in Pristina.
Ms Tamara Tomic-Brennan and her husband at his parents' home near Dundalk
yesterday. Photograph: Tom Conachy
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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