-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Saturday, April 10, 1999 Defiant Serbs Turn Target Into Weapon A Popular Symbol of Anger Spreads as Yugoslavia Arms Itself With Irony ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Service ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- BELGRADE - The predominant popular reaction in Yugoslavia to the NATO bombing campaign, a mixture of fatalism, defiance, gallows humor and paranoia, is best summed up by a symbol that has taken the country by storm over the past two weeks. You see the target sign everywhere, adorning billboards, the clothes of young children, newspaper front pages, Web sites, bridges and lapels of government ministers. It is designed to mock Western claims that NATO has no quarrel with the Serbian people, only with their leaders. ''We are trying to relieve our anger through humor,'' said Miroslav Radic, the director of a small public relations company in Belgrade that is responsible for popularizing the target sign. ''We are trying to send a message that not just Serbs, but anybody in the world can be targeted by aggression or by an anonymous bureaucracy,'' Mr. Radic added. The sign, supposedly borrowed from the advertising symbol for the American department store chain Target, has multiplied like a virus in the 16 days since NATO planes and cruise missiles began hitting sites that Western officials say are parts of President Slobodan Milosevic's war machine. Something of a Serbian equivalent of the peace sign worn by American peace demonstrators in the 1960s, it reflects widespread anger and bewilderment over the bombing. While the anger has been harnessed by the authorities and fanned by government propaganda, it has deep roots in the popular psyche. The grass-roots reaction to the bombing is best conveyed by the Serbian word inat, which has no direct English equivalent but implies a combination of extreme stubbornness and a willingness to go to any lengths to exact revenge on someone who has wronged you. Examples of inat are legion, from the waiter who spits in the soup of a patron who has been rude, to the people of Belgrade who took to the streets every day for three months in the winter of 1996-1997 to protest the Milosevic government's refusal to recognize an opposition victory in local elections. ''Inat is a natural state of mind for a weak person dealing with a stronger people,'' explained Voja Zenetic, a Belgrade commentator and advertising executive who has been leading the target campaign. ''When Milosevic thought he could do whatever he wanted with us, I was against him,'' he added. ''Now I am against NATO because they are strong and we are weak.'' He traces the concept of inat to the desire of Serbs to get back at the Turks during their 500-year subjugation by the Ottoman Empire. Other expressions of defiance of the United States and its NATO partners range from the creative to the obscene. Visitors to Belgrade are greeted by a huge billboard over the Sava River that is angled slightly upward, in the presumed direction of U.S. planes. It displays an obscenity in English. American-run restaurants have been given such names as the Baghdad Café, and the Canadian Embassy has been renamed ''the Embassy of Quebec,'' a suggestion of solidarity with separatists in that province. The U.S. Information Center, situated on a central pedestrian street, has been trashed and ransacked, along with the cultural centers of Britain and France. Lewd drawings of President Bill Clinton have appeared all over town, and Monica Lewinsky jokes are legion. NATO is routinely referred to as the ''New American Terrorist Organization.'' The once flourishing industry of Milosevic jokes, meanwhile, appears to be grinding to a halt. ''I don't think Americans would make jokes about Clinton if they were attacked by Russia,'' said Mr. Zenetic, who answers his cell phone, ''Hello, Clinton speaking.'' Asked to tell the most current Milosevic joke, he comes up with an old chestnut. Clinton, Yeltsin and Milosevic are in a plane that is about to crash. Fate decrees that only one can survive, and he will be chosen by democratic ballot. The final vote count goes like this: 1 vote for Clinton, 1 vote for Yeltsin, 1 million votes for Milosevic. Political jokes apart, the crisis has spawned much black humor, as Serbs attempt to make the best of their situation. An entire subspecies of humor has been spawned in the underground air-raid shelters frequented mainly by people who live close to military sites that could be targeted by NATO bombs. Question: ''What is the difference between a black beetle and a red beetle?'' Answer: ''Just the taste.'' Many of the jokes consist of puns that are difficult to translate into English. For example, the Serbian expression for ''good morning'' is ''dobar dan,'' but people now say ''bombar dan.'' Some jokes are directed at NATO planners. After it was reported that the only town of any size in Serbia that had not yet been targeted by NATO bombs was a place called Zrenjanin, a billboard went up there with the slogan: ''NATO, why don't you hit us? We are not contagious.'' Mingled with the humor is a suspicion of outsiders and a conviction that NATO saboteurs are directing incoming attacks. Rumors have spread that subversive elements are planting electronic ''locaters'' in military buildings, which are then blown up by NATO bombs. A Washington Post reporter was briefly detained by military police Thursday morning for ''loitering'' near the Defense Ministry while waiting for his driver to return from an errand. A military building nearby had been bombed by NATO planes overnight, and the soldiers were nervous. The target sign is said to be the brainchild of Serbian activists in Boston who appropriated the emblem of the American retail company, adapting it slightly to their needs. It then crossed the Atlantic via the Internet. In Yugoslavia, the image has been popularized by a group of advertising executives and intellectuals previously critical of the Milosevic regime who are now directing their creative energies to making fun of NATO. In addition to distributing target leaflets and T-shirts, the group has opened a Web site (www.yutarget.com), where copies of the sign can be downloaded along with audio clips of air raid sirens sounding over Belgrade. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Paris, Saturday, April 10, 1999 At the Border, a Worrisome Mystery ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By Craig R. Whitney International Herald Tribune ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- BRUSSELS - Three days after Serbian border police closed crossing points from Kosovo into Macedonia and Albania, NATO said Friday that its sophisticated military surveillance had not yet been able to solve the mystery of what happened to tens of thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians who had been stuck there. ''A key question is what is happening to the people who were trying to leave,'' an alliance spokesman, Jamie Shea, said, referring in particular to what he called the ''car people'' whose automobiles had been lined up 20 kilometers inside Kosovo near the Albanian border before vanishing overnight Tuesday. A senior diplomat from an allied European country said that NATO civilian authorities had asked the military command Thursday to intensify reconnaissance over Kosovo to try to locate the missing civilians. Unmanned U.S. reconnaissance drones have been flying over the province for the past several days. But a NATO military spokesman, Air Commodore David Wilby, said Friday that allied intelligence had been concentrating mostly on finding tanks and other armored vehicles for allied bombers to strike. Serbian paramilitary police and army units have been using the tanks in attacks that have driven hundreds of thousands of civilians out of Kosovo. General Klaus Naumann, chairman of the Military Committee at the alliance's headquarters here, has also requested surveillance reports from individual allies' reconnaissance missions, officials said, but thus far requests for better intelligence on the missing refugees had not produced any. Neither civilian nor military officials offered much explanation for the failure. Commodore Wilby said Thursday, ''We are certainly trying to identify all movement of people, and we are obviously very concerned about where those people are being moved to.'' And Mr. Shea said Friday, ''We believe there may be 150,000 to 200,000 people in Kosovo living without shelter, in the woods, in ruined villages and so on.'' But the allies, like international relief officials, have been reduced mainly to guessing what happened after President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia closed the borders Tuesday night, declared a unilateral cease-fire Wednesday and said refugees were free to return home. NATO has rejected all these claims as a duplicitous sham. The NATO secretary-general, Javier Solana Madariaga, said Friday that the Serbian forces inside Kosovo might have forced refugees back to make them ''human shields'' around the military targets of the allied bombing campaign, which continued Friday despite unfavorable weather conditions in the Balkans. Particular concern has been expressed about the fate of thousands of people who were lined up behind the border crossing on the road from Prizren to the Albanian border town of Kukes. ''We have received reports from the few people who have come through that all along the road behind the border the cars and wagons and tractors are just abandoned, with luggage and food left behind and nobody visible on the road,'' Judith Kumin, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. ''I am very much concerned for the fate of civilians remaining in Kosovo,'' the high commissioner, Sadako Ogata, said Friday in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Asked what her organization could do for them, she said, ''I am helpless there.'' Almost all international organizations left Kosovo before March 24, when NATO began bombing to try to force Mr. Milosevic to accept a peace settlement restoring autonomy to the ethnic Albanian population of the province and providing for an international peacekeeping force. General Naumann said in an interview with German radio Friday that it would be ''very, very difficult'' for the West to impose peace in Kosovo without sending in ground troops. He said he could not speculate about whether allied governments would ultimately think twice about their refusal to consider fighting their way into Kosovo to escort half a million refugees driven out by Serbian forces back to their homes. ''Ultimately a conflict is always decided on the ground, of course,'' he said. ''Without a presence on the ground, it's very, very difficult to achieve that.'' There are also no allied reconnaissance patrols from either Albania or Macedonia that might be able to fill in gaps in the allies' intelligence about the refugees. Macedonia has allowed 12,000 allied soldiers, including British, French and U.S. troops, onto its territory, but the defense minister, Nikola Kljusev, said on a visit to the alliance's headquarters Friday that his country still insisted that none of those troops could be used for offensive action against Yugoslavia. ''If there is agreement with the Yugoslav government for the entry of NATO forces into Yugoslavia, then they will be allowed to enter Yugoslavia,'' he said. ''Unless this happens, the passage of NATO forces into Yugoslavia cannot be accepted.'' The 12,000 soldiers were originally sent to Macedonia as the vanguard of the 28,000-strong peacekeeping force planned for Kosovo as part of a negotiated settlement, but Mr. Milosevic refused even to discuss peacekeepers. 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