The Daily Telegraph May 31, 1999 SUFFERING TURNS SERB BULLIES INTO MARTYRS It may be that civilian population in Kosovo is about to crack. It is just that it doesn't look that way here. By Boris Johnson Something went bang very loudly and the alarms went off. Dogs started barking. "Cleenton, Cleenton!" said the old fellow with the scar, waving his hands skywards. Actually it turned out it was only the sonic boom of a NATO jet, easing back to Aviano perhaps after re-demolishing some suburban radio mast, and Belgrade got on with Sunday morning. "Cleenton criminal," said the codger and carried on with his brandy and coffee. In the National Museum, highbrows were listening to the crashing chords of Serbian classical music. The postcard sellers got on with hawking views of "Belgrade By Night" (tracer fire). The passers-by hardly glanced at the remnants of the foreign ministry and other buildings, where the Tomahawks have left 20ft entry wounds. It may be that the alliance is right in claiming the civilian population is about to crack, and that they will rise up and demand an end to the reign of Milosevic. It is just that it doesn't look that way here. If anything, it looks as though NATO is merely strengthening Serb resistance. Vuk Draskovic, once touted as the democratic alternative to Slobo, told this newspaper that "since the beginning of the NATO aggression, European and American bombs have killed 128 members of my party who, two years ago, demonstrated carrying American and European flags. That is how NATO helps the democratising process in this country". When civilised Serbs think of sufferings caused by the Kosovo war, they think of premature Serbian babies snuffed out in maternity wards when NATO cuts the power, of vaporised make- up girls and sackfuls of body parts from bombed trains and buses. "Serbs are for NATO what the Jews were for Hitler," says Mr Draskovic. "Targets." That is why the miseries of the Kosovo Albanians are not uppermost in the Serbian conscience. We who watch the BBC know there is incontrovertible evidence of ethnic cleansing, murder and rape by Serb forces in Kosovo. That is not quite the picture presented here. Over the weekend a convoy of journalists was taken to see how the destruction of the Zastava car factory had wrecked the economy of Kragujevac, about 90 miles south of Belgrade. An Albanian family was produced, led by Idris Dahiri. He had in fact been laid off by Zastava in 1991, but was dependent on the firm for his dole. "This NATO pact with their attacks took the bread from our table," said Mr Dahiri, through a Yugoslav interpreter. To make matters worse, he now has to support his daughter and two of her children, who had fled Kosovo. Why did they flee? NATO attacks, of course. "Yes, we ran away from NATO. We did not run away from the Serbs," parroted Nedzmija Dahiri, the daughter. "Yes, our house was destroyed by NATO. It was destroyed completely. "No, we did not see any ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, we received much help from the Serbian army." A British reader might greet this account with suspicion, and there are many Serbs who will acknowledge, privately, the dark things done by their people. Outside the Dahiri flat, where young people were mooching around and playing with dogs, Zlatko, 22, made a chopping motion with his hands and said: "I don't want to talk about Albanians. I think there should be ethnic cleansing." Mario, 13, exclaimed: "We should do ethnic cleansing here." There may very well be Serbs who would be appalled by such attitudes. But any sense of guilt has been all but extinguished by the Serbs' own sufferings. Any sense that they have been bullies is replaced by their own martyr complex, of this tiny nation against the world. That is the flaw in the NATO strategy - one of the flaws, anyway.