[PEN-L:6325] (Fwd) MILIC WENT TO FETCH LUNCH. WHEN HE RETURNED HIS FAMILY W

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Date sent:              Fri, 30 Apr 1999 12:46:37 -0700
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From:                   Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                MILIC WENT TO FETCH LUNCH. WHEN HE RETURNED HIS FAMILY WERE
        DEAD 

The Guardian (UK)                               Thursday April 29, 1999 

MILIC WENT TO FETCH LUNCH. WHEN HE RETURNED HIS FAMILY WERE DEAD 

        There is no sign of the soldiers and trucks 
        NATO may have been seeking in Surdulica.

        By Maggie O'Kane in Surdulica 

        What is left of the 12 children of Jovina Street is piled on four 
metal trellis tables in the back room of a white-tiled morgue. Their 
street was named after a childrens' poet, Zmaj Jovina, who took to 
writing stories after he lost his seven children to tuberculosis. Now 
Jovina Street has 12 more children to mourn. 
        On Monday, between noon and 1pm - nobody seems to remember 
exactly when - they died when a NATO missile burrowed into their 
hiding place in a cellar.
        'They were aged between five and 11,' said Dr Alexander Nicolic, 
though it was impossible to tell the ages from the four heaps of 
human remains on the table.
        Most were from the Voyislav family. They had been waiting for 
their grandfather to come back. He had gone to fetch a salad from his 
sister's garden for lunch.
        Milic Voyislav liked to make himself useful when he was at home 
on holiday. For 31 years he had worked in a car factory in Cologne, 
raising his children on the wealth of German industry.
        This holiday he was fulfilling a long term promise: the Voyislav 
family were finally getting a satellite dish. Dragan came at lunchtime 
to put it up.
        That's when the two planes came in, high above the suburban 
spread of Surdulica. There, most of the 300 houses are built from the 
money of migrant fathers; plain two-storey homes built in the 70s and 
80s, each with a car in the driveway.
        When the NATO planes had finished, the white four-door saloon 
in Milic Voyislav's driveway was crushed into a pancake - its number 
plate VR633-52 just discernible - and at least 20 people, 12 of them 
children, were dead.
        It is night and the earth movers are still working by the electric 
arc lights. Men in navy boiler suits, white hats and rubber gloves are 
picking between the rubble for more bodies.
        An old man, his jeans covered in dust, finds his sheepskin rug and 
a pair of his trousers in the debris. He shakes them, folds them and 
carefully lays them to one side.
        Next to him, Ilica Srebena is saying: 'My sister is here 
somewhere, she's here somewhere. I don't understand it. What were 
they trying to hit? The barracks have been empty since the beginning 
and they blew it up on April 6. There was nothing more here, we 
didn't expect them to come back.'
        There is no sign of the soldiers and trucks NATO may have been 
seeking in Surdulica. The road to the town, 300 miles south of 
Belgrade, is a ghost highway. Once the trucks of Germany, Austria 
and Hungary ploughed through Serbia on their way to Greece, 
Bulgaria and Romania. Now there is nothing.
        Further south, the great highway becomes a mud track through a 
village, winding under 16th century bridges and past mountain 
lodges. Soldiers are silhouetted in the doorways of their 
commandeered houses, their trucks stowed in farmers' barns or untidy 
garages with corrugated iron roofs. They are far from military 
barracks in towns like Surdulica and the streets where the Voyislavs 
live.
        In Britain, Surdulica's medical facilities would be called a cottage 
hospital, an ordinary place where women give birth and the old die. 
But late on Tuesday night it was not a place that belonged to humans.
        In the first room of the morgue, under hard electric strip lights, a 
giant white table cloth held a mass of human flesh - the parents and 
grandparents of the children of Jovina Street. Body parts were mixed 
with shredded carpet, newspapers, torn flesh and raw bone.
        Three generations of Milic Voyislav's family are here. Somewhere 
among them perhaps is Dragan, the man who had come to put up the 
long-awaited satellite dish.
        Dragan's friend stood in the morgue. 'He was putting it on the 
roof of Milic's house,' he said. 'I saw him up there, then it hit and 
when I turned my head I saw that there was no Dragan and no roof.'
        Milic Voyislav, a grandfather in his 60s who worked all his life in 
Cologne, had come home to visit his family - now there is no one left. 
Somewhere in the morgue are his wife Vesna, his daughter Llijana, 
his son Dladica, his grandchildren Jana, Marina and Sash, his brother 
Alexander and Alexander's wife, Stamena.
        'I went to my sister's to get the salad for lunch,' said the old man, 
'and when I got to the front of my house I saw what had happened 
and then my neighbour told me "they are all dead".'