------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 12:46:37 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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".'
[PEN-L:6325] (Fwd) MILIC WENT TO FETCH LUNCH. WHEN HE RETURNED HIS FAMILY W
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Sun, 2 May 1999 22:20:04 -0500