CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: BELGRADE; Reduced to a 'Caveman' Life

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/world/crisis-balkans-belgrade-reduced-caveman-life-serbs-don-t-blame-milosevic.html

ARCHIVES | 1999
CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: BELGRADE; Reduced to a 'Caveman' Life, Serbs Don't Blame Milosevic
By STEVEN ERLANGER
MAY 25, 1999

In the Belgrade suburb of Zemun this morning, people were complaining that even McDonald's did not have coffee, because there was no water and no electricity.

In Kovin, a small town in the northern province of Vojvodina, there is no power for the air-raid sirens. So the populace is relying on the church bells, which are rung with pauses, in an imitation of the broken sound of an air alert.

Branislav Grbic described with fury how he had had to make a fireplace out of broken bricks in his Belgrade courtyard to heat milk for his baby son and grill the chicken in his freezer, before it spoiled. ''This is nearly the 21st century,'' he said, and NATO compels ''us to live like cavemen.''

''Slobo,'' he said, referring to the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, ''has plenty of power and water, and so does the army.'' He wondered why those supplies weren't NATO's targets.

After two months of bombing, which began March 24, a NATO bent on crippling Serbia's war effort is going after the country's electricity in a serious way, and water supplies dependent on electrical pumps are a major casualty. The high-explosive bombs are doing permanent damage to both systems.

People are buying up batteries and bottled water and boiling eggs, when they do have a little electricity, so they will have something to eat in the long, dark, powerless nights, when the planes come again and antiaircraft fire is the only light in the sky.

The electricity supply is intermittent for even the luckiest, while workers struggle to provide power to hospitals, bakeries and the water company. But the hospitals are having the most trouble, without enough water to bathe patients and sterilize equipment; the city is supplying them with water trucks.

Without power to run the pumps, many people have no running water -- and if they have water, they have little hot water, since most dwellings have electric water heaters. City officials say Belgrade is down to less than 10 percent of its water reserves because it cannot filter new supplies. They say that only 30 percent of residents, mostly in low-lying areas, have any running water.

The electricity cuts, which have been temporary in the past, intensified with new NATO attacks on Saturday morning. Each time the national electricity grid has begun to restore power, NATO has attacked it. The company urged consumers to be patient, saying that NATO has hit Serbia's five major transmitting plants, including those at Obrenovac, Kostolac and Kolubara.

The largest democratic opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement, led by Vuk Draskovic, issued a scathing attack today on NATO's sighting of power and water plants, calling the bombing of those public services ''collective retaliation'' and ''crimes against the civilian population.'' The party called on the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to intervene quickly to stop attacks on the utilities.

''The situation requires an urgent reaction by major international institutions, rather than a slow diplomatic process,'' the party said in a statement, ''since a flagrant violation of all international norms and customs of war is happening before the eyes of the entire world.''

The opposition Democratic Party, whose leader, Zoran Djindjic, has been attacked as a traitor by the Government, said that cutting electricity would produce needless deaths of the innocent, the very young and very old. ''Such attacks are particularly unreasonable at a time when diplomatic activity is being stepped up and there is a chance to find a solution,'' the party said.

However, the Russian special envoy for the Balkans, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, has postponed his next visit here. He was to arrive today, but now will not come until Thursday, so he can talk further with the American Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, and the Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari, who is acting on NATO's behalf alongside Mr. Chernomyrdin in the Balkan negotiations.

Some political analysts here said they assumed that NATO was intensifying both its attacks and its language as a way to force a diplomatic endgame on Mr. Milosevic and press him to sign a less favorable deal to end the war.

But Jadranka Djordjevic, who used to work at the American Embassy, is caustic about such assumptions. ''If NATO wants to overturn the Government, this is not the way to do it,'' she said. ''Bombing has never had that result anywhere in the world. I am absolutely certain this will not make people revolt against their Government -- they will revolt against whoever is doing this to them. NATO is terrorizing six million civilians in large cities in Yugoslavia. Making people's lives miserable is not solving any problem.''

Ms. Djordjevic, 64, was 6 when the Nazis bombed Belgrade, and she also remembers the Allied bombing of the city in 1944. ''Our generation is well trained in war,'' she said.

''My mother always had salt, flour and dried yeast in the house at all times. I have 100 liters of water in my apartment now. Of course, then we had wood stoves. My mother always implored me not to get rid of our wood stove. And I still have it in the pantry.''

She has no stock of wood just now, she said. ''But as a last resort I can use my parquet floor. In fact I think it could come to that this winter.''

She lives in downtown Belgrade, in a second-floor apartment, and a relative who used to live in an eighth-floor apartment in the newer part of the city has moved in with her. ''Of course, we all worry about our freezers and how long the food will stay safe to eat,'' she said. ''The problem is that for most of us, that food is now worth a fortune. We can't replace it if we have to throw it out.''

Ms. Djordjevic, who worked at the embassy for much of her career, is extremely bitter about this war. ''I worked for 30 years to elevate relations between our two countries,'' she said, ''and they were destroyed in two days of bombing.''

Will the new difficulties affect the way Serbs think about Kosovo? ''People now think of survival, of keeping old ones warm and the little ones safe,'' she said. ''It's exhausting. When you have to fear for your survival, you don't think politics. You just get angry at people who want to make you live like cavemen.''

Ms. Djordjevic also had some choice words for President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, who said the plight of Kosovo refugees reminded her of Holocaust scenes in the Steven Spielberg film ''Schindler's List'': ''People who learn history from Spielberg movies should not tell us how to live our lives.''

As for the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, she observed: ''I've heard he's said that this might make people rise against the regime. If he really said that, it means he's a terrorist and should be put on trial by the international court of justice in The Hague. You cannot terrorize civilians in this way. We are talking about millions of people here who are deprived of basic necessities.''

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 1999, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: BELGRADE; Reduced to a 'Caveman' Life, Serbs Don't Blame Milosevic.