Strikes Stir Up Nationalist Passion

Ten years ago Sunday, an ambitious Communist named Slobodan Milosevic had Kosovo’s self-rule revoked, assuring Serbian domination of the province, his own power and Yugoslavia’s bloody ruin.

But if any Serbs here remembered the anniversary of Milosevic’s triumph, they didn’t show it. They were too busy waiting in long lines for bread, milk and candles--or listening for NATO bombs--to celebrate.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched its airstrikes after Milosevic refused to accept a peace deal to restore the autonomy of Kosovo that he, then president of Serbia, revoked on March 28, 1989.

The first tremor of Yugoslavia’s collapse shook the country on that day. It was followed by all-out war in Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now Serbia and Montenegro, which are suffering the worst airstrikes in Europe since World War II.

As the once-prosperous Yugoslav federation disintegrated, many Serbs blamed Milosevic, at least for their own pain, and they sought to get rid of him with huge, noisy street protests.

Now that their country is under aerial attack, however, even Milosevic’s many Serbian enemies are closing ranks behind him.

“I was a very fierce critic of Milosevic, but now I must support him,” said Aleksandar Mitic, a Serbian journalist who went to high school in the U.S., lived in Belgium and earned two university degrees in Canada.

“Two cruise missiles have hit just 200 meters [660 feet] from my house in Belgrade,” he added. “No matter how pro-Western I am, I just have to rally behind Milosevic as our supreme commander.”

The weak Serbian democratic movement that was trying to get rid of Milosevic was one of the first casualties of NATO’s air war, which Serbs say has united them as never before behind a leader few of them liked.

Milosevic built his political power base on Kosovo, and he looks determined to make his last stand in what Serbs consider the crucible of their culture.

Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, is one of the poorest places in Europe. At the last census, ethnic Albanians made up 90% of its population of just over 2 million.

In the late 1980s, Milosevic began his rise from Communist Party apparatchik to Yugoslav president in Kosovo, by playing on fears that ethnic Albanians wanted to force the Serbian minority to leave.

When Kosovo Albanians tried to block Milosevic and hold on to their autonomy by protesting in the streets, he issued a challenge that could have been made yesterday.

“We are not at all afraid. We enter every battle intending to win,” Milosevic told an estimated 1 million people rallying in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, on Nov. 19, 1988, when he led the League of Communists of Serbia.

“Every nation has a love that eternally warms its heart,” he said. “For Serbia, it is Kosovo. That is why Kosovo will remain in Serbia.”

Holding On to Kosovo

Until a year or so ago, while Serbs watched what was once one of the region’s strongest economies fall apart, Kosovo wasn’t on many of their minds. Now, NATO’s airstrikes have stirred up nationalist passions better than even Milosevic, the master, could have himself.

“We are all scared, but we want to continue to fight for our everyday lives,” said Vesna Jukic, 19, a university student studying English in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital.

“Before this, we were aware of the danger in Kosovo, but not enough. Now, we are more determined than ever to keep on fighting for Kosovo.”

The power goes off each night in Pristina, either to make it more difficult for NATO bombers to see their targets or to make it easier for Serbian paramilitaries to attack residents of ethnic Albanian neighborhoods.

When the lights go out, Jukic sits in the dark chatting with her brother, mother and grandfather. Like most people in Pristina, they can’t find candles--they had only two left Sunday--so they use them sparingly.

Jukic’s 84-year-old grandfather, Vidak, tells her about how it was to live during the bombing of Belgrade in World War II when he too was a university student, pursuing a law degree.

Then he recalls the torture at a concentration camp where he was imprisoned in Germany. To his granddaughter, and many other Serbs, NATO’s attacks are just another phase in the long persecution of Serbia.

If there isn’t a conspiracy to destroy the Serbs, they ask, then why is NATO bombing a sovereign country for the first time with the justification that it must stop Kosovo’s yearlong war, which has killed just over 2,000 people?

In 100 days in Rwanda in 1994, at least 800,000 people were killed in one of the century’s worst genocides, and foreign troops didn’t intervene there, Serbs say.

Few Dare to Leave Home

After a night in a makeshift Pristina bomb shelter, a 29-year-old Serbian woman went looking for a pediatrician at the local hospital to treat her 4-year-old daughter’s fever.

But like most of Pristina’s residents, the doctor had stayed home rather than risk the streets, where armed Serbian civilians are becoming more powerful with each day.

Heavy clouds so far seem to have prevented NATO warplanes from hitting Serbian tanks, artillery guns and other battlefield targets, but Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas are still trying to slow a massive Serbian offensive.

On Sunday, Serbian police reported several KLA attacks in the previous two days. They viewed the attacks as a desperate attempt by remnants of a defeated terrorist force hoping to slip through enemy lines and flee the country.

But those assaults might prove the opposite: that Kosovo’s separatist guerrillas have not been destroyed by the Serbian offensive and could regain ground if NATO knocks out enough Serbian armor and heavy guns.

While Serbian security forces reportedly were driving tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo on Saturday night, the KLA’s guerrillas attacked more than 20 Serbian police targets, police said.

The guerrillas reportedly fired mortar bombs and assault rifles at police near Srbica, a rebel stronghold west of Pristina, and along the highway to Podujevo.

A KLA sniper also shot at a car with Belgrade plates along the same road Saturday about 8 a.m., killing the Serbian driver and injuring two Russian journalists, Pristina’s Serb-run media center reported.

The Russians are among the handful of foreign journalists left in Kosovo, along with a few Greeks, a Turk, a Spaniard and a Canadian who are constantly threatened by angry Serbs on Pristina’s streets.

“We are surprised, we are angry--we are furious--at America and other Western countries,” Jukic said.