by Ivanka Besevic
Reporting Direct from Belgrade
During the height of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, various residents were able to reach the outside world with personal accounts of what it was like to experience a NATO air attack. These accounts are based on frantic phone calls from two Belgrade residents. They were posted on the worldwide web and are excerpted here.
Belgrade (April 30, 1999) - At 1:30, the end of the world! The whole night broke down into explosions and flame and deafening roaring of the planes flying, it seemed, right over the tops of our heads.
The full moon, brightening the streets, was eaten up by the red, burning sky right over the roofs we watched through our shaking windows. It was so light, like we fell asleep in Belgrade and woke up in Hell. Then the black smoke snuffed the red and started billowing through our windows, open to prevent the breaking of the glass. We rushed to close them. I have no idea where it came from, but it was everywhere. We could barely breathe and I still cough. It stinks of burning and devastation. The smoke was unbearable.
We still had a roof over our heads. There was electricity and the TV was on, but it only showed old movies. Finally, the news came from the "Voice of America." They hit the big government building in Kneza Milosha Street, and all around it. Also, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was hit. Soon we found out that an old neighborhood of small homes (almost all one-story buildings) on the corner of Maxim Gorky Street was hit. Many hurt. How many dead?
[NATO bombers] waited ten minutes for the rescue crews and firemen to gather around the burning places and then bombed them again while they were trying to pull people out of the murdered buildings.
Kneza Milosha Street looks like a crazed farmer decided to plow it for spring planting with a cosmic-size plow. Except that it's the bodies getting planted, not wheat, and there is nothing sweet growing from it, just bitterness and desolation. Many little houses are gone.
What kind of pilots are flying those planes? Are they skeletons, grinning like the Riders of the Apocalypse? Anything with flesh and soul would stay their hand over the sleeping homes. For anyone to say that this is a humanitarian mission is an unspeakable obscenity.
The relay of Studio B TV station, the opposition TV station (it is Belgrade's city station, run by the Belgrade city officials who form the Opposition since the last elections) was blasted. So much for wanting to shut up Milosevic's propaganda machine. It is our tongues, people's tongues, that they are trying to cut off.
Divcibare TV's relay was hit. Novi Sad refinery was hit for the ninth time. Nis was bombed. Valjevo factories were bombed. Homes were hit. There's no water in parts of Novi Sad and no bridges at all - they get across the river in boats and barges.
Pristina is Hiroshima
There's nothing left. Yesterday they dug out three more decomposing, torn bodies of Yugoslav journalists from Takovska Street. In Surdulica, they are not just digging the bodies. They are trying to piece them together like a shameful puzzle, exploring the infinite possibilities of what one man can do to another, to a child. That's one of the reasons why they can't tell yet how many dead the NATO bombing has left there - the undertakers are having trouble piecing all the bodies [together].
It's becoming monotonous, this litany of dead and broken bodies, homes and factories.
A Dispatch from Olga
Belgrade - A hell, a nightmare, the end of the world. We barely stayed alive last night. I thought we were dead.
This is an attack on the psyche as well as the body. Sleep deprivation and terror. Everyone tries to live normally during the day, but that is only a pretense, it's not real. I am not a fanatic, nor a pessimist... however I can't be insanely optimistic either. It feels like the house is made of fine-spun glass, transparent, like the killers from above can look down and see us, so vulnerable, reach into this home and make us no more. So many are stuck, looking up into the planes, and not a chance of finding a safe place, a shelter. Hospitals, old folks' homes, handicapped.
In Vozdovac, which was heavily bombed today, my brother's neighbor Desa talked to me. She worked in Iraq during the never-ending NATO bombing and she told me about the way they handled it over there. From what she says, every time another bomb made a big crater in the Iraqi countryside, they'd run to the hole with a little tree and pat it shut. They take falling bombs like a matter of course in Baghdad, and turn them into forests!
There's still no panic but people are tired, woozy from the lack of sleep, and are having a generally hard time. We still hold on. We are used to almost-anything.
They are sending in B-52's with "stupid" bombs. We heard about these big planes. They carry bigger, more destructive bombs with no guidance, just death. We saw craters 15 meters [50 feet] deep.
In the midst of the man-made mayhem, the 5.5 earthquake was almost unimportant. It hit near Valjevo and it gave us quite a shake. Ivanka thought that it's the bombs, but my bed was jumping around and I was sure from the start that it's an earthquake.
We'll try to reach the relatives [and] their children. They went to a village near Valjevo to get away from the bombs. Now they are in the epicenter. I am very worried. Is there no end?
I am going to prepare for the day now.
Beneath NATO's rain of bombs