A letter from Belgrade April 23, 1999

Dear colleagues,

I thought that you might be interested how is it being a woman in Belgrade these days. I am Yugoslav, pure breed of mixed cultures (one granddad a Bosnian Serb, another Slovene, one grandmother Bosnian Croat, the other one Serb from Hungary...) I did my MA in Paris, 15 years ago, my Ph.D. in Stockholm, 10 years ago, I am a professor of Belgrade university, author of 7 books, writer, poet, and what is most important, mother of 3 little children, aged 9, 8 and 3. I used to live in Sydney in my maiden days, and I wrote a novel about it, 15 years ago. Time has stopped here. Our normal lives stopped to function 4 weeks ago. No schools, no kindergartens, no universities, no future plans, no nothing. My latest book, about mothers and daughters within the complicated macho mentality of the Balkans, was supposed to be printed 4 weeks ago. It was of course, halted. The film, I was working on for 4 years, was just about to begin shooting in Monte Negro, (it was supposed to be a film about our most successful woman ever, the last queen of Italy, who was a Montenegrin princess, the queen Helen of Savoy) and of course, there will be no film. Those are the banal trifles in comparison with the whole situation, but then, it is just an example how every one is affected with what is going on. We watch our collapse like a TV nightmare, a video game, and I still can not believe my own eyes. I moved from my home in the first week of bombing, after the NATO struck on the heating plant (needless to say there is no heating in Belgrade, and it is still quite cold outside...) , opposite the building I was living in. The detonations made me deaf for couple of hours, and I was playing a "LA VITA E BELLA" routine with my scared children, telling them "it was just an earthquake"... So I am a refugee in my own town, living in my parents tiny flat in the center of the town, with my 3 kids, my mother in law and my husband...At least, we crossed the bridge. There is no cooking oil in town, and for milk one should get up very early and cue. But then, we have been cueing for years now, since those sanctions...(at that time I had babies and we had to go to the village once a week and fill up the coca cola bottles with milk, then freeze them and pray to God, there will be electricity...), and the cues for cigarettes are miles long...but we still sing and dance every day at noon in the center, on our bridges at night, defending them with our bodies. I do realize that the next step is to proclaim all of us as military targets, because we might hide soldiers at our homes... Two days ago, NATO struck a TV station which was owned by the president's daughter, but ironically, that station had no news, just the trashy American films and south American soap operas, so we were devastated because the transmission of CASSANDRA and ESMERALDA was delayed for one day...is that a military target? Parts of the cluster bombs went straight through the windows of the people living opposite that skyscraper...a 3 year old kid died in her own bathroom, killed through the window with the parts of the cluster bomb...this is not propaganda, this is merely a mother's voice from the real world...no, we do not go all to the shelters...I can not imagine myself with 3 kids in a dump cellar, sitting there all night. And beside, we believed that the civilians will not be targeted...I do not know what to do anymore...but one thing is certain. This is not a peaceful mission. 3 million children go to bed with the sounds of the sirens...this morning the TV Belgrade was hit, and in its basement was the only children's cinema in town, and the youth center. A friend of mine was devastated when the hospitals released all the patients home, because they can not guarantee them safety, so she is stuck with her mother who can not move nor talk nor live without constant assistance. And she has no money to hire a nurse. She is a film critic of that same blown television, her office was in flame this morning, with her salary check...The other friend of mine went two days ago to a funeral of her cousin, a Bosnian refugee who was an engineer in Panchevo Chemical factory. When the poor man saw his work in flames, he simply had a heart attack and died. My neighbor is a chemist, working in a laboratory for the Police, she is mother of 3 astmathic children, and she can not go to the shelter either, because the kids might have an attack...she got pale when she saw from her balcony that 2 kilometers wide black cloud from the Panchevo chemical plant ...but God is with us. The wind blew it away from Belgrade, and the clouds are over my city every night for these 4 weeks, since the bombing begun. This is not the typical weather here at this time of the year, believe me....You might and should ask me about the poor refugees running away from Kosovo. You don't know how Kosovo looks like in normal times...scattered villages, isolated houses, a civil war going on since the Turkish times...I saw a documentary last year about this teacher, who walks miles every day, from her home in Djakovica to this remote village, just to teach 4 children in the last Serbian school there. Their parents say, "we would have sold our houses to the Albanians long time ago, if it weren't for her." She is 30 now, and is still walking...Albanians are good people, with lots of children, their natality rate is the highest in Europe, in average, they have 6 children....and now they are under the bombs, with no electricity, water nor food, in between two fires, with KLA behind them and Yugoslav Army in front of them...what would you do in their shoes? But that is another story...the story of mentalities, drug and weapons chain, the Balkan route of heroine, and so on. But I won't talk about the things I do not know. Nor I wish to even think about the radiation after thousands of bombs already thrown on my land, and how my grandchildren will look like if they are ever born...My brother is in Novi Sad, and I presume I should swim upstream Danube to see him again...there are foreigners in my sky every day and night, they are blowing up my country, telling me stories about peace and democracy...I know this: if the money spent so far on the bombs and humanitarian aid, was just invested in our country, it would have been a paradise for everyone....but the money keeps rolling on, the old weapons must be tested, and the new ones improved, the macho male pride must be satisfied on both sides. We are the lab rats, and we are still alive...no one expected that.

Thank you for reading this.

Yours truly,