Paranoid city

Belgrade is gripped by rumors that NATO is about to begin bombing again.

By Laura Rozen

Mar 15, 2000 | A new panic has gripped Belgrade, as a rumor spread across the city that NATO might soon bomb Serbia again. As tension mounts in southern Serbia, northern Kosovo and Montenegro, the Serbian capital is testing its air-raid sirens, gripped with fear of new bombing and civil war.

NATO has emphatically denied plans to bomb Serbia. But in this paranoid city, where power is constantly shifting, the fear itself is making waves across the political landscape.

The recent assassinations of warlord Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic and Yugoslav defense minister Pavle Bulatovic in Belgrade have added to the sense of the city's growing violence and anarchy, and the fear Belgrade itself will become engulfed by street-fighting.

Suddenly, young men in the Serbian capital are plotting exit strategies. One air traffic controller is trying to organize papers to get a job in Skopje, Macedonia. A downtown cafe manager is considering an invitation from his sister in Switzerland to come visit "just for a few weeks or months to see what happens." An anthropologist who possesses a prized Slovenian passport is prepared to move at the first hint of war.

Why do Serbs think NATO may bomb again, when all signs in Western capitals are that they have no such intention?

Regardless of NATO's denial, the sense of war's inevitability has been fueled by the government's recent issue of 100,000 conscription notices, mostly in southern Serbia.

Some believe that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has planted the rumor as a way to consolidate his own sagging popularity, and as an excuse to step up his repression of Serbian pro-democracy forces.

"Slobodan Milosevic is purposely causing a psychosis of danger of NATO bombardment," opposition politician Zoran Djindic said Sunday. "By causing fear among the citizens, Milosevic wishes to hide the failure of his economic policy and the very harsh situation in Serbia." Analysts point to a pattern of Milosevic using fear of conflict -- as well as the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo -- to quell dissatisfaction at home with his leadership and to put his population on the hunt for an external enemy for Serbia's troubles.

Meanwhile, many Serbs believe the West is looking for any excuse to overrun their country. They speculate that NATO could bomb on the pretext of protecting pro-independence forces in the neighboring Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, or on behalf of ethnic Albanians making incursions into southern Serbia, and Kosovo Albanians trying to reunite the ethnically partitioned Kosovo city of Mitrovica.

The fear of more NATO bombing has been front-page news here. "NATO is planning no intervention outside Kosovo or attacks on Serbia," said the headlines Thursday in an independent Belgrade paper, Glas Javnosti. Meanwhile, other Belgrade newsweeklies speculated that a NATO attack against Serbia would come March 23, the one-year anniversary of the previous bombing. Even a popular Serbian fortuneteller, Lev Gershwin, predicted in Belgrade's weekly newspaper the Weekly Telegraph that NATO would bomb Belgrade, but that the new bombing campaign would be fairly short and targeted at economic infrastructure.

"Certainly, it will be a war," said a burly taxi driver last week. "Between whom? Between the government and the people."

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