Extracts from a letter from Stasha Zajovic - Women in Black, Belgrade 28 March
SINCE YESTERDAY there’s been euphoria for the shooting down of the ultra-sophisticated aeroplane the F-117. Everybody, in the media and in the street and in the bomb shelters (which I never go down but people tell me) celebrate this.
Radio Belgrade plays anthems about "Kosovo - sacred land", with Partisan songs from the Second World War instead of advertising spots.
We saw a group of people of Romany origin (gypsies) demonstrating their loyalty to the state in front of the US embassy with the slogans "We will give our lives, but not surrender Kosovo", "Kosovo is Serbia’, making complaints against the Albanians in Kosovoa. Here the logic of the oppressed is obvious – to be with the strong. It’s awful.
The TV has shown for the fifth time in recent days the film ‘The Battle of Kosovo’, and the programming is nearly all of this type.
Yesterday I was trying to get a telephone line, and eventually I was lucky. I heard horrible things from friends in Prishtina, and will try to repeat them.
"Nobody sticks their head outside, not even to the door. Yesterday I opened the door for five minutes and was terribly scared.
"Nobody who wants to live dares go in the street. We have nearly no communications within the city, the telephones hardly work. Food is scarce, and I wonder ‘until when’?
"Near my house there was an explosion, breaking all the windows. I am repairing what I can. I don’t sleep. Part of my family has moved somewhere else, I stay here as "guardian of the house".
The woman is a student of medicine, who has stayed looking after her father who has a heart condition.
She asks me "What are they saying? What are the predictions?"
I stay quiet. At the end, we exchange words of consolation, support on both sides. Another tells me:
"Gangs are going round the streets, they are people released from the prisons, paramilitaries, who knows ... They break into houses, move out the people, kidnap, massacre ... Already there’s no food left - except we have 50 kilos of flour (a big family)."
At the end the man with a resigned voice: ‘I won’t give a penny for my chances if they come, I can’t do anything.’
He quoted me what somebody had said these days:
"In the sky, NATO: on the ground, Milosevic".
What cynicism! What a trap!
What am I to say now when in today’s patriotic concert two singers, Rambo and Bajaga took part – singers who in the years before always spoke for peace? One of them, Rambo, even performed in the concert for Sarajevo we organised in April 1992.
Let me go back to the testimonies from people in Prishtina:
"I don’t have any tranquillizers, I don’t have more heart medicine. What can I do without these?"
This is a woman who has always encouraged me, comforted me with hope, now her voice is breaking as, on the point of crying, she thanks me for calling.
"This is an area of gloom. We don’t have help from any side. They have now left the gangs to do whatever takes their fancy.
The police have requisitioned all the trucks and big vehicles; people mainly fear the paramilitaries."