April 7, 1999
CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: IN SERBIA
Small Serbian Town Is Stricken by a Deadly 'Accident of War'
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
LEKSINAC, Serbia -- On Monday night, about 10 p.m., Stana
Stojanovic, a 62-year-old pensioner, was watching "Esmeralda,"
her favorite soap opera, when she heard the airplanes flying low
over this little coal-mining town.
"I asked my husband if he could hear anything, but he said
'No,' so I turned off the television," she said Tuesday,
shuddering and hugging herself in the hot morning sun, standing in
the chaotic rubble of what remains of Vuka Karadzica Street.
"At that moment there was a huge explosion, and it felt like a
hammer on my head. I dragged him off the sofa and pulled him under
a table."
When she emerged, she said, the houses across the street were
smoking heaps of brick and tile, with body parts visible and pools
of blood. Her neighbors, Dragan and Dragica Milodinovic, and their
42-year-old daughter, Snezana, were dead, their daughter-in-law and
two grandchildren, Marko and Dijana, badly wounded in the hospital.
"The people responsible for this should be tried," she
shouted, beginning to weep. "We will not take revenge, but we will
not be slaves."
In what NATO called an accident of war, on Monday night NATO
bombs demolished two residential areas in this quiet town of 20,000
people, killing at least seven of them and wounding nearly 50
others, the local police said. The explosions also damaged NATO's
reputation for surgical precision in its undeclared war from the
air against President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and his
policies in Kosovo.
In Brussels, with the dry precision of the well-briefed modern
military man, Air Commodore David Wilby said: "It is possible that
one of our weapons fell short of the target." NATO was aiming at a
barracks that houses the 203rd Mixed Artillery Brigade, he said,
but the munitions apparently fell 600 yards away.
He regretted any loss of life, he said. "Despite our meticulous
and careful pre-attack planning," he said, "the law of statistics
will at some stage go against us and we will be exposed to a
technical defect."
Smilja Janic was another of those people so exposed. "I have no
idea why NATO is bombing us," she said, weeping and shouting in
Dusana Trivunca Street, where a second NATO bomb ripped through
more houses about 300 yards from the first one.
"I'm not any kind of politician," she said, standing in shards
of glass and burnt-orange roof tiles. "I'm just an old woman and I
don't understand."
She gestured across the street to another expanse of blasted
urban trash, where houses 56 and 58 Dusana Trivunca Street used to
stand. "Voja and Radojka, they're probably still in that house,"
she said, describing her neighbors, who were teachers. "And Sofia
and Jova, he was a policeman," she said.
"I could never expect this to happen in this town," Mrs. Janic
said. "I was a kid in World War II, and the Nazis just drove
through town in their tanks. They didn't bomb us here."
Tuesday, however, was the 58th anniversary of the Easter bombing
of Belgrade by the Nazis, so the comparison with NATO was in the
air, made incessantly by state-controlled radio, television and
newspapers.
Across the street, in the depths of the crater, a woman was
wailing like a terrified animal. "You criminals!" she yelled, her
voice cracking. "What have you done to us?"
A policeman shooed a journalist away. "Her parents lived
there," he said.
In the crater, a seven of diamonds lay half-buried next to what
appeared to be a child's collection of different brands of empty
cigarette packets. There were Marlboro and Lucky Strike, Kent and
Bastos, a Spanish brand that purports to be American.
An orange and yellow comforter draped crazily from an empty,
shattered window frame; a red plastic telephone, cracked in half,
ended up on top of a demolished Mazda.
"I don't have any feelings any more," said Aleks Zivkovic, a
27-year-old woman who lives in the town. "I'm just empty."
She tried to help a Greek journalist with translation, then
turned back. "This war was real for me from the beginning," she
said. "But I couldn't ever believe my town would be destroyed --
it's small, it's almost too small to be on the map."
On Vuka Karadzica Street, Mrs. Stojanovic had drawn a small
crowd. "Clinton Nazi!" yelled one passerby. "Clinton will never
kill the heart of Serbia," Mrs. Stojanovic said. Then she had some
words for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who spent part of
her childhood in Belgrade with her diplomat father and who speaks
some Serbian
"Albright has no soul and no heart," Mrs. Stojanovic said.
"She grew up with the Serbs and this is how she pays us back."
A blasted Mercedes was covered with a fine layer of orange-brown
dirt, like a perfect paint job. Policemen and emergency workers
swept up glass and prowled the rubble, searching for life. No
official tried to stop any journalist from doing interviews. There
was no need. What happened here Monday night was obvious.
