May 2, 1999
BELGRADE
Ordinary Man Is Caught in NATO Missile's Path
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- In one of the ordinary epics of everyday
life, they buried Tomislav Mitrovic Saturday.
He was 60 years old, with a wife, Lila; two daughters, Ivana and
Jelena; a grandson, Kosta; and an informally adopted son, Dejan,
the grown child of his best friend, who had died years before.
Mitrovic was a program director for Radio Television Serbia, the
state-run broadcaster that gives the news much as President
Slobodan Milosevic wants it given. Mitrovic was on the overnight
shift on April 22-23, when NATO missiles hit the station to silence
what the Pentagon spokesman, Kenneth H. Bacon, had called "as much
a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military."
Mitrovic, known as Tomi, was the 11th body pulled from the
rubble of the station. They found him -- or, more precisely, they
were able to identify him -- on April 29, six days after the
explosion. He was in the control room that night, coordinating
camera positions and tape for the early morning news, roughly where
the missile impacted.
His family knew he was missing; they were simply waiting for the
final, formal notification. Other families still wait, while
investigators continue to sift through the broken masonry. Sixteen
people of the 100 working that night are dead or still missing.
Those who died in the 2:10 a.m. strike were not the editors or
the managers or the creators of the programming that Brussels,
London and Washington find so dangerous -- and which is still on the
air in much of Serbia.
They were people like Darko Stoimenovski, 26, a technician who
had helped foreigners transmit their footage; Ksenija Bankovic, 28,
a video mixer; Jelica Munitlak, 27, a make-up artist; Milan
Joksimovic, a 46-year-old security guard, and Tomi Mitrovic.
Everyone knew the station was a likely target. But the workers
had been told by their editor in chief, Dragoljub Milanovic, who
was not in the building, that for reasons of patriotism and need
they would work their assigned night shifts or they could pick up
their work papers and find another job, losing their pensions.
Mitrovic, well liked in the way congenial, competent people are
in any technical profession, was a year away from retirement in a
country deformed by years of international sanctions, economic
mismanagement, ethnic hatred and civil war.
"You retire in a year, and you're told to work or leave now and
lose your pension," said another employee of the station.
"It's less than $100 a month, but it's still something. And in
a country broken like this one, you can't afford it. And when
you're 60, no one else is going to care."
Mitrovic was the best man at the wedding of Dejan's father,
which brings with it special responsibilities here. He was the
"kum" (pronounced koom) of this second family, like a godparent
but more. Dejan's father, Mihajlo, had been a lawyer, a
sophisticated and cosmopolitan man with important connections in
Yugoslavia and big expectations for his son.
But Mitrovic was the salt of the earth, an easygoing man whose
company Dejan's father cherished. And when Dejan wanted to become a
journalist, and his father was horrified, it was Mitrovic who
interceded, again and again, and kept a peace between the two.
"He started in television in the early '60s as the guy who
delivered the mail," Dejan said. "He had no sons, but there was
this little boy who was the son of his best friend." Here, hating
it, Dejan's face slowly collapsed, tears surging from his eyes as
if a pipe had broken.
"When I talked about journalism," Dejan finally said, "my
parents were so embarrassed, but he supported me. He said, 'Do what
you care about and the money will come."'
When Dejan's father died in the hospital in early 1995 after a
long illness, it was Mitrovic who went to identify the body. And it
was Mitrovic who brought the family the wedding ring that he had
carried to the nuptials of his best friend many years before.
"Tomi loved America," Dejan said. "He built himself an
American house, and everyone joked about it, but they admired it.
He built a ranch house, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. He
saw it somewhere and he liked it, so he built one."
The living room and dining room are connected; there is a nice
garden and a very un-Serbian lawn: Mitrovic used to cut the grass
short, American-style.
"He had a wife, two daughters, a grandchild, a couple of cats
and a dog who appeared one day," Dejan said. "He was just one of
the people working there. He had no influence on the programs or on
Milosevic. He just switched the cameras and the programs from
channel to channel. He was a professional. He worked for his
salary. If the political opposition ran the station, he'd work for
them, too."
He and Dejan used to talk politics, and after 30 years of being
a faithful reader of Politika, then as now the mouthpiece of
whatever regime rules in Belgrade, Mitrovic stopped reading the
paper in the winter of 1996-1997. Then, months of pro-democracy and
anti-Milosevic demonstrations roiled the country, and state
television refused to cover those demonstrations for a month, as if
they did not exist.
The demonstrators called the station "the Bastille," and some
of the windows still covered with plastic, even after NATO's
bombing, were those broken by the stones of democracy's advocates.
"But the West did nothing then," the state television
journalist said. "They had a chance to push out Milosevic and did
nothing." He laughed harshly. "They certainly didn't bomb."
Mitrovic became embarrassed by the station's politics. "He was
no supporter of Milosevic," said Dejan, now 31. "I had these
debates with him. But you know, older people have this distance.
They have so much to lose."
Dejan stopped again, busied himself with a cigarette, looking
away. "He told me, 'You know, at this age, what can I do? My whole
life is there. I'm not 20 anymore and single so I could deliver the
milk if I had to."'
Tomislav Mitrovic was mourned by hundreds Saturday at the
Topcider cemetery. He was just one out of the many dead, Albanian
and Serb.
The night the missile hit, said Slobodan Novakovic, speaking
today at the graveside, Mitrovic told his subordinates to go home,
while he remained on duty. "He showed enormous courage,"
Novakovic said.
"He was an ordinary man but a special man," Dejan said, again
in tears. "He was my father's best friend, and he became my
friend. And he was guilty of nothing."
