Many Pristina Serbs Shrug Off Airstrikes

A daylight air raid Saturday over Kosovo’s capital didn’t disturb the clientele relaxing in plastic patio furniture outside Brooklyn Bar.

The young women and plainclothes police just kept chatting over their cups of espresso and cappuccino. A soldier in camouflage body armor nursed a beer while his AK-47 assault rifle leaned in the chair next to him.

No one seemed to notice the air-raid sirens wailing, or the noise from at least two cruise missiles that streaked just above the city center and was followed by three explosions about 9:15 a.m.

After 18 days of NATO airstrikes in and around Pristina, many people here say they have just stopped caring.

A Serbian university professor who took a chair later Saturday morning at Brooklyn Bar, itself in central Pristina, described the mood as a numbness of the mind, and he said his elderly mother shared it.

At the first thump from an explosion on the outskirts of Pristina, she was baking bread, as many women now do because of food shortages.

Her son was heading down to the cellar, their only air-raid shelter, and stopped to wait for her.

“Go ahead if you like,” she told him. “But what for?”

The professor didn’t have an answer, so he turned and went back to listening to music, and his mother went on kneading her dough.

Life goes on, or at least a fair imitation of it.

The Brooklyn is one of only a few bars and cafes that are back in business in Pristina since a wave of looting and “ethnic cleansing” passed, and the people left behind try to act as if everything is normal.

The TV set above the bar at the Brooklyn is linked to a satellite dish, and the channel changer Saturday was locked on FTV, or Fashion Television.

So it was possible to watch hour after hour of models sashaying along the runway, to listen to Beethoven or to pan flutes on the Brooklyn’s stereo, and to forget you’d ever heard of NATO or, for that matter, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“You see, you Americans can never win. The cafes are open!” a proud Serbian journalist said as he passed a patio full of police officers and soldiers lounging in the sun in a slightly less conspicuous spot.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization did manage to knock Serbian state television off the air in Kosovo on Saturday by destroying the relay station at Goles, about 10 miles southwest of Pristina. The microwave antenna had to go because it could have been used by the military, NATO said in Brussels.

In the first few days after the alliance’s airstrikes began March 24, Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitaries expelled thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes in Pristina, and then from elsewhere in Serbia.

But even though the Serbs emptied whole neighborhoods, they didn’t get rid of all the capital’s ethnic Albanians, many of whom stayed in ethnically mixed apartment buildings and other districts.

They live in constant fear of Serbs coming to get them, if NATO doesn’t kill them first by missing a “strategic target” and bombing civilians again, as the alliance’s warplanes did early Wednesday.

At least a dozen civilians died in that attack, including three young ethnic Turkish girls. Serbs and ethnic Albanians were also among those killed or wounded by NATO.

Meanwhile, the Serbs’ forced exodus of so many Kosovo Albanians has left Pristina with only a weak shell of its economy, which wasn’t very strong in the first place.

There aren’t any black-market money-changers on the streets anymore, making it more difficult for the security forces and paramilitaries who stole German marks from fleeing refugees to get a good exchange rate.

Before the mass deportations, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians made up about 90% of the Serbian province’s population, and owned a lot of shops and other small businesses that the Serbian minority relied on.

Now, all but a few of those businesses in Pristina are either locked up, looted or gutted by fires set by arsonists.

About the only place left in the city where it is possible to hear spoken Albanian with one ear and Serbian with the other is in a crowd waiting outside a food store.

Almost three weeks after the air campaign began, the few shops open in Pristina, most of which are owned by the state, have little more that’s edible than milk, yogurt, bread and dried meat.

The only fruit lies rotting in locked stores that looters haven’t attacked yet. Cartons of juice disappear soon after they reach a shop. But the shelves never seem bare of chocolate, cream-filled cookies or potato chips.

Transistor radio batteries are impossible to find anywhere. As barter, a few fresh batteries would probably buy a case of beer, a bottle of single-malt scotch or better.

Cigarettes and coffee also are rare, and for those with a habit, the hardest things to do without. When a shop gets new stock, word spreads fast, and police come in to handle crowd control.

Gasoline is rationed at 40 liters a month per car, or about 10 1/2 gallons.

The most important shipment to reach Pristina on Thursday was eggs, which people carried through the streets in open cartons of 30, often stacked two and three high.

Today is Orthodox Easter, and dyed eggs are as essential to the festival as a stuffed turkey is to an American Thanksgiving.

On the eve of Easter, one of NATO’s missiles struck near the medieval Orthodox monastery at Gracanica, a treasure of Serbian culture built in 1320, authorities said in Serbia.

The Yugoslav army had an ammunition dump nearby, but NATO began bombing it the first night of the air campaign and had destroyed it days earlier.

Shaking the foundations of the Gracanica monastery yet again just hours before the celebration of Christ’s resurrection was an obscenity of the worst kind to many Serbs, even those who aren’t especially religious. It added heat to an already roiling anger.

Serbs insist that they are more determined than ever to take everything NATO can throw at them and still say no to its original demand that NATO-led ground troops come to Kosovo to keep the peace.

In a war, nothing can go to waste, not even the bare mannequins left standing in the front showcase of a clothing store whose windows were smashed by either looters or the shock waves from a NATO bomb.

Someone took the upper half of a male mannequin and placed it on a chair outside a small cafe that thieves had cleared out several days earlier. The mannequin sits, like a sentry, where sidewalk tables used to be.

It has a plastic flag taped to one hand and a kitchen knife planted in the top of its head. Scrawled across its chest with a black felt marker is a Nazi swastika--and the acronym NATO.

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All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/dispatch.