Torn Apart by War

Vesna Milosevic is tortured by the questions. How do you live your life, she asks, when your loved ones are living under skies streaked with missiles at night? How do you sleep and eat? Or keep your thoughts together? How do you not feel guilty for fleeing Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a few days after the sirens started blaring and the night sky turned plum red from powerful missile explosions?

Milosevic, a 51-year-old Serbian woman with dual Canadian-Yugoslav citizenship, recently fled Belgrade for the San Fernando Valley at the urging of her adult son and daughter.

Now staying with her children, Milosevic sat on a leather couch in their condominium and told her story. She asked that the identity and location of her family remain confidential, so they would not be harassed.

She said it was her hope that people will realize it’s not just the Kosovars who are suffering in the war. Listening to Milosevic--who is not related to the Yugoslavian president of the same last name--one hears the urgent, pained voice of a woman caught in the middle of the dangerous, confusing, world of war.

“The everyday people of Belgrade, good people, they suffer too,” she said. “People like myself and my family, we are not evil like you see on TV. We are frightened and just wish for the fighting to stop.”

NATO maintains that the military action is necessary to stop the Yugoslav government from driving ethnic Albanians from their homes.

When the dark-eyed woman returned to her native country last year--after living as a Canadian citizen since 1973--she thought she would be in Belgrade for the rest of her life.

She had met Miodrag Filimonovic there, and they were planning to marry. The two took an apartment in downtown Belgrade, near the longtime home of Milosevic’s ailing parents and a stone’s throw from important government buildings that would end up targeted by NATO bombs.

“I had never, in all my life, been so happy,” she said. It was a time made better by the fact her son and daughter were now living together and well on their way to successful lives: her 31-year-old son working as a freelance photographer and her daughter, 28, studying for a teaching certificate at Cal State Northridge.

*

In Belgrade, Milosevic said, it was a blissful and naive moment in time. Many disliked Slobodan Milosevic, but many more, like herself, seemed “not political.”

And the problems in Kosovo appeared far removed from the prosperous, cosmopolitan life lived in Belgrade. Military threats from NATO seemed surreal. “We would hear about the threats and then NATO would pull back, they would threaten again, and nothing would seem to happen.”

Then reality struck. On the evening of March 24, Milosevic and her fiance were lying down on their bed, unaware that their city was caught in NATO cross-hairs and about to take a hit.

“We heard an explosion, like a thunder. The building shook and shook,” she said.

For the next three days, NATO bombs slammed into buildings in downtown Belgrade, Milosevic said.

“It was like some movie at first, like this wasn’t really happening,” she said. Bombs in the middle of a modern capital city, she asked? In this day and age?

On March 27 Milosevic was finally prodded by her son, daughter and fiance to take advantage of her Canadian citizenship and leave. She said that was an option not available to her other family members, because Serbian citizens cannot leave the country.

In a caravan of buses and vans packed with people from countries like Sweden, Scotland and England, Milosevic left Belgrade by cover of night. She was headed to Budapest, where she had a plane reservation to Frankfurt and another that would send her to Los Angeles.

It took 10 hours of driving on back country roads under a dark night filled only with the sounds of missiles and jets but Milosevic arrived in Budapest on March 28. One day later, she landed in Southern California.

For her, the story is far from over. She is living now in a comfortably appointed home on a comfortably appointed street in the Valley. But Milosevic, who because of the conflict has the harried look of a woman unable to find her bearings, is consumed by fear and frustration.

She imagines the worst things that can happen in America to a family of Yugoslavian Serbs with the last name of Milosevic. The possibility of threats, vandalism and attacks.

She can’t sleep. At 2 and 3 and 4 a.m. she is up watching CNN coverage of missiles hitting the neighborhood where her fiance, grandparents, cousins and best friends live, the villages she has traveled to, the roads she has taken.

*

On her best days, those when she is feeling most relaxed, she’s still so nervous she’ll barely eat a thing.

She watches the war on the smallest TV she can find because the large-screen Mitsubishi in the living room is too much to deal with. “I stay away from that thing,” she said. “The big TV brings the war right here. . . . I can not deal with that now, only the small one.”

Milosevic said she appreciates the fact that America affords her safety and provides a place for her son and daughter to prosper. Still, she doesn’t want to be here.

“I am torn, because I love the U.S. and I love Canada, but I just don’t see what they are doing to my country.”