With War Over, Serbs Must Heal Psychic Wounds

The night caller was typical of the trauma beginning to fill Borislav Radovic’s crisis hotline here in the Serbian capital.

She was distraught, perhaps even suicidal. Her husband, she told the young psychologist who answered the phone, had been drafted along with tens of thousands of other Serbian men in the days leading up to NATO’s air war on Yugoslavia over the province of Kosovo.

But the woman had wanted to spare their 4-year-old daughter the horrible truth of the coming war. So she’d made up a story.

“Daddy isn’t at war. It’s just training,” she said. And with each wailing siren and each bomb that shook Belgrade in the ensuing weeks, she reassured the child it was only pretend.

Then the war ended, and reality returned--just as it has for this entire nation of 10 million people after nearly three months of collective denial.

The child saw some of her city’s finest buildings bombed to ruin, Radovic’s counselor later related. And the girl blamed her father, an army reservist now returned to the hatred of a daughter and a family in crisis after surviving 11 weeks of war.

“I’m afraid this is just the beginning,” said Radovic, a Serbian sociologist and expert on post-traumatic stress who runs one of the few private crisis-intervention centers in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic. The lines there now are busier than they were throughout the war.

“It will take about two months before the worst of it starts showing up,” Radovic said. “My intuition is that by autumn, we’re going to have a lot of work, as everyone confronts the reality of their situation.”

Already, city police say that Belgrade’s suicide rate has soared: 96 men, women and children killed themselves in the capital from March 23, the day before the first NATO bomb fell, through the end of June. And in interviews Saturday, a wide range of Serbian psychologists, psychiatrists and social analysts said they expect this rate to increase, along with a host of psychological disorders, in the weeks and months to come.

That prospect only grew Saturday as a torrential downpour left parts of this nation flooded and at least one person dead and 10 missing.

Stress clinics and hotlines rarely used during the 78 days NATO’s bombs fell are busy. Postwar sales of over-the-counter sedatives that became popular during the war are increasing, the doctors said. And, amid growing political uncertainty, the psychiatrists reported that their caseloads are accumulating steadily.

All of this is occurring in a capital city of 2 million that cast itself throughout the war as a bastion of defiance, where rock concerts taunted NATO bombing runs, where bull’s-eyes appeared on T-shirts, doorways and windshields, and where Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic declared victory immediately after losing Kosovo in a war he said had proved his country’s ability to withstand the military force of the most powerful nations on the globe.

“Now is the time of confronting reality--a reality that is not very pleasant,” said Dr. Milan Popovic, a retired University of Belgrade psychotherapist who works part time at a city crisis center financed by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“During the bombing, people were so concerned with the existential problem of staying alive. Now, they’ve relaxed from the bombing, but there are so many problems in front of them. The psychopathology we have now is not a mental illness. It’s a psychopathology of everyday life.”

On the surface, this broad-shouldered city appears to be resuming its former life. Cafes are full, children play, office workers commute, revelers party into the night, and a culture that prides itself on its resilience and fierce survival seems to be on the rebound.

But tens of thousands of army reservists called up for the war have returned to unemployment after NATO bombs demolished dozens of factories on which hundreds of thousands of Serbian lives depended. Many have yet to receive their wartime pay. And with power plants and oil refineries bombed into ruins and fuel already a precious commodity, a harsh winter looms ahead.

And cut off from the Western economy and all reconstruction aid as long as Milosevic remains in power, this nation that has endured nearly a decade under U.N. economic sanctions and wars that tore it to pieces, republic by republic, is more isolated than ever.

“What we have now is a postwar depression,” said Dr. Vladimir Jovic, a psychiatrist at Belgrade’s state-run Institute for Mental Health. “But even worse, I think, is the internal loss of faith--faith in government, institutions, society, democracy, the West, everything. It’s similar, I think, to the Vietnam veterans in the States.”

Added Popovic: “Truth is the biggest casualty of this war--on both sides. Our people don’t believe anybody anymore. There are just so many broken promises.”

The political implications of this credibility vacuum are potentially huge, as street protests against Milosevic and his regime mount by the week in a country where arms and ammunition have replaced trust and security through nearly a decade of internal wars.

“The people now express their aggression much more freely than before,” Popovic said. “There’s been a radicalization within society. . . . And the question in everyone’s mind is: Where [will this] stop? Will it just be verbal expression or will it be a more radicalized, violent expression? I just hope it won’t come to civil war.”

Those fears, he and other psychologists agreed, were encapsulated in a single, haunting image that appeared in every Serbian-language newspaper Saturday.

It was a photograph of Ratko Zecevic, the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia district administrator in the town of Prokuplje--pistol in hand, a cigarette dangling from his lips, frowning in cold resignation--on a balcony overlooking an anti-government rally in the southern Serbian town Thursday.

It was taken only seconds after Zecevic unloaded all 15 bullets from the semiautomatic pistol’s clip over the demonstrators’ heads, just as the rally began, and one paper captioned it “The Fastest Gun.”

Psychologist Zarko Korac, a po-litical science professor and opposition party leader, pointed to the radicalization of the pro-democracy demonstrators after more than eight years of war and 2 1/2 months of NATO bombardment.

“They’re going to personalize their suffering, and it’s going to be directed at Milosevic,” he said. “He’s a very specific target, a high-profile target. And that puts him in danger.

“But Milosevic also is a dangerous man. And his options are extremely limited. He could simply opt for chaos--bloody chaos.”

Such fears, the psychiatrists say, are fuel for the postwar fire of Serbian desperation.

“A lot of people who commit suicide do so out of fear--not just depression, hopelessness and despair,” said Dr. Oliver Vidojevic, a private psychotherapist here.

In explaining a suicide phenomenon that extends throughout Serbia, Vidojevic stressed: “This war was not from March 24. This war is from June 1991 [when Croatia’s split from the Yugoslav federation ignited the first of the decade’s regional wars]. These past months were just the most extreme--and we hope the last--phase of it. But there is fear it may even get worse.”

He and Popovic have both worked extensively with the more than 700,000 Serbian refugees who have fled during the past decade from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--and with the ones now fleeing by the tens of thousands from NATO-occupied Kosovo. The two doctors said they suspect suicide rates are the highest among the Serbian refugees.

To illustrate, Vidojevic told of a couple he counseled during a visit to a center near the provincial border, where an estimated 100,000 Kosovo Serbs have taken refuge in fear of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians since NATO-led peacekeepers took over the province last month.

“The man looked 70, but he was only 52,” the psychotherapist said. “He and his wife had fled Croatia in 1993 after the war took his right arm. They first moved to Belgrade, where their children married and left home. Finally, they settled on a small piece of land in Kosovo, until last week.

“The man was desperate. He has lost everything--for the second time. And now even his children are gone. He spoke of suicide by hand grenade, and I believe there’s a risk he’ll do it, maybe even with his wife. And it was difficult for me. As a professional, my duty is to promote life and tell him there’s hope. But I left there without finding a way to offer him any.”

For the rest of the Serbs bearing psychological scars--made all the worse by a demonization of their nation through images of mass graves and other atrocities in Kosovo--the mental health experts here said the only cure they see is truth.

“We must all, as individuals and as a nation, confront reality--however painful that reality may be,” said Radovic, whose International Aid Network crisis-intervention center, funded by U.S. and British nonprofit aid agencies, is expanding rapidly into the Serbian countryside.

Added Vidojevic: “Denial is a defense mechanism, but when it is overused, it could become a manifestation of a death instinct. If someone who is walking on a roof is in denial about it, then he jumps. We now have to use the real truth, speak the truth, say what is real.

“False hope is what brought us here. Real hope is what’s needed now. And only real truth will lead us to real hope.”