Serbs Rebuild a Bridge: 1 Down, 46 More to Go

White and orange dust clouds from an army of sandblasters, spray painters and sweepers billowed around the black, late-model Mercedes-Benz as it screeched to a halt more than 100 feet above the Danube River, carrying one of postwar Serbia’s most important men.

It was not Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, nor any of his top police or army commanders, nor even one of the senior ruling-party officials who will take center stage at a ceremony today in this remote village north of Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

Serbia’s man of the hour is Milovan Krstajic, a soft-spoken civil engineer who is general manager of Belgrade’s leading bridge-building firm. His workers were putting the finishing touches on the first bridge to be rebuilt since NATO destroyed it and so many others, along with much of the basic infrastructure in Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

And as the bridge neared completion Sunday, Krstajic was justifiably proud. After all, the timing of today’s reopening ceremony is vital to Milosevic’s personal image, standing and survival.

Serbian political analysts say Milosevic’s hopes of clinging to power depend only partly on deep divisions within the opposition now staging near-daily protests calling for his ouster. Mostly, they said, Milosevic’s fate rides on his and the Serbian government’s ability to rebuild without outside help.

On June 15, Milosevic, whom the West and Serbia’s fractious opposition now are striving to drive from power, stood at a bombed-out, 40-yard gap on this bridge and promised in a nationally televised speech to reopen it to traffic within 40 days.

Today is only Day 35.

“Yes, it’s a great achievement,” Krstajic said. “We are completely convinced there is no company in the world that could have finished it faster.”

Krstajic detailed working day and night under tremendous deadline pressure from a regime that owns a big piece of the GP Mostogradnja construction company. His engineers closed the gaping hole in the 1.4-mile-long bridge by filling in the marshes beneath it with a mountain of dirt. But Krstajic candidly conceded: “Given that this is marshland, I cannot guarantee it won’t sink in the future.”

The bridge begins to reconnect Serbia, as well as a major commercial thoroughfare from Central and Western Europe that cuts through Serbia on its way south toward Greece and Turkey.

The scene on the bridge was a telling one in the monumental reconstruction task facing Milosevic and his cash-strapped regime. For bridges alone, today’s ceremony means one down and 46 to go.

In addition to road and railway spans that NATO damaged or destroyed in airstrikes, there are dozens of crippled factories, oil refineries and power plants, as well as demolished apartment blocks and private homes.

Bridge Repairs Just a Fraction of Total Cost

The bridges alone will cost $160 million to fix, according to estimates by an independent Serbian economic think tank, the G-17. And that is a tiny fraction of a postwar repair bill the group estimates at $4 billion for a government that is technically broke.

The numbers facing Milosevic and his reconstruction team get even grimmer from there.

The Serbian government has yet to issue official figures or specific damage assessments, and has labeled estimates such as the G-17’s “malicious” and premature. But the opposition-leaning think tank says the bombing will cost Serbia’s gross domestic product about $30 billion in the years ahead. The GDP already declined in sanctions-saddled Serbia to $17.4 billion last year from $30.8 billion in 1989.

NATO’s bombardment, meant to end Serbian atrocities against ethnic Albanians in its southern province of Kosovo, also cost more than 200,000 jobs. Many of those who have kept their jobs, largely in the state firms that still dominate Serbia’s socialist economy, haven’t been paid in months, nor have millions of pensioners. Serbia’s average wage, now the equivalent of $50 a month, is expected to drop in value to $35 by year’s end.

The bottom line, according to the think tank and other independent economists: The Serbian government needs about $4.5 billion to pay its bills and it is believed to have less than $150 million in hard currency.

“When you look at the numbers, you can see that the real humanitarian crisis will be here in Serbia--not Kosovo,” said one member of a United Nations survey team that has been assessing Serbia’s postwar economic nightmare.

“The numbers alone suggest that the entire pension and social welfare system could come crashing down very soon, which would cause an enormous humanitarian disaster here at a time when most of the world just wants to forget that Serbia exists.”

Western nations have said Serbia will get no reconstruction aid as long as Milosevic remains in power. Western aid officials say they expect Serbia to be at the bottom of the priority list when international donors meet in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on July 28 to allocate postwar resources in the Balkans.

When he set the 40-day deadline for the bridge project, Milosevic said it would mark “the renewal of our country.” He told his 10 million fellow Yugoslavs: “It is possible because even while the bombs were falling, the builders were secretly preparing elements which will be built into this bridge.”

Asked Sunday if this was true, general manager Krstajic said, “Well, that’s what he said.”

Later, he added that his firm wasn’t hired to do the job until four or five days after Milosevic delivered his speech, making the 30-day rebuilding achievement as remarkable as the ingenuity employed by his engineers.

The 40-yard gap was near the Danube’s northern bank here. In effect, the engineers “shortened” the bridge by extending the riverbank to close the severed span.

First, Krstajic said, workers cleared debris that threatened to pull down more of the bridge, and used the rest of the road debris as a base for the new foundation. Then, they sank a new pylon deep into the marshland to anchor it, and truckloads of dirt filled in the rest, forming a small mountain that connected the riverbank to the existing span and supported 40 yards of roadway built atop it.

“We worked three shifts, around the clock, every day, first through the intense heat and then through terrible floods,” the general manager said.

In a nation where few state workers speak openly for fear of losing their jobs, Krstajic then acknowledged: “One of the biggest problems is the fact that this new extension is all built on marshland, and most likely it will settle. I’m not excluding the possibility it might sink in the future.”

But he quickly added: “It’s not of great concern. If it does, we’ll simply refill or repave to bring the roadway back up to the right level.”

As he surveyed his finished product, Krstajic was only too eager to focus on the next challenge: A temporary pontoon bridge he plans to complete by Sept. 1 on barges strung across the Danube upstream, which will reconnect the Serbian metropolis of Novi Sad with itself. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization destroyed all three bridges in Novi Sad, where about 50,000 people now commute on flatbed barges.

Refocusing on the moment at hand, Krstajic summed up the significance of today’s event: “First of all, it’s economic. Commerce again will move through here, and that’s very important. But the message is: We can do what we promise.”