Anger, Hardship Fears Temper Serbs’ Relief

Nenad Milic and his partners had to inaugurate their new cafe without electricity Friday because NATO bombs had wrecked power transformers near Belgrade in the days before Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic bowed to peace.

With a portable generator and a small gas stove, they managed to keep the beer cold, the coffee hot and the music on. But Milic was worried about his dwindling stock of fuel--an omen, he said, for postwar Yugoslavia.

Ten weeks of air assaults have killed hundreds of civilians, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and forced its people to improvise in the ways that got their parents and grandparents through World War II. Now their palpable relief that peace is at hand is tempered by the bitterness of defeat and a fear that the lingering hardships will last far longer.

“Of course we’re relieved, but we’re also angry--angry at NATO, at Milosevic, at Clinton, at everybody else who started this stupid war,” Milic, 35, said under a lime tree in the cafe’s courtyard. “It will set us back many years.”

Heating plants, oil refineries and electrical power facilities are so ruined by the bombing, officials say, that millions of Serbs face a winter with unheated apartments. Independent economists here say about half a million people are out of work. Food production could suffer from shortages of fuel and fertilizer.

Ljubica Jerotijevic, a 37-year-old psychologist, is already thinking about the cold that is still more than four months away. She was shopping Friday for a wood-burning stove to replace her electric one and was stocking up on sugar.

“I’m horrified by the thought of winter,” she said. “In some ways, it will be more difficult than the war.”

Milic’s cafe was born from the hardships that Belgraders now face. The building surrounding the cafe’s courtyard in the old Vracar district belongs to Milic’s advertising agency, Incognito. The agency stopped functioning after two of its clients--a petroleum products company in the city of Nis and a home-appliance factory in the town of Cacak--were bombed and the others went idle in the wartime slowdown.

With tables hauled from their homes, the agency’s 10 employees converted the place and went to work as bartenders and waiters, angling for a share of the thousands of idled Belgraders who have spent the spring sitting in cafes discussing a conflict that started in distant Kosovo province.

The cafe workers don’t expect their ad agency to be revived any time soon. Now they’re pinning their hopes on the Propaganda Kafe Klub, a name that Milic said was inspired by the ad business. But it fit more aptly with the topic in his courtyard Friday--the official line that Milosevic had achieved a favorable compromise with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The president’s defenders argued that the peace agreement Milosevic accepted Thursday will prevent Kosovo and its ethnic Albanian majority from seceding from Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

“It’s still a capitulation,” said Ivan, a 17-year-old student from the neighborhood. “We had to accept their terms, pull all our troops out. America is too strong. We were brave, but that’s never enough.”

“Whether or not it was a capitulation doesn’t matter,” Milic said. “Our leaders don’t feel any responsibility to explain. And nobody is going to make them.”

The agreement could lead to a definitive bombing halt in a matter of days. NATO began its air assault March 24 to stop a brutal offensive by Milosevic’s army and police forces that expelled from Kosovo not only the rebels of the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army but also most of the province’s ethnic Albanian population.

For many Serbs, NATO’s decisive intervention was the latest in a string of humiliating defeats in ethnic conflicts that have broken up the Serbian-led Yugoslav federation in the decade since Milosevic came to power and have contributed to their self-image as a victimized people.

In interviews over the past six weeks, Serbs have asserted that they were right to be fighting for Kosovo. While a few expressed shame at the purging of ethnic Albanians, most were appalled at alleged Western support for the KLA and at what they viewed as a NATO effort to demoralize the entire Serbian population by bombing cities, bridges and power stations.

As the bombing dragged on longer than expected, however, Serbs voiced less pride in their defiance of NATO and more impatience for a settlement. When one finally came, they blamed both sides for taking so long.

“The most general feeling I observe among my compatriots today is outrage,” Nis Mayor Zoran Zivkovic told reporters in Belgrade on Friday. “People recognize the culprits in the regime and the international community, which could not find another way of achieving its aims.”

Zivkovic, whose city of 250,000 people recorded 37 civilian deaths from the bombing, said those familiar with the terms of the agreement feel even more let down.

“The official story up to now was that Kosovo will not be given to anyone, but in reality very soon it will be full of foreign soldiers,” he said. “This will be one in a long list of deceptions perpetrated by the government.”

As of Friday, state-controlled media had yet to report Milosevic’s concessions, including an agreement to withdraw all of his 40,000 police and military forces from Kosovo. Nor had they reported European leaders’ vows to withhold reconstruction aid from Serbia as long as Milosevic is running Yugoslavia.

Radenko Jaksic, a 50-year-old phone technician, covered his face with his hands and walked away from a reporter in dismay after being told what the peace agreement entailed. “Milosevic disappointed me,” he said.

But many Serbs familiar with the agreement said their anger at the West was still too deep for them to think about criticizing their president, who many believe had little choice in the face of an overwhelming foe.

“NATO committed so many crimes against my people, and now nobody will be punished for them,” said Mirjana Ilic, 29, a Spanish language teacher whose institute has run out of money. “If the West doesn’t help us out financially, we will never return to a normal life, and that will make it that much harder to forget about this conflict--or to forgive.”

The dismal economic outlook weighs far more heavily on Serbs than do the terms of the peace settlement. Some said they no longer care much about Kosovo, a place with historical and cultural significance for Serbia that few Serbs have ever visited.

“They’re more worried about getting through next winter than they are about politics,” said Srdjan Karanovic, a film director.

On the Boulevard of the Revolution, Belgraders put out of work by the bombing lined the sidewalk, selling T-shirts, flowers, pirated compact discs and used magazines.

A NATO plane roaring overhead produced a sonic boom, setting off car alarms along the boulevard and some doubts that the war was really ending. Warplanes struck an airfield outside Belgrade, but the city itself escaped bombing for a third straight day.

“I don’t trust our president to stick to this agreement,” said a laid-off metalworker who was selling Disney T-shirts off the hood of his car and identified himself only as Beli, 35. “Until we have a change of power at the top, our lives will not get better.”

But Serbs say they have no more control over Milosevic than they do over President Clinton or British Prime Minister Tony Blair. After a decade of ethnic conflicts, international sanctions and economic decline, people have become resigned to his authoritarian rule, opposition party leaders say.

“Eventually, he will give a palatable explanation for this war, and people will probably accept it,” said Indira Becarevic, 29, who took to selling baby rabbits out of a cardboard box on the boulevard after the bombing forced her photocopying shop to close. “What’s most important is that there’s a settlement. We’ve had enough tragedy and suffering.”

* CHANGE OF HEART

Pounding of army, utilities and economic targets may have led to Milosevic’s shift. A10

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