War-Battered Serbs Face Huge Rebuilding Job

The war is over, but Jordan and Marija Mitrovic’s four-room house at 10 Vardarska St. in old Belgrade is damaged beyond repair and still shaking.

A bomb blew a crater in the street, demolishing a neighbor’s house and opening wide cracks in every wall and seam of the Mitrovic home. Part of the ceiling caved in and is being held up by stacks of tables and cabinets.

The retired couple sit under an apricot tree watching their little house quiver and crumble as a steam shovel takes another bite from the street so workers can fix broken water pipes. Marija Mitrovic, 60, who has lived in the house all her life, bursts into tears.

“They tell us we have to tear it down and rebuild,” said her son Lazar, an out-of-work electrician. “But we have no money and nowhere to go.”

This is just one city block of a shattered nation. NATO’s 11-week air assault left many such scenes of destruction across Yugoslavia and millions of people in a postwar state of uncertainty and despair--under the rule of a man whom the West refuses to bail out.

Although the Yugoslav military purged hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from rebellious Kosovo province and destroyed many of their homes, the rest of Serbia suffered the heaviest damage from NATO’s bombs. Hundreds of factories, bridges, houses, roads and railway lines lie in ruins in Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

One of the most developed economies in Eastern Europe until this decade, Yugoslavia is now likely to overtake Albania as the most backward, economists say.

Before the bombing, the independent G-17 research group here was estimating that Yugoslavia would need 25 years to regain the level of prosperity it had in 1989--before post-Communist mismanagement and international economic sanctions began taking their toll.

Today it will need 41 years, the think tank says--unless the country gets enough foreign aid for a repair job that will cost at least $10 billion, by the most conservative estimates.

“There is no possibility for real economic recovery without foreign assistance,” said Mladjan Dinkic, coordinator of the G-17 group. “The only thing we can do alone is provide enough for people not to go hungry.”

The peace deal accepted by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic calls for reconstruction aid for the Balkans. Kosovo is eligible, as is Montenegro, Serbia’s Western-looking fellow republic, but President Clinton and European leaders say the rest of Yugoslavia will get no aid until Milosevic is out of office.

In his address to the nation Thursday, Clinton spoke directly to Serbs, saying, “As long as [Milosevic] remains in power, as long as your nation is ruled by an indicted war criminal, we will provide no support for the reconstruction of Serbia.”

Whether the combined weight of sanctions and war damage will force a political change is unclear, however. With Milosevic weakened and isolated but determined to cling to power--like a Balkan Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein--Serbs have begun to weigh the odds of their own long-term survival as they add up the damage.

The Mitrovic family has registered the equivalent of $20,000 in damage claims with the municipal government but has no illusions.

“We’ll get compensated when money falls from the sky,” Lazar Mitrovic said.

Overall repair needs are enormous. Traffic on the Danube River is blocked by three downed bridges, and the main north-south highway is littered with collapsed overpasses. Government buildings in Belgrade are demolished, the city’s main television antennas toppled.

Yugoslavia’s two oil refineries have been destroyed, along with half its petroleum reserves, according to NATO. Fertilizer and petrochemical complexes, weapons-for-export factories and the country’s automobile assembly plant have been ruined by deliberate NATO airstrikes.

The machine factory in Kraljevo is smashed. Thus there is nowhere to manufacture the heavy construction equipment that will be needed to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

Misguided bombs and missiles damaged at least three hospitals and hundreds of homes, killing 2,000 civilians, the government says.

With the economy at a near-standstill and half a million workers idled, some experts predict a 40% drop in the gross national product during the year.

Serbs are already bracing for a harsh winter. Shortages of fuel and fertilizer will mean a reduced fall harvest, officials warn, while damage to electrical transformers and central urban heating plants might not be fixed in time for officials to cope with the demand for home heating.

In Belgrade, sales of generators and coal-burning stoves have soared in recent weeks, and people have begun stockpiling sugar and other commodities. Thousands of city dwellers have moved in with relatives in the countryside, who heat their homes with firewood and grow much of their own food.

Factory workers whose plants escaped damage are uncertain about their jobs because heavy industry might have to shut down in the fall to divert as much electricity as possible to private homes.

In the face of such hardships, no political, military or business leader has risen to challenge Milosevic for having led the country to ruin or for standing in the way of recovery. Many Serbs say that any such gambit would lead to violence, and they’ve already had enough; they sound resigned to enduring postwar deprivations for months and years.

The question is how. Some radical Milosevic supporters want him to impose a Soviet-style command economy with centralized distribution of goods at controlled prices. State-run media are urging idled factory workers with rural roots to return to the countryside and help with the harvest.

Milosevic hinted at this option Thursday, when he said the rebuilding effort will require “great mobilization” of people.

“The West may be pushing Milosevic toward a closed, militarized economy,” said Tomislav Popovic, director of Belgrade’s independent Institute of Economic Sciences. “But I doubt he would be able to maintain one for long.”

Others around the Yugoslav leader agree that he cannot afford to accept isolation. These advisors are lobbying for some rebuilding assistance from the West.

“They would not be giving this aid to Slobodan Milosevic; they would be giving to the people of this country,” said Bogoljub Karic, a Serbian business tycoon and government minister who counseled the Yugoslav leader to bow to peace in order to escape even greater devastation of the country.

“Our people have swallowed a bitter pill in accepting this peace agreement,” Karic told a group of Western journalists recently. “If everything remains the same, they will feel betrayed and cheated. The consequences will be catastrophic.”

Another political faction, led by Serbian Renewal Party leader Vuk Draskovic, favors installing a democratic, pro-Western government under Milosevic but having him fade to a figurehead role. Draskovic, who was fired from the government in April after calling for a peace agreement, has been offering ever since to lead such an effort.

But neither Karic nor Draskovic is certain of attracting much immediate relief from outside, and without it, Serbs will be forced to rely on their ability to make do, as they have throughout the recent years of ethnic bloodshed and punishing sanctions.

Hundreds of thousands of Serbs have emigrated during the 1990s, and each year they send home enough cash remittances--$1 billion in 1998--to sustain the economy. The flow of emigrants and their cash is now expected to increase.

Djordje Cvejic, director of a trading company that imports thermoplastic resins for dozens of Serbian factories, is seasoned in the complex arrangements that well-connected businesses must make to pay for imports and circumvent foreign prohibitions on dealings with Serbia.

“Everything the West is doing against Yugoslavia brings pressure on ordinary citizens,” he said, while Milosevic and his cronies manage to prosper and stash their money abroad. As long as their wealth is untouched, he said, no Serb is going to rise up against them. “I have children,” he said. “I have to make a living.”

A more hopeful scenario voiced by Serbs who want to break their impoverished isolation is a long-term one: Rather than challenge Milosevic directly, self-reliant Serbs would organize a stronger civil society--as the Poles did under Communist rule in the 1980s--and build up a network of private business, professional and cultural ties with the West.

“The natural instinct of this country is to cooperate with the West in one way or another,” said Voja Zanetic, a political commentator and leader of protests against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during its bombing assault. As such ties develop, he added, “pressure for reforming society will build from within. . . . Those who don’t accept the new way of thinking will fade away.”

On the Web

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