Belgrade, Serbia: July 16 -17, 2000: Anna Marie has cried only twice when she dropped me off at the airport terminal in Denver. Once was when I went to Baghdad, Iraq, and the other time was today, when she dropped me off on Sunday for the trip to Belgrade.
“When I see you walk through those airport doors, I never know if I’ll ever see you again,” she said. Then she apologized for crying.
I cannot tell you how much the two of us depend upon the travel promises in Psalm 91. At the airport is where the rubber really meets the road. There are no outside pressures making me do what I do with Project C.U.R.E. It truly is a love gift to God. And Anna Marie and I are both totally a part of that gift.
As soon as I determined that I should go to Belgrade, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about the history of the Balkans and how the most recent unrest started. I read newspapers, books, news magazines, and briefing papers. I even asked Jim Peters and the US State Department to give me materials and had Anna Marie glean information from the Internet. I took a lot of the documents with me on the plane for continued reading.
United Airlines flight 296 departed Denver at 10:00 a.m. and flew to Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. After a couple hours’ layover, Jim Peters and I were to have boarded United flight 962 to Munich, Germany. However, the plane scheduled to make the Munich flight was hit by lightning on the incoming flight, so we were delayed an additional four hours while the electrical maintenance people and engineers thoroughly checked out the equipment. I was worried about making the connection to Belgrade in Munich. If Jim and I missed our connection, there were no alternative flights to Yugoslavia.
During and after the US and NATO bombing of Belgrade, all air traffic was halted into Yugoslavia. The flights just resumed, and there are still very few flights scheduled. In fact, when Jim and I were first making our travel plans, we had to consider flying into Budapest, Hungary, and taking a bus from Budapest to Belgrade.
The woman at the United flight desk figured it out for me and said that if our plane could take off by 9:00 p.m., we could still just make the Lufthansa connection in Munich to Belgrade. At 9:15 we were given clearance to depart and left Washington. I knew then that Jim and I would have to run through the terminal in Munich if we were to catch the flight to Belgrade.
Somehow we made the connection, and our luggage was even properly transferred. We arrived in Belgrade around two o’clock in the afternoon, and to my surprise, I wasn’t hassled at passport control or customs for being an American. Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic met us at the airport. Olga is the daughter of one of Jim’s deceased brothers. She has a PhD and a very responsible job. Alexander is an engineer and has designed projects and airports not only throughout Europe but all over the world. He is also head of the engineering department at the university in Belgrade.
I wasn’t prepared for the amount of damage I saw in Belgrade, which was inflicted during the recent bombardment of the downtown area. Their largest and most prominent government buildings were bombed either from the outside in or from the inside out by US smart bombs. At one downtown intersection, all of the large buildings on all four corners had been totally destroyed with precision so as not to impact surrounding buildings.
I began to see that the US and NATO bombing game wasn’t just about destroying billions of dollars’ worth of factories, police stations, army barracks, and infrastructures; it was also about psychologically scaring the pants off the Serbs with the surgical precision of high-tech weapons. All of the sorties were flown no lower than fifteen thousand feet with pinpoint accuracy. Conventional defense systems like antiaircraft guns can’t reach anything above about five thousand feet. The US and NATO were playing serious cat-and-mouse games with the Serbs, and the message was, “Either sign the peace accords, or we’ll shoot the pillow out from under your head in your own bed from an elevation so high, you won’t even know we were there.”
As we crossed the Sava River where it flows into the Danube River, I could see the ruins of lots of bridges that had been blown into the water. The debris was still blocking ships from using the river ports. That sent an unmistakable message to the neighboring countries of Romania and Austria, who are now economically disadvantaged because they’re unable to use the river for shipping. Olga told me that seventy bridges were targeted and destroyed throughout Serbia.
Jim and I checked into the old Moskva hotel, which dates back to the old days of Russian influence and is located right in the heart of historic downtown Belgrade. Over the past two weeks, Belgrade experienced a heat wave, with temperatures setting records of well over one hundred degrees. The weather people are calling for much cooler temperatures during our stay, and when I realized that the old hotel isn’t air-conditioned, I too began calling for cooler temperatures.
As I opened my hotel window, I could hear the chants and loud voices of political protestors just a few blocks away. They were calling for the ouster of President Milošević. I decided that’s one area of the city I won’t visit. Common sense and experience have taught me to stay far away from antigovernment protests or any gatherings that could become unruly. I’m in potentially dangerous surroundings.
Slavka Draskovic, the director of the Serbian Unity Congress, joined Jim, Olga, Alexander, and me for dinner at the hotel. She had helped Jim set up all of our appointments at the hospitals, clinics, and organizations we’ll be visiting during our stay. I asked Slavka about the demonstrations I had heard from my window, and she told me that the Serbian Unity Congress stands in opposition to Milošević’s government, and months ago, members of the congress joined thousands of protestors who were calling for Milošević’s resignation. But now, most people have completely lost heart and hope for any change, and only about fifty to one hundred gather in the square to protest. She said they had all hoped that America and the NATO countries would help them in their opposition, but the Clinton administration only sent bombs and sanctions, which has made all of their lives more miserable, killed a lot of their loved ones, and reduced their incomes to less than fifty dollars per month but left Milošević and his people wealthier and more powerful.
At dinner the three of us went over next week’s schedule of appointments. We’ll be traveling outside Belgrade, as well as performing needs assessments at the major health institutions in the city. It looks like a tough week ahead. As Slavka was leaving, I asked her what kind of reaction I can expect as an American from the people we’ll meet.
“There is no hiding the fact that the people here really hate Clinton and Albright. Clinton has deceived us, and Mrs. Albright used to live right here in this city when her father was the Czechoslovakian ambassador to Belgrade. She knows us and grew up with us, and she is the one who negotiated for bombing us. Most of the common people here are just terribly confused. It doesn’t seem like Washington knows what it’s doing with their foreign policy. Now it will be harder for other countries to ever trust the American government. The common people we meet will be terribly surprised you’re here. You are the first to try to bring help to us. They will appreciate you and like you for that.”
I’ve fallen in love with the old European cities. At night people still put on clean clothes and go to the downtown centers to walk, visit, and stop at the sidewalk cafés to have coffee and maybe some ice cream. They really carry out that tradition in Belgrade. Jim Peters, who is seventy-six years old, wanted to show me some of the history of Belgrade, so before we retired for the night, we spent almost an hour walking. He showed me where his boyhood friends used to live and where he used to work, and the office buildings where his prominent family members used to run their businesses.
When we got to one intersection, Jim stopped and pointed out the old bank building where his father was once an influential officer. Just across the street, he pointed out where he spent his last night in Belgrade in 1944. The Gestapo had already surrounded his house and was going to put Jim and his brother in prison or in front of the firing squad. For every German soldier who was killed, the Gestapo would kill a hundred civilians in retaliation. Jim told me that the Yugoslavians had ambushed and killed seven German soldiers. The next day the Germans rounded up seven hundred civilians, men, women, school children and shot them.
Jim asked a school girlfriend, who was also in the resistance movement, to hide him and his brother at her house overnight. They then slipped out of the house, jumped fences, and ran into the nearby forested hills to escape. After his escape in 1944, Jim wasn’t able to return to Belgrade until just ten years ago.
Next Week: Yugoslav Red Cross Will Help Us