(Note to the Reader: This is the last Journal segment of the July, 2000, trip to Serbia. I must tell you how very proud I am of the staff and volunteers of Project C.U.R.E. For the last nineteen years we have not forgotten or neglected the wonderful people of the old Yugoslavia. Once we go into a country and establish a relationship, we do not just send an initial ocean-going shipping container to that country and then abandon them. To date, we have donated millions of dollars worth of medical goods. In just the past few weeks Project C.U.R.E. has continued to ship the most needed medical supplies into the country through our friends, HRH, the Crown Prince and Princes of Serbia. I am so grateful for this organization called Project C.U.R.E.)
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Belgrade, Serbia: July 22-24, 2000: Jim Peters intends to fully utilize my time in Belgrade. We even scheduled another three hospitals for Needs Assessment Studies. Our first appointment today was at 9:00 a.m. at the children’s disability hospital, out away from the city center.
The hospital sits directly adjacent to the Yugoslavian military barracks. NATO had targeted the military facility, but during the bombing, the rockets and bombs splashed over onto the hospital complex, totally destroying several of the main buildings and severely damaging the rest of the medical complex. The collateral damage included not only the buildings but also many of the disabled children and hospital staff members, who were killed in the air strikes. It really is a profound tragedy.
As we drove up to the facility, the hospital director and one of his aides met us. The director is an older gentleman and was very cordial and appreciative that we came to see his hospital. He immediately furnished us with videotapes of the destruction and carnage from the bombing and the steps toward reconstruction that the hospital is taking. He said that when he asked why the hospital was a military target, NATO authorities told him that it was foolish for them to build their hospital so close to the military project. “But,” he protested, “the children’s disability hospital has been here since 1861.”
As we approached an administration building that has been almost completely renovated with funds from the government of Denmark, we met a middle-aged, bleach-blonde woman who was involved in fund-raising for the hospital reconstruction. She is either a lawyer or an economist, but she isn’t a medical doctor. She kind of took over the meeting and led us into the conference room of the rebuilt administration offices.
Once we were seated, the blonde bombshell turned into a human buzz saw. Her eyes were wild, her questions were erratic, and her mouth was going eighty miles an hour, even though I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Jim attempted to get a word in edgewise, but it was like trying to thread the needle on a sewing machine that was running at top speed. The very fact that Jim tried to say something only made her actions more intense. Alexander tried to jump into the conversation as well, but his efforts met with the same response.
When the woman left the room briefly to pick up some solicitation brochures from a desk, Jim had just a minute to explain what was taking place. The woman was incoherently anti-American. How could the Americans destroy a country, bomb and burn a city, and demolish a civilian hospital, killing innocent children? Who gave them the right to enter a sovereign country and start killing and destroying property without even declaring war on the country? And how dare an American actually come to her country under the pretense of wanting to help? She was very, very angry—dangerously so!
When I heard what was going on, I told Jim and Alexander that we weren’t there to sell anything, and I advised leaving quickly and quietly. The woman was out of control.
The intensity only increased when the woman reentered the conference room and shoved some brochures across the table at Alexander and me. At that point Jim tried once more to explain why we were there. But the woman’s jabbering only got faster and louder. I could see Jim’s neck turning red, and the color working its way up into his face. He was getting angry.
At that point Alexander stood up and pushed back his chair. I put my things back into my attaché case, stood, and reached across the table to retrieve the Project C.U.R.E. business card I had given to the woman earlier. I walked to the conference-room door, opened it, and walked out into the hallway. The hospital director was sitting there in shock. He had looked forward to our visit and had prepared a list of needs for us, including a new X-ray machine and medical supplies.
I reached the outside door of the building but discovered that the woman had locked it. She had to get on her mobile phone to call someone close by to unlock it from the outside. In those minutes, her anger was so intense that I believe she would have shot us if she’d had access to a gun.
The week had already been emotionally taxing for me from viewing all the destruction and loss of life. But the episode with the anti-American woman left me exhausted and solemn. She had a right to be angry, and our presence in Belgrade had become the flash point for her anger. On our way out of the building, we talked with the doctor as we walked. I tried to assure him that we held nothing against him because of the unpleasant meeting. It was my advice that we let things cool off for a bit. Then, in the future, Jim can work with him on his specific requests for help.
The whole incident was a wake-up call and a reality check for me. The Yugoslavians we met had overwhelmingly accepted and appreciated us. They were fascinated with my presence in Belgrade but were warm and responsive. However, I was reminded that you don’t dare get complacent or sloppy in security measures. I’m in a life-threatening position every time I enter a hostile environment like Iraq, Pakistan, northern India, Rwanda, North Korea, or Cuba. In reality, there’s a lot of global anti-American sentiment. No longer are we the “darlings” of the world, and our elitist and arrogant national policies in recent years have turned many people around the world against us.
Our next appointment was across town at the university hospital for cardiovascular diseases. We had another set of excellent meetings with Dr. Miodrag Grujic, the director, and Dr. Vladan Vukcevic, the deputy director. I was very impressed with their medical procedures. In many ways they are very advanced, and the doctors are very well educated and respected around the world for their work. But under the current conditions in the country and the economic situation, they really have nothing enabling them to practice medicine up to their potential.
At 2:00 p.m., Jim and I were scheduled to perform our final hospital assessment in Yugoslavia. Already my mind was jumping ahead to how nice it will be to get home to the Colorado mountains, where I can walk along my peaceful creek, feel the cool breeze coming off the glaciers of Mount Evans, and listen to the birds singing and the pesky squirrels chattering.
The last hospital was another obstetrics, gynecological, and maternity hospital located right downtown in a large converted office complex instead of the central medical complex we visited earlier. As Jim and I walked to our appointment from the Moskva hotel, Jim reminisced a bit and pointed out the building directly across the street from the hospital, telling us that when he was a teenager, the building had been the girls’ high school. He had attended high school dances there, and he described how the teenage boys of the 1930s and early 1940s pursued the young Serbian chicks of that era.
The hospital was much larger than it appeared from the street. It accommodates nearly four hundred beds and delivers twenty-five or more babies per day. Our host doctor explained that the number of births in Yugoslavia has decreased by half from ten years ago. I asked if that was due to increased demands for abortion, but the doctor, Nikola Antic, said that abortions have also dropped in number. The decline seems to be caused by a decision not to have children and bring them into a world of such uncertainty and chaos. Young couples are having a tough enough time taking care of themselves and don’t want to accept the responsibility of rearing children. I encountered the same attitude in many of the old Soviet republics.
In my opinion, Communism over the past eighty years has successfully discredited the value of the family unit and the importance of the individual. The government has permitted no positive influence from the church regarding sanctity of the family or the special love and nurturing of children. At its roots, Communism doesn’t promote love, social nurturing, or altruism, even though it is marketed that way. It is rather a very sinister, selfish, and elitist philosophy. Now, those countries that adopted and adhered to the greedy philosophy are paying a high price economically, socially, and morally.
Like the other hospitals we visited, the maternity hospital of Belgrade exists in faded glory. In the past, health-care funding came from the redistribution of wealth in a socialist system. But the well eventually ran dry.
The hospital lacks spare parts for their broken equipment, and every department suffers from the lack of the most commonly used medical supplies. No longer can the Communist dictators offer free health care to meet the needs of the populace. Yugoslavia is financially broke, and in my opinion, they aren’t even close to arriving at any economic, social, or moral solutions for the country’s problems. The next eighteen months will really be difficult for the people of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
I returned to my room at the Moskva hotel to sign the books I brought to give as gifts. I want to give the big prize, Atlas of Human Anatomy by Dr. Frank Netter, to my new friend Dr. Mihajlo Kobac, the health minister who nearly cried when he heard what God did to change my life. Jim’s words were still ringing in my ears following our unusual meeting with the health minister: “Did you hear what Dr. Kobac said to you just before we all got up to leave? He said, ‘God bless you, my friend.’ That’s amazing. He was raised as an atheist and a Communist, and I doubt the word God has ever crossed his lips.” I wrote a note of friendship and thanks in the front of the book. I won’t be able to present the gift to him in person but will have Jim deliver it to his office next week. I want the health minister to know how much I appreciate our new friendship.
I also toted along with me two lovely picture books of Colorado. I signed one with a note of thanks to Dr. Cedo Kutlesic, the head of the medical complex in Nis. Our driver will make the four-hour trip to Nis next week and give the book to Dr. Kutlesic on my behalf. The other book of Colorado I’ll personally present to Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic, Jim’s relatives, who had been so kind to host our visit. The last book I brought with me is an abbreviated version of Dr. Netter’s work on human anatomy, focusing on the thorax. I want it to be given to Dr. Vesna Bosnjak Petrovic, the head of the Belgrade hospital specializing in pulmonary disabilities. She has been doing an outstanding job at her hospital.
At 7:00 p.m., Jim and I had dinner with a young lady who was born in Belgrade. Four years ago she was a writer for an opposition newspaper in Belgrade. Just before the NATO bombing began, she left Yugoslavia on a journalism scholarship and traveled to Denver, Colorado, where she worked as an intern at the Rocky Mountain News under the direction of some fine editors and journalists. My friend Ann Imse, who wrote a wonderful story about Project C.U.R.E. and published it in the Rocky Mountain News, told me about Ana Davico and asked that I contact her while in Belgrade.
Over dinner with Jim and me, Ana summed up the overall feelings of most of the common people of Serbia. Ana quit her job with the opposition newspaper upon her return to Belgrade and is working as a translator for English-, German-, or Russian-speaking people traveling in Yugoslavia.
“I couldn’t take the hopeless pressure any longer,” she told us. “I went into survival mode, trying to take on odd jobs to support myself and my young son. I came back to witness the destruction of my city and my country and realized there was no way to rid the country of Slobodan Milošević. The actions of NATO and America gave Milošević complete control over the Yugoslavian people rather than helping to eliminate him.
“Our economy is in a shambles, with over 60 percent unemployment, and those employed make only about fifty US dollars per month. I could handle the opposition no longer. I had to concentrate on just surviving from one minute to the next. It’s that serious here in Serbia, and I’m convinced it will only get worse in the months to come. We thought we could depend the US and NATO for help, but instead, they bombed and killed us and left us with no hope and no one to turn to. History has been cruel to the Balkans.”
Sunday, July 23
This morning I checked out of the old Moskva hotel. Olga and Alexander Cvetanovic and their teenage son arrived in a car to pick up Jim and me. On our way to the Belgrade airport, they drove us to the top of a large mountain overlooking the city. It was lushly forested with spruce, pine, and cedar trees. It has been the hiking and camping destination for the families and youth of Belgrade for hundreds of years. Jim and his friends had trekked to camp fifty years ago, as did Olga and Alexander when they were kids.
At the top of the mountain, a beautiful marble monument had been erected to the unknown soldier of World War I, in which so many Yugoslavs lost their lives. The surrounding grounds were kept beautifully. It’s a place of sacred honor, and I was privileged to be there as Olga, Alexander, and Jim related stories to me of so many individual family members who were killed in wars in the Balkans. They really opened up their hearts to me as they described the wartime tragedies that had plagued their families.
The huge television and communications tower that was built on the top of the mountain had been blown up by NATO and US smart bombs. It lay in a heap of rubble not far from the war memorial. The bombs and missiles had exploded with surgical accuracy. The tower was completely destroyed, but the buildings just a few feet away were unscathed. Our means of destruction has really become high tech.
I was headed home but Jim Peters would stay a few more days with his family. At the airport I checked through customs and passport control with no problems. Again, all the airport personnel looked at me with “What in the world are you, an American, doing in a place like this?” glances.
I took a Lufthansa flight from Belgrade to Munich, Germany, where I spent the night at the Mövenpick Hotel.
Monday, July 24
Today was the last leg of my Serbian trip. I boarded United flight 963 for the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Munich to Washington, D.C. There I endured a little layover before winging my way back to Denver International Airport, where my lovely Anna Marie was waiting for me at 7:30 p.m. God answered my prayer for wisdom and acceptance on this trip—wisdom to say the right thing to the right people just at the right time, and acceptance from the hurting people of Yugoslavia.
Once again, I’m safe at home!