#PERIOD AFTER Jasmina Tesanovic - 03/04/1999- Belgrade

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 April 3rd, 1999
It is morning, a beautiful sunny morning. I am crying, I am relaxing. Last night the center of Belgrade was bombed with appalling precision, yes the military targets, but only 20 meters from one of the biggest maternity hospitals in the Balkans, the one where I was born and years later gave birth. The destroyed building was the Ministry of the Interior: some of my friends remember being interrogated there. I am relieved and happy with NATO’s precision, it was even raining. But I feel visible, exposed to those young responsible pilots who carry their cargo wondering will they make it to hit the military building without doing wrong to a new born baby. They were all in shelters, the babies and the mothers, and I am crying, relieved, all this matter of life and death reminds me of a delivery, of my delivery, of being brave and crying at the same time. I wonder, which words can describe the relief of staying not only alive but not crippled or bitter, but physically and emotionally integral.
I heard that in a village near Belgrade, a small village on the Danube in Vojvodina, peasants are looking for the American pilot. They are organized in an all-out war, a partisan guerilla action, ridiculous and most serious, as some 60 years ago or as in a film. I asked why in that village? My friend from that village said: probably they are doing it in all villages, all over Yugoslavia. And what would you do to the pilot if you found him, I made an inquiry, among children, among the researchers. Nothing, of course, they all said. Some would give him food and preach about the big Serbian people, mostly the grown ups, whilst the children would hide and feed him in a cellar. From whom, I asked. >From everybody, like a favorite toy.

What a virtual, playful, cruel war. There can be wars lived from inside or from outside: as a matter of proper fantasy, or epic history. Or you can do it both all the time. Personally, my war is a horrid war, made of terrible images of the killings of my dearest and torture and rape ... Those images haunt me when the alarm goes off, it is them that made my hair go white, in one night, last night. The first time I got white hair was ten years ago, at the border with Slovenia, when a drunken customs officer harassed us because we were Serbs from the still existing federation called Yugoslavia. I knew that was only the beginning, as I know that this is the end, I hope not only for me but for all of us. I feel solidarity with all people in war in every century or country. We receive emails from all over the world from such people, people in war or who have been in war. But then, who hasn´t, it is only now our turn. A bad, bad world.

On BBC, CNN, SKY TV commentators already speak of the war as a chess game between a very talented human, FRY, and a big humanized but imperfect machine, NATO, praising the skill of human all the time as well as finding flaws in the high technology, thanks to the human enemy. And then the refugees, and then our heavy nights, but nobody really tries to put that picture together.
I am supposed to go to Budapest with my daughter: I am wondering is it safe, the roads, and then in Budapest, whom can I turn to, will I be just a Serb or somebody with a face and a story. Years ago, in ´92, as a well-off refugee, I spilled many tears because of the offences I had to put up with. It was more than I could bear, I just ran back home, whatever it would be like. Probably I was spoiled but then, frozen bank accounts, a severe if not impossible visa regime, not even the cheapest jobs available clearly pointed out that we were even less wanted than refugees from other countries, if wanted at all. All the lack of love I suffered in the past came back to me as a wave of unbearable pain, I wished I wasn´t born. Now, that kind of exile I cannot stand anymore, that life is too degrading for my child. I prefer hunger and danger, it keeps you vital, it doesn´t destroy the human side to war.

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