#PERIOD AFTER Jasmina Tesanovic - 16/04/1999- Belgrade


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April 16th, 99
I started this diary, my war diary, on March 17th, 1998, more than a year ago when the conflicts in Kosovo began. The title of my diary: Normality; a Moral Opera by a Political Idiot. I can hardly remember my life before I started thinking in this way. I can hardly remember my life before the bombing of Yugoslavia started on March 24th. But I insist; I don't want to go back, only ahead. At literally any price. I cannot pretend that I don't know the things I saw in the past few weeks, years...

Last night panic struck my household: the noises and lights of the Yugoslav artillery covered the sky over Belgrade as in a military parade whilst literally 300 NATO planes were flying over the city, again as in a military parade. Children started screaming, out of fear and joy, like at a circus. I ushered them in a great hurry to our local shelter: I drank wine quickly to stop my hands and knees trembling and then we went back home where, as the children say, they feel best. We slept like logs.

My friend says who is a University professor of chemistry and has traveled a lot said: I don't know any place in the world that has such wonderful microcosms and such a terrible macrocosm, as Belgrade, Yugoslavia. My other friend said; I hope the war spares Belgrade and its atmosphere, we saved it already once in '92, unarming the uniformed violent people from all over ex Yugoslavia with this easygoing Belgrade atmosphere. Yesterday we went shopping: the shops are full and the prices are going down, especially clothes. People have no money to buy anything anymore; those who have some keep it for the future hardships. We called it the last shopping. I always hated shopping for clothes but yesterday I enjoyed it, maybe because I believed it is the last. We heard on radio that kids will not have to pass a state exam for entering high school: the joy among them is enormous. It was a wrong and hard exam but these kids are happy without any exams, any school, anything anymore. They say, don't you see now that going to school was useless: other things matter, like power, money... They don't connect knowledge with power and money, not after this war.
People from abroad ask me, how are Serbian people taking the death of the bombed refugees? What a question! The same as all other civilian deaths, too many which have occurred in this "humanitarian bombing". It never occurred to me to think of dead civilians as Albanian or Serb. But obviously people from NATO countries feel differently. And maybe they should: it is their bombs, their tax money, as citizens from democratic countries usually say. They can also choose their victims. Another anniversary, April 16th is the Easter day when Belgrade was bombed by the allies in order to be liberated at the end of the war. Let's not abuse the parallels to feel better, to feel worse. In those days a thousand people were killed in Belgrade, a maternity hospital was hit, not mine, the second biggest in the region and 15 new born babies were hit. In our war today the babies were in the cellar and the hospital wasn't hit; let's hope it stays so, let's hope that «humanitarian» bombs really bring us peace, and not only the peace after death.


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