Simpson on Sunday: Reborn Serbia refuses to look back in anger
By John Simpson
(Filed: 31/08/2003)

Walking through the streets of Belgrade, which Nato bombed for 11 long weeks only four years ago, is like being a drunk who wakes up and finds the memory of last night's violence coming back in all its horror: did I really do that?

There are remarkably few signs left of what Nato did from March to May 1999. The wrecked aircraft have disappeared from the airport. The USCE building, once the headquarters of the political parties of both Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mira Markovic, is being entirely reconstructed; in 1999 I watched in disbelief as a smart bomb struck the roof and burrowed its fiery way downwards from floor to floor. Only the secret police and army headquarters have been left as they were, wrecked and open to the sky, a memorial to Serbia's nasty past and Nato's brutal response to it.

Nobody here ever speaks about the bombing directly; they refer, if they have to, simply to "99". Perhaps it is as much of an embarrassment to them as it is to us: a mutual brutality that is hard nowadays to explain. Everything has changed. Milosevic was overthrown by the Serbs' own efforts in 2000 and shipped off by them to The Hague, where he raves on behind bullet-proof glass about how the French secret service, not he, was behind the unthinkable massacre at Srebrenica.

His dreadful wife Mira is in Russia, thanks to a deal brokered by his brother, a former ambassador to Moscow; she cannot therefore be questioned about the death of a close political colleague, murdered apparently because he got too big for his boots. Her son Marco, wanted here for corruption, floats around the dodgier Central Asian states on his remaining hot money.

Changing the government did not get rid of corruption. Poor Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister, was murdered last March by the Zemun clan for trying to stamp it out. In every official building you see posters with the dozen or so mugshots of the men wanted for his murder, with several faces now crossed out in red: captured or killed.

One leading member of the clan, known by his nickname "Legija", is still free. Last year, according to the captain of the motor yacht that my friends and I have chartered off the coast of Montenegro, Legija hired it and strutted round the deck drinking, spitting and being generally obnoxious. In Budva harbour we tied up beside a much smarter yacht belonging to a sugar baron who is being investigated for an alleged scam in which poor-quality Polish sugar was supposedly sold as high quality Serbian sugar.

Murder, extortion and banditry are all very Balkan, of course. Yet Djindjic died for his efforts to stamp it out, and the tide is clearly turning here. People want an economy that functions properly (in much of Montenegro, which is federated with Serbia, you can pay only with euros, not the native dinars) and a political system that is not beholden to crooks and savages. The Serbs hope to be ready with the rest of the former Yugoslav republics for European Union membership within five or six years.

According to the opinion polls, a clear majority of Serbs even favours joining Nato. But there is a problem: the US is pressing Serbia, like other countries, to promise not to prosecute Americans for war crimes - the bombing of Belgrade television, for instance. Brussels is warning the Serbian government privately that agreeing to this will not help their chances.

So the memory of four years ago is still here; it is simply been overlaid by the memories of the other wars which the US, for its own political reasons, has fought since then, with wholehearted British support. It was over the bombing of Belgrade that Alastair Campbell first tried to curb the BBC's news reporting and get it "on message"; what he did to Andrew Gilligan a few weeks ago he did to me then. We first heard Tony Blair's impassioned crusading over Serbia's crimes; later the adjectives would be recycled and the goals memorably restated for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Will we be able to wander down the peaceable streets of Baghdad in four years' time and marvel at the way everyone there has forgotten the war? Somehow it seems less likely. Here, they got rid of Milosevic by their own efforts, and the bitterness has long since evaporated; there, the Americans insisted on staging an invasion to overthrow Saddam themselves. You don't get rid of the anger and resentment nearly so fast that way.