Word: serbians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...become less terrifying to Serbs. The sirens still sound at 8 o'clock each night in Belgrade, but the wail is now muted. The residents of the embattled city have given the sirens an affectionate nickname, "Esmeralda," after the popular Mexican soap opera that used to appear on Serbian television at 8 p.m. Increasingly the war seems like just something to watch on the tube, a long-running melodrama with only occasional plot twists. "In the beginning we used to run to air-raid shelters every night, but we don't bother anymore," says Mirjana, 42, a government-employed clerk...
...bombing campaign has become melodrama, Serbian TV and a crackdown on dissent have helped ensure that NATO is the bad guy. A series of new government decrees have piled even more repression on top of the already draconian media laws passed last fall. Says a Belgrade lawyer: "They can now put people away for up to two months without even notifying anybody from the judiciary system. Law doesn't live here anymore...
...just one. Even the horrors of Kosovo are explained away. Whether by word of mouth or the Western media, much of Yugoslavia knows something of the "ethnic cleansing" going on in the province. But the quick, brutally cynical response from the government--that NATO bombings, not Serbian soldiers, are to blame for the flood of refugees--is parroted by many Serbs...
Among the most attuned citizens, there is a nagging sense that all is not right in this uniform Serbian message. But with few outside reference points to rely on, they can fight that battle for the truth only in their minds, where rationality and emotions throw equal weight. For most Serbs, their rational side is used up getting through the day--battling price rises and shortages of fuel and cigarettes and looking after the health of their families...
...carnage and grief, side by side on television. Flip: a teenage girl lies on a gurney, her throat freckled with bloodstains. Flip: a mother in Kosovo keens over the body of her child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that death...