by Chris Bowers
Throughout the period in which the tribunal did its work, Serbia and the other former Yugoslav nations rebuilt their badly damaged countries. In 2003 Serbia and Montenegro dropped the pretence of being Yugoslavia and called themselves ‘Serbia & Montenegro’ in a three-year deal that would culminate in a Montenegrin referendum on independence. In 2006 the Montenegrins narrowly voted for it, thereby ending the break-up of Yugoslavia that had started in 1991 and taken 15 bloody years. In that time, more than 140,000 people are believed to have lost their lives in the wars, based on estimates by international humanitarian agencies.
There’s no doubt that Serbia emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia with the lion’s share of the blame. The belligerent figure of Slobodan Milosevic probably has a lot to do with that, and a 1994 UN report said Serbia was trying to create a Greater Serbia, rather than trying to restore Yugoslavia. The war-crimes tribunal also said the majority of the casualties were victims of Serbian aggression, and there are accounts that Serbs who argued for a tempering of Serbian nationalism were often harassed, hounded and even killed. Yet is it really fair to tag the Serbs as the only villains, even if statistics suggest they were the biggest culprits in the four wars? Croatia’s nationalism too was always ‘exclusive’, there are plenty of tales of the Muslim community of Bosnia whipping itself into a frenzy, and while the Muslims and Croats did indeed suffer in Bosnia at the hands of Serb nationalists, in the 1941–45 civil war it had been largely the Serbs who had suffered at the hands of the brutal Croatian fascists, the Ustase, and, to a lesser extent, the Muslim Bosnians. It makes it understandable but still tragically unnecessary. It would be wrong to spend too much time in this book on the question of blame, yet it is fair to say that a view of the Yugoslav wars that says it was all down to Serbian aggression, and that the Croats, Bosnians and others were innocent victims, is oversimplistic in the extreme.
It’s also important to remember that there were many in the old Yugoslavia who had no truck with the inter-nation belligerence. Symbolically, a march in Sarajevo in March 1992 united Bosnians, Serbs and Croats in opposing inter-ethnic conflict, but it ended when shots were fired from Serb positions, and Sarajevo’s first fatality was a student demonstrating for peace in that march. Such voices for peace were seldom heard.
It’s easy to see the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s as the build-up of inter-ethnic hatred over many decades but that isn’t, on its own, a satisfying explanation. The ethnic and religious differences between most of the nations that made up Yugoslavia were, if anything, much less pronounced than the differences among some of the German-speaking states that made up Germany from 1871 and continue to make up the country today. Faced with joint threats in the 1920s and 1940s, the Yugoslav states were happy to come together, first as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then as Yugoslavia under Tito, to fashion a state that defied international threats and did rather well out of both Moscow and Washington. But once Tito had gone and Moscow’s influence was on the wane, there was no longer an external threat to hold the various states together. And perhaps the fact that they had been held together pretty much from 1918 to 1990 – largely by Tito’s charisma and without the crimes of the civil war of 1941–45 being fully worked through – meant conditions were rife for resentments to grow to the point where they created a powder keg just waiting to be lit.
Arguably the biggest tragedy is that Serb nationalism grew to the point where anyone who was not Serbian was relegated to second-class citizenship and ethnic cleansing was considered (by some) a legitimate means of establishing the Serbian state. The idea that Serbia had an ‘inclusive’ ideology in the 1850s and 1920s, viewing Croats, Montenegrins and Macedonians as people who could live peacefully in the same country as Serbs, may be a little too benign as an interpretation of original Serb nationalism. The Nacertanije document of 1844, which acted as a blueprint for the establishment of a sovereign Greater Serbian state, talked of including Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina and northern Albania in the new Serbia, and there are those who believe Serbian nationalists came to see the 1918 kingdom as a construct that they could dominate and, therefore, as a vehicle for achieving Greater Serbia by the back door. But the fact that the Serbs worked moderately successfully with their five fellow Yugoslav states up to 1990, plus the closeness of Serbian language and culture to that of many of Serbia’s neighbours, suggests that an entrenched ‘them and us’ attitude towards national identity is not helpful today. One hopes that Serbia’s application to join the European Union means ‘inclusiveness’ is back, if only because Serbia’s economic well-being depends on it.
So Serbia went into the 21st century restored as a sovereign state but needing to undertake a massive exercise in rehabilitation. What Germany, Italy and Japan had faced after the Second World War, South Africa after apartheid, and Argentina after its era of ruthless military junta, Serbia faced after its bloody emergence from Yugoslavia. In this context, if you had to draw up the ideal ambassador to represent the still-new Serbian state on the global stage, it would probably be a passionate Serb of mixed-nation parentage who both connects with his people and has the intellect and sensitivity to understand the reservations harboured by an international community still in shock from the images of Serbian brutality it saw on its television screens throughout the 1990s. How fortunate for Serbia to have just the man.
CHAPTER FIVE
TOUGHENED BY NATO’S BOMBS
It’s hard for a generation of people who have not known the hardship of war to hear the tales of those who went through it. Those born in Europe after 1945 will have had to listen to the stories of parents and grandparents telling them how they survived the fear and privations of the two world wars, the people they knew dying around them, the uncertainty of not knowing who would be next – stories often told with a subliminal admonishing message of ‘You don’t know how lucky you are’.
What distinguishes Novak Djokovic from Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray and many of their contemporaries is that Djokovic does know. He was 11 when Nato planes started bombing Belgrade and he spent his 12th birthday with the bombing in full swing. It didn’t stop him playing tennis, although each new day often meant a different court. But spending many of the 76 nights of the bombing in a cellar robbed him of sleep, as well as allowing him to share the collective fear of the whole city and, specifically, the people he and his brothers shared the cellar with. It’s he who will be boring his children and grandchildren with tales of how he survived the war.
When the bombing began, the family was together in Belgrade after the winter season in Kopaonik. They spent much of the time in Grandfather Vlada’s two-bedroom flat, not because it was a spacious place to be but because it had a basement storage area where the family could flee to whenever the sirens started.
In late 2011 Djokovic allowed a camera team from the American television company CBS to come with him and Vlada and visit the cellar where they spent many nights during the bombing, including every night of the first two weeks. Even today, the basement is stark, lightless concrete. Modern warfare meant that, when the siren went, they had to go straight down to the cellar – there was no time to prepare as there had been during the Second World War – and there was no limit on the number of people allowed into the cramped space. Watching him on camera in the cellar, it’s clear he has retained the child’s ability to be factual about it and not to impose on to his memory the feelings that come with adult awareness. It’s just what happened, and if there’s any emotion attached to it, it’s the schoolboy’s satisfaction of not having to go to school.
Djokovic was asked by the CBS interviewer Bob Simon whether he lost his focus. ‘The first couple of weeks I did,’ he replied. ‘We were waking up every single night more or less at two or three in the morning for two and a half months because of the bombing. But I try to remember those days in a very bright, positive way. We didn’t need to go to school and I played more tennis. It made us tougher, made us more hungry for success.’
Ana Ivanovic, a contemporary of Djokovic who had visited the Djokovic restaurant in Kopaonik when she was four (her father and Djokovic’s uncle Goran were at school together), tells a similar story:
It was a very tough period, not only for us as kids but for our country in general. The 1990s were very hard anyway, the economy wasn’t great and I remember the bombing starting on 24 March – it was actually my cousin’s birthday, so she was very sad because she couldn’t celebrate it as everyone was going into the shelters. For the first few weeks we didn’t practise because we didn’t know what to expect, so we’d stay at home, but later on, when the danger was not there, when the sirens were off, that’s when we started practising. Most of the time it was six to eight in the morning, or maybe seven to nine. We’d try to live as normal as possible. I remember towards the end that they had an under-12s tournament and they even had a rule that, if the matches were on and the sirens came on, the match had to be finished but no new matches were called to start! I never played a match when the siren went off but I was there once when it went off.
Ivanovic also tells the story of her and Djokovic having fun at tournaments around that time. ‘We shared lot of fun moments,’ she says. ‘We played lots of tournaments, under-10s, under-12s, in Serbia. We used to play hide and seek. You play two, three matches a day. In between you have nothing to do, so you play games.’ Without ever having been an item, Djokovic and Ivanovic are very close – they are clearly very fond of each other and many who know them suggest Djokovic holds something of a candle for Ivanovic but not to an extent that has ever threatened his relationship with his fiancée Jelena Ristic. It may be more of the shared history of both Kapaonik and surviving the bombing that creates a ‘bunker’ solidarity and thus transcends any conventional idea of friendship, sexual or otherwise.
The Serbian coach and Davis Cup captain Bogdan Obradovic remembers that lunchtimes, rather than early mornings, were the safest time to practise during the bombing. He says he did most of his coaching between noon and 2 pm ‘because nothing really happened then’. The time is almost immaterial – the fact is they were constantly adjusting their life and practice courts to keep clear of the best aircraft Nato had at its disposal.
The impression someone from western Europe could get from such tales is that there was a string of tennis clubs dotted around Belgrade, but that would be a slightly misleading picture. There were several courts but many of them were in a very modest state of repair. Tennis had never been particularly big in Yugoslavia and this was a time when the Serbian economy was in a particularly parlous state. Often, it was a case of making a court out of any available space. The most notorious example was the court at the Jedanaesti April club (the ‘11 April’ club) where Ivanovic and Janko Tipsarevic played. The club had an Olympic-sized swimming pool but it was too expensive to maintain, especially when people weren’t into swimming. So the pool was emptied, a carpet put in it and a singles court was marked out – there wasn’t enough room for a doubles court. These days it’s a pool again and it has proper courts where Tipsarevic runs his academy. But that illustrates the lack of facilities available to budding tennis players in Serbia throughout the 1990s.
In a rare interview, Dijana Djokovic told the Guardian newspaper in January 2008 that it was Djokovic’s tennis routine that saw the family through the Nato bombing. ‘All our family were here in Belgrade during the bombing and all day we were on court,’ she said. ‘And this is what saved us. It wasn’t any more or less safe than any other place in the street, but if you’re sitting at home in the basement, thinking they are going to bomb your home, you’re going crazy. It’s not good. We were practising all day and at seven o’clock we would go home and sit with the curtains closed, everything closed and dark the way it had to be.’
Ana Ivanovic echoes this philosophical approach to the threat:
We were underground for the first night and then my parents said, ‘You know what? If it’s going to hit, it’s going to happen,’ so we just stayed at ground level. We had a two-floor house, so we just took the back room and that’s where we basically lived. Once we got into the bombing, people would say they had an idea of where would be bombed that day – they said it was targeted but we never really knew. A few times we heard really loud explosions and it’s not the best feeling. For me, it wasn’t about missing school, it was that everyone was together. As a kid, I never wanted to sleep on my own, so during the bombing we all slept in the same room, so for me, that was paradise – my parents and my brother, we all stayed in one room. We always had grandparents and other people coming over to stay, we were always hanging out, so I was never on my own, which was perfect. There was one very scary moment. We used to live across from this large post office and one night they came and said this would probably be bombed that night. This was 10 o’clock in the evening and we were ready for bed, so my parents said, ‘Right, we’re going to go to [your] grandparents,’ who lived about 10 minutes away. So we took a car, we drove there and we had to pass by a really tall building, which was about 500 metres as the crow flies from where my grandparents lived and, literally 15 minutes later, there was a huge explosion – they’d bombed the tall building, the building we’d driven past 20 minutes earlier. That was the worst moment. As a kid, your parents tried to protect you a little bit. I remember one time sitting in the living room and a plane went through the sound barrier, and there was a very loud noise like an explosion. And I said to my dad, ‘Oh my God, what was that?’ and he said, ‘Oh, nothing, a truck fell in a hole in the street.’ These kind of things – they try to protect you and it’s only later that you realise that was actually quite scary.
Djokovic himself has talked of that time as ‘the period that nobody in our country likes to remember’ but he goes further. ‘It is a very powerful memory from my childhood that really shaped my character,’ he says. ‘It was a devastating and helpless time for my country; those three months of not knowing who and what is next, and you have nowhere to hide for real. Many innocent people died, a lot of infrastructure was destroyed and even now is still in ruins… It takes time for a country to recover after such a big destructive force. We were at first hiding at the basement thinking we would be safe there, but the reality is that even some people hiding in basements were dying when the bombs crashed, so there was no point. So, after those first few weeks of panic and disbelief, we went back to standard routines, even though the bombs were still falling all over. My family was at first all together, but then each of us went back to our duties. My parents went to Kopaonik to work, I went back on court to practise.’
Like Ivanovic’s cousin, Djokovic was unable to do much celebrating when his 12th birthday arrived on 22 May 1999. ‘I celebrated on court, like every other birthday,’ he says with a smile, ‘except that by then there were no more bombs flying over my head, only fireworks.’
During the 2013 US Open, Djokovic ventured a very strong opinion on whether the US government should sup
port air strikes against Syria, whose government was suspected of using chemical weapons against its citizens. His vehement reaction (see page 249) stems directly from the lessons he learned from the Nato bombing of Belgrade. But when it was happening, when the 11-year-old boy was playing tennis by day and dodging the bombs by night, did he realise why it was happening? He is very clear about this. ‘That is the first thing everybody asks when things go wrong, and something bad happens. Why me? Why us? I did ask and got a very simple answer: Because they can. And that was the truth. Now as a grown person, I can always give you a straight answer: there is no valid justification for any act of violence that for a consequence has the death of many people. What answer can justify the fact that many children died, many families were torn apart, many cities destroyed, many left sick? No war is good and thank God many people are now fighting against it.’
This is powerful stuff. His ‘because they can’ appears to strip bare the morality of the foreign policy of countries in the developed world. Although he doesn’t use these words, his statement could be read as implying that there are all sorts of injustices in the world and no shortage of despotic regimes, yet the countries either side of the North Atlantic choose which of them to attack and which to leave well alone on the basis of feasibility. As a cri de coeur from the developing world, it is very resonant, whether one agrees with it or not.