Shadowplay by Tim Marshall

Author:Tim Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783964468
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

CHAPTER 11

‘Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly.’

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

SOMEWHERE IN SERBIA, A VILLAGE WAS MISSING ITS idiot. He didn’t look dangerous, despite the pocket-knife he was waving towards me. In fact his manic grin, hair and clothes were more Forrest Gump than Freddy Krueger. We were filming at an anti-NATO rally in Kragujevac, at the spot where the Nazis had massacred 6,000 Serb men, women and children in 1943. Apart from the village idiot, there were about 15,000 other people present.

‘You are NATO pig,’ he said, pronouncing NATO as ‘Nah-toe’.

‘You are NATO fascist aggressor,’ he continued. ‘We kill all NATO,’ he went on, and he would have gone on and on, but I brushed past him and caught up with cameraman Veljko Djurović and soundman Milan Antić. At least they were only crazy in the way that all Serbs are, not in the village idiot sense. They were also two of the bravest people I’ve ever met.

We’d already filmed a bit of bomb damage to a local barracks; the Zastava car factory was also on the itinerary, and now this rally.

Here I sensed, en masse, what I’d already felt around town in Belgrade. Defiance, yes, but also fear. It wasn’t there in the first few days of bombing. The people were so angry then that they forgot to be scared. Eventually they thought long and hard enough about where they might be heading to realize that there could potentially be a ground war in every one of their cities and municipalities. Few people would say it openly, but in private, many were deeply concerned.

They would have fought a ground war, even if they were frightened of doing so. As crazy as it seems to some people in the West, they would have taken on the American, British, German, French and other armies. Knowing they would be beaten, they would have fought. Like I said, they’re crazy.

One hot afternoon, Veljko, Milan and I were in a cafe in Belgrade when talk turned to a ground war. Despite Bill Clinton, it was beginning to look possible. President Clinton had dropped a huge clanger on 23 March by helpfully telling the Yugoslav political and military elite: ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to have a ground war, so you guys hold out for as long as possible.’ The words he actually used were along the lines of ‘My fellow Americans, don’t worry, I am not about to send American ground troops to a war in a place most of you have never heard of.’ It just sounded like a reassurance to Belgrade. ‘Since when did anyone win a war through air power alone?’ they asked. ‘The US in Vietnam? The Russians in Afghanistan? Half the world in Iraq?’

The military establishments in all the NATO countries collectively uttered a massive ‘D’oh!’ For domestic political reasons, Clinton had given away a major military weapon: the threat of a ground war.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was among those who were stunned.

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