The Danube by Nick Thorpe

Author:Nick Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300181654
Publisher: Yale University Press

Skadarska Street intersects with Francuska Street in Belgrade, home to the Serbian Writers's Union and a restaurant with traditional Serbian food. The nineteenth-century villa is a well-established nest of nationalists and communists. You reach the entrance down the side of the building. In March 1999 I came here one evening with some fellow reporters. Entering the hallway, a staircase spirals down into a murky restaurant in which the brightest objects are the perfectly starched, almost fluorescent white shirts of the waiters, floating between the tables like fireflies. The gloom allows those who have been sitting here for hours a chance to survey each new arrival at their leisure, before they are identified themselves. As we reached the bottom of the steps, an elderly woman shrieked across the room: ‘Simpson is here, war is . . inevitable.’ The tall man at my side, the easily recognisable figure of the BBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson, froze in mid-step as if he had been hit by a sniper's bullet.

‘Who is that woman?’ John asked me.

In the ebbing darkness, I recognised the fragile figure of Dessa Trevisan, the doyenne of the foreign press corps in Belgrade and a long-serving correspondent for the London Times.13 I whispered her name.

‘Oh, Dessa, how are you?’ he asked, and went and sat on the arm of her chair. The broken fabric of the hubbub rapidly healed. Plates of fiery red paprika baked in olive oil and stuffed with sheep's cheese bounced from the tables, hurled down by waiters who identified us as the enemy, but who were determined to maintain the tradition of Serbian hospitality to the bitter end. During the war in Bosnia, if you failed to drink enough plum brandy with the gun-toting thugs on the roadblocks, you could be killed on the spot for that reason alone. Serbia is a nation of Boy Scouts. If there's no fire, no alcohol, no meat roasting on the spit, the men get bored very easily.

Dessa Trevisan was right. A few evenings later we watched NATO missiles rain down on Batajnica, the base of the Yugoslav Air Force just outside Belgrade, and on the bridges over the Danube. The waiters of the Writers' Union, like many of their compatriots, spat fire and fury that their Second World War allies had turned against them so cruelly, so incomprehensibly. And we were holed up in the luxury of the Hyatt Hotel, just across the Sava river in New Belgrade, being bombed by our own airforce.

The strategic importance of Belgrade, at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, is best appreciated from Kalemegdan, the fortress on the headland overlooking both rivers. In November 1990 I came to Belgrade for the first time, hoping for an interview with President Slobodan Milošević. Vladimir Stambuk, one of his minions in the Socialist Party of Serbia, met me instead. We drank freshly squeezed orange juice in the socialist headquarters in the same drab skyscraper across the river which would later be the target of NATO airstrikes.

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