Just as I received plenty of letters praising my 'alternative approach' to NATO bombing, one of my Serb friends told me authoritatively that masterfully created Serb air-defense systems in Bosnia are not Russian, but Serbian design. Actually it is the same trick Yugoslav defense industry employed for decades: get the best of East block and the best of the West block stuff, put it together and come up with some inexpensive but revolutionary improvement (like how they adapted AK-47 guns to be used with NATO standard ammo). Why is he so sure? Because his father (a physicist who teaches at some U.S. university now) worked on the design of that system. It is basically a network of underground radars connected with high-speed underground lines. Radars pop up shortly, take a picture, and then burry themselves again. Timing is coordinated through the network. The brain (in Pale) that collects all those radar images creates a relative accurate picture of skies over Bosnia, and may see well into above the Adriatic (which means they are able to track planes as they leave the carrier). The brain is well underground and bombing is unlikely to destroy it (unless of course NATO nuke it). Apparently, low flying cruise missiles and stealthy f-117 are still problematic for the system. The rest of aircraft is basically flying targets. Serbs lack missiles (that's where Russians could come in handy - but NATO rather wages wars against potential hits than against real hits).

Franjo Tudjman is kind of sensitive to the age issue like Bob Dole: they are generation. So, he would never admit that he is actually tired (and he always says "I still play tennis"). That's how Anci got him to dance with her at 1 am on annual celebration in Gavella, one of Croatia's better know theatres. Anci is an actress, and she is in New York now. I learned that my old school pal became a superintendant of her theatre and grew really fat and married to a female body-builder. Some of Croatia's best actors are not there any more, however. Rade Serbedzija (the star from Before the Rain) lives in London now (after he was systematically blacklisted as a "Yugo" in Croatia, and physically attacked as an "Ustasha" in Serbia). His children still live in Croatia, and his son plays in an angry rock band. Mira Furlan (probably the best young Croatian actress) is playing one of those alien species in Babylon 5 (which looks appropriately similar to Yugoslav multi-ethnic mixture), and has no intentions of leaving LA. Her husband, who was a kind of alternative film director in Croatia (he directed a long clip for Laibach, Slovenian industrial band), is ethnically a Serb and studied in Belgrade (but he lived and worked in Zagreb for most of his life). Media whitewash was so complete that Anci did not know that he is not really "some guy from Serbia." Of course, Zagreb is recovering from the nationalist onslaught and have no problems with having those people back now, but it is probably too late.

Artists are the ones who suffer the most from the war. Because they are too idealist, they are champions of the mind over matter approach to life. And the war is an ultimate triumph of the matter over mind. Darko is a drummer. He was a drummer in a kind of grungy rock band in post-human Sarajevo. Now he plays in a band here in New York. Before every performance he carefully tapes a drumstick to his right forearm, his hand lost in a bomb blast in that other world over there.

back

more