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Belgrade Central Prison: some prisoners are more equal than others |
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Mr Slobodan Milosevic
Belgrade Central Prison
Belgrade
Yugoslavia
April 2001
Dear Slobodan,
I trust you’re settling in well at the other Hyatt Regency. I say “the other Hyatt” because one of the jokes doing the rounds in the foyer of the genuine article is that you have to be very specific when asking a taxi driver to take you to the hotel. Apparently your fellow inmates have renamed the floor that has been set aside for you as the Hyatt, so when the rest of us take taxis we have to make certain we are being driven to the hotel not the prison.
And a lot of us do visit the Hyatt Regency these days. A year or so ago you could have heard a pin drop in the Tea House that adjoins the lobby. Sipping a cup of afternoon tea there today, you can eavesdrop on scores of conversations in all sorts of accents, mostly American and German. But there are also plenty of Serbs there now – not least because these days they can visit the lobbies of Belgrade’s five-star hotels without worrying about being caught in gunfire. Last January’s shoot-out in the lobby of the Inter-Continental didn’t do much for the reputation of our top hotels.
It’s not just the Hyatt that is buzzing with activity nowadays. This time last year the airport was like a mini ghost town. Now, incoming British Airways, Lufthansa and Swissair flights are crammed with hopeful returning Serbs, many of whom arrive clutching boarding passes originally issued by Air Canada or Air New Zealand, or duty-free bags from such airports as Tullamarine, which I believe is in Melbourne. That suggests that the mass brain-drain you initiated in the 1990s is starting to reverse itself. Mind you, it’s only a start. You need a big aeroplane to ferry in 250,000 people.
Although the Hyatt and the airport are buzzing, the streets are generally calm, and have been so since your arrest at the end of March. Perhaps you imagined that thousands of us would take to the streets to protest against your detention, or that the local press would emerge as a vocal champion of your cause. Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no evidence of either of these developments.
People are recognizing that they can get on with their lives peacefully in your absence. Like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, we are discovering that without much ado we can all muddle through without you.
Having said that, if it’s any consolation, living standards in your new home are probably a lot better than they are for most of us.
Granted, since the election monthly salaries have almost doubled, with the average Yugoslav worker taking home the equivalent of about DM140 compared with DM80 last October, the value of which is no longer being eroded by sky-high inflation. But that (if you’ll excuse the pun) is not much to write home about.
After all, my cousin Dragan works as a porter in a Munich hotel, and earns almost DM2,000 a month – after tax.
You say that you did what you did for the sake of Yugoslavia. Perhaps you can run that one past me again. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you came to power our country was seen as being potentially the biggest beneficiary of economic reform in central and eastern Europe.
Because we had traded much more successfully with western Europe than the Poles or the Czechs had done throughout the 1970s and 1980s, we were the ones at the front of the queue when it came to thinking about an enlargement of what used to be the EEC. Now we’re firmly at the back of it, probably neck and neck with such countries as Albania.
Then you came to power we had an emerging and increasingly aspirant middle class. That has been almost completely wiped out. The middle class has either fled the country or is now living somewhere at or near the poverty line.
What spending power there is in Serbia and Montenegro is no longer in the hands of an industrious and well-educated middle class but in those of corrupt civil servants who for a decade gorged themselves on smugglers’ kickbacks.
When you came to power we had a vibrant tourism industry. We were the custodians of two of Europe’s most attractive cities, Ljubljana and Dubrovnik. And we had miles and miles of beaches. That’s almost all gone, and if Montenegro goes the way of Croatia we won’t have a kilometre of coastline or a single seaport left to call our own.
The giant Yugotours tower still stands close to the highway that links Belgrade with the airport, but it is now looking uncannily like a sad and grotesque shrine to the Yugoslav tourism industry of the 1970s and 1980s. Small wonder that the Nato bombers did not pay much attention to the building. Your lot did a pretty effective job of figuratively bombing the Yugotours headquarters and the Yugoslav tourism industry to smithereens.
In the absence of tourism, what have we got left in what remains of the Yugoslav economy? Someone was telling me the other day that one of our five biggest exports last year was gravel. Gravel, for mercy’s sake! How do you possibly add value in the gravel market? And how does our gravel differ from Romanian or Bulgarian gravel? Transpose one letter of gravel and you’re left with grovel, which, frankly, is what we’re going to have to do for the next decade if we are to be reintegrated into the global economy.
We can start the process of demonstrating to the world that we are responsible global citizens by making certain that come hell or high water you stand trial. And if you can persuade your son to join you, so much the better. Then we can all start the serious work of rebuilding this shattered economy.
Good luck in The Hague.
Yours very truly,
Sebastian Erb
