Bombed bridges dominate collective imagination

The fish at the Alaska Koliba open-air restaurant are fresh, and if you pay them enough, the gypsy singers who croon Love Me Tender beside your table will leave you alone. Looking across the Danube at the green hills and red-roofed houses glowing in the afternoon sun, you might think you were in northern Italy.

But as you watch the boatmen on small outboard launches puttering from one bank to another, fighting the river's strong current to pick up clients with pre-arranged appointments, there is a persistent absence: the bridges of Novi Sad.

All three were destroyed in NATO's 11-week bombardment of Yugoslavia, along with the oil refineries and most of the infrastructure of Serbia's third-largest city. Residents wait up to three hours for a ferry to the other bank of their city - about the same amount of time it takes to drive to Belgrade, cross the Danube and drive back up to the far side of the river.

Bridges dominate the collective imagination of Novi Sad now.

Slobodan Savic, a cameraman for the local official television station, was crossing the Sloboda ("Freedom") Bridge when NATO aircraft bombed it at 8 p.m. on April 3rd. He was driving very fast, and his friends think that saved him. Dramatic images of his Mazda car clinging perilously to the steep incline where the middle of the bridge crashed into the water were seen all over the world.

Mr Savic was so badly hurt by the concussion that he could not walk, but he managed to pull himself out of his car on to the tilting asphalt. He saw another missile coming towards him and believed his life was over. The missile hit a different section of the bridge a few hundred metres away. When, eventually, a motor boat came to save him, the cameraman slid down the broken bridge to the water. "Please go and get my camera from the car," he begged the rescue workers.

Two days earlier, a 26-year-old oil refinery worker was not so lucky. He was crossing the old Petrovaradin Bridge on his bicycle when it was bombed just before 5 a.m. For a month, the young man's family and friends searched for him. No one was sure whether he had been on the bridge when it was destroyed. Then his body - without legs - was discovered 10 km downstream.

The inhabitants of Belgrade wondered why NATO spared their own four bridges over the Sava and the Danube. A few days ago, President Jacques Chirac of France announced that he had vetoed the bombing of the Belgrade bridges. Cynical Serbs interpreted the gesture as an early French bid for Yugoslav reconstruction contracts, but it could backfire.

"If he could save the Belgrade bridges, why didn't he save the bridges of Novi Sad?" one official asked.

There was plenty of cynicism to go around in this war, not least from the Yugoslav government. State employees were ordered to join "spontaneous" night-time "human shield" protests on the Belgrade bridges; if they did not, they risked losing their jobs - of which there are precious few here. At the beginning of the war, the bridge protesters were paid 20 deutschmarks per evening. When the money ran out, they were given two litres of cooking oil instead.

Because Novi Sad was one of the hardest-hit Serbian cities, President Slobodan Milosevic made his first post-war appearance here. Despite his aversion to public speaking, the President has visited other badly damaged towns, such as Kragujevac and Cuprija.

The people of Serbia must work together to rebuild their country, he tells his audience in each city, calling for volunteers to join work gangs.

The crowds are neither warm nor enthusiastic. "When you watch him on television, you get the impression that he believes this is his country, his property, that it belongs to him," an unemployed woman said.

With Western countries refusing to help rebuild Yugoslavia as long as Mr Milosevic is in power, the government apparently intends to squeeze the population for reconstruction money.

Parliament is expected to end the state of war today or tomorrow, but Serbs see only future hardship. Cafes in the capital were ordered to bring all their tables and chairs off the pavements yesterday, then allowed to put them back outside after paying a new 35 dinar per square metre tax.

"Rocky" (known for throwing drunk customers out of his restaurant) owns a truckstop on the highway from Belgrade east to Romania. He fired two waitresses and pulled his son out of university last week, after receiving exorbitant income tax, water and electricity bills. And he has no customers, because all of the bridges on the way to Romania were blown up. "I may as well skin myself and sell my hide in the market," he said.