Stop Them With "Wasps"

At 00:00 sharp, October 5, the telephone rang in an office of the Ministry of the Interior (MUP) of Serbia in Prince Milos street 101, a square washed out building which was not hit during the NATO bombing. There was a short message for a colonel who picked up the receiver: "Third alternative. Take ’wasps’ and ’hornets’ with you." The colonel put down the receiver. The officers who were with him in the room were staring.
"Third alternative," he told them, "they want us to kill them".
Silence fell upon the room. Its walls are freshly painted in reseda, new desks are brown as are the closets nearly touching the high white ceiling. On a small table next to the colonel, a pistol "glock" with 18 bullets in the clip, at his feet, on the carpet, a "Heckler & Koch" with thirty bullets, sniper sight and silencer.
A proper fighters’ room. People sitting in it have for years looked death in the eye in Croatia, Bosnia, in Kosovo. They were looking at the floor now. Four of them, all high officers of Specials Police Units (PJP), were given the task of meeting the columns of demonstrators who announced their arrival in Belgrade, at the head of their men experienced and seasoned in war. "Third alternative," the order that has just arrived from the minister of police Vlajko Stojiljkovic, through Ljubo Aleksic, the chief of the police department, meant, at the moment, that columns - of buses, cars, trucks – should be fired at from the strongest combat means available to the special units: heavy machine–guns, "wasps" and submachine guns. Officers who were sitting in the room knew well what it looked like when a grenade from a "wasp," a portable rocket launcher, hit a bus. All in the bus are dead. Scorched in the explosion developing temperature of close to 2000 degrees centigrade.

At the same time, a few blocks away, Cedomir Jovanovic, twenty-nine year old leader of the Democratic Party, sleepy, with red blotches all over the body, signs of reduced immunity due to fatigue, repeats to himself:
"All right, if the police fires, we fire back".
Ceda is a face from the wanted poster. Both him and Zoran Djindjic, president of the DP, and Nebojsa Covic, leader of the Democratic Alternative. And God alone knows how many leaders of the democratic opposition of Serbia yet.
At that moment, he is precisely informed about the plans for arrest and liquidation.
"We have already talked to the people who had orders to kill us and who did not want to do that. Some have already been given advance payments for the job."
Ceda, in a way, had nowhere else to go on October 5. Should the demonstrations fail, some of the hit men who received advance payment might wish to collect the balance, already on October 6.
"That or the prison," thought Jovanovic. Nine charges were already brought against him, mainly for "undermining the state" and he was facing an effective sentence to five-month imprisonment, again for "undermining the state".

He dialed telephone numbers, deliberately, from the premises of the DP, counting on wiretapping.
"Uzice, are you ready?" he shouted. "How many of you are coming?"
"Cacak! Ready?"
"Subotica?!"
According to a plan, people who were to overthrow Milosevic, would have to come to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia, from five directions: the Ibar highway was intended for the people from Cacak, Kraljevo, Uzice, Valjevo, Ljig, Milanovac, Takovo; the motor highway from the south would bring the people from Nis, Vranje, Leskovac, Pirot, Zajecar, Negotin, Bor, Majdanpek, Kragujevac...; the highway from the north was for the people of Subotica, Novi Sad, Vrbas, Bela Palanka, Sombor...; from the west, the people from Sabac, Mitrovica, Loznica, Sid, Ljubovija, Zvornik.. would swarm; people from Pancevo, Zrenjanin, Kikinda, Becej, Kovin, Vrsac would be coming from the north-east.

In a village near Ljubovija, which cannot even be accessed by road, the priest and the teacher explained the peasants the situation in the evening of October 4. Mother of Milovan Brkic, a Belgrade journalist, gave her son a ring the same evening:
"Son," she confided in him, "the priest and the teacher told us, that the man had really cheated us out of the people’s will".
"Yes mother, he did it" replied Brkic.
"Well then, our boys are going to Belgrade in the morning to catch ’im," that was the message of this peasant woman.
For the first time in ten years It was clear to Brkic that the final showdown was approaching. "It will be very nasty" he murmured.

"We can fire," the colonel was thinking at that time.
"We can kill, say, a hundred of them. We can kill another hundred at another point. Well, then nobody will come to Belgrade."
He looked at other officers. Their faces were distorted in a questioning grimace. The colonel knew what the questions were.
"What then?" he thought.
"Most probably, popular rebellion". The officers shared his views, he could see it.
"NATO would bomb us," he continued counting, "the forces located on our borders would come in, from all sides. Cities would be burning, we would fight in forests." The colonel shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, that is most likely".

Copyright © 2001 Dragan Bujosevic, Ivan Radovanovic