Andreas Broeckmann on Tue, 6 Apr 1999 22:55:27 +0100 |
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Syndicate: (Xchange) D. Klaic: A Bridge Too Far |
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 20:39:33 +0300 (EEST) From: Heidi Grundmann <hgrundmann@mail.thing.at> The following text reached me today from composer and radio-artist Ivana Stefanovic under the title "Letter from Amsterdam" A Bridge Too Far by Dragan Klaic The Petrovaradin bridge was destroyed this morning at 5 am. My wife woke me up with the news she just heard on the BBC radio. I thought it was the newer railway/highway bridge but when I finally succeeded to phone to Novi Sad in the evening, I heard it was the old metal bridge connecting the center with Petrovaradin and the old fortress above, on the other side of Danube. Why that bridge? It was build in haste in the winter of 1944-45 by the German POWs under the supervision of the Red Army engineers and a railway line was added to renew the connection with Belgrade, 80 km south. So in my childhood, with each train passing the ramp would go down and the traffic would pile up on both sides. It wasn't that much traffic. I remember the uneasiness I felt every time crossing the bridge even in the daytime: the wooden planks of the side board got lose and rotten and one could see the water underneath. I feared I'll step in the void and even sink into Danube, little as I was. In the early sixties, a new bridge was built 2 km down the river and the railway track was displaced too. The old bridge got a face lift and served all these years as a busy connection, away to enter straight into the center of Novi Sad from the Srem side. In the years before I had a driver's license I was crossing it often on foot in the sunset, going to the fortress for a stroll or to some of the inns on the Petrovaradin side with wild Gypsy music only to return in the small hours, admiring the dawn above the city. Ugly as it was, this bridge was part of my childhood and adolescence. The consequence of the bombing is that windows are broken in that part of town and there is no running water around, even the large hospital on the nearby hills of Fruska Gora, some 900 beds, is without water. This is not making the awful lot of Kosovo Albanians easier. It is not prompting the brave Novi Sad citizens to start an uprising against Milosevic. Of course not, Milosevic is stronger than ever and as popular as he was in 1988-89. Moreover, many decent Serbs will hate NATO, W. Europe, USA for the next 50 years and the self-destructive, obsessive ideology of Serbian nationalism has been fed richly by this past week's attacks and has seen all its favorite myths reinforced with new arguments and examples. If only NATO bombed Milosevic's fleet in the Adriatic in September 1991 when it started pounding Dubrovnik, well before Vukovar and the horrors of Bosnia &Herzegovina, the ongoing Balkan war could have been stopped at an early stage. If only a fraction of 1% of what NATO is spending in this campaign now has been spent instead to support the emerging forces of the civil society and the independent media Serbia would have a different future. A military escalation won't halt the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo nor speed up the return of the refugees. This senseless violence should stop at once. The politicians and generals have committed great errors in judgment. They should call further bombings off and step aside for a while. How about a conference with 50 Balkan scholars from the Western and Eastern Europe getting together and using their collective knowledge to envisage some sort of future without war and terror, to restart a dialogue. The politicians can in the meantime vote budgets for the humanitarian aid much needed in the region and entrust the generals to implement it. We know how good they can be at it. Dragan Klaic Dr D Klaic is Professor of University of Amsterdam and Director of TheaterInstituut Nederland. e mail: dragank@tin.nl | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (a) (c) (o) (u) (s) (t) (i) (c) ( ) (s) (p) (a) (c) (e) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | information&comunication channel | for net.broadcasters http://xchange.re-lab.net (Xchange) net.audio network xchange search/webarchive: http://xchange.re-lab.net/a/ ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- information: http://www.v2.nl/east/ mail archive: http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/current/ to unsubscribe send a message to <syndicate-request@aec.at> with the message in the body: unsubscribe your@email.adress