A Serbian woman who left Belgrade last Thursday said NATO has bombed non-military targets in Kosovo. Ms Tamara Tomic-Brennan (24) and her Irish husband, Paul, were in the Brazilian embassy in Belgrade at 9.45 a.m. last Thursday when the air-raid siren sounded.
They succeeded in leaving Belgrade that day but Ms Tomic-Brennan fears for the lives of her mother, father and younger sister. "We are Serbs and are one of the 22 national minorities in Serbia. The (news) reports fail to say that people are running from NATO bombs, the bombs do not choose to hit Serbians or Bosnians or Albanians . . . "
On March 19th, Ms Tomic-Brennan and her husband left Belgrade for Pristina to visit her family, who moved there after the Bosnian war. En route they were stopped 40 kilometres from Pristina by Serbian police, who said the KLA had attacked police and army personnel. As they took an alternative and longer route to the city, the couple said they did not see any burning villages or fleeing Albanians.
"All we saw were masses of trenches on the sides of the road but there was nobody leaving. In Pristina the Albanians are in a majority. They run shops there but are also under the KLA curfew. When we were there two Albanian cafes open after four o'clock were bombed by the KLA and people were killed, but the reports in the West placed the blame on the Serbs."
Ms Tomic-Brennan continued: "In the winter of 1996-97, there were massive demonstrations against Milosevic but the West did not help the people then to knock him and have the sanctions removed. Nobody ever raised a voice then when we asked for help."
The NATO bombs "are making people suffer and doing this all because of one man. There are Croatians, Bosnians, Yugoslavians . . . we can't keep running. There is nowhere else to go. The fear felt over the NATO bombs is awful. We thought the ground would open under us, but it is so easy to bomb when you are thousands of miles away."
Ms Tomic-Brennan and her husband say NATO bombs hit non-military accommodation within the army barracks in Prokuplje. The barracks is in the centre of the town. Bombs also fell on the left bank of the River Sava in Belgrade. "It was bombed because the largest reservoir supplying over two million people is there. Then last Sunday NATO bombed the civilian airport at Surcin, which is 10 kilometres from the military airport at Batajnica."
Ms Tomic-Brennan and her family are from Sarajevo and left the city for a weekend in April 1992. The city was cut off and they could not get back in. "Two days after we left Bosnian soldiers broke into our flat. They had put a gun to our neighbour's father's head demanding the key to our flat. They were looking for us because we were Serbs. I believe we would have died if we were there. People who are still in Sarajevo have told us not to return as there is no life there for us. The anti-Serbian propaganda was horrendous."
Her family lost their home and property and well-paid jobs. They ended up in Scotland, where Ms Tomic-Brennan and her sister returned to school.
By the summer of 1993 the family had returned to Yugoslavia but to Belgrade, where there was hyper-inflation because of sanctions imposed by the West. Ms Tomic-Brennan took up the offer of further education in Scotland and left her family.
They later set up home in Pristina.