Hours after NATO began its bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 24th, Serb Interior Ministry police in blue camouflage uniforms armed with Kalashnikovs took journalists out of their hotel rooms in the Kosovo capital of Pristina and held them until dawn in the lobby.
Paramilitary militiamen arrived to rough up the departing Westerners. Two slapped the CNN correspondent, Alessio Vinci, and threatened to kill him. "They said, `You're a war correspondent, so you'll die in the war'," Vinci recalls.
The irregulars seized portable computers and satellite telephones. One stabbed valuable television equipment with a knife. And when the militiamen set fire to the CNN television van, someone did what civic-minded people do when a fire starts. They called the local fire department. And sure enough, amid the threats and violence and looting, the firefighters arrived.
The surreal quality of the moment was not lost on its chief protagonists. Both the militiamen and the firefighters burst into laughter.
A month later in Belgrade, I discovered the poetry of Desanka Maksimovic, one of Serbia's best-loved writers, who died in 1994 at the age of 96. Although Visions, the volume I received from my husband as a birthday gift, was published three years before the Yugoslav war started, every poem foresees the catastrophe that has destroyed Maksimovic's country.
The opening verses seemed to describe the Albanian refugees' accounts of Serb atrocities, the militiamen stabbing television equipment with knives: I am not ashamed of being, as you would say, a barbarian from the Balkans, home of all that's unclean and stormy.
If the barbarity of this conflict was quickly understood outside Yugoslavia, the other lesson of that Pristina morning - the absurd, tragic, intense and sometimes even humorous super-reality that takes over in a war - is almost impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced it. Eating dinner in the battery-lit garden of the Writers' Club in Francuska Street, I overheard a woman complain between two explosions: "The strawberries are not very good this year. There was too much rain".
Last Sunday morning we sat on the balcony listening to the rumble of fighter bombers and watching mushroom clouds rising to the south-east. The bells of the Communion Church began chiming for morning Mass as white missile tracks streaked across the sky. A plane went into a power dive as it accelerated to drop its bomb. Amid the familiar "pop, pop, pop" of cluster bombs, scores of frantic, squawking birds pirouetted before us.
One Belgrade resident said it felt like being sandwiched between President Milosevic on the ground and NATO in the sky. It was, she said, like being strangled. Yet the citizens of Serbia have learned to live with their government. This is not oppression on a Stalinist scale, not terror the way it is exercised by Saddam Hussein: it is more the exasperation of living in Europe yet being governed by neo-communists, intent on brainwashing and harassment.
In the aftermath of the peace agreement, I even heard a Serb journalist say he hoped Slobodan Milosevic would remain in power, because those who might take over would steal as much as they could, as fast as they could. "Milosevic is the only one who has an interest in salvaging what is salvageable," the young man said.
On the Yugoslav border post at Subotica last week I watched hundreds of residents, who had walked or ridden bicycles across the border into Hungary to shop for groceries, returning to their homes in Serbia. That they returned at all suggested that the dictatorship they live under is still bearable for them, but the cross-border traffic also showed how living conditions had deteriorated during the war.
The fuel shortage caused by the bombing was so severe that bicycles became a standard means of transportation. Cigarette factories were also bombed, and our mini-bus driver on the Budapest-Belgrade run earned a handsome profit on the Lucky Strike cartons he hid under his seat. The war turned quite a few Serbs into petty smugglers.
But the bedraggled crowd crossing back into Serbia in searing heat were not smugglers, just provincial people so desperate for washing powder, sugar, cooking oil and disposable nappies that they loaded themselves down like pack animals to carry these scarce commodities home.
A tall, gum-chomping customs officer wearing mirror sunglasses and looking every inch the mean east European border guard inspected every plastic grocery bag and cardboard box. You might think the Yugoslav government had more serious problems to deal with.
With so many bridges bombed, travel through Serbia became an obstacle course where sprints down the motorway were interspersed with long detours through potholed country lanes. On the journey south, the bombed-out barracks and factories, the rusting hulk of the bombed Grdelica passenger train, become landmarks by which we calculated the hours to and from Belgrade.
A Yugoslav army colonel gave us a lift to Surdulica, where a NATO bomb hit a tuberculosis sanatorium this week. He pointed out the dead birds along the roadsides, thousands of them, killed by the explosions. On one stretch of dirt track, where the dust rose in clouds so thick we could not see where we were going, the colonel began singing John Denver's Country Roads.
One of the most industrialised countries in eastern Europe will henceforward be an agricultural nation. Without massive assistance - unlikely as long as Mr Milosevic is in power - experts say it will take 15 years to rebuild what has been destroyed. Health officials are discouraging Serb women from getting pregnant. They fear that depleted uranium shells, which NATO has admitted to using in Yugoslavia, could cause birth defects.
Under the bombardment, living conditions in this European nation fell to the level of the world's least developed countries. Without electricity, there was no refrigeration, and food-poisoning was a common complaint. "You go to the market for your radioactive lettuce or your depleted uranium strawberries, and they cost twice as much," a woman in Belgrade complained. "It's the jam-making season, but even if you can find sugar in the market, by the time you get home, there's no electricity to cook it."
Many thousands of Serbs fled to Bosnia or Hungary. Men under the age of 65 were not allowed to leave, in case they were needed for military service. Some bribed officials to be allowed to escape with their families. Crime shot up in the capital, and abandoned apartments were often robbed. But the most terrifying prospect was ending up like the bomb-mutilated bodies shown on television. Official statistics here claim that more than 1,400 Serb civilians were killed in the bombardments.
On May 20th, a woman who was delivering a baby by Caesarean section was among four people killed when a bomb hit the Dragisa Misovic Hospital in Belgrade. Residents of the capital saw police and soldiers sleeping in hospitals, primary schools, sports centres and kindergartens.
The suburb of Racovica was the most bombed place in Belgrade. Many of its residents fled, making only fleeting visits home during the daytime. Constant bombardment barely fazed a huge underground bunker beneath a granite hill called Strazevica, but it made hell of the lives of everyone living for miles around, with apartment buildings falling into pieces. "I don't have a dining-room any more," a 25-year-old housewife named Irena said with bitter sarcasm. "But I have two balconies."
Ever since Tito's partisans fought the Germans, Yugoslavs have been experts at digging in. Underground Yugoslav weapons factories continued to produce munitions, and NATO never managed to destroy the underground runway at Batajnice.
At least three times, NATO bombed houses or bunkers where Mr Milosevic was known to stay; a young woman died in the bombing of an apartment building owned by a leading member of Mr Milosevic's SPS party. Yet after all that, and an indictment for war crimes, the West is yet again forced to deal with him.
A Russian and a Finn held the last, fateful meetings with the Yugoslav President, but the US Deputy Secretary of State, Mr Strobe Talbott, talked to him on the telephone. When Mr Milosevic finally gave up on Thursday, I couldn't help thinking of another poem by Desanka Maksimovic. Written more than a decade ago, it captured his predicament, and that of his country, with extraordinary prescience:
. . . fate will come to meet you, cutting off behind you all retreats, and breaking down bridges for escape.
Above you stands the sky that has no refuge, below you lies the earth and in it help- less bones, and left and right now sheer cliffs rise up;
and you have memories and all without mercy for you.
Neither in you, nor yet outside you do you have anywhere to go. Comfort amid the chaos. A Yugoslav army soldier and his girlfriend kiss in a central Belgrade park during the height of the conflict. Photograph: Reuters