They've been stirred by nationalist passion, the government-tainted Yugoslav press, and other such detractors from the truth. Some people I spoke to seemed intentionally ignorant, as if they spent too much time worrying about how their families were going to get by to obsess over politics. Except for the barons of the flourishing underground economy, including Milosevic's twentysomething, jet-setting son Marko, most people are having a harder time of it. Since the war, unemployment has increased and inflation has raged. Liquor and beer are sold on the street at all hours.
People drive at dangerous speeds on streets and highways, ignoring speed limits.
Police officers are easily bought. Belgraders either live or co-exist in a largely unregulated world of sex, criminal activity, and downspiraling poverty. In April 1995, a few months before the Dayton peace accords brought a cease-fire to the fighting, a large memorial was dedicated on the Sava River bank to those massacred in nearby concentration camps during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia 50 years ago. Change the names of the victims on the inscription and the crimes sound hauntingly familiar. It says genocide was committed by the Nazis against 100,000 Serbs, Jews, and gypsies at four nearby camps and by the Croats, who were allied with the Germans, and Hungarian occupying forces.