And now it is over, some particularly satisfying evidence has come to light of the manipulative habits of the Milosevic regime. The ground outside the parliament building is covered with fraudulent ballot papers from the recent presidential election, which the crowd found when they broke into the building. On each one the number opposite Slobodan Milosevic's name had been neatly ringed by some obedient bureaucrat. It wasn't entirely a revolution of velvet like the Czechoslovak one was, partly because this is the Balkans, not peaceable Central Europe. I watched a large and enthusiastic crowd break into a government department store, while another smashed and stole everything in a perfume store owned by the Milosevic's son Marko.
Revolutionary crowds are some of the bravest and most generous groups of people on earth.
Nothing is too dangerous for them to attempt, or too precious for them to share. People made great tanks of coffee and went round handing it out at their own expense. Shops gave bread and cakes and bottles of water, and sometimes of plum brandy, slivovica, to passers by. Assistants at a chemist shop I passed had put some antidote to teargas in a bucket, dipped wads of cotton-wool into it and dispensed them to a line of people with red, streaming eyes and hacking coughs. A revolutionary crowd with its spirit up can do anything and policemen or soldiers, who are merely armed with guns, quickly understand that they can't do much against that kind of thing.