GOTOV JE (He's Finished)! Part 2

On that day I awoke early as I had to go to work. It was a sunny day, warm but a little bit windy. The city was quiet, quite the opposite of the usual crowded streets and traffic jams. Stores were closed; public transport reduced, and parts of town were without power.

I went to my office, drank coffee, read the papers, and spent some hours searching the Net for news. About 1:30PM, the director of my company called and told me to close the office and go where we all should go. He was reluctant to speak freely over the phone, as you never know when you are taped.

I decided to go straight to the meeting and see what would happen. In front of the Assembly were some 10,000 to 15,000 people; mainly those who decided to come early to get a better view. Those who came from places near Belgrade and those who travelled by night from all over the country to avoid roadblocks joined them. The crowd was getting bigger and bigger every minute as people came from all over the town.

Then I saw something that I will remember for the rest of my life: the column from Nis came over the highway and entered the Srpskih Vladara Street from the north, and the column from Cacak came in the same street from the south. Srpskih Vladara Street, one of the major streets in Belgrade, was completely filled with people.

As far as I could see were people, people, and nothing but the people. I felt like part of an unstoppable force that would make Milosevic see how wrong he was and send him to history, if not to jail. By 3:00 pm, the whole area in front of the Assembly and nearby streets was filled with people, and even modest reporters guessed that more than 500,000 people gathered there. Never before had Belgrade seen a crowd so huge and so motivated as on October 5.

Milosevic’s servants, the army and police, realized that even in their ranks, Slobists (those who vote for Slobodan Milosevic) were outnumbered by antiSlobists by 3:1 or 4:1. Milosevic was sinking and the rats started to leave the ship. First to disobey his orders were the policemen in small cities who knew they could not act upon Milosevic's orders and avoid retaliation from their neighbours. Even the hard-liners decided that the time had come to ask for forgiveness, or even defect to the other side.

But the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of the Secret Police together with special anti-terrorist forces and part of the army were determined to fight. So a fight was inevitable.

Knowing that the army would use tanks to quell the demonstrations, I walked around the Assembly building and to the nearby State TV station Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS). The RTS building was a symbol of the Milosevic regime, as TV news was one of his most notorious ways to manipulate people.

Milosevic used to send around 1000-2000 fully armed and armored police every time some kind of protest was going on, but this time, they were not there. Another strange thing I saw was three Jeeps without license plates or any marks but with camo paint. I guessed they were PUCH jeeps used by the Yugoslav Army, but the camouflage paint looked more like NATO paint than our drab olive color. I concluded that whoever was inside the RTS building was a trained professional and went on walking in a circle around the meeting place rather than stand in the crowd.

At 15:45 I was just behind the RTS building when I heard whistles and shouts, followed by the worst human stampede I have ever seen. I ran for about 400-500m, and then turned around. People were running from the meeting place and pouring into nearby streets. The wind carried a smell very familiar to me: tear gas. Later I learned that the people had confronted the police forces at the Assembly entrance and almost run them over, when the police received the command to use "every necessary mean to stop people from entering the building".

But the people pressed in and police fired so many cans of tear gas that it was impossible to breathe. The people scattered but the wind was blowing and the tear gas was carried away. People charged the Assembly building again, and this time they reached the main door. The police had used up all of their tear gas, and some of them fired their side arms into or over the crowd but killed no-one.

The crowd backed up for the last time. Nearly 200 policemen were stranded inside the building. Their commander abandoned them and they were low on tear gas.