It definitely got personal. After a month of strikes against Serbia’s military and economic infrastructure, NATO last week began hitting the places that embody Milosevic’s regime. Just after 3 a.m. Wednesday at least three cruise missiles set Milosevic’s party headquarters alight. The following morning, just before 4, a missile gutted the official residence of Yugoslavia’s president. The RTS bombing was the bloody coup de grace. The bombing in Belgrade put a deadly exclamation point on the promises coming out of London, Washington and Brussels that NATO will not hesitate to punish the Serbian leader himself.
The most spectacular strike last week literally peeled the roof off the Usce Business Center, a 24-story high-rise that houses the headquarters of Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia and several regime-linked businesses. A TV station there, owned by Milosevic’s daughter, had just finished showing “Sexgate,” a hard-core-porn sendup of the Lewinsky scandal, when the cruise missiles slammed into the base and top of the building. Locals stared, dumbfounded, as firemen shot streams of water into the bowels of the building, where an orange inferno silhouetted disjointed beams. There were, remarkably, no casualties: the businesses had cleared out, and so had the politicos.
Next came Milosevic himself. Nobody really expected the Serbian leader to be in his official residence, a large villa where Tito once lived. NATO says he spends each night in a different bunker. The alliance’s justification for the hit: it was a presidential “command and control” structure. But few people in Serbia believed that. “NATO committed a criminal act without precedent: an assassination attempt against the president of a sovereign state,” said Government Minister Goran Matic. That may be stretching things. But the message was clear: NATO is in no mood to talk, and even Milosevic isn’t safe.
