LITERARY | Serbia: Studying Trauma During the NATO Bombardment of Belgrade
August 2009 | Ana Djapović-Scholl | Img: Belgrade 2001 / CC
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When the International Aid Network got started in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1997-8, there were twelve of us. The agency found its specialty in providing psychological support services. Since I was planning my bachelor’s thesis in psychology at Belgrade University, I decided to join the team and learn as much as I could about the field. I wanted to work closely with refugees who had fled war in Croatia and Bosnia to find safety in peaceful Belgrade. I wanted to learn about how traumatic stress affects adults and about the defense mechanisms they use to stay whole.
At the time, NATO, led by the US, had been threatening to intervene to change the course of Yugoslavia’s conflict in Kosovo, in the south of Serbia, a conflict which had already led to serious political violence. In March 1999, just as I began planning my research on post-traumatic stress with refugees in Belgrade, in the north of Serbia, NATO began its bombardment of our city.
Right away, I had to quickly adjust my research question and methodology so that I could take advantage of the rare opportunity not only to study post-traumatic stress, but also to study stress while mass trauma is still taking place. I never knew what to expect. I never knew when the bombing would stop or not stop or what people were planning to do. Maybe we would be carpet-bombed and we would all be killed. It was kind of a nonobjective position to be in as a researcher.
I wanted to see if there was a difference between men and women, to see if women deal with things in a different way, I wanted to see how the amount of stress, their level of exposure to the actual bombardment led to varying levels of response and coping. Everyone was exposed, but if I traced the proximity and kind of exposure and analyzed that against the person’s age and gender, I thought I could make some kind of scale.
Post traumatic stress disorder was one of the scales I used to see whether any were at the level called “Clinical PTSD”. But this scale was not fully appropriate because there were no scales to look at acute stress, how people react at the time of the trauma and during repeated traumatization. Few people have assessed this kind of stuff while the stressor is still going on. Fires, rape, armed robbery: It all happens and then later you ask how people feel about it. And this time I was asking while it was still going on, and it was going on for three months.
For a good research paper, it would be hard to have high quality methodology for collecting data. I admittedly had no experience doing this at a war time, but who did? I found a few people from Tel Aviv and Baghdad University to correspond with who had done similar research during conflict. Baghdad had survived a similar bombardment nine years earlier. But for the most part I was on my own in creating this study.
When the bombing began on March 24th, 1999, the Yugoslav government called for Marshall Law, which made a lot of things more complicated for my work. Officially, I would not be permitted to collect data without permits from every level of government, a stamp of approval from the federal, republic, then city offices, as well as from my institution. If I wanted to do such research during Marshall Law I would need an official document explaining who I was and who had approved the work. Since time was moving quickly, I got started anyway.
Random sampling wasn’t really possible considering some neighborhoods were extremely dangerous or inaccessible at certain times. One couldn’t walk trough the city all the time. One had to wait until there was a break. And you couldn’t go to Novi Belgrade because the bridges were a big risk. But I went out several times anyway, taking chances. I divided Belgrade by how heavily each section had been bombed at the time, a month in, which was somewhat associated with whether there was a military target or not. The sample would have to be collected through people I already knew on different sides of town.
When the bombing started each time, air raid signals whined to give people forewarning that aircraft were spotted. I went to the big buildings, the skyscrapers, to find people many of whom were down in their basement air raid shelters. At such a time, they needed something to do, so it seemed practical to distribute a questionnaire. The questions were not intrusive, just asking about what they do in their regular lives to cope. PTSD was assessed on a regular scale. Although I completed a clinical presentation on this study several years ago, I’ll include here my more subjective reflections, a look back ten years later.
I’m not sure how much of it is cultural, how Serbian women are, but men were really hostile, really protective of their area where they lived. They were really paranoid. People would ask me, “Are you doing this for NATO? Are you coming to the roof to plant a bombing locator?” That was something the air forces used to help target what they wanted to hit with a tomahawk missile or other explosive projectiles.
Serbian men acted in such a way that didn’t show any fear, more strong and hostile, a generally aggressive attitude. That was hard for me to go around. I needed to overcome some really nasty reactions. How much would I divulge about what I’m doing? Would I lie about the findings? They would generate theories of conspiracy about how this is happening and why. Who was I to come there and who was I working for? Was I going to put a target locator on their building and kill them all?
But that reaction never came from a woman. And it usually didn’t come from younger men. It usually came from middle aged and older men who were otherwise just there making really dark jokes about everything, drinking beers. I really don’t look intimidating. And I was trying not to be in anyone’s face. But anyone they had never met, never seen in the neighborhood showing up asking questions was really intimidating.
Women were very different. Women were putting all their needs and worries on the side and caring more than ever for their children and men. They would clean more and cook more. Cooking was a very common reaction. They were cooking more and better than before. They were eating like it was Christmas all the time, like it was their last meal. You weren’t going to die from hunger in this time period. And it wasn’t easy to get things at the time, but they were getting it, they were getting the food to feed their children and men and keep them well fed.
Women were very protective and caring and nurturing. When you look at how they actually felt, they were really depressed, but they were doing the actions to cover up from anxiety and fear that their kids could be dead in a minute when the bomb fell. I feel like their motherly nurturing role went to the extreme as a way for them to try to control the situation.
One touching and human part of the story of my research was learning more about the older people I know, including my grandparents. Older people from Belgrade at the beginning of the bombing felt that they were well equipped because they had endured the Nazi bombing of Belgrade back in the 1940s. They tried to teach us about precautionary measures. But from the beginning they were not aware of how irrelevant such advice was considering how much had changed in warfare. Put the drapes down so no one can see the lights. Cover the windows. Save candles. Be quiet, don’t make sounds.
There was an old women who went into dementia and mentally traveled back to the Second World War and couldn’t come back. She totally identified the situation with the Nazi bombings. She ended up reliving life in a German concentration camp. A clear, level-headed woman just lost it.
Recent refugees from Croatia and Bosnia were a minority in my sample, but those I studied were extremely traumatized. They were going through a terrifying event soon after escaping a different war to what they thought would be a safe haven. They had already lost everything, so there was nothing left to lose for them but their sense of safety, as well as each other. From the beginning, the refugees were more aware of how threatening this attack was going to be, more than regular Belgrade citizens did.
Some refugees had a stress reaction to what was happening in Belgrade even though it was not as difficult as what they went through before. Bombs fell, people died; it was terrifying, but in Belgrade at the time you were still among friends. In Bosnia, they had experienced situations in which your own best friends and neighbors could transform into the enemy and wish to shoot at you. In Belgrade, your friends and neighbors were all in it with you. Bombing came only from the air.
For me, I had imagined the NATO bombing would be like what I had heard about the bombings in the Second World War. Everything would be destroyed in a short period of time. NATO began publicizing that they would bomb to stop the Yugoslav forces in Kosovo in November 1998, so by the time the bombing went on from March to May 1999, many of us had time to think about it and prepare somewhat.
When the event finally came, I felt that things which had been important to me before were now less important, or even irrelevant. Everyday things melted away when death was so close. But after three months of bombing, values came back and even the trivial became important to me again.
The attack lasted too long for people not to learn how to get used to it and live with it. It’s still in your mind that you could die. It could be your bad luck. There were people who just happened to be in the right or wrong place. It was on your mind all the time, but you kept operating. That’s human resilience.
After presenting my bachelor’s research on the way people coped with the bombing of Belgrade, I got involved in humanitarian aid work and development. But ultimately, I traveled to California and returned to psychology. Recently, I’ve been working for the US Veteran’s Administration, interviewing and listening to American survivors of war in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq.
Now working with people who served the US armed forces, just a few years after the US-led bombing of my hometown of Belgrade, I often reflect on my experiences with people surviving those terrifying days. Americans who travel to Belgrade often wonder how people there will treat them considering the war, but they are always surprised to find that people there are kind to them.
That’s how life in America has been for me. Perhaps it is ironic, or perhaps it is another way people learn to get beyond political events, by separating the trauma of the past from the people of the present.
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