The Balkans Truce: `Momenat' - the universal answer in this exhausted city

WHEN YOU want to talk to the Russians in Belgrade, you take a taxi down to the old Soviet embassy in Deligradska Street and press the steel bell at the gate. After a minute, a voice on the intercom says: "Momenat." If you want news of Chernomyrdin's visits, of Russian peace forces, you have to press the bell. Occasionally, a lady with painted eyebrows comes out and says "Momenat," with a big smile. It means, of course, "one moment".

And after 10 minutes or so - after there has been silence and you have smiled guiltily at the Yugsoslav cops at the gate - you press the bell for a third time. "Momenat," says the voice once again. When will the Yugoslav army commence its withdrawal from Kosovo? "Momenat." When will the Russian army arrive to join the "peace-keeping" force? "Momenat."

Drive over to Svetozara Markovica street and ask ex-General Vuk Obradovic how soon the general election demanded by the opposition parties will be held and he says they should be called within three months and held within the following 60 days. Which is another way of saying "Momenat."

Between peace and war, defiance and retreat, Yugoslavia awaits its fate with exhaustion.

So I asked an old acquaintance - a Yugoslav army officer with no connection to the ex-general - why the Russians were not poised to drive into Kosovo alongside Nato. "They can't get organised," he said with resignation. "I can't understand the degree of humiliation the Russians accept. If they come, they will be in one part of Kosovo, probably the north, and they will not be mixed with Nato on the ground.

But the absence and the presence of the Russians is always mysterious. With allies like that, you don't have a chance." Momenat, I thought. The same goes for those mysterious elections which the opposition parties - including, of course, our old friend V. Seselj Esq (he of the White Eagles) - would like to have called within three months. The idea is to dethrone President Slobodan Milosevic, the man who humiliated the army three times in a decade. Faced with a legion of forest hunters with shotguns, they were forced to withdraw from Slovenia, then from Croatia - where the army was given no policy - and then from Bosnia, where the army had to give logistical support to the tin-pot "Serbian Republic of Krajina." Whenever Milosevic wanted to use the army, the army always said that there were other, political solutions. Momenat.

As the colonel remarked yesterday "our first error was to try to defend Serbia against an enemy ten times greater in strength and the second error was to stop half way - it means that the dead died for nothing." And that, of course, is what happened. After 72 days of bombardment, President Milosevic sat down with Marrti Ahtisaari and Victor Chernomyrdin and said "Momenat."

Vuk Obradovic, the youngest general in the Yugoslav army when he resigned in 1992 because he could not honour his promise to soldiers' parents to bring them home from Bosnia by a May deadline, says that Serbia must now "turn its face towards social democracy". His political party - 115,000 votes at the last election after only two months of existence - is called the Social Democrats. "This war should not have happened - never," he says. "It could have been avoided with a little bit of sense and understanding. Because war is always the defeat of reason by insanity. No war ever brings good things to people. We kept warning Nato that Yugoslavia should not be dropped into a war, especially against the most powerful military machinery in the world."

The 52-year-old ex-general in his steel-framed glasses wears a blue T- shirt amid the oppressive afternoon heat in the office in which he spent most of the war - only a few hundred metres from the Serbian television station blitzed by Nato missiles. He produced his own Kosovo peace plan a year ago, calling for a multi-ethnic peace plan, and fired it off at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the United Nations, the Contact Group and Messrs Gonzales, Kinkel and Solana. To no avail.

He certainly doesn't take Nato's side. He condemned General Wesley Clark for Nato's bloody "mistakes" after Nato bombed an entire family in Surdulica in April and says that "no war can justify the destruction of a nation"- but he draws a frightening picture of the future Yugoslavia. "Serbia was in a difficult situation before the war, with the economy breaking down and a million unemployed and another 830,000 who were officially employed but had no jobs. Before the war, we had three million living in poverty ...Now we have a further 500,000 unemployed and possibly two million poor. This means that 80-85 per cent of Yugoslavs live in poverty. It is up to us to overcome this. And it is in your interest," - here he points at me - "to help because your countries will be flooded with refugees from Yugoslavia and Serbia if you don't."

He does not blame the army. "All this does not represent the defeat of the Yugoslav army or our people. Both the soldiers and the people remained heroic all the time. No, it is the defeat of the non-public policy of President Milosevic - only this, nothing else. And it remains without saying that I am very sorry the army will have to swallow the bitter fruits of such a policy." Which was not quite the view of yesterday's Politika. The president's call for an end to the war, according to Tito's old paper, was "a brave and wise move." The dailies in Belgrade were telling their readers that the war might be over by last night - though that was not the story from the "peace" talks in Macedonia. All Yugoslavia, it seems, was yesterday waiting at the "Momenat" bell.