It could have been any day of '92. Let's say, I have no idea, Thursday, October 22nd.
So it is Thursday, October 22, 1992, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is under sanctions, the country is ravaged by inflation, the Belgrade asphalt is being destroyed by the gang of “dieselers”, that Thursday Misha Düsseldorf is looking for Aleksandar Knežević Knelet in the city, desperate people with plastic bottles are looking for gasoline, and Jezdimir Vasiljević’s Jugoskandik Bank is offering them interest on savings of forty percent. Boss Jezda has no problem with inflation, with his money the chess “match of the century” is being played in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro, Bobby Fischer versus Boris Spassky: that Thursday they played a draw in the twenty-third game, and the current score is 8:4 for the legendary American.
Barely fifty kilometers to the west, JNA units were retreating from Konavle that day and shelling Cavtat, and on the same Thursday, October 22, at a press conference in Zagreb, Dr. Clyde Snow, a forensic expert from the UN mission, announced that a mass grave containing dozens of skeletons had been discovered on an unnamed farm near Vukovar, most likely Croats and prisoners from the city hospital who had been executed by the army under the command of Major Veselin Šljivančanin in November of the previous year. At the same conference, the special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, would warn the international community about the situation in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where “many will not survive the winter”: “The governments of Western countries need to wake up before a great tragedy occurs!”
In Bosnia, however, neither tragedy nor its victims await winter, so Sarajevans are cutting down trees for firewood en masse in the parks. Poplars are falling under axes, citizens are falling under sniper fire: up above the city, in the Jewish Cemetery, there is a sniper's nest under the command of Chetnik duke Slavko Aleksić, from where the reports are sent by the documentarian and reporter for TV Novi Sad, Rajko Đurđević, who left his one and a half year old daughter in Belgrade's Kaluđerica and went to witness the fight of the unarmed Serbs in Sarajevo. One autumn day in 1992 - perhaps, why not, on that very October 22nd - they will be visited by duke Vojislav Šešelj, president of the Serbian Radical Party and commander of the famous White Eagles, who will be met at the Jewish Cemetery by a tall, beardless volunteer from Belgrade, a twenty-two-year-old law student named Aca.
If the duke wasn't at the Jewish cemetery on October 22nd, his White Eagles were there that day, about a hundred kilometers west, in the village of Mioče near Rudo. Under the command of Milan Lukić, they stopped a bus to Priboj and rescued sixteen passengers, took them to Višegrad, and after torturing them at the Vilina Vlas hotel, executed them all, throwing their bodies into the Drina River.
The murdered passengers were Muslims from Sjeverin in Sandžak, citizens of Yugoslavia, but Belgrade had more pressing problems that Thursday: Slobodan Milošević, during the war with Prime Minister Milan Panić, sent special forces to occupy the federal MUP building on Kneza Miloša Street, and after student protests over the May elections - in which his SPS recorded a convincing victory, and Šešelj's Radicals more than a million votes - called early elections. Twenty-six-year-old Ivica, the president of the Young Socialists, who graduated in journalism from the Faculty of Political Sciences and became the party's spokesperson at the SPS congress at the beginning of the year, has his hands full at the start of the campaign: on that day, for example, young Ivica drafts a public statement about the replacement of the SPS president, where party boss Slobodan Milošević will return instead of Borisav Jović ahead of the elections.
Youth is the future of Serbia, and the December elections will be the first for many who are just coming of age. Here is a small survey among them. Ana, a third-grade student at Belgrade's Fifth Gymnasium, is not yet eighteen, but she plans to go to America after high school anyway. Politics interests Dragan from Železnik more, who turned nineteen that October and, like Ivica, enrolled in journalism at the Faculty of Political Sciences. Dragan's peer Darko from Ub is also ready to defend Serbia, having just returned from military service in the Guard, Military Post 4795/12 - under the command of the same Veselin Šljivančanin from Vukovar, now a lieutenant colonel - and that Thursday he is attending his first lectures at the Higher Civil Engineering School.
Neither the army nor the war, nor journalism nor politics, however, interests the newly-adult Jasmina, the daughter of the famous Belgrade accordionist Mićo Đorđević, known as Gverini, and the singer Mira. Eighteen-year-old Jaca has her father's talent and her mother's voice, and she quickly became known as the future big star of folk festivals in pubs and on television. That summer, she briefly got involved with the fourteen-year-old accordionist Dragan Ašanin, known as Aške, but to the relief of her parents, she decided to end the relationship. A few weeks later, on Thursday, October 22, the Belgrade tabloid press published that in an apartment on Lenin Boulevard, in front of her twelve-year-old brother, accordionist Aške had shot and killed the promising young singer Jasmina Đorđević with three shots from a pistol.
That's what a day in the distant 1992 looked like. It could have been any day, it was Thursday, October 22. Murders, sanctions, students, protests, police, gangsters on the streets, folk fairs on television and somewhere far away some kind of war. Thirty-three years have passed, who remembers anymore? The 1990s are far away, we have forgotten Fischer and Spassky, Milošević and Šljivančanin, Misha Düsseldorf and Knelet, Vukovar and Sarajevo, and the two hundred and sixty skeletons from Ovčara and the sixteen murdered citizens of Sjeverin, let alone an eighteen-year-old Belgrade girl. Not even the survivors of this story remember her.
Jaca's murderer Aška, for example, served twelve years in prison and today sings his hit "It's time to enjoy yourself, I've been waiting for this for years" at fairs. Convicted in The Hague as a war criminal, Vojislav Šešelj also spent years in prison, and today lives and works as a general practitioner in the Pink television studio. A prominent member of his party would later be the high-ranking student from the Jewish cemetery, Aca, as he was called. Aleksandar Vučić later founded his own party and has been the president of all of Serbia for almost a decade.
The young socialist Ivica - Dačić, that's right - has come a long way, having been the president of the Socialist Party of Serbia for twenty years, a reliable minister in every government, later even three times prime minister, and today the deputy prime minister and minister of the interior. When he returns from America, the prime minister will also be that girl from the Fifth Gymnasium, Ana Brnabić, today the speaker of the National Assembly, and the one from the Higher Civil Engineering School, Šljivančanin's soldier Darko, today the minister for public investments, Darko Glišić. Even that baby from Kaluđerica, the daughter of the duke's reporter from the Jewish cemetery - yes, Milica Đurđević Stamenkovski, Milica Zavetnica - is now working as the minister for labor and employment.
Finally, that freshman journalism student from Železnik, Dragan - Dragan J. Vučićević - thirty-three years later, the owner of the tabloid and television Informer, the king of the Serbian media scene who, at the end of this story, will invite all its surviving participants to an Orthodox Christmas party broadcast live from the TV Informer studio in Voždovac, also prospered nicely.
There they were last Wednesday around the table with a pig from the furnace, all present, live and healthy: President Aca, Assembly Speaker Ana, Deputy Prime Minister Ivica, Minister Darko, Minister Milica, Duke Voja and host Dragan. They are gnawing at the bones of zombies from 1992 in the television broadcast of Christ's birthday party, and they are entertained by some sleazy singer, the same one, what was his name, yes: Dragan Ašanin.
Yes, by God, he did - "the time has come", here it is, "the time to enjoy with you, I've been waiting for this for years", the convicted murderer of Aška waited for a full thirty-three years to sing at the Christmas fair for President Vučić, so he sings a little in praise of the Minister of Police, "a living fire burns over Kraljevo", a little in praise of the Speaker of the National Assembly, "look, mother, how you know / to give me for a Serb", and so that it wouldn't turn out that the happy nineties had been forgotten, Aške, embraced by Vučićević, sang in praise of Duke Šešelj and "Duke Sinđelić", let's all raise our hands, "A Turkish woman swore in front of the mosque / that she only loved a Serb".
It could have been any day of that ninety-two. Let's say, I have no idea, Wednesday, January 7, 2026: murders, sanctions, protests, students, police, gangsters on the streets, folk fairs on television and somewhere in Voždovac, the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thirty-three years, he lived a good life.
Bonus video:
