NOT A FAIRYTALE BUT… SECOND CHAPTER, THIRD STORY: EVERY BUILDING NEEDS A BILJANA

25 Mar NOT A FAIRYTALE BUT… SECOND CHAPTER, THIRD STORY: EVERY BUILDING NEEDS A BILJANA

“Every Building Needs a Biljana”
– Third story of the March monthly chapter –

Written by: Dunja Karanović
Read by: Marija Drndić

I BREATHE IN THE CITY: little houses, small buildings, tiny people, June; before the bombing – hunger – civil war. I breathe  the city in from bus number 83, greedily; I close my eyes and see Sarajevo, I open them and still see Sarajevo. (…) The city is filled with an ambiguous energy, unpredictably spilling over, back and forth, crossing and running in parallel.¹

Seventy-two thousand candles lit in Pionirski Park in late 1991 and early 1992 failed to provoke any reaction from Slobodan Milošević’s regime. But one hundred thousand people gathered in the center of Belgrade on May 31, 1992, as part of the Black Ribbon (Crni flor) action, could not be ignored.

“They reacted for the first time when we organized Black Ribbon. We were sitting at my place talking about what to do, when Zorica Jevremović, a dramaturge, said, ‘People, let’s make a black ribbon.’ And we jumped up immediately, got into Nikola Barović’s car, and drove to measure the distance from Slavija to Terazije. The next day, Primož Bebler and Emir Geljo – who was still working as a set designer at RTS at the time – managed to find black cardboard paper sheets in a studio in Košutnjak. We split into five or six groups to distribute the sheets. Biljana and I were near the Albanija building; we thought the crowd would trample us. That was the first major protest in Belgrade”, Jelena Trpković recalls, speaking from the same attic apartment where the entire Civil Resistance Movement used to gather.

At the initiative of activists from the Civil Resistance Movement, a 1.300 meters-long strip of black paper was created, stretching from the Palace Albanija to Slavija Square. The protest was organized in opposition to the siege of Sarajevo, the destruction and the crimes committed since the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1992. In Marshal Tito Street, as it was still called at the time, 100.000 citizens officially gathered. As Jelena explains, the Civil Resistance Movement alone could not have mobilized such a crowd without the support of numerous activists (Borka Pavićević, Biljana Kovačević Vučo, Zagorka Golubović, Staša Zajović, Sonja Liht…), as well as other anti-war organizations (Center for Anti-War Action, Women in Black, the Women’s Lobby, the Helsinki Parliament, the Pančevo Peace Movement…), the Serbian Youth Union, but also political parties like the Social Democratic Union, Vuk Drašković’s Serbian Renewal Movement, the Democratic Party, and others.

“We invited all political parties to join us, but on one condition – no political party symbols. We said that the Black Ribbon was for all those killed in the war, a kind of memorial service, and it had to remain free of any political markings. That was the only way. We could negotiate everything else later, once we reached some common ground. Established political parties helped us – the Social Democratic Union, Vuk Drašković with his large following, Vesna Pešić’s Civic Alliance – there were even monarchists, Ravna Gora supporters and some right-wing parties. That was when the authorities started to take notice,” Jelena adds.

In a letter that arrived in Berlin a few days later, addressed to Maruša Krese, Biljana described how it seemed to her:

“One thousand three hundred meters of black art paper, in pieces, which people carefully held by the edges and joined together, until it finally stretched from Albanija building to Slavija Square. One hundred thousand people. Along one part of the line – ordinary citizens: women, men, babies in strollers, dogs, some people I hadn’t seen in years, people who had never been to any kind of demonstration; I ran into long lost friends and acquaintances. Then a mix of SPO activists and women, and then – like underground thunder – as the ribbon was ‘passing’ by the government buildings: ‘Slobo resign!, – more a cry than a chant – the black ribbon held high and stretched tight.”

At the end of the letter, a footnote: “Actually it was 1.400 m; the night before, Jelena, Primož, Goran, Emir, Nikola and I ‘measured’ 1.300 – one car’s meter was working, the other’s  wasn’t”.

Twenty-two organizations officially joined the Civil Resistance Movement in the Black Ribbon action. To reach them, Biljana made countless phone calls. Activist Lepa Mlađenović, in her text about Biljana, recalls one of those calls:

“Out of nowhere, that May of ’92, she appeared on my phone. Short and direct: ‘Hi Lepa, you have to come…’ She was calling me to make sure that I would attend the announced peace protest, the Black Ribbon. I remember, I was surprised; is it possible that there are people in Belgrade who had come up with such a good, such a large-scale action: assembling a black ribbon for the victims of war and walking in silence from the Palace Albanija (the first skyscraper in Belgrade at the corner of Terazije and Knez Mihailova Street) to Slavija Square. Is it possible that Biljana is now dialing every number in her address book, convincing people they had to be there?”

Biljana, as her friend Jelena Trpković remembers her, was tireless:

“We would sit together planning how we were going to organize the Black Ribbon, and then Biljana would go home to New Belgrade, and we would keep talking until four in the morning. There weren’t many of us, but we all knew each other and were constantly together. Even without mobile phones, the network was strong, and within a day or two, everyone knew everything. We communicated better than people do today. But Biljana was a treasure trove – I don’t know how she managed to read and see everything. She had a laser-sharp mind – precise, accurate, piercing, like a drill. We should have one like her on every corner. Every building should have its own Biljana – someone who can lift the whole building, spark resistance, cause a stir, and walk away from it with elegance, knowing she’s right”.

Two weeks after the Black Ribbon, the Civil Resistance Movement launched another action, called The Last Bell. Three military trucks were borrowed and fitted with three church bells, with the idea of moving through the city from different starting points and using noise to call citizens into the streets and into collective resistance against the regime of Slobodan Milošević.

“Police with long guns showed up, because they realized that if there were a hundred thousand people there, it could easily be a million here. The official explanation – which we demanded since the protest had been registered – was that the trucks were not licensed and could not drive through the city like that. Then truck drivers arrived with trailers and lifted the trucks, but they were tall and we couldn’t go any further. We realized at that moment that it was over – the energy dropped, and the police were all around. People were standing in front of the Assembly with no program. I remembered I had Abdulah Sidran’s poem in my wallet, ‘The House’. Biljana climbed up with a megaphone and read the poem – that was the only thing we could do”, explains Jelena Trpković.

Several thousand people gathered for The Last Bell action, circling the Presidency building three times with the noise of keys, bells, and rattles, shouting “Belgrade, wake up! Belgrade, be ashamed!”

The following day, the Center for Anti-War Action and the Civic Alliance organized the Yellow Ribbon protest in front of the National Assembly, in response to the forced expulsion of Croats from the village of Hrtkovci in Srem. That same day, student demonstrations began in front of the Rectorate building – protests that would continue throughout the entire summer.

1 Biljana’s Letter to Berlin (to Maruša Krese), June 3–5, 1992