I was visiting trenches day and night and recording worst moments: Gvozden remembers bloody Serbian spring

Photo: RINA

Although 23 years have passed, the memories of the war are stll alive with those in Serbia who felt the NATO aggression on their skin. Although they did not carry a rifle or wear a uniform, war reporters witnessed many instances of suffering, and one of them is the journalist Gvozden Otasevic from Cacak. He described what this part of our homeland went through that bitter spring in his book, a historical memorial entitled, "Cacak and Lucani, Hard Days And Even Harder Nights," published in 2019.

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He says that he intended the book to serve above all the younger generations, those who were too little or not yet born at the time the savage aggression was taking place. In those days, people did not have mobile phones or access to the internet, they needed to come up with hard currency to buy the essentials, and the news could only be obtained if you went to the scene.

"Such is the job of a correspondent. I had to go from one destroyed site to another day and night, to record and describe the difficult moments and destinies of our people and to this day I rejoice when I remember how much unity there was among the people then," Gvozden Otasevic told RINA and described how many people's lives got changed overnight back then.

"One day, I guess by accident, I came across the phone number of a buddy of mine from Lucani and I asked him how he sleeps in that small town that the enemy was savagely bombing. He tells me, "I don't sleep in the apartment. As soon as they give the air raid signal, we take the sleeping bags, go to the forest above Lucani and stay there," recounts Otasevic.

He also notes that he himself does not know how to today describe the fate and the suffering of the Serbian people.

"In the last century alone, the little Serbia fought fierce battles in as many as six wars, while a country ike Sweden, for example, last fought back in 1814 against its neighbor Norway. That is why each piece of good news from our Serbia makes me happy, a country that, just two decades after a war against the strongest armies on the planet, is rising again," said Otasevic.

During the bombing in 1999, the city of Cacak was the target of the aggressor that used aircraft and crusie missiles against it more than 10 times. A total of 215 bombs fell on the city area, with 18 citizens, soldiers and civilians killed, while 22 were injured and over 3,000 residential buildings damaged.

(Telegraf.rs)