A blast from the past
Monday, May 14, 2007
Serbia's Eurovision win is slowly fading into events past and I need to find something else to spend my time doing, aside from browsing my statcounter statistics, which show that in the last three days, I received more than 400 visits from countries around the world, most of them looking for answers to questions like "marija serifovic is she gay" or "marija serifovic gay is ok", etc.I started decluttering and going through a minor spring clean-up, trying to minimize the number of boxes of things I have in the basement. Among some of the things I came across was a book I had bought two years ago, Dusko Doder's biographical book on Slobodan Milosevic, Milosevic:Portrait of A Tyrant.
The book is an easy read and allows people like me, who've heard all about the man and in many ways, suffered the consequences of Milosevic's decisions, to go into the depths of his family history, the problems of which seem to have been outlined in the stars, as an astrologer seems to think.
I read a chapter of the book and, slightly distracted, wondered what YouTube would have on the Serbian dictator. The results showed a Jon Stewart joke, a Family Guy excerpt featuring Milosevic in a tight circle with Saddam Hussein, and a short clip that made me go back 13 years to a time that I remember very well, perhaps too well, considering that it has been a long time.
In 1992, following possible implications of the Serbian government in the Bosnian war, world powers, including the United States , imposed economic sanctions on Yugoslavia [Serbia and Montenegro at the time]. I remember 1992 to 1995 being the years when everything was scarce, including baking flour. In order to buy groceries, it was regular routine to wait for hours in a line. The inflation rate was so high during the sanctions, that new banknotes (with an extra zero in front) were issued almost every week. You could buy two litres of car gas one day with 100 million dinars, but the next day, you'd be lucky if you got one piece of chewing gum for the same note.
Two YouTube videos I came across show the situation as it was. In one of the videos, you see seniors pushing for free bread, distributed by the state, in Belgrade. Free bread was not distributed in Kosovo, but the fighting went on even when you had to pay for the bread.In another one of the videos, you see the empty shelves of corner/grocery stores. It brings back a memory of walking into ghost supermarkets. Here they are:
Labels: 1990s, inflation, Kosova, Kosovo, sad, sanctions, Yugoslavia
