Before he let the journalists from Belgrade approach the wasteland of the factory where he worked for 25 years, Radomir Ljujic, the general manager of Sloboda ("Freedom") household appliances, wanted to tell us a thing or two about NATO's war on Yugoslavia.
"Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of this factory. On March 30th, we received the biggest congratulations from NATO," Mr Ljujic said with bitter sarcasm. "The factory is finished."
B-52s fired at least seven AGM 86 cruise missiles from Hungarian airspace at the factory early on Tuesday morning. In a sloping valley surrounded on three sides by hills, the industrial zone the size of several city blocks looked as if an angry God had picked up warehouses, workrooms and assembly lines, shaken them violently and hurled them to earth in a hail of stone, wood, corrugated steel, machine parts and cardboard boxes.
The cruise missiles hit their targets with stunning accuracy, and the craters they left were gaping chasms 40 feet deep and 100 feet across. The windows broke in the red-roofed chalets just a few hundred metres up the hillside, but they were otherwise untouched. Because the missiles were fired between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. the factory was empty and no one was killed.
Mr Ljujic was aware of the rumours and before we left he gave us orders. "Don't turn vacuum-cleaners into grenade-launchers, and don't minimise the damage," he said. "The damage is terrible. We hope that one day someone will have to pay for this."
So why would NATO target the factory that supplied half of Yugoslavia's vacuum-cleaners, cookers, hair-dryers and refrigerators? Independently of one another, three reliable sources confirmed that it also made munitions, though not in sufficient quantities to justify such an attack, one added.
Can damage to Yugoslavia's economy be compared to the suffering in Kosovo? The question seems absurd, but in a murky way it sums up the Serbs' claim to victim-hood in this war. The material damage we were shown yesterday in Cacak and Kragujevac, two cities 100 kilometres south of Belgrade, was dramatic. But in both cases NATO struck without loss of human life. "I have to admit, as a military man, that NATO are being honourable, that they are hitting military targets with precision," a Yugoslav officer said. "Obviously, if you live next door to a barracks, you are in danger."
In its war with the Kosovo Liberation Army, Serbia has argued that because the guerrillas live in villages with their families, it is impossible to distinguish between "terrorists" and civilians. NATO's moral separation between military and civilian targets appears to have broken down in mass bombardments in Kosovo, where the interior ministry police have moved into civilian housing.
The distress of the Sloboda civilian factory workers shows what a fine line divides the civilian and military, especially in Yugoslavia, where virtually all the country's industry was dual-use. After all, Serb journalists said yesterday in Cacak, the Boeing company that made the cruise missiles that destroyed Sloboda also makes civilian airliners.
Mr Ljujic's factory employed 5,000 people and supported an estimated 20,000. The factory was worth $700 million. "This is a tragedy for Cacack," he said. "This factory was known throughout the world. We produced vacuum-cleaners under licence from the German company Progress and refrigerators under licence from Ignis in Italy. We received congratulations from Aviano [NATO air base in northern Italy], too. We used to produce 300,000 vacuum cleaners every year."
As he spoke, a woman in blue overalls and a pink anorak stood nearby, weeping. Other workers carried red vacuum-cleaner casings and aluminium baskets, plastic tubes and hair-dryers from the mountains of rubble, stacking them in orderly piles. Faded pinups and images of football stars were still taped to one of the few walls remaining. "Orders can be delivered by post," a sign noted. "Quality guaranteed by Sloboda, Cacak."
But there was a very strong police presence for a damaged appliance factory. They stood scowling, feet wide apart and hands behinds their backs, in front of plastic ribbons, cordoning off the areas we could not visit, allegedly because they had not yet been secured. And the choking dust smelled odd, like gunpowder.
"That's enough questions," a plainclothes man shouted when I spoke to workers on the far side of one of the ribbon markers. They refused to speak any more. As we walked away at the request of uniformed policemen, another plainclothes man gave me a hard shove in the back, and for a fraction of a second I thought I could imagine what it might be like to be a Kosovo Albanian.
Yet the information and defence ministries had chosen to bring us here. By showing the damage sustained in NATO bombardments, they were trying to be open. The tension between our official guides and the local police was palpable; Yugoslavia is not so much non-aligned as it is pulled in opposite directions, between nostalgia for communism and a desire to be in Europe, between two kinds of attitude and education.
Fifty kilometres to the east at Kragujevac, we were shown three military garages on the edge of an army base, flattened in a NATO bombardment, again with no loss of life. There is only one business in Kragujevac, the Zastava car factory, which also happens to be Yugoslavia's main producer of sidearms, assault rifles and machineguns. The Zastava factories run for miles in a swathe of giant warehouses through the centre of the city of 180,000.
Zastava's automobile workers have gained a great deal of publicity in Serbia for their "heroic stand against NATO aggression".
"If our factory is destroyed, we have no more life. So we decided to be a human shield, so that Clinton and his pilots would have to bomb our bodies," Jusic Dorovic, the director of the car bonnet plant, told us. The decision, like the "peace" rally where we met him yesterday, was spontaneous, he insisted.
"Workers work their shifts, and while they do, the others wait in the factory," he explained. But how had they notified NATO that it risked a massacre if it bombed this particular dual-use target?
They flooded the Internet addresses of President and Mrs Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and other NATO notables with messages: the tactic appears to be working.
Kraguvevac is famous throughout former Yugoslavia as a martyred city. On October 21st, 1941, German occupation troops murdered 7,000 of its inhabitants in reprisal for the killing, by Tito's partisans, of 70 German soldiers. When the Germans ran out of Serb men to execute, they took schoolchildren. The vivid memory of this atrocity gave the town a reputation of hostility towards foreigners.
Some of yesterday's demonstrators were old enough to remember the bodies stacked in neat piles, with straw placed between the layers. None, it seemed, saw any parallel with the bodies of Kosovar Albanians discovered at Racak in January, or in Drenica last October.
Ten thousand people participated in Kraguvevac's "peace" rally yesterday, and not by chance, the marchers carrying daffodils and wearing "Target?" stickers wended their way up the hillside, past the museum dedicated to the second World War martyrs and to the mass grave where they are buried. However inappropriately, the Serbs seem convinced that they are reliving the second World War, or the Cold War. President Clinton is constantly compared with Hitler, and NATO is alternately called "the fascists" or "the imperialists".
Ljiljana Kostic was five years old when the Nazis massacred the Kraguvevac 7,000. "The Germans lived in the barracks in the market," she recalled. "Every morning I looked on the ground in the stalls for something to eat. There was a German soldier who gave me a piece of white bread and butter every day, and I ate it because I was hungry. "He wanted to touch my hair but I would not let him. We Serbs do not like to be touched by our enemies. We Serb people always take, but we never give up."
One of the most striking things about Serbia is the uniformity of opinion on what is happening in Kosovo, and the eerie disconnection between the Serbs' own sense of martyrdom and the persecution of the Albanians. Mrs Kostic, a retired economist, was no exception. The US encouraged the ethnic Albanians to rebel, she said, so that it could gain a foothold in the Balkans.
Yes, she knew of the mass exodus of Albanians, but that too was NATO's fault. "They are fleeing from the NATO bombing," she said with absolute conviction. "Otherwise they would not flee from anything. How could 90 per cent of the population flee from the 10 per cent who are Serbs?" Like her fellow Serbs, Mrs Kostic is not optimistic. "The war will last for a long time," she said. "Because we are not going to surrender, and they [NATO] are not going to give up."