Like most retired generals, you can now see Božidar Delic walking in a civilian suit, slightly more buttoned and toned than those who did not wear the uniform for so long, in the streets near the former Federal Assembly. Unlike his former colleagues, Delić was on the verge of arriving at that building, the threshold of which he has been crossing in recent months as a member of the republic, on October 5 in uniform, since as commander of the Belgrade Corps he was in charge of the military units that were desperately summoned by the Minister of Police Vlajko Stojiljković, head of the Department of State Security, Radomir Marković, and director of state television, Dragoljub Milanović, while the demonstrators looted what they had won in the elections on the streets of Belgrade. "We were on the edge," says Delic in the parliamentary chambers of the Serbian Progressive Party, looking out the window towards the street from which the protesters stormed the parliament. The fact that the column of tanks that day remained in the vicinity of the "Stepa Stepanović" barracks in Banjica, on the ruins of which Dulić's apartments are now sprouting, does not mean that the army idly watched the collapse of the empire of its commander-in-chief, Slobodan Milošević.
The first order from the Chief of the General Staff of the VJ, Nebojša Pavković, arrived that day by phone, while an endless river of dissatisfied citizens of Serbia, determined not to return home this time with their noses down, so that the fugitives from Belgrade's squares would later turn into heroic confrontations with by the frantic police, was already flowing towards the center of Belgrade. A visibly upset colonel-general demanded that the column that was rolling from the direction of Čačak be stopped at all costs. The generals from Čača heard from their reliable sources that, in addition to clubs, stones and pistols, they also used a few "zolja" that some of them took to the slopes of Ovčar, after inglorious battles and roaming the Slavonian kaljukas. When a unit of the Air Defense Forces rushed to the Ibarska highway from the direction of Umka to carry out the entrusted task, about which they could not find out anything in the military-strategic books that describe in detail the use of such forces, they saw only a few weak followers of Velimir Ilic, stumbling a bit , looking for that big bend in the Lipovačka forest. The military leadership did not understand much from this tragicomic episode, so the officers soon heard Pavković's hoarse voice repeating that the column of Vojvodina must be stopped, but by coming to the aid of the police, who were well entrenched on the highway. The unit from Zemun was faster than the pe-ve people who had already marched towards the base, but they also returned to Munze faster and better, but not because of the angry people from Novi Sad, who did not change their temper even on that fateful day, but because of the self-confident members of the MUP, who claimed that they would deal with the meek Lalas themselves. You could see how they got out, when the people of Novi Sad, the people of Subotica, the people of Sombor and the people of Zrenjan came roaring over the barricade near Batajnica and joined the people of Kraljevo and Čača, who were already knocking on the massive parliament doors. When Pavković the next time excitedly called that the crowd that was coming from Niš must be stopped, but by blocking only one lane of the highway near Bubanj Potok, the officers just shrugged their shoulders and started to carry out this apparently senseless order, because the "southern railway" soon after roared with another lane. If you've seen that episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus about the priest who, somewhat frantically, arrives on the scene at dusk, you'll know what I'm talking about.
However, things were not as naive as one might think about the mention of the funny Terry Jones, because at one point members of the General Staff could hear through the intercom of Pavković's phone the cries of the head of the MUP to send tanks immediately because, allegedly, in the center of the city there are bitter fights between the demonstrators and the police, that a truckload of weapons was taken from the station in Majke Jevrosime, that the RTS building is on fire, and that the federal assembly is hovering above the blackest smoke. "It was the moment when the possibility of army intervention was mentioned," recalls former general Božidar Delic. His column of tanks did start from Bubanj Potok, but to the "Stepa Stepanović" barracks, where they started their engines every hour, knowing that their noise would be heard by those who are not residents of Banjica. Despite the fact that the members of the General Staff had not an iota of sympathy for the protestors who seized power, most were against the involvement of the army because they were aware that it would lead to bloodshed, since the army would not allow their members to be trampled in the streets, to which the police , due to the nature of the work, she had Googled it. It was one of the rare moments when, after a series of shameful episodes in the 1990s, a tiny grain of reason appeared in military patriotism.
Thus, the stories about the plans for the bombing of TV Studio B, the list of forty opposition leaders who needed to be killed, or the famous military raid at dawn, came to the level of those pre-October 5th heroics. If anything remains from that day, at least those who tell the stories at the pub table have changed.
