But now, I will never give up.”I heard much the same from the icon-seller on the end of Knez Mihailova street. A bearded refugee from Krajina – the most unreported “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, presumably because the Serbs had the cleansing done to them rather than the other way round – he offered me a black Angel Gabriel painted on the back of a broken wooden floorboard. He wanted only 65p.”Nato told the Hague tribunal to charge Milosevic and I know what that means,” he said, leaning against his wall opposite the Tsar Cafe “Nato is burning Milosevic. The Americans won’t be able to negotiate with someone they call a war criminal So they don’t want to talk. They don’t want [Viktor] Chernomyrdin [the Russian envoy to the Balkans] to succeed.

So the war will go on.”There’s a new joke going the rounds – even Goren Martic, a Yugoslav government minister was passing it on yesterday – based on the premise that Nato will always sabotage peace hopes when the Russians try to negotiate “Watch out!” the joke goes. “Chernomyrdin’s coming back.”And it sometimes feels like that. Every night, the jets go for Rakovica where, so rumours have it, the Yugoslav military hierarchy work from a bunker deep beneath the airfield runways. “They’re trying to destroy the bunker but they don’t know exactly where it is,” a Serb friend says.

“It was built after the break-up of the old Yugoslavia – the Bosnians and the Croats who were in the Yugoslav army don’t know its location so they can’t give it to the Americans.”But the real bunker lies, I suspect, within every Serb Not so much the stubborness that my travel agent talked of. Certainly not any maniacal loyalty to President Slobodan Milosevic. More a refusal to lie down, an absolute unwillingness to accept the demands of foreign powers, right or wrong.True, the Serbs are not being told of the terrors visited upon the Albanians of Kosovo. Only opposition news agencies report an anti-war rally banned in Cacak and the sentencing of three military conscripts to almost five years’ imprisonment for failing to return to their units. But even the chairman of the Cacak municipal assembly is now saying that his protest was of “a civil and patriotic character”, one that shared every Serb’s abhorrence of “Nato aggression”.I’ve come across only one man who has been truly broken by the bombings. I saw him last a month ago, weeping in the arms of his neighbours and promising to commit suicide because he had survived the Nato bomb that killed his wife, son, daughter-in-law and and all his grandchildren in Surdulica.Back in the town on Monday – after Nato had killed another 18 innocents when it scored a direct hit on the local hospital – I asked a friend of Vojeslav Milic if he had recovered The man shook his head “Voja is very bad,” he said.