This weekend's NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has a long profile of life in Belgrade, and amidst the tales of kleptocracy and anomie, the author notes the absolute apathy of the citizens towards any atrocities that might have occured.
See http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990829mag-serb-youth.html
The end of the article ends with these paragraphs:
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The night before coming into Belgrade, I had dinner with Milka Tadic, a prominent Yugoslav journalist. During an evening in which she grew increasingly combative and angry, she warned me not to be taken in by Serbs who claim that they do not know about the atrocities committed in their name in Kosovo.
"The silence in Belgrade about what went on makes me really sick," she said. Tadic is the managing editor of Monitor, a weekly political magazine published in Montenegro.
"Serbs don't want to know, but most of them know," she went on. "They have satellite dishes and short-wave radios. They know, but they don't care. All they care about is themselves. For them, Albanians are not really human beings. The Serbs believe they are the chosen people. It is racism. I hate to say it, but it is like what the Germans did."
As our dinner ended, Tadic told me a jarring story about the huge winter demonstrations that nearly toppled Milosevic two years ago. She remembered a chant -- "Go to Kosovo! Go to Kosovo!" -- that University of Belgrade students shouted when the police confronted them with clubs.
Tadic said the students objected to police brutality only because it inconvenienced them. "These are the nice young liberals of Belgrade," she said.
I argued with Milka that night. I said it was unfair to tar an entire people for the depravity of their leaders. But after a month in Belgrade, after listening to intelligent and cultured people dismiss the savagery in Kosovo as "no worse than what they did to us," I came to share Milka's rage. "