Blast from the Past

Just before 3 a.m. on Saturday a hand grenade went off outside the bedroom window of my Belgrade apartment, filling the room with smoke and shards of glass, leaving shrapnel holes on the ceiling and walls. Despite the damage, we were lucky: when the police arrived, they found a second grenade, unexploded, on the sidewalk nearby. I had been in danger many times before while covering the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia for TIME and for the local newsmagazine Vreme. But this was different: the wars ended years ago, Serbia's former President Slobodan Milosevic is dead and buried, and this was not a combat zone — it was my own apartment in my own hometown. And for the first time, my wife was also a target. Fortunately, our teenage daughter wasn't home at the time.

Four days later, police have no clues who the attacker was, but I have a pretty good idea what triggered the attack. On April 12, I was a guest on a local television show discussing the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Serbian troops led by General Ratko Mladic, who is still on the run from international justice. The TV debate centered on the April 10 verdict by a Serbian war-crimes court that sentenced four members of a paramilitary group known as the Scorpions for the execution of six Muslims from Srebrenica.

The trial was a test case for the Serbian justice system, and the evidence was incontrovertible: a video of the killings recorded by a member of the Scorpions and shared with his comrades as a macabre souvenir. The tape showed six handcuffed victims — two were just 17 — taunted and mocked by laughing executioners. At one point, one of the Scorpions asks a tied-up Muslim boy, who lies face down waiting to be shot: "Have you ever f — -ed?" The boy answers no. "Well, you're not going to, ever," replies the soldier, and all his comrades laugh.

Considering the evidence, harsh sentences had been expected. The commander of the group and one other soldier received the maximum penalty, 20 years, while a Scorpion who had confessed got 13 years. The man taped mocking the boy got only five years because the court found that he didn't pull the trigger himself. Most disappointing, the judge seemed eager to absolve the Serbian government and, to some extent, the accused. She called the Scorpions an "irregular volunteer unit," insisted they had no relationship with any branch of government in Serbia, and said there was no evidence that the deceased were from Srebrenica or were victims of the genocide.

Like many people in Serbia, I was troubled by this, and I said so on TV. I guess that provoked someone who refuses to believe the genocide in Srebrenica happened — or who thinks it was a good thing — to place those grenades on my windowsill. This didn't require a lot of expertise: grenades are user-friendly and easily available on the black market. So it could have been anyone. I now have police watching my home.

The attack was a reminder that six years after Milosevic's fall, Serbia is becoming increasingly violent, and virulent nationalism is on the rise again. There have been more than 100 politically motivated assaults in the past three months alone, and hate speech is increasingly common in the media and politics. The targets are human-rights activists, journalists and politicians who dare to stand up against the nationalists. One reason for the nationalist revival is the U.N.'s push toward independence for Kosovo, a province mostly populated by ethnic Albanians, but cherished as a historic heartland by most Serbs. Another is that democracy has failed to bring economic prosperity, so people are growing nostalgic for the bad old days.

I don't take the attack personally. Its target was really that part of Serbian society that believes we can't move forward until we've honestly confronted our past. And, judging by the response of the authorities, something positive may yet come out of the ordeal. Within hours, the director of Serbian police showed up to tell me that finding the attacker is a top priority. President Boris Tadic came over to express his support. Rade Bulatovic, the head of Serbia's main security agency, whom I had often criticized, phoned and offered help. Expressions of outrage and offers of help also came from judges, politicians, diplomats, colleagues and ordinary Joes. And on Monday at noon, traffic was blocked for five minutes in all of Serbia's major towns and cities as a symbolic gesture against the attack. So the grenades may have served as a wake-up call to Serbia to renounce violence and stop its slide toward the ugly past. Maybe this time, it will stay awake.