Jakovljevic took part in her first protest in Krusevac in May 1999 – against the Milosevic regime, against mobilisation and against the war in general. For around 15 days in May 1999, some two months after NATO started its bombing campaign to stop the Serbian forces’ campaign in Kosovo, residents of Krusevac, mainly women from surrounding villages, protested against their men being sent off to war – at some risk to themselves, as it was small city that hosted military facilities nearby.
“I remember that the protesters had a walk [across town, protesting] against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic,” Jakovljevic recalls. They shouted: “Give us back our children”, and “Why our sons?”
“Later, it started to become a real citizens’ protest to stop the war,” she comtinues, explaining that soon the chanting changed from “Why our sons?” to “Down with Milosevic” and “Bando Crvena [Red Gang]”. Bando Crvena was a slang term that had been used since the early 1990s to condemn the authoritarian Milosevic and his Socialist Party regime.
When the men who were deployed in Kosovo heard about their wives, mothers and sisters putting themselves at risk by demanding their return and the end of the war, many of them abandoned their posts in Kosovo to join the protest.
International media reported at the time that more than 400 Yugoslav Army reservists had mutinied, joined the protests and refused to return to Kosovo. “They came to Krusevac and joined the protest. They were with their mothers, sisters and their wives,” Jakovljevic recalls.
Initially, some of the protesters who were arrested were sentenced to 20 to 30 days’ imprisonment. Nebojsa Pavkovic, a Yugoslav Army general, “came to Krusevac and promised the protesters that he wouldn’t [mobilise men from the region] again and that the men who had escaped from Kosovo wouldn’t be punished. They wouldn’t be called deserters.”
Jakovljevic recalls that the mobilization had mainly been done in nearby villages. “People from the villages had been taken and sent to Kosovo because the government thought that they [villagers] wouldn’t protest against them [the government]” and would silently obey.
It initially appeared to be a crack in Milosevic’s war machine. But locals from the nearby Rasina region soon realised that Pavkovic’s promises were only “propaganda”, she says. “After a certain time, they immediately called up again the same people who had escaped, to go back to Kosovo.”
One of them was one of Jakovljevic’s distant relatives. “When I asked him why he did that [returned to Kosovo with the army], he said: ‘I didn’t know what to do, they just called me.’
“I know my relative is a very good man, actually. I’ve known him all my life. But when somebody told him that the government had said, ‘Go’, he just went. It’s a tragedy, actually.”
Pavkovic was eventually sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to 22 years in prison for committing war crimes in Kosovo, alongside three other high-profile Yugoslav military and police officials. He died in October 2025, not long after being released.
‘We don’t face the past in Serbia’