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Belgrade, still just about the capital of something still just about called Yugoslavia, is a city of a thousand jokes about one man, and the best one goes like this. A Belgrade resident is driving the dusty, potholed streets in his wheezing, backfiring Yugo sedan, searching for somewhere to park it. Eventually, he finds a likely spot outside a grand, faintly familiar building, and reverses into it. As he does so, an armed sentry rushes frantically up to him and says “Hey, what are you doing? This is where the President lives!”

“Ah,” says the man, getting out of his car. “I’ll make sure I lock it, then.”

About a year before photographer Dave Thompson and I arrived in Belgrade, NATO began 78 days of dropping heavy explosive things all over Yugoslavia. The intention was to persuade Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to desist from his barbarous persecution of the largely ethnically Albanian population of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, and permit the presence of an international peacekeeping force, and it worked, more or less. During the bombardment, Belgrade’s air-raid sirens, dormant since the city was flattened by the Luftwaffe in 1941, sounded many times. Though figures remain a matter of contention, around twenty targets in the city were struck, and while these resulted in fewer casualties than might have been expected, people - civilian people - were killed: sixteen in a television studio, four in the Chinese embassy, disputed numbers of others elsewhere (neither the Yugoslav interests office in London nor NATO were keen to deal in precise numbers).

All things considered, Thompson and I have arrived in Belgrade with serious reservations about how friendly the locals are likely to be, especially on the anniversary of the bombing. We know we will be taken for citizens of NATO nations - that is, people whose taxes paid for the missiles that landed on their city, and whose votes elected the governments that launched them. In a worst case scenario, we have been hoping that swift (and for what it’s worth, truthful) protestations that he is Scottish and I am Australian will confuse any gathering lynch mobs just long enough for us to engineer an escape. At best, we have been hoping for the co-operative indifference we will need to figure out two things: what do the people here think of us? And what do they think of themselves?

“Welcome. My name is Vladimir.”

Vladimir is an easy six-and-a-half feet, and that’s just across the shoulders. He has a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver stuffed into his waste band at a jaunty angle, and a handshake that suggests he has been forced to waste little of his life searching for a nutcracker. He is the doorman at Club Nana, which seemed like a good idea at the time, which is to say five o’clock on Sunday morning, at the end of a surprisingly rewarding inquiry into whether it was possible to have fun on a Saturday night in the capital of Europe’s foremost pariah state.

“I told you it would be cool,” says Jasmina, as we enter. Jasmina is one of the people we have acquired along the way, and she clearly looks upon Club Nana, and its clientele of sharp-suited, second-division gangsters and their barely-dressed escorts, with the same wide-eyed hunger as a different kind of wannabe regards London’s Met Bar. It’s probably understandable - with Yugoslavia’s legal economy ruined by inept, corrupt government and silly, counter-productive United Nations sanctions, the criminal classes are possibly the only people in Belgrade who can afford to enjoy themselves.

Dave and I huddle uneasily in a corner. We’re the only men here not wearing Armani knockoffs - our entry has been secured only by Jasmina’s spectacular lies to Vladimir about the scope of our fame and influence. If this were a film, the music would have stopped as soon as we walked in, and we both wish dearly that it had. The genre of choice among Serbian mafiosi is an indigenous pop called Turbofolk - a hybrid of Balkan peasant ballads and Euro-techno which is actually even worse than that sounds, especially at this volume. In Club Nana, they probably couldn’t hear the air raids.

“I’m going to take some pictures,” shouts Dave. I am uneasily aware that this could be the last sentence he ever speaks, and ask him to clear it with management.

“They said,” he reports, upon returning, “that I could do it if I didn’t mind leaving here in a bag. But Vladimir says we can take one of his gun, if we like.”

In a week in Belgrade, we do not attract so much as a single hostile glance - even the oblique threat to Dave’s life in Club Nana was delivered with hearty good cheer. Instead, we find a people as generous with their food and drink, of which they generally have too little, as they are with their time, of which they generally have far too much - unemployment in stony-broke, sanction-wracked Serbia being the rule rather than the exception. People we’ve never met before invite us to attend their birthday dinners, and beautiful waitresses with terrible teeth ask us to parties as we sip our morning espressos. Things might be different if either of us looked like Tony Blair or General Wesley Clark, but the people of Belgrade, on the whole, do not appear keen to hold either of us responsible for anything.

On March 24th, the anniversary of the beginning of NATO’s air campaign, we wander wholly unmolested through the events commemorating the occasion, be they half-hearted pro-government rally or wishy-washy opposition demonstration. I try to enter into the spirit of things by buying, from a street vendor, a rosette in Serbian colours with a target in the middle of it. I’m not sure what this marks me as for or against, but it doesn’t really matter. By lunchtime, everyone has gone home.

Belgrade doesn’t look like the capitals of dictatorships are supposed to. There are no soldiers on the streets, save for occasional wandering conscripts in uniforms five sizes too big, as if designed for a fondly imagined peoples’ army of seven-foot Serbian supermen. We only see police in significant numbers when we go to see Yugoslav league leaders Partizan Belgrade at home to already-relegated no-hopers Borac; Partizan stick eight past them without raising a sweat, and the most intimidating gesture the cops can be bothered to muster is confiscating two bottles of Sprite as we enter.

And the people, for their part, are not cowed: Belgraders’ opinions of their government keep the air in most bars and cafes a virulent shade of blue. The sonorous cadences of the Balkan accent suit English swear words better than any other, and when Belgraders discuss their politicians or their politics or, by extension, the demolition of their nation’s civilian infrastructure in retribution for the insanity of their leaders, they curse with a rich, luxuriant vehemence.

The accepted front for anti-government feeling in Belgrade is a radio station called B92. They have had problems with the regime; most notably, being chased out of their studios shortly after NATO started bombing. They began broadcasting again last August, from a high-rise block with commanding views of the wreckage of the twin Ministry of Defence buildings, both well and truly ventilated by Tomahawk cruise missiles.

“They don’t bother us much now,” sighs Toma Grujic, B92’s music director. “We don’t have any party connections. We’re just in with this whole bunch of traitors and servants of NATO, and so on.”

B92 is Belgrade’s third biggest station, mostly broadcasting left-field rock and dance. Their March play list includes The Cure, The Beta Band, Moloko, Eels, Q-Tip and Richard Ashcroft - Toma admits that they can keep up only by relying on internet downloads and Belgrade’s innumerable bootleg stalls.

I’ve come to B92 in order to be interviewed on air, at the invitation of a DJ called Sasa Markovic. I met him the night before the anniversary, at an exhibition of photos he’d taken of himself naked except for one strategically located sock. This fact alone makes on-air conversation difficult; a five-minute slot and the necessity of an interpreter reduces my contribution to little more than “Hello,” “Fine thanks, and you?” and “Well, cheers for having me.” Over the next couple of days, an astonishing number of the people I’m introduced to tell me they’d been listening. If I’d only known, I could have incited the revolution myself. Or at least given my book a plug.

It is traditional among despots to rebuild their fiefdoms in their own image, but there are no statues of Milosevic in Belgrade, and no heroic portraits. “This is because,” explains our guide, who I’ll call Biljana, “we f*** hate him.” In a week, we see only two images of his querulous, hedgehoggish face. One is on a poster wielded by a deranged old woman (she has lovingly handwritten “My hawk”, in Serbian, on his collar). The other, rather less reverent, is on a postcard I buy at a souvenir stall along the pedestrian boulevard of Terazije. It shows a still of Milosevic taken from a Radio Television Serbia (RTS) broadcast at the end of the bombing, his triumphantly lofted hand computer-altered to extend a middle digit to the audience. The caption is typically sledgehammer Balkan sarcasm: “Presednik Milosevic najavio obnovu i razvoj zemlje!” (“President Milosevic proclaims reconstruction and development of Serbia!”)

Postcards and badges inspired by the war are something of a boom industry along Terazije, and they betray the same traits that reappear through any reading of Serbian history or any round of drinks with Serbian people. In no special order, these are self-mockery, self-regard, self-pity and self-delusion, coalescing wonderfully on a badge which reads: “Ottoman Empire - No More; Austria-Hungary - No More; Third Reich - No More; NATO - Working On It.”

Belgrade does, of course, have sights as well as souvenirs to offer the tourist interested in recent events, and Dave and I get around to most of them, aided by a black market exchange rate (the official rate is six Yugoslav dinars to the Deutschmark - most waiters or shopkeepers or street-corner fruit-sellers will offer 22) that makes taxis cheaper than London buses. In the centre of town, the two immense orange-coloured office blocks that once housed Yugoslavia’s MoD are both collapsed from the middle outwards, like a pair of vast mistimed soufflés, with scarcely a scratch on the surrounding neighbourhood. The RTS building, petulantly and pointlessly struck by NATO on April 23rd 1999, with the loss of 16 civilian staff, resembles, similarly, a cake some almighty dessert knife has taken a slice out of. Whatever the merits of NATO’s decision to hit it, the precision is, again, awesome: I’ve certainly never seen bomb damage with right angles before.

Across the Sava river in New Belgrade, we see what is left of the Chinese embassy, and the gutted ruin of the USCE business centre which, alone in the middle of a car park, looks like it was cut down while trying to escape. There’s also the Intercontinental Hotel, where the war criminal and gangster Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic was shot dead on January 15th. Arkan is little lamented in Belgrade. “Shithead,” observes the taxi driver who drops us off. Many express not just relief at Arkan’s passing, but at the fact that it has driven his widow, turbofolk megastar Ceca, into a year of traditional silent mourning. Another current joke notes that the “businessman” husband of Serbia’s second-biggest turbofolk star, inflatable-doll-lookalike Jelena Karleusa, was also dispatched recently, thus condemning her to 12 glorious months of grieving quiet, and speculates that Belgrade’s underworld is being terrorised by a gang of vengeful music lovers.

Outside of town, next to the newly reopened international airport, is Belgrade’s aviation museum. Though the permanent exhibition is interesting, there’s no doubt about the stars of the show. Busloads of Belgrade school kids take pictures of each other next to the tailfin of the American F-16c shot down near Nakucany on May 7th 1999, and the pilot canopy, emblazoned with the name of Captain Ken 'Wiz' Dwelle, of the F-117a Nighthawk fighter that crashed near Budjanovci on March 27th. Back in Belgrade, we buy more gloating postcards bearing pictures of the stealth aircraft with the legend 'Sorry -we didn’t know it was invisible'. The museum’s amiable staff are so proud of these trophies that it seems churlish to point out that NATO flew 38,008 sorties last year, and that an air defence strike rate of one in 19,004 mightn’t be all that much to boast about.

We don’t visit the restaurant where Defence Minister Pavle Bulatovic was gunned down in February, having been advised that it’s a real dump. We do see the memorials to the NATO campaign beginning to appear, and they reflect the divide between the country and its leaders. Near the wreckage of RTS, a white tombstone bears the names of the dead beneath the question ‘Why?’ It was paid for by families of the victims, not Serbia’s government - hardly surprising, given that government’s complicity in ensuring the body count. The first official memorial is a short walk away in the park by St Marko’s church: a faux-bronze statue of a little girl, standing in front of the words ‘We were just children’ in Serbian and, lest the point be missed, English. It is dedicated to children killed during the bombardment, and while this certainly happened, and this is certainly terrible, it is difficult not to feel nauseated by such sentimental agonising, coming as it does from the government who orchestrated the horrors of Srebrenica, Vukovar, Gorazde, Sarajevo, Racak and dozens more. The temptation to spray-paint something to this effect on it is almost overwhelming.

We spend our last night in Belgrade in a bar that, in both senses of the word, is underground. A lot of the people we’ve spent the week with used to come here during the air raids, and tonight they restore a shred of national honour by dealing Dave and myself a proper old hiding, seven frames to two, in an impromptu Serbia vs NATO pool tournament.

Inevitably, we find ourselves having much the same conversation we’ve been having all week, often with the same people, with the same great unanswerable question left hanging at the end of it

“Everyone knows this country has one problem,” says one of our opponents, as he chalks his cue. “It is one man. Why didn’t NATO just launch one missile?

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