By Ljubica Gojgic
Reporter, NIN
Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Thanks to my national descent and the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships program the year that's coming to its end was one in the lifetime for me. Being a Serb I lived to celebrate political changes in my country. Being an Alfred Friendly Fellow I saw an extraordinary American presidential race too. In a very unexpected way, that only life itself can arrange, the two countries that kept quite remote for almost a decade, got closer thanks to the most unlikely unifier—politics—exciting elections, more precisely.

In Yugoslavia people miraculously got rid of the regime that led them into four wars and made them losers four times. Yugoslavs ousted their President Slobodan Milosevic, who turned the country from one of the most prosperous in the Balkan region into a pariah state, isolated from the rest of the world for almost a decade. In September the opposition candidate, Democrat Vojislav Kostunica won the presidential elections, but the incumbent Milosevic refused to concede. He was counting on his well-trained flunkies to rig the elections as they have done many times before. But people of Yugoslavia had other plans. Terrified with the thought of what may happen if Milosevic stays in power, unarmed people—impoverished, degraded and desperate—clashed with the police in a final attempt to bring the strongman down. The rest is history in which one excavator played a significant role. The vehicle was used to remove the police barricade in front of the crowd storming the National Parliament building.

Miles away, across the big sea, I was watching a grand finale on TV, feeling homesick like never before in my life. Not even Pittsburghers with their great hospitality could save me from feeling unfairly disconnected. The fight I watched on CNN was my fight and I believed my place was there! Then the second in this chain of miracles came as a response to my wishes, in the shape of an offer from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to go back to Belgrade as a correspondent and write a couple of stories for my American host paper. Three long and exhausting days of traveling were forgotten the moment I saw my hometown in which the hopefulness and relief replaced the desperate atmosphere I left only a couple of months ago. It was a privilege and honor to report that to the rest of the world, or at least to my Pennsylvania readers.

All of the sudden the image of my country changed in the eyes of my American friends. Media followed this trend, not always voluntarily, but that is another story. Understanding, compassion and sympathies dominated the reports sent sometimes by the same people who in the past had so many problems in finding a professional balance, and lack of willingness I would say, in "understanding the Serbs." It was an extraordinary experience to watch the international news this October, where my country was "breaking news" again. Only this time the context was different—positive.

Hitting Yugoslavia with millions in loans and aid instead of cruise missiles?! It sure worked for me! I barely had the time to catch my breath when a new breaking story sent my county to the news history. The time has come for the Americans to elect their new leaders. And the elections we had! The winner undeclared two weeks after the ballots were cast, riots in the streets (though low key ones and quite harmless), battle in the courts, allegations of electoral fraud…

America started feeling like home for me. People believed that what we saw in the past two weeks was so typical for the "developing democracies" but so unlikely to happen in the United States. A "worried" friend of mine sent an e-mail asking for some advice, mockingly of course! Another friend found "The Onion" feature story revealing that some 30,000 Serbian peace keepers are coming to Washington D.C.!

I felt that while joking, we understood each other better than we did before. We learned that crisis, or unusual election outcome if you like, could happen anywhere in the world—including the world's leading super power. To quote that famous movie line…"Nobody is perfect." Right?