Branislav Kapetanovic

I was born in 1965 in Kraljevo, south Serbia, about 200 km from Belgrade. I was living in Kraljevo until the accident, and I now live in the capital. Before joining the army, I was working in a civilian firm. At that time there was high inflation in Serbia and the firm closed, so I decided to join the army when I was 27 years old.

Years before, during compulsory military service, I had received special training as an EOD operative/de-miner, so when the firm closed I decided to go back to the army which could assure me a “safe job” (safe in economic terms). I worked in the army from 1995 until 9 November 2000, the day I had the accident. I was very happy with that job, well perhaps I felt a bit afraid sometimes, but during clearance activities you cannot be afraid, there is simply no room for feelings at those moments. During the NATO air campaign, and in the course of the following year, I worked all around the country and particularly in the southern regions. Before the NATO bombings I hadn’t had any experience with cluster munitions. By 2000 I had cleared thousands of bomblets, and now I believe cluster munitions are more dangerous to clear than mines.

During the war not all the contaminated areas were cleared, so clearance activities continued in 2000. On 9 November 2000, I was accompanying a group of engineers visiting the Dubinje airport in Sjenica in south-west Serbia. I was usually the first to enter a contaminated location to check if there were cluster munitions. Normally you always go in teams, but as I was the only de-miner in my team, and there was so much work to do at that time, I went alone. There were six or seven BLU 97s, so I evacuated the soldiers from the area. I started working on the first bomblet, it was in a bush. As I came closer to the bomblet it exploded. I am not sure if I ever even touched it. I think I fainted for a few seconds but most of the time I was conscious and I called to the other soldiers. I lost all four limbs, my hearing was damaged, as well as my eyes (I was blind for several months after the accident), my head and lungs were also injured. There was no doctor at the clinc so the paramedic bandaged my wounds to stop the bleeding and tried, somehow, to stop my pain. The 90 kilometre drive to the hospital took us about one and a half hours. My condition was worsening and I lost a lot of blood because my arteries had been cut. I was still conscious in the ambulance, but I started to feel that I was dying. I shouted to the driver to drive faster as I felt that my heart was beating very slowly. The last thing I remember was the driver saying that we were in front of the hospital. I fainted. I was almost dead. The doctors started resuscitation. My heart and my lungs had stopped functioning. I was in a semi-conscious coma for four days; that is what the doctors told me later. I have no memories of that period. I was operated on four times; then an ambulance transferred me to Belgrade, to the Military Academy Hospital. During this second trip I went into cardiac arrest. When I arrived at the hospital I was resuscitated and then went through several operations. Doctors cleaned my wounds. Some of them were infected, so they had to remove some skin to graft it from one leg to the other. I underwent two re-amputations to prepare my limbs for prostheses. I spent four years at the Military Hospital in Belgrade. I was released at last in October 2004. During those four years I underwent more than 20 operations: Four times on one leg, five times on the other leg, an operation to my ear, operations to remove shrapnel from my forehead, and they also did plastic surgery. I was in hospital for three years without ever going out. In the fourth year I was allowed to go out every second weekend and finally started to readapt to everyday life gradually. When I got out of hospital everything was difficult. I had to accept the world, the eyes of the people, the stares. I was lucky because my doctors gradually let me readapt to the outside world, so by the time I finally left the hospital, I was somewhat prepared. For about one year the army hired someone to live with me, but now I live alone in my apartment in Novi Beograd. These are my keys (smiles). In early 2006 Norwegian Peoples Aid found an article on me on the Internet and contacted me, and that is how my involvement with the Cluster Munition Coalition began.