Peace Kills

by P. J. O'Rourke

  I asked the officer, “Can you really turn this place into a multicultural society?”

  “We’ll try our best. After all,” said the officer with an optimistic, very American smile, “if anybody can do it, we can.”

  Which, back in America we, rather famously, can’t.

  A bored black private stood guard at another American fortress, Camp Monteith, in southeastern Kosovo. On the subject of local hatreds, he said, “At least if they put you and me in a police lineup, they can tell us apart.”

  * * *

  But they can tell Maria, too. “Serbs are identifiable,” said Maria. “I can’t explain why. It’s subtle—facial structure.” She told me about a ten-year-old boy, walking down the street, who pulled a knife on her and said, “You are Serb. I kill you.” Maria’s mother said a little kid ran up to her and pantomimed a throat-slitting.

  Maybe it’s the bubble gum. Or maybe it’s history. Peoples who hate each other often seem to be fond of history. The Serbs, the Serbs say, have always been in Kosovo. Except that the Serbs didn’t arrive in the Balkans until the sixth century A.D. So Albanians, the Albanians say, have always been in Kosovo. Although British historian Miranda Vickers says, “Serbian archaeologists have been hard at work seeking to refute … the long-standing Albanian claim for a continuity of descent from the ancient Ilyrians.” Anyway, somebody’s always been in Kosovo. And somebody else is always showing up, the way the Ottoman Turks did in 1389. The Battle of Kosovo caused a large portion of Kosovo’s Serbs to leave for, among other places, Transylvania (making one wonder why the Serbs don’t hate vampires rather than ethnic Albanians).

  The Serbs reconquered Kosovo in 1912 and committed atrocities against the Albanians, who sided with Germany in 1914 and oppressed the Serbs, who regained control of Kosovo in 1918 and tyrannized the Albanians, who sided with the Germans again in 1939 and crushed the Serbs, who recaptured Kosovo in 1945 and persecuted the Albanians, who rioted in 1981 and beat and robbed the Serbs, who …

  “Oh,” said Maria’s mother to Maria with an I-forgot-to-feed-the-cat look, “you got another threatening phone call. A man’s voice said, ‘What are you waiting for?’”

  Food aid was the answer to that question in Gorazdevac, a Serb village in western Kosovo that once had a population of 2,000. The number of residents shrank to about 30 during the air war but had now returned to … “Eight hundred,” said the village drunk, although 770 seem to be making themselves scarce.

  The village headman—or, anyway, the oldest male around—explained that it took five soldiers from the Italian armored brigade in Pec to escort a single villager into the fields. As a result, no winter wheat had been planted, there wasn’t enough livestock fodder to last until spring, and—he grew grave—” Yesterday a haystack was set on fire.”

  “How are people living?” I asked.

  “Food aid,” he said, serving the Italian soldiers, a son-in-law, me, and the village drunk morning glasses of Sljivovica Manastirka that, if you missed your mouth, could provide a skin peel and an eyelid tuck.

  “Can Serbs and Albanians live together peacefully?” I asked.

  “We would like to live as before the war,” said the headman. “Even though in the past we didn’t want to live together, we lived together.”

  “There is only one God above us!” said the village drunk.

  I asked if the Milosevic government had been unfair to the Albanians.

  The headman’s son-in-law answered. “Milosevic called for Albanians and Serbs to live together.” Two little boys peeked shyly at the yakking men. The son-in-law said he’d named them “Wolf” and “Fearless.”

  “The Albanians would start a war anyway,” said the son-in-law.

  The village was a Peter Brueghel painting, if you ignored the villagers in Nikes and the corrugated metal and concrete block that augmented the thatch and the wattle-and-daub. A listing half-timbered gristmill sat athwart a stream. The stream wandered through the main road, and so did pigs.

  “The cultural level of Albanians is low. Serbian culture is more high,” said the son-in-law.

  Luan Mulliqi, the new Albanian director of Kosovo’s national Galeria e Arteve—which was up and running in Pristina, although things like water and electricity often weren’t—said, “What is a difficult place to live is, for culture, heaven.”

  Mulliqi was giving me a tour, partly by flashlight, of an exhibit of Kosovar Albanian modern art. Intimations of dread and portraits of corpses pervaded the pictures, although most were painted a quarter of a century before, when Yugoslavia was supposedly a multicultural model to the world. Even the abstracts look worried. One of these was gloomy and terrifying without anything on the canvas except a white billowing shape. “A shroud,” said Mulliqi.

  The recent artworks, created during the previous year’s chaos, were more cheerful. Mulliqi, himself a sculptor, was finishing a piece that incorporated a swatch of the green Astroturf of hope, an array of the tools of reconstruction, and some new wood rafters fastened to an old charred roof beam. A corpse was hanging from those rafters, but it was a cheerful sculpture, comparatively speaking.

  Serbs argued that Kosovo’s Albanians were cheerful because they were enjoying their martyrdom. “An Albanian with seven sons will sacrifice six for Albanian independence,” said the village drunk in Gorazdevac (perhaps making poor young Wolf and Fearless think, “Don’t give Dad ideas.”)

  More likely what Kosovo’s Albanians were enjoying was a chance to provide martyrdom to Serbs, especially their immediate neighbors. “Crimes in Kosovo were done by Serbs here,” said the KLA vet in Kosovo Polje. “No Serb in Belgrade would know which house Albanians lived in.”

  In Pasjane, another of Kosovo’s Serb villages, the school principal begged to differ, at least about the behavior of the Serbs in his hometown. “There was no killing,” he said. “There was no looting.” He paused. A large photograph of Slobodan Milosevic hung on his office wall. “Well, maybe there was some. But all the dirty people ran away to Serbia. The people remaining in Pasjane are all honest, decent people.”

  Honest, decent, and furious. Pasjane, in the far southeast of Kosovo, was under intermittent mortar attack from Albanians in the surrounding hills who hadn’t gotten the news about storing their weapons. A man had been killed two days before. The other men in Pasjane left the funeral and gathered in the churchyard. They pointed to gravestones damaged by mortar attacks. They pointed to the shrapnel scars on the church.

  “This church is from the 1200s.”

  “This village is from 1340.”

  “First to fight the Turks.”

  “Before 1389 all these villages were Serb.”

  Old hatreds aside, new hatreds were growing apace—hatred for the Americans guarding Pasjane, for example.

  A U.S. Army forensics team had come to gather the shell fragments from the lethal mortar attack. The Pasjane Serbs said that they believed the U.S. Army did this to hide something. When the man was killed, they said, an American armored personnel carrier was down the road. The APC turned off its engine just before the mortar shell struck. The Pasjane Serbs thought the U.S. Army was giving a signal to hidden Albanians.

  Why couldn’t everyone cooperate in Kosovo the way Russian troops and NATO troops were cooperating, which, according to official military sources with whom I spoke, was “fully,” even if the Russians had arrived as peacekeeping gate-crashers and even if the Russians were supposed to be perpetrating in Chechnya what the Russians were supposed to be preventing in Kosovo and even if, as one Norwegian enlisted man said unofficially, “the Russians drink on duty”?

  “Time is the best medicine,” said a colonel in the Russian medical corps who was running a civilian clinic in Kosovo Polje.

  “If time is the best medicine,” I said, “why don’t we all feel better than we did twenty years ago?”

  “That,” the colonel said, “is a good question.”

  Another good question was: What really should be done wit
h the Serbs and Albanians? One British soldier, on night patrol through a former Serbian—now sooty ruin—section of Pristina, said, “It’s what barbed wire was invented for.”

  But advocating barbed wire would have embarrassed the forces for good, the participants in the peace blitzkrieg, the elves in the Santa War. So the tenant committee meetings went on.

  “We’d like you to take down the Albanian flag on the balcony,” said the beleaguered Norwegian captain in Kosovo Polje. “It could be seen as a provocation.”

  “It’s a wedding tradition,” said the chairwoman.

  “The wedding was last week.”

  “Flying the flag from Thursday to Monday—that is the tradition,” said the KLA veteran.

  “Well, tomorrow is Tuesday,” said the captain. “And one more thing. There are too many stray dogs. They are creating a health problem …”

  Said an Italian colonel in Pec, “This is the future of war.”

  3

  ISRAEL

  April 2001

  Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you’re handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood, and smiting firstborn, give me a pass, and tell me when it’s over.

  And the Lord did well by me at Passover—brilliant sunshine on the beaches of Tel Aviv, pellucid waters, no flies in my room at the Hilton, and certainly no lice. I am a firstborn myself but was not the least smitten, not even by the cute waitress at the Hilton’s kosher sushi restaurant. I am a happily married man. And by the way, Leviticus 11:10 says, “Of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you,” an apt description of sushi as far as I’m concerned. But gentiles aren’t expected to understand the intricacies of dietary law, although extra complications thereof lead to Passover’s main drawback: food and—more important to gentiles—drink.

  “I’ll have a scotch,” I said to the Hilton’s bartender.

  “Scotch isn’t kosher for Passover,” he said. “It’s made with leaven.”

  “Gin and tonic,” I said.

  “Gin isn’t kosher.”

  “What can I have?”

  “You can have a screwdriver—Israeli vodka and orange juice.”

  “What’s Israeli vodka like?” I asked.

  “The orange juice is very good.”

  There was no plague of tourists in Israel. It should have been a period of hectic visitation, with Passover beginning April 7 and the Eastern Orthodox and Western Easters coinciding a week later. But Israel’s income from tourism dropped 58 percent in the last quarter of 2000, and to judge by the lineless queues at Ben-Gurion Airport and the empty-seated aisles of El Al, the drop had continued. The marble lobby of the Hilton echoed, when at all, with the chatter of idle desk clerks and bellhops. The din of strife had rendered Israel quiet.

  Quiet without portentous hush—traffic hum, A.C. buzz, and cell phone beepings indicated ordinary life in an ordinary place. Tourism wasn’t the only thing there was no sign of in Israel. Demonstrations didn’t block intersections, public address systems failed to crackle with imperatives, exigent posters weren’t stuck to walls, except to advertise raves. There was no sign of crisis—international or bilateral or domestic political—although all news reports agreed that a crisis raged here, and an economic crisis as well. A 12 percent quarterly decline in gross domestic product was unevident in boardedup shops and empty cafés, which didn’t exist, or in beggars and homeless, who weren’t on the streets.

  There was no sign of terrorism, not that there hadn’t been some. But what doesn’t inspire terror, by definition, isn’t terrorism. The Carmel Market was crowded, either with people wholly unafraid or with people indifferent to whether they were blown up singly or in bunches. If security was pervasive, it was invisible. Israel, I’ve heard, is hated fanatically by millions of Muslims around the world, whereas the U.S. Congress is loathed by only a small number of well-informed people who follow politics closely. But a walk around anything in Israel is less impeded by barriers and armed guards than a walk around the Capitol Building in Washington.

  There was no sign of war. Plenty of soldiers were to be seen, carrying their weapons, but this is no shock to the frequent traveler. For all that the world looks askance at America’s lack of gun control, foreigners love to wave guns around. Nothing about the Israeli Defense Forces is as odd as Italian carabinieri brandishing their machine pistols while grimly patrolling that flashpoint, Venice.

  There was, in fact, no sign of anything in Tel Aviv. In particular there was no sign of Israel’s vital importance to world peace—except, of course, those signs of vital importance to world peace that one sees everywhere, the lettering here in Hebrew but the trademark logos recognizable enough.

  Tel Aviv is new, built on the sand dunes north of Jaffa in the 1890s, about the same time Miami was founded. The cities bear a resemblance in size, site, climate, and architecture ranging from the bland to the fancifully bland. In Miami the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia’s meddling with Cuba. In Tel Aviv the striving, somewhat troublesome immigrant population is the result of Russia’s meddling with itself. I found a Russian restaurant where they couldn’t have cared less what was made with leaven, where they had scotch, and where, over one scotch too many, I contemplated the absurdity of Israel being an ordinary place.

  What if people who had been away for ages, out and on their own, suddenly showed up at their old home and demanded to move back in? My friends with grown-up children tell me this happens all the time. What if the countless ancient tribal groups that are now defeated, dispersed, and stateless contrived to reestablish themselves in their ancestral lands in such a way as to dominate everyone around them? The Mashantucket Pequots are doing so this minute at their Foxwoods casino in southeastern Connecticut. What if a religious group sought a homeland, never minding how multifarious its religion had become or how divergent its adherents were in principles and practices? A homeland for Protestants would have to satisfy the aspirations of born-again literalists holding forth about creationism in their concrete-block tabernacles and also fulfill the hopes and dreams of vaguely churched latitudinarians giving praise to God’s creation by playing golf on Sundays. A Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont. As an American, I already live in that country.

  Maybe there’s nothing absurd about Israel. I wandered out into the ordinary nighttime, down Jabotinsky Street, named after the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who wrote in 1923, “A voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future.” Thus Jabotinsky broke with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who, in Altneuland (1902), had a fictional future Arab character in a fictional future Israel saying, “The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them?” And now the Carmel Market was full of goods from Egypt.

  From Jabotinsky Street I meandered into Weizmann Street, named for the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who in 1919 met with Emir Faisal, future king of Iraq and a son of the sharif of Mecca, and concluded an agreement that “all necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.” Faisal sent a letter to the American Zionist delegates at the Versailles peace conference wishing Jews “a most hearty welcome home.”

  Turning off Weizmann Street, I got lost for a while among signpost monikers I didn’t recognize but that probably commemorated people who became at least as embattled as Jabotinsky, Herzl, Weizmann, and Faisal. I emerged on BenGurion Avenue. The first prime minister of Israel was a ferocious battler. He fought the British mandate, the war of liberation, Palestinian guerrillas, and the Sinai campaign. He even won, most of the time, in the Israeli Knesset. And still he was on the lookout for peace. In the months leading up to the Suez crisis, in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower
had a secret emissary shuttling between Jerusalem and Cairo. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, told the emissary (in words that Yasir Arafat could use and, for all I know, has), “If the initiative [Nasser] was now taking in these talks was known in public he would be faced not only with a political problem, but—possibly—with a bullet.”

  A bullet was what Yitzhak Rabin got, at the end of Ben-Gurion Avenue, from a Jewish extremist, during a peace rally in the square that now bears Rabin’s name. A bullet was also what Emir Faisal’s brother, King Abdullah of Jordan, got, from a Muslim extremist, for advocating peace with Israel. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, got a bullet, too.

  If bullets were the going price for moderation hereabouts, then I needed another drink. I walked west along Gordon Street—named, I hope, for Judah Leib Gordon, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist who wrote in classical Hebrew, and not for Lord George Gordon, the fanatical anti-Catholic and leader of the 1780 Gordon riots, who converted to Judaism late in life and died in Newgate Prison praising the French Revolution. This brought me to the stretch of nightclubs along the beach promenade. Here, two months later, a suicide bomber would kill twenty-two people outside the Dolphi disco. Most of the victims were teenage Russian girls, no doubt very moderate about everything other than clothes, makeup, and boyfriends.

  My tour guide arrived the next morning. His name was a long collection of aspirates, glottal stops, and gutturals with, like printed Hebrew, no evident vowels. “Americans can never pronounce it,” he said. “Just call me T’zchv.”

  I called him Z. I was Z’s only customer. He drove a minibus of the kind that in the United States always seems to be filled with a church group. And so was Z’s, until recently. “Most of my clients,” he said, “are the fundamentalists. They want to go everywhere in the Bible. But now …” The people who talk incessantly about the Last Days have quit visiting the place where the world will end, due to violence in the region.