The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  There was a stream over on the right, surely. There were high and snow-lined Albanian hills ahead, surely. There should be, on the right, a water meadow of singular loveliness. And then it dawned on me: that field of wildflowers and bending grasses that had seemed so idyllic a stopping place all those years ago was the very one that was now filled with mud and dirt and misery, and peopled with this sorry infestation. My “field of dreams” was here, right here—but it had become, in twenty years, a charnel house.

  And then again—why so? True, there were dreadful crimes being committed back up along the road, and there were NATO bombs dropping, and in response, even more dreadful crimes being committed. This is what the refugees were saying—telling us about slaughter and rape and burning and terror. But that didn’t answer the more basic question that pushed its way into my mind, and that related to my having stood on this field before, and that was not Why this? nor Why now? but more specifically—Why here? What had changed at this water meadow that had turned it, in twenty years, into the charnel house it had become?

  There was, so far as I could see, just one simple difference, one act of change that had occurred in the years since I had first been here—and it struck me in an instant that this, in simple truth, was the primary reason for what was happening here: There was, a few yards behind me now, a border.

  Here, in the middle of what was once Yugoslavia, and through which in 1977 we had journeyed from the border of Austria to that of Greece without a single question being asked or a single fee being charged or a single policemen stepping onto the road to make demands, stood a border. Or, to be precise, two borders—the one to the north being that of the Kosovo Province of the Republic of Yugoslavia, Savezna Republika Jugoslavija, and the one to the south, where I was standing, that of a new country, since 1992 independent of its former Yugoslavian motherland, the Republika Makedonija, the Republic of Macedonia.

  As was usual in border crossings between mutually hostile or less-than-friendly states, the two border stations were out of sight of each other, the flags of one being invisible to the citizenry of the other, and vice versa. Between them, through which the demarcation line was drawn, and where the white pillars that marked the frontier stood, was a no-man’s land, a place of razor wire and minefields and the threatening arcs of fire from competing gun towers. This frontier, between Blace in Macedonia and Kosovo’s General Jankovic—I remembered the name, and could even see from here the great man’s cement factory, all now seemingly wrecked—was, without a doubt, a true, old-fashioned international frontier. It had border guards. Security police. Customs officials. Flags. Sentry towers. Searchlights. Pools of disinfectant, so that no bacillus might pass from one territory to another. Red-and-white striped poles, six inches thick and fashioned from heavy-gauge iron pipe that not even a speeding truck could breach, and which proclaimed STOP FOR INSPECTION, INTERROGATION, THE ISSUANCE OF VISA, AND PAYMENT OF ALL FEES REQUIRED and only then, PERMISSION.

  A border had been made. Politicians and diplomats far away had waved their wands and had sent their surveyors and their cartographers and their global positioning devices and had created here a new frontier. (Though perhaps not too new: Many of what we think of as the new frontiers of the Balkans are only contemporary renderings of very ancient borderlines, and this, the line between Old Serbia and Macedonia, is probably, approximately, one of them.) The region had—in the purest and most classic sense of the word: “to divide a region into a number of smaller and often mutually hostile units, as was done in the Balkan Peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries” (according to the OED’s unimpeachable authority)—been Balkanized. And what has happened across almost all of the world’s more recently created borders—across, for examples, those frontiers thrown between the two Germanys, or the two Koreas, or the Congo and Zaire, or Namibia and in the Sahara Desert—had happened here as well. This pathetically short and seemingly so unimportant a frontier had suddenly, and predictably, become a fulcrum across which, in due course, the human spirit—here of Balkan people, as had happened also to Africans and Koreans and Germans—was being savagely broken. Maybe, given the desperate history of this place, worse would before long happen here: Maybe, as has happened all too often before elsewhere, fights would break out across the line, wars would be declared.

  But at this moment it was simply the border as the breaker of the human spirit that seemed most in evidence: Tens of thousands of innocent, modern European people had been driven from the state to the north, had fled across this hitherto invisible, politically dictated line on the ground, had poured over it past its guards and under its watchtowers, and had then collapsed, weary and wrecked, into the unfriendly and unwelcoming collective arms of the state to the south, their spirits broken, their hopes dashed from them, their dignity crushed. Why, the question seemed so pertinent, why create borders anymore?

  After all, across the rest of Europe, in the North and South and even in much of the once Marxist East, there were everywhere the signs that life was about becoming so very much less complicated. Frontiers were coming down all over Europe. The passport seemed every day less essential. The cry of “Papers!” or of “Documents, please!” became less and less frequently heard. The borderless world seemed a concept well on its way to being born, and at least in Europe itself, there was also the probability, almost a reality now, of that elegant device to be known as the single currency.

  But here in the Balkans, while elsewhere frontiers were coming down and currencies were becoming melded and melted down into one another, the very opposite was happening. Starting in early summer of 1991, no less than three thousand miles of brand-new European frontiers, de jure and de facto, had actually been drawn, surveyed, and created. By the end of 1992 there were whole new nation-states—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia*—and in due course, one must imagine, there may be more: The new nations of Montenegro and possibly Kosovo may one day be created, too. New moneys were being minted as well—the brand-new central banks housed within the brand-new frontiers (one of them, in Bosnia, being run by a New Zealander) saw to it that four entirely brand-new currencies (the Croats’ version named after a small and fur-covered rodent, the kuna) were actually spawned.

  It had all been so much more stable and content—or at least had seemed so—when I was first here: When this narrative began I was at a place that did not exist, next to a country which had not then been created, among a people who, in the sense of being people with the national identity to which they now belong, had not been born. And, at least superficially, it seemed to have worked: There was a certain prosperity, a certain satisfaction among the peoples of the Yugoslavia that had been hammered together earlier in the century. But now it had all changed, and the changes that had been brought about in just the last ten years seemed to have brought nothing but woe and misery and confusion. It had brought the specter of the old Balkans back among us, to terrify those who live there and threaten those who live beyond. It seemed the most wretched of situations, even though the doomsayers and Cassandras had long said, as they do with everything connected to the Balkans, that it was bound to be so.

  But once again there arose the question that seemed so eternally asked and so perpetually appropriate here: Just why? Just why is there, and seemingly always has been, this dire inevitability about the Balkans being so fractious and unsettled a corner of the world? Just what was it that had marked out this particular peninsula, this particular gyre of mountains and plains, caves and streams, and had made it a byword, quite literally, for hostility and hate?

  It was now well on in this early spring day, and it was getting dark, and some of the refugees had by now cut six-foot birch branches and stuck them in the mud, and had strung up flimsy sheets of black plastic from old garbage bags to act as windbreaks. A few of the more resourceful families now had little wood fires flickering and guttering in the chilly air, and occasionally there were blackened cooking pots sitting precariously on the logs, hissing with warming
water. Here and there rusty tractors were being driven down into the morass by local Macedonian farmers, hauling a group of French aid workers who were standing on carts and tossing all they had into the crowds—small hands of green bananas, black plastic bags, bottles of Evian water—creating fierce tornadoes of stampeding, clawing, snatching, punching, spitting people. I tramped back to the car, through a shower of bitterly cold needles of rain, wondering how the refugees, in what would turn rapidly into a freezing swampy field, would be putting up with the weather that night. The border guards had said there were thirty thousand there already, and another thousand coming in every hour. How would they put up with it? How would they cope?

  Mike Jackson, who had rightly promised that I would never forget what I would see at Blace, had been angry the night before, on the juddering helicopter flight back to his forward base camp at Skopje. He had been outwardly angry, mainly because the international relief agencies—not the aid workers, but their agency bosses back in the comfort of their head offices—and who were supposed to have anticipated this flood of humankind, had not done so. In consequence the world had been caught unawares by the exodus, had been unprepared for the extent and enormity of the crime that some could have foreseen would be perpetrated against these Albanians. The UN, in particular, had been caught wrong-footed, impotent, unable to bring more than a few bananas and garbage bags to the hundreds of thousands—here and elsewhere; there were massive outpourings of terrified and hungry people elsewhere in Macedonia too, as well as at the crossing points into Albania and Montenegro—who were relying on the organization for help. General Jackson was angry too that his troops were having to fill the gap, were having to deal with such mundane matters as chickens and rice, and whether they were halal or not, when the real business of his force, which was grandly titled NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, was fighting.

  “I’m a NATO general, and I’m up here flying in the dark, in secrecy, well within the range of Yugoslav artillery, just to organize meals for these people,” he had kept saying. “That’s surely not why I’m paid to be here.”

  But he had been more angry still that the refugees should be here in the first place, and that made for a deeper and darker and bleaker mood. As we had stepped off the helicopter—and this was the night before I had seen the water meadow at Blace—he had muttered something about how dreadful it all was, but that he had it in his power to help. “They’ll go back home, these people,” he said. “They’ll get their houses back, if I have anything to do with it. And we’ll find the people who drove them out. A few weeks of bombing, believe me—that’s all. A few weeks and the Serbs will cave in. Then we’ll be taking these refugees back. By God, I hope so!”

  On my way out I made a small bet with one of his staff officers as to just how long it might be before Belgrade caved in, before the refugees were in fact permitted to go home. Eighty days, someone said. It was a figure that stuck in my mind. This war, one of General Jackson’s senior planners had predicted, would go on for just eighty days. It would only be an air war: No soldiers would be fighting on the ground—the Americans in particular had no stomach for the notion of losing their boys in a battle here. But the persuasive might of the combined allied air forces would be enough, the officer said. Eighty days—he was just about sure of it.

  Which meant that if matters went according to plan I could be back here in Blace, standing beside the water meadow for the third time. This time, however, I would be with a force of men and machines heading north, and behind us would come the refugees again, but this time going home.

  Might it work? Could it take so short a time? The officer was confident. “Trust me,” he said. “These bombers are damn good.”

  With his words ringing in my ears I then hatched a modest plan. It came about as I was on my own ride back to Skopje through the rain the next evening, after I had seen the horror of the refugee field, and was concluding that of course I shared the general’s hopes that all the homeless would be home again—but at the same time wondered whether there was much long-term wisdom and merit in the simple fact of taking all these people home and then employing international troops to guard them, for how long?—months, years, decades, maybe?—in the hope that they and the Serbs who had done all this to them might come to tolerate each another once again.

  And then, as that thought duly flared and waxed and waned, so came its successor, the thought that invariably dogs anyone who is foolish enough to become interested, fascinated, or eventually obsessed with the quagmire of the Balkans. I wondered further, as the car bumped through the outskirts of the old Turkish town, the castle walls glowing warmly through the drizzle, just what it might be that was, deep down, leading these unfortunates, and all their brothers and sisters over time, to be in such a terrible situation in the first place? What forces were really at work here? I didn’t mean by that the obvious ones—the forces of today’s Serbian brutes with their rifles and bayonets, their cudgels and their knuckle-dusters. Nor even the equally harsh forces of their official opposition, the UCK, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the men in dark uniforms who, fighting for the idea of a Greater Albania, had already committed crimes as vile, but against the Serbs.

  I meant—or thought I meant—what basal forces, what innate characteristics, what elements of competing Balkan histories and cultures and ethnicities could ever have led to such a situation as this?

  For there was nothing new in this. All that had changed since the last time the Balkans erupted in horror, back in the 1940s, was that these new events were taking place under the lights of television cameras, so that all the carnage and coercion and terror and torture were being brought directly into our living rooms, live, with the newly consequent power both to shock and stun us, and yet to bore and weary and anesthetize us too. What was actually happening here at Blace’s swamp camp, and all the tales we were hearing from the refugees of what had been happening up in Kosovo, were merely—as if the word merely could really be used in so awful a context—more manifestations of what had been going on in the Balkans for a thousand years or more. They were further excrescences of that bloodcurdling intercourse between Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Slovenes and Macedonians and Hungarians and Rumanians and Montenegrins and Albanians and Bulgarians and Greeks and Turks and Vlachs, and who had been acting either because of pressure from great powers, or grand alliances, and who had been doing so under the various orders of, or at the behest of, or led by an endless array of sultans and emperors, grand viziers and archdukes, metropolitans and pashas, janissaries and dragomans, and whole hosts of lesser mortals whose battery of names suggests something of the bewilderment of the places where they ruled.

  There were among them, to name just a very few, hosts of competing and conflicting grandees of churches and districts and parties, with titles like aga, ajan, ban, beg or bey, beylerbeyi, emir, gazi, gost, imam, kapetan, kadi, khan, mameluke, mullah, pan-dur, sancàk-beg, starc, strojnik, vojnuk, voivode, and zupan; or less grand but invariably more violent villains who were organized into terror bands like the White Eagles or the Black Legions, the wartime Ustashi and Chetniks, and today’s Tigers. These groups were led by men like the dreaded but outwardly genial Arkan, a Serb named Zeljko Raznatovic, who once reputedly ordered all the men of one family to bite and gnaw the testicles off one another, or his compatriot and similarly steely zealot Vojislav Seselj, a Serb paramilitary who boasted publicly of scooping out the eyeballs of his Croatian captives using only a rusty shoehorn.

  And in thinking about all this I suddenly realized that I, like a score of wanderers and wonderers before me, had all of a sudden become fascinated—enraptured even—by the savage mysteries of this wretched peninsula. I had no standing in these parts at all; from centuries back, I realized as I scanned the bibliographies of the books I had, clever men and women had come to these parts in an effort to learn. And now, driven by the same strange compulsion that had brought them here before, I very much wanted as well to try and learn a little mo
re, to see a little more, to begin to understand a little more.

  After all, I was here. I had some time on my hands. I had enough to survive on for a few weeks. And this war, by all accounts, would end in eighty days. Might I not stay in the Balkans for some or all of this time, looking the place over, looking at a place that was being convulsed by a war that I could hear as distant thunder all the while but in which I could not play a part?

  It seemed a beguiling idea. It was now the beginning of April. If all went as the planners believed—and I had this curious faith that it well might—then the engagement between the West and Belgrade ought to be over, and some definable event—the retaking of Kosovo by the western forces, for example—should have taken place by the middle of June. So why not stay, and contrive some way to understand something of the context behind all that was happening?

  Why not use the time, I then said to myself, to make a journey, to visit as much of the Balkans as it was possible to see, in the hope of completing a mosaic picture of the complexities of the place, one out of which might emerge something that, however blurred and fuzzy it might at first appear, did paint an approximate portrait that gave, at least to me, a context to what was happening in Kosovo?

  I decided there and then. I telephoned a friend of mine, a clever and congenial traveling companion, and splendid linguist, called Rose. I had met her five years before, in an Internet discussion group about Ireland. She had been a modern linguist at Oxford—her degree was one of those very rare Congratulatory Firsts, in which the papers she wrote were so brilliant that the dons assembling for the viva voce part of the final examination stood up and applauded her work and asked not a single further question. When we met she was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, then went on to work at The Nation in New York City, and finally became the senior writer at Colors, the original and highly inventive Venice-based magazine. Six months before I telephoned she had embarked on the risky adventure of being a full-time freelance writer: When I tracked her down she was in Rajasthan.