The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  But ten minutes later we were at the border, lining up behind a group of armored cars from an engineering support battalion based in faraway Kentucky. The Macedonian frontier guards were making every solder present his passport, stamping each man in as though he were a tourist, making sure the vast green vehicles that roared and spluttered in the heat had all the proper registration and insurance documents. Their commander, a young African American from Texas, scratched his head in disbelief. “I figured we’d cross frontiers like they weren’t really there,” he said. “What could they do if we just put the hammer down?” He patted the inch-thick steel flank of an armored car. “Do these guys think they could they stop a baby like this?”

  But the officer behaved himself and patiently waited until the forms had been filled and the stamps all stamped, and then the convoy roared off into what was once called Thrace—and what until 1992 had itself been a part of Yugoslavia, but that was now called either FYROM, or by everyone but the angry Greeks, Macedonia.

  We followed twenty minutes later, only to discover the convoy stranded, perhaps in that notorious commanders’ nightmare that comes about when you are, as they say, “lost at the join of four maps.” They were turning around in a fog of smoke and dust, heading for an overnight rest camp. We passed them, and the young black officer waved sardonically.

  “See you at the front!” he yelled. “If you manage to find it,” I shouted back.

  By dusk we are in the smart little mountain town of Tetovo, thirty miles shy of the Macedonian capital. I had made a phone call: There were no rooms in Skopje, and so it seemed sensible to spend the night here. We found a motel beside a gas station, with rooms both for us and for Monday and his friend. It was a noisy night. The waitress, a glamorous blond who served us drinks while wearing a dress that might have been sprayed on, whose top half was so sheer as to be almost transparent, made extravagantly noisy love in the room next to ours. And then at four in the morning there came the crashing, screeching, grinding noise of steel tracks on an asphalt road. I looked out of the window: A column, miles long, of German Wehrmacht tanks and armored cars and self-propelled guns was grinding its way northward, just below the window. The great invasion was getting noisily under way.

  8

  The Sound and the Fury

  IT WAS A LITTLE after four o’clock on a cool and starlit Balkan summer morning, the water meadow by the border was quiet and deserted. The main road beside it was quiet, too, but, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, so we could see that the northbound lane was lined with scores of jeeps and armored cars and, lying on the dew-damp asphalt, hundreds upon hundreds of sleeping soldiers. A scattering of the officers who would command them were in the back of their Land Rovers, hunched over maps lit by pools of red light from night-lamps. Some were smoking. All were fidgeting. Everyone was waiting.

  The operation had been code-named Joint Guardian. It involved the rapid establishment of a peacekeeping force in and throughout the cities, villages, plains, and mountain ranges of the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo. The operation was vast in size and scope, and it taken military planners much of the previous six months to work out how best it might be carried out. It involved principally large numbers of heavily armed forces from Britain, the United States, Italy, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Holland, most of whom were either waiting here or were parked at marshaling sites within a few miles of the frontier zone.

  It now required only a decision from NATO headquarters outside Brussels, and the formal issuance of an order by the forces’ commanding general on the ground, Sir Michael Jackson, to set the vast machinery of this operation—by far the biggest European military operation since the end of World War II—in motion. That was what everyone—and half the world outside—was waiting for. We stamped our feet to ward off the morning chill: In a headquarters back at an airbase near Skopje, commanders waited for radio messages, and for the green light, for the signal to go.

  Rose and I had arrived from Albania on the evening of Thursday, June 10. The next day, Friday, was when the forces were first scheduled to make their entry, but it turned out instead to be a hectic and surreally confused day, with the Russian government indulging in a subtle and dangerous power play that caused angst and irritation among the Western allies, and ended up causing a twenty-four-hour postponement. But now matters had been at least partially resolved. The Serbian forces that were supposed, under the terms of the previous week’s agreement, to be leaving Kosovo, were now in the process of doing so. It was vitally important that there was no vacuum between the departure of one force and the arrival of another. To avoid the possibility of anarchy, or the seizure of the province by any one or more of the guerrillas and paramilitary groups with which the region was blessed, or cursed, depending on your viewpoint, NATO now had to move very fast. So it came as no surprise late on that hectic Friday afternoon when we were told that H hour, the moment when the Allied forces would formally start to roll into Kosovo, was now to be 5:30 in the morning of Saturday, June 12. British forces, it was decided, would be the first to go in. A battalion of Gurkhas* first, then paratroops, and behind them a great deal of very protective heavy armor and a number of extremely large guns.

  In anticipation of what we would be likely to see, the two of us, along with an Australian colleague from a newspaper in Melbourne, managed to reach the Kosovo frontier line shortly after three o’clock. There, beside the Blace water meadow that I was now seeing for the third time, along with a scattering of others who were curious to witness the denouement of this long Balkan crisis, we waited, and waited, in the cool and deceptive peace of this strange Macedonian dawn.

  The more obvious preparations had begun to take place just after nightfall. At about 10:00 P.M. a long column of heavy armor began moving along the main bypass to the north of Skopje, past the main hotel where the immense collection of foreign reporters were staying, and past the slums and shanties that, by happy chance, were largely occupied by some of Macedonia’s half million Albanians.* The first few vehicles—huge British Challenger tanks manned by engineers, and with earthmoving equipment mounted on the front, as well as Warrior armored cars and self-propelled guns—came and went without the onlookers doing much more than staring, open mouthed in awe. But by midnight, when the column had swollen to an endless roaring river of iron, it seemed as though someone had said to the Albanians it thundered past: These tanks, these are for you, these are going to help liberate your people. And once that realization had sunk in, the people on the street began to go wild.

  By 1:00 A.M. a huge mass of people, with hundreds of little children all way past their bedtime, stood beside the road cheering madly, waving flags, blaring horns, tossing pieces of ribbon and newspaper confetti at the passing tanks. The crews looked from their turrets in happy puzzlement—men from Lancashire and Devon and Belfast and Hawick, witnessing scenes of adulation and hope that had not been seen in Europe since perhaps the liberation of Paris. It was an astonishing, deeply moving sight; and I shall long remember turning away to go back for an hour’s sleep, and hearing the strange harmony of the sounds the came from behind me—on one hand the roaring and grinding of the tank columns, and on the other the ecstasy of cheering from those who were watching them, and willing them on, to the frontier.

  The eastern sky began to lighten at about half past four, and although the columns of soldiers remained quiet, unmoving, or just begin to stir uneasily, I thought I heard the distant thud of helicopters from behind the eastern hills. Later on it turned out that a small number of aircraft had indeed had set out, an hour or so before the deadline: A single squadron of men from the British Special Air Service and a thirty-strong team of paratroopers known as a Pathfinder Group crossed the border under cover of dark. They stationed themselves on hilltops, building a half dozen or so small observation posts from which they could see and direct the movement of the invasion force to come.

  We knew none of this at the time; and in strict legal terms by moving before the
designated deadline the NATO side may well have breached the so-called Military Technical Agreement that had been signed three days before, by General Mike Jackson on one side, and the Yugoslav Colonel-General Svetozar Marjanovic on the other. But if this was so there was certainly no one on hand to complain: and none of the Chinook helicopters that took off from the Macedonian airfield at Kumanovo, nor any of the fifty-odd fighters they disgorged, made any contact with an enemy. If there had been Serbian soldiers in this corner of southern Kosovo, they had clearly slipped well away during the night.

  By 5:00 it was fully light, and all the soldiers were waking—at the side of most Land Rovers troops had lit small Sterno stoves and were brewing tea. Men were checking their weapons, stowing their sleeping bags into their rucksacks, tuning their radios. There was an air of quiet deliberation about them all; a few made rather feeble attempts at gallows humor; for the rest it was more comfortable to be quiet.

  Ahead loomed the chimneys of the old cement factory at the improbably named Serbian community of General Jankovic. Near it, in the middle distance, were some houses—all of them roofless, burned, and empty, all the visible evidence of the local Serbs’ apparently systematic emptying twelve weeks before of the Albanian border villages. The water meadow, where I had stopped in 1977 and where, just three months ago, tens of thousands of wretched refugees had tried to camp, was almost pristine now. The mud had gone, and there was thick grass in its place, and except for a few huts put there by the aid agencies, there was little now to show for the brief period when it had enjoyed such notoriety as the squalid first resting place for the people driven from their Kosovo homes.

  Then, at 5:05, a sudden burst of activity. A smallish, sprightly British officer, a brigadier named Adrian Freer, detached himself from the throng and marched quickly toward the Macedonian border guards. His own sentries, tough young blades from the Parachute Regiment, made sure that these guards—men who had never behaved well toward the refugees, nor toward the press, and who even now were angrily trying to keep everyone away from the frontier—fell away; within seconds he was at the line itself, demanding through an interpreter to speak to his Yugoslav army opposite number with whom, as he put it, “I believe have an appointment.” He was looking for the brigadier commanding the 243rd Mechanized Brigade of the Yugoslav army, the man who had been ordered to tell the incoming Britons where any minefields might be, how safe it was to proceed along the road ahead.

  But the commander was nowhere to be found. The minutes ticked past. No one came. A few sentries on the far side could be seen talking urgently to one another, and then leaving their post on the double, passing out of sight. On this side the brigadier was joined by a strange-looking officer in a tricorn hat that was covered with what looked like gold-thread curtain tassels. He turned out to be a Dutch brigadier, the holder of some important staff job at NATO, and was known universally as Haen the Hat. But even his arrival did nothing to scare up the Yugoslavs, and at 5:10 a coldly exasperated Adrian Freer shrugged, turned smartly around, and marched back toward us and his men.

  He assembled us in a small group, and said quite simply, and with a graceful courtesy perhaps known only in a British-managed invasion: “I have attempted to make contact with my opposite number on the Yugoslav side, but as you can see I have failed to do so.

  “My orders are now to clear and secure the Kacanik Defile and to open the Kacanik Corridor. So, gentlemen and ladies—if you would be so kind as to step to one side, I now propose to carry out my orders. Would you kindly let my convoy pass?”

  And he gestured with a prearranged signal to Capt. Fraser Rea on the leading Gurkha Land Rover Defender, while at the same time another radioman mouthed a coded one-word order into his microphone.

  There was a cry from the column: “Attack! Attack!” and in the one unforgettable moment that followed, two entire brigades of the British army, the Fifth Airborne and the Fourth Armoured, which together make a terrifying monster when roused, got formally and majestically under way. A hundred engines started and began to roar, and from tents and lairs beside the road columns of Gurkhas materialized and began marching swiftly alongside the vehicles that started grinding steadily north.

  The Macedonians melted to one side, one of them pausing long enough to raise, rather theatrically, the orange-and-white pole that marked the entrance to no-man’s land. And then in the soldiers streamed—mortar carriers and machine-gunners, engineers and bomb-disposal teams, spotters and radiomen, mine clearance specialists and explosives experts, sharpshooters, antitank snipers, military policemen, and hundreds upon hundreds of tough, fit, menacing-looking members of the infantry. Captain Rea had the distinction of being the first to cross the line: The two thousand men of the forward element of Operation Joint Guardian were just moments behind.

  As they moved in, so at the same time came what remains in my memory the most dramatic moment of the morning. There was a tremendous roar from behind and then, rising in unison from behind the southern hills, a wave of helicopters that dipped their noses together and, flying fast and true, streamed in toward us at the frontier. The first was an Apache, perhaps one of those we had seen refueling on the Albanian border two days before. As it steadied itself in the crosswinds a hundred yards or so before crossing, it dropped a package that briefly flashed in the sky beneath it, and from which drifted down a myriad fragments of silvery foil—chaff to deceive any radars ahead or perhaps merely to impress the cameras.

  Whatever its function, the tiny explosion in the sky was the signal for the other machines to move in—and this they did, fourteen heavy-lift helicopters, eight Chinooks and six Pumas, with six Apaches swooping and curving, riding shotgun alongside them. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” said a paratrooper, marching fast underneath them. “Just so long as they don’t shoot at us,” said another private, well aware of the Apaches’ mixed reputation.

  The Chinooks, great double-rotored monsters, were all carrying vehicles slung by wire cables underneath their bellies. There were light tanks, artillery pieces, armored cars, ambulances—and they swung far out into the sky as the machines banked at each curve in the Lepenec River valley. They roared into the distance, settling down their cargoes hurriedly on the far hillsides and by the distant bridges, and then they thundered back for more. Within half an hour more than a thousand troops had been hoisted up into the high ground above the Kacanik Defile, the men joining the observers who had been prepositioned during the night. Now, with machine-gun nests set up and the portable radar stations and antiaircraft installations fully functioning, the oncoming convoy could swish smoothly north and up toward the Kosovan capital of Pristina, fifty miles away. That, we all assumed, was the target for the day: Indeed, when I had had a beer with Mike Jackson the day before, he had said I would be a “sissy” if I didn’t meet him in Pristina by sunset on Saturday.

  Once the first airborne brigade was safely inside Kosovo, those of us who were being allowed in as civilians—a lot of press, some doctors, a handful of returning refugees working as translators went in next, in a ramshackle convoy of cars and vans.* There was some chaos, as had been predicted, with the press inevitably getting under the feet of the torrent of incoming soldiery. (Sometimes quite literally: A brigadier’s armored car, its driver frustrated at not being able to squeeze past an Italian television van blocking the route, suddenly accelerated, tearing off the van’s door and very nearly running over the irate producer’s feet. But when the armor vanished over the horizon even the producer seemed amused: He’d get the car door repaired on expenses, he said, and the shoes he was wearing weren’t exactly his Sunday best.)

  There were some delays, as small suspect bombs were detonated, as a party of Yugoslav militia were disarmed and sent packing, as a group of Gurkhas got into a heated argument with some heavily armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who wanted to be photographed linking arms with the small and wiry Nepalese who appeared to have liberated them. Forty members of the MUP, the dark-unifo
rmed Yugoslav special police, were escorted north by another troop of Gurkhas; they said they were afraid for their own safety, scared that the Albanians might begin reprisals. One of them we spoke to was sweating profusely under his thick serge uniform. “Perhaps I’ll never come back here—I just don’t know,” he said, before the Gurkhas dropped him off in a safer part of the countryside and told him to make himself scarce.

  But by noon the convoy was moving well, the infantrymen and light armor going in first, the heavy tanks rumbling through some time later in the morning. Units of the Fourth Armoured Brigade, which included such stylish army formations as the Household Cavalry, most usually photographed changing the guard outside Buckingham Palace, as well as the Irish Guards and the tanks of the King’s Royal Hussars, were pouring in by lunchtime. The lead vehicles had soon cleared the crags and canyons of the defile and were then out in the hayfields and meadows of Kosovo proper, speeding along without interruption, except at two or three junctions where other units, who had come across the border later and from different places, joined the main northbound torrent.

  The roadway, which by now had been marked by black-and-yellow tac-signs of a dagger and a Gurkha knife, the kukri, and with a thin orange wire on each side of it marking the swept and mine-free corridor, had now been given a formal designation, just as had the routes in Bosnia: whereas we had driven down to Sarajevo on Route CLOG, this one had been marginally more attractively christened: The Blace-to-Pristina route was known as Route HAWK. And the soldiers were fast fanning out from it now, to the villages that lay to the left and right of the highway, their populations, such as remained, supposedly waiting for this day of liberation, which they must have feared might never come.