The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  Those few refugees who came along on the convoy with us, to be the first to see the villages from which they had been expelled, were taking a very considerable risk. Just before throwing them out, the Serbs on the frontiers had confiscated many thousands of Kosovo Albanians’ identity papers and passports. All they had now were flimsy temporary documents, like the old Nansen passports, that had been issued by the Macedonian authorities. Now these same authorities had warned them that if they made the choice to go back into Kosovo they would not be able to come back, no matter what they found at home.

  A young Kosovo Albanian woman named Aferodite, whom we had met in Tetovo, had earlier tried to seize the chance of coming with us. She brought her mother and father and brother, all refugees from the latest pogroms, to see her off. But once she realized that she might discover terrible things, and would not be able to come back to her parents so long as they remained in Macedonia, she suddenly balked. She drew us a map of where her house had been, and the names of some neighbors we might try to find. She wanted to know, especially, about a baby boy who had been born in her village, a boy named Trim. But she wouldn’t come herself to find out, not until she knew she still had an escape route.

  “There might be Serbs still there,” she said, trembling. “I might find that what they have done to our place is just too much for me to bear. I might want to come back—and then I find the border closed. I will stay. For now I stay.”

  From what we could see on that haunting, memorably awful journey north, not a few of the Albanians who came on the convoy—and many of those others who, like Aferodite, decided to return some days or weeks later, when the situation calmed down—did find and see things that were too much to bear. We could see from the roadside scenes of the most appalling ruin. We passed villages—Kacanik itself, then Urosevac, then Gradimlje—where almost every house was gone, burned, wrecked, vandalized, covered with obscenities, the Serbian cross, Chetnik graffiti.

  Such people as we could see were wandering around with a look of bedraggled bewilderment, gazing horrified at the devastation, as though for the first time. And then we spoke to them and found that this was in fact the case. They had been terrified by what had happened, frightened beyond belief when the mobs stormed in and began their long nights of pillage and force, of rapine and rape, and they had run away, vanishing into the shelter of the deep woods on the mountainsides. They had lived by their wits, eating leaves, trapping animals, drinking from streams. It was only today, and when they saw the long trails of armor glinting on the distant road, and saw that the cars flew British flags or the blue-and-white NATO burgees, and had the letters KFOR stenciled on their flanks, that they knew it was safe to come home. And so, muddy and ragged and weary, they staggered down into Kacanik and Urosevac and Gradimlje, and stared open mouthed in shock at what had happened while they had been away.

  Before long they, and other soldiers, other examiners, were finding terrible, terrible things. Graves, newly dug, with scores of ominously long and spongy lumps in the soft and giving ground. Rooms in basements that—blood-spattered and with chairs and shackles and lengths of rusty chain, and with bullet holes in the plaster—had evidently been used as torture chambers or places of execution. Skeletons by the hundred. Detached bones, some with flesh and rags still adhering, which had been dragged away by dogs. The half-burned bodies of children. The bodies of old women raped and then hatefully mutilated. Men lying with their heads smashed in with sledgehammers, children cut in half with rusty scythes. And yet more graves, scores upon scores of crudely labeled memorials, fashioned not in one final moment of compassion and decency, but only to rid the area of the stench of death so that the killers could look more comfortably and without reminders for other ghastly deeds to perform. On all sides, almost everywhere you looked, there was evidence of the vandalism of the truly cruel, of the machinations of the appallingly vile.

  The soldiers who went in to these first villages, gingerly wary of the booby traps and mines that the retreating soldiers and police had left behind, and who were advising in vain the villagers not to come until all was perfectly safe, were more stunned and shocked than most of them had ever been.

  “Fifteen years I’ve been a para,” said one sergeant, holding up a chain saw and a bloodstained hammer, and opening for view a box of crudely homemade knuckle-dusters, “and I’ve never seen anything as dreadful as this. How can people behave to one another like this? What kind of hatred makes a man behave so terribly?” I had known this soldier since Ireland days, and we both knew well that the hatreds of Ireland are deep and dire. “But never like this,” said the soldier. “Never anything so bad.”

  A pattern soon became obvious: It was always the big houses, those of the wealthier Albanians, the merchants and the contractors and the successful farmers, that had borne the brunt of the destruction. Envy had clearly played a part in the victimization—the same envy that once made Nigerian Hausas turn on the Ibo, or makes some Gentiles turn on the Jews, an envy that is familiar around the world and has been forever, and which is born of economic discord, of imagined exploitation, a blind revenge on anyone who manages life better, who makes for himself and his family something that others in the community have never managed to do.

  The reasons behind the murderous behavior of the Balkans are legion, and they are legendary. It is now thought quite improper to dismiss all that has happened and that will continue to happen as the consequence merely of “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Economics, it is said, is in fact by far the more potent reason for the violence. And here, it seemed, was ample concrete evidence to back this theory up. Those who perpetrated the attacks in the villages we passed, where the big houses, the houses of the local squires and of what the Australians call the squatocracy, were fired first. The attacks were motivated, without a doubt, by an envy that came from the economic disparities that coincidentally overlay the ethnic dissimilarities. It so happened that the Albanians here had evidently worked harder, had made more money, had managed to succeed where their neighbor Serbian Lumpenproletariat had not—and the Serbs had struck back at them, evening the economic score, demonstrating that equality was entirely possible, provided that one reduced everyone else to a similar level of ruin. The attacks and the atrocities were perpetrated not so much on the Albanians as Albanians but as a people generally, who, unfairly and in part because they were Albanians, had done so much better than the local Serbs.

  And yet. It was not so much the scale of the attacks—the razing of house after house after house after house—but the vicious, venomous nature of the attacks that gave the lie to the idea that economics was the sole or even the main motive. The terrible things that were done—the deliberate maiming of children, the live evisceration of elderly women, the castrations with razors, the battering with mallets, the sawing off of heads, the use of blunt trowels to gouge out eyes, the rapes, the rapes, the rapes—these were acts of inhumanity done out of hatred and revenge, and that drew down on the appalling memories of generations and generations past.

  It was the nature of these acts that had nothing to do with money, or land, or territory, or with the manipulative cynicism of politicians or criminals. It had to do instead with revenge, pure and simple. For academics to remark dryly that ancient ethnic loathings had little or nothing to do with what has been happening in villages like those we saw that warm summer afternoon, were denying a simple and awful truth: that there can be no imagining the horrors that can be born from the white heat of pure and unalloyed hatred. The Serbs here in Kosovo were getting back at the Albanians, as they saw it, for what the Turks had done to them. History, at least as it had been taught to them, should leave no Serbs in doubt that they, if as intolerant and unforgiving as most in the Balkans so sadly are, had more than ample cause for doing so.*

  A dozen miles before we came to Pristina there was a junction to a town called Lipljan on the left, and the column of soldiers, signposted by a man standing on top of a Challenger tank, all took the turn. Ther
e was a small crowd of Albanians here, and they cheering wildly as the column slowed and ponderously swung off the main road. Where the troops were going we weren’t exactly sure; the three of us, however, decided we should go straight on. It seemed symbolically important that we first visit the capital of Kosovo. It would mean going without the comforting presence of the KFOR armor, true, but a city and its population would tend, I was sure, to offer some kind of protection, some kind of safety in numbers. It nearly turned out to have been a ghastly mistake.

  The first sign that all was not well came just on the outskirts of town, when our way was blocked by a long line of tractors, piled high with people and their possessions, heading for the north. It took only a moment to reason that these were Serbs—peasant farmers who were themselves now frightened that the returning Albanians would wreak vengeance on them. So they were off toward Belgrade and Mother Serbia; and if the incoming NATO troops were trying to offer them sufficient reassurance to stay, these people were not listening. They were angry, terrified, hostile to all who had put them in this position. NATO was the villain, every bit much as were the Albanians and the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (which we called the KLA, but which people of all persuasions in the region called by the initials of the army’s real name, the UCK).

  All of a sudden our accreditation badges, for which we had lined up for six hours the day before, seemed more dangerous than protective. They had the acronyms NATO and KFOR emblazoned in blue on white: To anyone who might carry a grudge, they now bore the mark of Cain. We unclipped them, hid them in our jackets, hoping that no one had seen. A group of Yugoslav army soldiers were escorting the villagers to the main Belgrade road, and they came across and looked at our car with hostile curiosity—they must have suspected we were in the NATO van, and they looked for a moment distinctly as if they were having second thoughts about how to deal with us. But after a cursory look they grunted and moved back to their own refugees, scowling, pointing, looking back at us.

  Pristina was an ugly town, by turns poor and pompous, grim and grandiloquent. It smelled of coal smoke, ash, and cabbage. There were huge and tottering brown tenements, an immense and gaudy marble university littered with broken glass and piles of smoldering garbage, a soccer stadium gifted by Tito as a demonstration of the benevolence of his regime toward all, Albanian and Serb alike. Its gates stood open, the field inside gray cracked mud. It was barely used, except that on Thursdays during the soccer season it was said to be ringed with Serbian riot police who would give the Albanian soccer fans a good crack on the head if they dared so much as to raise a finger.

  The Grand Hotel, five stars beside the crooked neon letters of its name, rose from the center of town as a grisly beacon to Marxist realism. It was filled with angry Serbs, all smoking, most drinking heavily, all wondering what to do next, when the soldiers arrived. The lights were off, the elevators were stopped, the telephones were not working, and there were no rooms. But I had agreed to write a story of the NATO “liberation” of Kosovo for a Sunday newspaper in London, and the deadline was now ninety minutes away. For the following hour I hid myself behind a column at the back of a washroom, and typed frantically away, praying that the battery of my laptop would last. As to how I could transmit the copy, with no power and so no cell phone service, and the only satellite phone that I knew of still stuck with the convoy back at the turnoff—well, Write now! is the general rule in situations like this, and worry about transmitting the story later.

  There was just one interruption. A pair of burly and unfriendly-looking Serb policemen, both with machine guns, were making a search of the hotel, found me lurking behind the column and asked me the Serbian equivalent of what the devil did I think I was doing, before going off in search of a manager, who they seemed not to be able to find. I wrote ever more furiously, well aware that they would be coming back. I managed, typing the last line with a flourish and then, presto! the power came back on, my cell phone came back to life, and I was able to telephone London and be put through to a copy-taking center nearby, and dictate those two thousand hurriedly written, ill-thought-out words. The first draft of history, as teachers have been known to call journalism, can be a sketchy thing indeed.

  But then I found myself dictating the piece to a copy taker who, after taking down the first few paragraphs, confessed that he was more interested than usual, on that rainy English afternoon, to be hearing firsthand what was going on in the capital of Kosovo. The exchanges I had with that unknown man in a faraway town—the piece took perhaps twenty minutes to dictate, while I kept checking the hall for the two policemen, and my watch to make certain that I had met the deadline—added a rare moment of pleasure, I thought, to what had otherwise been a fairly wrenching day. Newspaper copy takers are a hard-bitten breed: men and women who, eternally unfazed, have quite literally heard it all, and from everywhere. They are infamous for uttering deep sighs, usually while the reporter is in the middle of dictating his or her purplest passages, and asking impatiently: “Is there much more of this?” But my man today was enthusiastic, eager to hear more; and when I told him that I had to go, as the two Serb policemen were now most certainly on their way back, cradling their machine guns in their arms, he said he was truly sorry, and I think I believed him.

  “But you take good care,” he added, and seemed to mean it. Moving as quickly as I dared, I cut the line, gathered up my computer, and fled back out into the open air. The day had been hot and oppressive, but now it was thundering, and within moments of my emerging, hailstones the size of cherries began clattering out of the sky. The policemen, who had followed me into the lobby, took a look up at the towering thunderheads, pointed at the carpet of mothballs gathering on the ground, shook their heads, and vanished back into the gloom. I got into the Fiat, pried it carefully out of its parking space and headed away. There were still no NATO soldiers in Pristina, and suddenly it seemed a jumpy, nervous, and rather less than welcoming place. And besides, the story of the afternoon, we gathered from our colleagues, was unfolding ten miles away, at the Pristina airport.

  To the embarrassment and annoyance of the NATO planners, a small contingent of Russian troops had flown in to the airport the day before. No one in NATO wanted the Russians in Kosovo at all. The Kremlin had furiously opposed NATO’s bombing campaign, not least because the Russians, as Slavs, had long been in broad sympathy with the aims and aspirations of their ethnically similar Serb cousins. Any Russian involvement in a Kosovo peace would, from the point of view of the West, and also of the Albanians, be highly suspect. They were bound to be, at least emotionally, rather less than wholly disinterested. In a firefight between the Serbian MUPs and the Albanian UCK, for example, at least some of a troop of Russian soldiers would be certain to take sides.

  Diplomatically the situation was rather worse: The Kremlin made no secret at all of wanting to have Kosovo divided, with a Russian zone policed by Russian soldiers, and a NATO zone policed by soldiers from beyond. But that, said NATO, would effectively mean the partition of Kosovo. And that, as well as further Balkanizing a region that had suffered from all too much Balkanization in the last decade—three thousand miles of extra frontiers since 1991, and endless outbreaks of warfare and bloodshed in consequence—would reward with land, with extra territory, those very Serbs who had indulged in the vile practice of ethnic purging in the first place.

  No, said NATO very firmly, all soldiers sent to Kosovo to keep the peace should be under NATO control—answerable in the first instance to General Jackson, and then via an American general in Brussels to the NATO Political Council. Equally firmly the Russian government then told NATO it would do no such thing—and just twelve hours before Captain Rea and the thousands of men and heavy armor moved in across the Macedonian frontier, so two hundred Russian airborne troops and a handful of armored cars were flown in to Pristina airport, from which they refused to budge.

  We drove over to see them. I first wanted to drive to the field by way of what one might call the
usual route, through Kosovo Polje and past the famous battleground of the Blackbird Field where, more than six hundred years before, the Turks had defeated the Serbs—a defeat every Serb remembered still, and vowed to avenge. The hail had turned to rain, which was stopping as I crossed an overpass beside an old army base that had been bombed by NATO jets some days before and lay in still-smoldering ruins. A roadblock of MUP forces were waiting on top of the bridge, fingering their weapons. “Go away,” is all they would say. “Turn around.”

  We decided to make the airport via the southern route, the way that the NATO forces appeared to have gone when they made the turn from the main road some hours earlier. We sped south, came to a turn and were confronted by a huge column of armor moving out of the area, back the way we had come. It was the Yugoslav army, beating a retreat as the Technical Agreement insisted it had to do, and its men were in no mood to let us pass. “Get out of the way,” they cried, and pointed rifles and machine guns at us. “Go away.”

  I looked at the map, and tried another approach—passing through back streets of villages that displayed the dismaying contrasts of this strange and spiteful war. We could tell which were the Albanian villages—they were in ruins, charred and broken and deserted. And we could tell which were the Serbian towns—untouched, still alive with people—and angry, disaffected people at that, who shook their fists at us as we passed—where young men with guns moved toward us if we stopped.

  I made the mistake of asking for directions in such a place, from a group of young men and soldiers manning a barricade of razor wire and burned-out cars. One of them—a tall and gangly youth with acne, his hand on the stock of his machine pistol—came toward us. He made the three-fingered gesture of Serb supremacy, and shouted with fury at us. “Get out! Get out! You have three minutes. Then your forces take over. Until then this is Serbia! Get out quickly! Three minutes—or else!”