KOSOVO: The War in the Backyard

March 27-April 1, 1999

Friday: Day -- or more precisely, night -- three of NATO air strikes. Balkan consciousness has reasserted itself in Slovenia in a big way, at least all over the media, since that's all the headlines scream and the news anchors talk about as the eyes of the world turn to Kosovo. Even Radio Student busies itself digging out folk songs about that cursed patch of land. In the streets of Ljubljana, by contrast, it seems to be business as usual. The Euro-shiny, postmodern construction projects grind forward, new cafes and boutiques opening as the old Ljubljana morphs itself into the new, piece by piece, block by block. Over at the Fairgrounds, walking distance from my flat, there's a culinary fair -- pizza ovens, wine, new yogurt taste sensations -- packed with the usual business types and daytrippers. But in the air, somehow, is a difference, and I don't think it's just me imagining it. Maybe it's merely that everyone's imagining it at the same time. Or maybe, there really is a difference.

My father called me up a day or so ago from Florida and asked, is everything all right? Am I OK? What's going on over there, what's the deal with Kosovo? Who is this Milosevic? I reassure him in matter-of-fact tones: everything's OK here, it's a long way off, it's the other end of the ex-Yugoslavia, it's someone else's problem.

Yes and no. My friend Vesna (not her real name), a Slovene whose father's family is Serbian, voices her concerns as representative of many: Slovenia allowed NATO planes to use its airspace, and worries that maybe, at some point, Serbia might retaliate; after all, Slovenia isn't yet a NATO member. No way, I tell her; Milosevic wouldn't dare, NATO and the USA wouldn't permit such a thing. She, more or less, then, agrees. (The following Monday, NATO secretary general Solana sent a letter to the heads of state of Slovenia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia assuring them of NATO's support in the event of a Yugoslav attack. Sleep soundly, Ljubljana.)

Are the bombings making the Serbs treat the Kosovar Albanians worse? (From all indications, it seems that they could hardly be treated worse than they are right now; the word genocide is being widely bandied about, and CNN reports an estimated half a million refugees, one-quarter of Kosovo's population, are busy streaming over the borders into impoverished Albania and ill-equipped Macedonia and Montenegro as I type this.)

If Kosovo isn't exactly next door from here, neither is it an impossibly remote place. Unlike most Americans, Slovenes can locate Kosovo on a map -- or in their heads -- without difficulty; after all, it used to be part of their country. You can still take a bus or a train to Belgrade from Ljubljana, and I can get Serbian TV on my cable system (not very exciting: Slobodan addressing his public, sober news anchors reporting current events, and the occasional late-night war movie).

Vesna tells me that the Slovenes, though they despise Milosevic and his government, hold great affection for the Serbs and their culture, similar, I imagine, to the way Bostonians and New Yorkers view the Cajun and Creole cultures of Louisiana: cultural and attitudinal polar opposites, and necessary ones, at that; the other side of the mirror. The Serbs are laid-back and emotive where the Slovenes are workaholic and repressed, to exercise the stereotypes, though, like the American Southerners at least used to be, the Serbs are haunted by a history of doomed causes and military defeats (going back far longer than the 19th century; for greater background, pick up Robert D. Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts). As for Milosevic's fate, many Slovenes and Croatians look at it as getting one's own back; the going around of what's been coming around for years.

Vesna calls me one morning and another discussion heats up and boils over. She ends up berating me for only watching CNN, but she can't explain what's going on either, and I hear the internal conflict in the rising tension in her voice: "I watch CNN and I watch Serbian and Croatian TV, and you can't believe anyone! Everybody (in Serbia) hates everybody in NATO now. You feel so helpless. I spoke to a friend who told me she has to hide out in underground, what do you call them, bunkers every day for two hours. It's not good for children to grow up like this! There are going to be Serbian refugees! NATO has totally failed!"

I want to watch and not watch at the same time, and in the end, I watch. I watch a CNN anchor interview Slovenia's ambassador to the USA (a man who, a couple of years ago, was mayor of Ljubljana): "The former Yugoslavia is, unfortunately, the former Yugoslavia..." he intones. How would Slovenia feel about joining NATO -- they're considered among the prime candidates for the second wave of ex-Eastern Bloc membership -- and being obligated to fight their former countrymen? Well, he responds, Slovenia is "as far from Belgrade as Hungary or Italy or Austria"; the country made a choice at the beginning of the decade to turn to the West in all ways, hitching their wagons to the stars of NATO and the EU, and they're now in the process of reaping the benefits. Although many Slovenes exist for whom the second half of March has been just another couple of weeks at the office, there are others who cast an anxious look south, and wonder just what their former compatriots are thinking of them, when they think of them at all. What is the truth here? Has Slovenia lost a part of its soul by turning its back on their southern "cousins"? Even after all the bombings, exploitation and poisoned history?

At Ljubljana's main bus station, just as dingy but no worse than most bus stations anywhere, I ask about buses to Belgrade (though I have no intention of going there). The bored clerk at the information desk rattles off the times; buses are leaving daily, she says, "for now." At the shinier, more salubrious train station across the road, her counterpart, a young, intelligent-looking man, confirms trains are still running to Belgrade today, but as for tomorrow, he doesn't know, and, he implies with a shrug, who does?

When I set my woolgathering wheels spinning, here's what comes up: If you don't have to, why go to Belgrade (whose name means, literally, "white city") at all? Stay in Ljubljana. The world comes to Ljubljana. In a month, Bob Dylan is coming to town to play the local indoor sports arena (I've got my ticket; I'm looking forward to seeing just how he'll address current events in the region). Bill Clinton, yes, is set to visit in June, after an economic summit in Germany. The Pope is stopping by in September to beatify a local bishop...

Why go to Belgrade? Better to put it out of your mind. Buy a ticket for Woodstock Europe '99, the 30th anniversary, in a suburb of Vienna. North, not south, of here. North and west. Forget south and east. There's nothing there worth seeking out.

There are some people here who must be trying to tell themselves these things.

Tuesday: After visiting Mojca in the old town for a semi-regular Slovene lesson (conversation, laughs, grammar), I walk down the cobblestone streets, still and always incredibly charming for all the familiarity and commerciality, and get my first live look at Ljubljana's mayor, Viktorija ("Vika") Potocnik, who is standing on the City Hall steps wearing a dark blue skirt and jacket and even the heavy, ceremonial gold chain of her office. To her left stand musicians clad in green, 18th-century style outfits and powdered wigs. It is clear that everyone's waiting for a ceremony to begin, and I guess it's a visit by highly placed officials of a foreign state, Ukraine I think. Finally, the business-suited guests arrive in a phalanx and the bewigged musician/courtiers play a welcoming fanfare on brass instruments. All then disappear inside City Hall.

Two hours later, I am standing on a rise in front of the Orthodox church across the street from the National Museum. Other police ride by on horseback, wearing helmets with riot shields. By now antiwar demonstrations have erupted from Moscow to Chicago, and Ljubljana is no exception. A large crowd, mostly Serb, has gathered and chants "Yugoslavia" and "Serbia", raising their arms and holding out three fingers high (a Serb sign for "We will win," Vesna later informed me). The protest is peaceful. There are the usual signs in Serbian (Cyrillic script, of course), Slovene and English:

NATO
KILLERS
PEACE

and
CLINTON
War Criminal
for The Hague

Frankly, after twenty minutes or so I'm both bored and hungry, and the plastic shopping bags I am carrying grow heavier in my hands, so I catch a bus home before they march off to the American embassy. (Checked the papers the next day; it was a peaceful demonstration, thus mercifully boring to the non-emotionally invested.) Back in my flat, I turn on Serb TV for a few minutes: they're running Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. No kidding.

The propaganda wars continue as the bombs keep raining down on the guilty and innocent alike and the refugees stream across the borders, surrendering their passports as they go. Tuesday night seems to be Shrapnel Night on Serb TV, with footage of wounded in hospitals and bits of fallen incendiary devices; lots of this feed seems to be picked up by Western news stations.

Meanwhile, CNN broadcasts an unending procession of official spokespersons reading statements at press conferences (the White House, NATO, the British Ministry of Defense) alternating with footage of refugee transports and gray screens showing where the bombs landed, shades of Desert Storm. You know: you've seen it too. You've read about it. Serb TV shows footage of the anti-NATO, anti-US demonstrators in Portugal, the USA, Russia; the other night they broadcast Ramsey Clark (I focused on the shabby horrible cheap brown jacket he was wearing, and the jet-black dye in his hair, and felt sorry for him) speaking to a less than huge audience of fellow weary-looking liberals and shabby fringe dissenters in a room that looked like it belonged in the rear wing of a junior high school somewhere; actually, I think it was somewhere in Belgrade. Clark, decades away from power, speaking to the equally disenfranchised and embittered. I can't hide the contempt I feel for him -- even from myself. Not that I don't have my doubts about what's really going on. I don't think anyone really knows what's going down in Kosovo right now, even Milosevic, though he might have more of a clue than most, and leaving aside that it's nearly impossible for me to believe anything that comes out of Clinton's mouth these days. What I do think is that what's happening in the early spring of 1999 is going to be another major black mark on the Balkans and the source of another 50 years, at least, of resentments and grievances on an epic scale.

In the plodding press conferences of the powerful, and the volatile street demonstrations of the powerless, the propaganda wars continue, with the inevitable dueling Nazi imagery: Who's Hitler here, Bill or Slobodan? Whom does the swastika armband fit the best? We're not the Nazis, pal, you're the Nazis!

Wednesday: At the end of a lovely day I head to a local gostilna (inn) for Ljubljana's Passover seder; yes, there's a Jewish community in Slovenia and it's small but thriving, due largely to the efforts of a couple of young, chipper guys in their early twenties who aren't tired to do all the legwork required. I go fresh on the news that NATO bombings are planned, if not already underway, of buildings housing Belgrade's government ministries and military offices. I admire the success (if not quite the viewpoint) of the Belgrade-based hackers who caused havoc with NATO's home page and e-mail system. (Never been to Belgrade, hear it used to be a hip, liberal city; wouldn't mind visiting it some time under calmer circumstances.) The Internet sends me news of the cigarette and gasoline shortages there; at least they've still got coffee. I am amused at the news that Serbs tore apart a couple of McDonald's outlets in Belgrade. (Why? McDonald's is a restaurant, he said with a knowing smirk.) Macedonia is now rejecting Kosovar Albanians without passports. The TV and print analysts keep looking for motives and, so far with futility, for an endgame. It's not your imagination, everything does seem to move at fast-forward speed these days; with today's technology, World War II would have lasted about six weeks from the invasion of Poland to Japan's surrender.

The seder is well-attended and fortified with guests from Croatia's and Bosnia's Jewish communities. Everyone is sociable, well-dressed and in a good mood. All ages are represented, and everyone I meet seems well-educated, well-spoken and interesting. Fact is, we're all glad to be here. Passover is one of the most important dates on the Jewish calendar, a happy occasion commemorating the Jews' exodus from Egypt. The fact that this year the Kosovar Albanians are playing the role of wandering refugees in real time is not articulated. Two hyperactive, extremely young rabbis (22, 23 perhaps) from the Chabad Lubavitcher Orthodox community in New York are among us; frail figures with full beards, black long coats and wide-brimmed hats, one of them no more than five feet tall if that, they'd turn no heads in Brooklyn, but I don't think Ljubljana has seen the likes of them since maybe ever. The leader (actually an Australian, whose accent has turned three-quarters New York, probably from prolonged Brooklyn living) speaks in a continual shout, educating the congregants about the meaning of the rituals (they speak in English and one of the community's leaders, Matija, a clean-cut young man about the same age as the rabbis, provides continuous translation for the older people who need it).

Who wants to talk about Kosovo? We have home-baked matzos, and a Xeroxed Haggadah in Hebrew and Croatian (the latter of which, at least, all of Slovenia's Jews understand). The seder starts late and runs to about one in the morning (this is a weeknight), and as the evening wears on and people put on their coats and start leaving, the younger of the rabbis becomes more and more antic and talks faster and faster.

After the seder finally concludes -- notwithstanding the rabbi's contention that "We never say the seder is over, so it never ends!" -- I sit at an outside table with a few younger members, including one of the leaders, a bespectacled kid named Chris, somewhat embarrassed about his name, with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. "We're starting from almost zero," he admits, speaking of the community's knowledge of Jewish traditions. I tell him how much I appreciate witnessing the rebirth of a Jewish community in Europe after many moribund years (especially since I, uh, live there); sometimes it's better than to participate in rituals which have been going on the same way for 50 years.

"Or 500, or 3000!" he responds. Chris wants to go to Israel ("It's my greatest dream"). He wants the community to have a synagogue (there are two in Slovenia, neither in Ljubljana, and both closed; most of Slovenia's Jews now live in the capital).

Thursday, the first: I sleep in late after the Seder marathon and awake to the Serb video of three captured American soldiers captured while on patrol along the Macedonian border. The NATO spokesman is terse while confirming the obvious, remaining the soul of British politeness while refusing to take questions. A badly needed bargaining chip for Slobodan, at the least.

(If you've read straight through this far, you have my eternal gratitude for your forbearance in putting up with my hot-off-the-brain ramblings.)

My skepticism and cynicism never fail to kick in, their second-look balancing act tempering the initial passion that comes with events like this. Lately, the old X song "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" ("Both sides are right, but both sides murder...") has been running through my head on a regular basis. Another day; the Balkan beat goes on. Human stupidity never fails to deliver, and at times like these you know nobody comes off looking good.

Yet I still don't doubt that the bombing, though "regrettable," as they say in the corridors of power, and way messier than NATO and the White House would have us believe, is necessary, if not overdue. Since the breakup of Tito's Yugoslavia, the Serbian army, though not without its flaws, has been the strongest and most aggressive fighting force in the Balkans. (The Slovenes were, actually, its first victims, though they got off almost unscathed after winning a 10-day war.) If the Serbs plead respect for national boundaries, ask the Croatians and the Bosnians about how the Yugoslav army has respected such things in recent years. Didn't NATO bomb Milosevic back to the bargaining table at Dayton? How many lives were saved then? Consider your emotional response when thinking about the three captured American soldiers; now compare it to the way you think about those hundreds of thousands of displaced Kosovar Albanians. Whose lives are worth more consideration?

Last year, when I was in Dubrovnik and the southern coast of Croatia, I saw centuries-old villages bombed to rubble, heard tales of an agricultural population forced to spend five years in hotels converted to emergency housing. No side consists solely of angels -- both sides hate, murder and commit atrocities -- but if the (somewhat muddy) objective of NATO and the USA is truly to disable the Serbian military machine and its scorched-earth policy, I say: There is no other reasonable choice. Every day the horrors increase. It is a good thing to maintain common sense in the face of a seemingly monumental lack of same elsewhere. Eventually, after careful consideration of what facts are available, it is a good thing to take a stand and say: Some things are right, and some things are wrong.

All that post-Holocaust lip service we've all listened to about "We must never let it happen again": I never thought it applied only to never happening again to the Jews, and I don't think most people ever thought so who weren't chauvinistic Jews or fools. I also think that most people would agree with the sentiment, but the questions that you then must be asked include: Are you part of "we"? And how exactly is "never let it happen again" going to be applied? Because in the details lurk not only angels but devils.

(Disclaimer: I know the preceding is preachy and I don't know if any of it makes any sense to you. I don't know if it will even makes any sense to me in a week.)

Meanwhile, at Ljubljana's main bus station, the destination stops remain posted to the green-and-white sign at the spot by the curb reserved for long-distance bus number 30: Novi Sad, Beograd, Paracin, Nis, Krusevac, Pristina, Kragujevac, Kos. Mitrovica, Prizren, Kraljevo, Vrnjacka Ban., and Bihac. According to one source on the other end of the route, in Pristina, the bus station there is " full and buses are still operating. But the only routes they travel now are north towards Serbia. Only Serbs are allowed to board."*

This narrative has to stop somewhere, though life doesn't, and today seems as good a time as any to call time out.

April fool. There's a war going on in the backyard.

Postscript, April 25: Lately I've been spending Sunday mornings at the sprawling junk market in Rudnik, at the end of an urban tentacle that passes for the ragged southeastern edge of town. Unlike the twee antique market by the river, this market is filled with things sold and bought by the working class, including a substantial percentage of Serb and Macedonian emigrants. No tourists are ever seen here. I ride the number 3 bus -- crowded with working-class men, unshaven, mostly young -- to the end of the line, buy a ticket from a man behind a cage in a small yellow booth by a wire fence, and wander among brusque people buying and selling the jammed, makeshift aisles. Unlike the antique market, you can find real bargains here with ease: old Yugoslav army clothing, shoes, kitchen sinks, stoves, electric motors, tools, wicker chairs, toilets, Tito portraits, old TV sets and radios, records, bedding, bicycles, books, badges, pots, pans, worthless old Yugoslav dinars (issued in war-inflated denominations of up to 500 billion during 1993). The only order is in disorder. By nine a.m. the place is packed and by ten the crowd has started on lunch by the grill at the back fence which serves up the spicy, large Yugo-style burgers called pleskavica, along with tall cans of awful Union beer and little white plastic cups, the kind the dentist gives you to wash your mouth in the spit-sink, only here filled with grainy, rocket-fuel espresso. Drizzle and sunshine usually alternate in 45-minute shifts. Among other items, I purchased a curious box, with a hinged lid shaped like a crown, made from old postcards cut out and placed artistically over every surface, the whole covered with plastic protective sheets and sewn expertly together with red and green thread. It must have taken substantial hours of work to put together. I bought it for the equivalent of one dollar and sixty-six cents.

The vendor I bought the Yugoslav money from was a Serbian, friendly and helpful. If he asked, I would have told him I was Canadian and half-Slovene (to explain my limited use of the language). I bought a bicycle pump from a Macedonian woman who didn't know as much Slovene as the word for "thousand."

I'm sorry that it's impossible to travel to Serbia now. I never wanted to do so before this month, but I do now. Just to get to know the Serbs as individuals. Just so they could get to know at least one American as an individual. Stupid and won't happen. But right now, I just feel like doing it.

I read the pros and cons. I collect opinions. I can't decide. I want the truth, but what is the truth? The truth isn't on Serb TV, and you won't get it from the talking heads on CNN.

Is the truth what you see in the faces in the street? And if so, which faces?

"The bus station in Pristina is full and buses are still operating. But the only routes they travel now are north towards Serbia. Only Serbs are allowed to board -- Albanians are ordered off. Otherwise, there is no way out of town. Paramilitary units control the roads, and no one would dare to try and pass. Some try to use bribes to make their way out." Anonymous correspondent for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Balkan Crisis Reports, quoted via MSNBC

© 1999, Center for War, Peace and the News Media

December 1999: The Aftermath

Apparently viewers outside Serbia protested its presence on their cable system, so for a while, after TV Serbia went off the air Channel 17 in Ljubljana was filled with innocuous Austrian video wallpaper -- Muzak-type melodies over views of mountains and lakes -- which was then replaced by abstract patterns changing in tune with an accompanying new- age soundtrack. After awhile, that too stopped and the channel went dark. Then, in late October, the cosmic patterns returned. By December, Serbian TV (officially known as "Pink Plus," with a pink splotch in the right-hand corner as the channel's logo) was back on 17, Slovene cable having been declared safe for dance-party shows, dubbed Ninja Turtles cartoons, and Spanish-language soap operas with Cyrillic subtitles. (No wonder why the powers that be at Pink Plus figure their viewers could use even more escapist programming than usual these days.) Back to [sigh] normal...

Hey, hey, hey, what else is there to say? Slouching towards the millennial spectacle, as the earth's population passes six billion -- a milestone announced "officially" by, of all things, Kofi Annan's inexplicable junket to Sarajevo to welcome the momentous hypothetical arrival -- the earth's increasingly shorter attention span has wandered off to other matters like a hyperactive six-year-old in search of cotton candy. A nuclear error in Japan. A coup in Pakistan. Demonstrations of what just might be fledgling democracy in Indonesia (Gus Dur: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma). Chechnya (once more, with feeling). And, of course, East Timor. Play "Mambo No. 5" again, and pick up the new issue of Talk. And a little bit of war on the side to spice up the day.

Has our stupid old world learned anything from Kosovo? Not as far as human behavior is concerned, if the revenge killings of Serbs by some Kosovar Albanians are anything to go by. But can you blame them for this, or judge them? I don't feel much like trying, myself.

"I personally had a lot of difficulties to accept the bombing of Belgrade," a Slovene journalist told me last June -- two days before Bill Clinton's triumphant if soggy visit to a rain-blasted Ljubljana -- "but I couldn't think of any better solutions." Neither can I. Dislike Clinton for any number of reasons and know you're in plenty of company, say the war was a mess and anything but the clean, video-game victory some expected and even now believe happened, but know this: the cause was just, and the Vietnam model that confounded some old leftists (but not everyone) did not apply. As East Timor may have proved, the one thing that we might have learned from Kosovo is that national sovereignty shouldn't be enough anymore to insulate ethnocentric dictators from carrying out acts of terror, violence and murder against their own people. Is this such a bad idea?

Or, if you chafe at the idea of American hegemony, ask yourself: Do you really miss old- style warfare that much? The old paradigm like Grandpa used to shift? Soldiers killing each other on the ground, rather than bombers wreaking havoc at will from on high? Or would you rather have a resolution like East Timor -- messy as hell (but not nearly as messy as Kosovo), messy as people always are, but maybe the state of conflict resolution we can look forward to as the 21st-century dawns?

The latest issue of Bostonia, the BU alumni magazine, arrived in my mailbox today. The first thing I turned to was the book review by Michael Kort of the book 'Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality on the Balkan Battlefields' by David Fromkin (The Free Press, 1999). The book (which I haven't read) makes the point, Kort explains, that an American foreign policy based on idealism, promotion of human rights, etc., runs aground when it comes up against the people on the ground, whose strategic interests in the area -- not to mention history -- not only far outstrip the USA's, but are doomed to live on long past the time when the Americans and NATO lose interest in the area and wander off to the next hot spot.

Fine realpolitik, but then you read Elie Wiesel's excerpt from his report to Clinton from refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania. As always, Wiesel puts a human face, or rather, faces, to the situation, as he relates the stories of atrocities committed against the victims of Milosevic's army and police. From the big picture to the small, from the general to the individual. One pair of binoculars, two lenses.

Eventually, if you don't throw up your own hands, you ask yourself: Is it really possible for everyone to live together after all?

To understand all is to forgive all. Perhaps there is nothing else.

Ljubljana, March-December, 1999