History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  The Waste Land

  Two more days in the “ethnically cleansed” Krajina, this time heading south with my friend Konstanty Gebert, a Polish writer, and Ana Uzelac, his Serbo-Polish colleague from Belgrade. On the roads, there is no traffic except the Croat military police at the roadblocks, a few white-painted UN vehicles, and, incongruously, the occasional smart BMW or Mercedes with German number plates racing past. Presumably Croat Gastarbeiter revisiting family homes or just on safari.

  For hour after hour, we drive through the most spectacularly beautiful countryside, along the wooded valleys of the Plitvicka National Park, across the karst uplands, and down to the fortress of Knin. For hour after hour we see nothing but devastated, burned, plundered houses. Roofs burned out; windows smashed; clothes, bedclothes, furniture, papers strewn across the floor. Everything of value removed. Orchards, vineyards, fields, all with their crops gone to waste. No cars left, no tractors, no farm equipment, no cattle, no dogs. Only a few cats survive.

  And, for mile upon mile upon mile, we see no single human being. Nobody. Ana has brought from Belgrade the addresses of Serb families that fled, but their houses are very difficult to find, because the villages no longer have the landmarks the inhabitants remember. Could this have been a grocer’s shop? Was that once a white wall? But there is no one to ask for directions.

  Cleansing is in an awful way the right word for what has been done here. The Krajina, an area the size of several English counties, has literally been picked clean. This was not random looting. The plundering and burning has been done quite systematically—for the most part, it seems, by Croats in one uniform or another. The object, apart from booty, is simple: to ensure that the Serbs don’t come back. Croatia is to be, so far as possible, Serb-free. Serbenrein.

  According to the local UN office, some one hundred elderly Serbs who stayed in their homes have been murdered since Croat forces retook the area. At Gračac, we find fresh graves in the cemetery, numbered neatly on the identical wooden crosses. However, here, as elsewhere, the Orthodox church has been left standing, to show that the Croats are western, civilized people, unlike those barbaric Orthodox Serbs, who raze Catholic churches to the ground. But the vicarage has been torn apart. A children’s Bible and a church calendar for 1996 lie among the litter on the floor.

  At Kistanje, once a pretty, small town, we find three family photo albums laid out on stone tables in the marketplace. The wedding. A son’s christening. The ceremony to celebrate his joining the Yugoslav army. As we turn the pages, a white armored personnel carrier of UNPROFOR, the so-called United Nations Protection Force, roars through the deserted town. Ludicrous protectors of nothing. The UN self-protection force.

  In places like this, journalists say, “the story writes itself.” Wherever we look, journalistic “color” and clichés offer themselves wantonly, like the whores in Amsterdam. Outside a plundered home, a doll is sprawled across the road, one foot torn off. In the ruins of the family home of Milorad Pupovac, leader of a small would-be liberal Serb party in Croatia, I find a book of children’s verse, Robber Katja and Princess Nadja, published in Sarajevo in 1989. Ana can recite some of the verses from memory. The last poem is entitled “How Our Yugoslavia Grows.” In the rubble of another house I see what looks like a white scroll. Unrolling it, I discover a black-and-white photograph of Tito—the kind that once hung in every public place and in many private houses too. It has a bootmark pointing toward the face.

  Knin was the capital of the self-styled Serb Republic of Krajina. Now “liberated,” its imposing hilltop fortress, with the checkerboard flag flying from the top, forms the background to the main election poster for President Tudjman’s nationalist HDZ movement. In the foreground you see Tudjman himself, waving both fists above his head like a victorious football manager. Before the war, some 37,000 people lived in Knin; now even the local government claims only 2,000. Croat soldiers and military police, baseball caps reversed, speed along the deserted streets in their stolen—sorry, “liberated”— cars: a smart Mercedes, a Renault, a Mitsubishi Jeep with the name of the German dealer still advertised on the back. We climb to the top of the fortress and discover the largest flag I have ever seen in my life. It must be at least thirty feet long. Young girls in black jeans and T-shirts are photographing each other literally wrapped in the flag. The cliché made flesh.

  As the sun sets over the mountains like a holiday advertisement, we drive down to the Adriatic, across the invisible line to the part of Croatia the Serbs never occupied, and suddenly there is ordinary life: houses with roofs, electric light, curtains, cars, a young couple canoodling on a scooter. In ibenik, one of the beautiful resort towns on the Dalmatian coast, we gape at the cheerful, well-dressed crowds, the nice hotels and the Café Europa.

  Ah, Europe—but we’ve been there all the time.

  Three years later, British television commentators celebrated the World Cup soccer match in which plucky little Croatia defeated Germany. The cameras showed, draped across one side of the stadium, a huge Croatian flag. The Croatian team played well and sportingly, but I could only think of the cleansed Krajina, and of the huge flag flying over Knin, and of how the same people cheering their soccer players now must have been cheering their soldiers then. Perhaps it was the same flag.

  BOSNIAN GLIMPSES

  Tuzla

  WE ARRIVE IN THE LATE EVENING, AFTER AN EXHAUSTING SIXTEENHOUR bus journey across Bosnia, and enter the dim and cavernous Hotel Tuzla, instantly recognizable as the kind of grimly modernist tower-block hotel built all over communist Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. I step into the lift, press the button for the second floor, and at once subside, powerless, into the cellar. The reception committee in the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and David Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to Michael Ignatieff, “I can’t believe that this is your first time here.”

  Next morning, we are bused to a large congress hall, with usherettes in red jackets and black miniskirts. Mary Kaldor, chair of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, welcomes us “after this long journey, so difficult for all of us.” But she came by helicopter. Julie Christie reads a poem which goes, according to my notebook, “Sarajevo, glowing white … as a translucent china cup.”

  Then four local politicians, middle-aged men in suits, make their appeals for international support. Sturdy Selim Beslagič, the mayor of Tuzla, tells us that our planet is based on natural laws and harmonies, and asks us to help defend Europe from fascism. The provincial governor, who comes from President Izetbegovic’s Muslim-led Party of Democratic Action (SDA), says Europe must do something to prevent genocide happening one hour’s flying time from its capitals. The president of the Bosnian parliament says, according to the simultaneous interpretation, “We are defending the basic principles of the world system,” while the head of the Tuzla Citizens’ Forum, which cohosts this meeting, talks of “the spirit of progressive mankind” represented by the Helsinki Citizens Assembly and asks, “is Europe dying in Bosnia?” He insists that two things are vital: the right of refugees to return to their homes and the punishment of war criminals.

  We have been told that Tuzla is an island of liberal, multiethnic, multicultural coexistence. The reality I discover over the next three days is more complicated. The style of these men, like that of the congress hall and of the hotel, is unmistakably communist. And one reason—perhaps the main reason—why Tuzla is still relatively tolerant of ethnic diversity is precisely that it was such a strongly communist, Yugoslav industrial city. Yet even Tuzla isn’t that multiethnic anymore. According to the 1991 census, only 55 percent of the Tuzla region’s population identified themselves as Muslim; now the UN estimate is 96 percent. The Serb Orthodox church is beautifully kept, but the old caretaker says they haven’t had a priest here since 1992. For three years, the remnants of the congregation have been improvising, intoning half-remembered chants and hymns but with no christenings, marriages, or funerals. And then, when you talk to people from Mayor Be
slagič’s city council, you find that for them the main enemy seems to be not the Serbs but rather their Bosnian political rivals from President Izetbegovic’s SDA.

  Like the complex landscape of physical destruction on the way out here, these political complexities spoil the simple picture with which many people started the journey of solidarity: immaculate Bosnian victims (“Sarajevo, glowing white …”) against child-eating Serb villains. But this is one very good reason for coming. It’s what I call the Homage to Catalonia test. Can you, like Orwell in Spain, maintain solidarity with the victims without compromising the truth about the faults on the victims’ side? When the assembly’s concluding statement describes Tuzla as a “multiethnic, multireligious paradise,” it has, in my book, failed the Homage to Catalonia test. But that’s the trouble with assemblies, committees, platforms: They always do.

  Survivors of Srebrenica

  When Serb forces seized the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica, marching Bosnian men off to killing fields while Dutch soldiers stood by, most of the surviving refugees came to the Tuzla area. In a bar in Tuzla, Michael Ignatieff and I meet one of the few soldiers from Srebrenica to have escaped with his life. He limps in on crutches, one foot still heavily bandaged, and tells his story through our interpreter. After being operated on by Dutch surgeons in a UN camp at Potočari, he was told by the Dutch that he would be evacuated to Tuzla. Instead, Serb officers strode in and ordered that an old man should be transported in his place.

  Now he was told he would be taken to another hospital, shown on Bosnian Serb TV as proof of how well the captives were being treated, and then evacuated. Instead, he was taken to a Serb prison camp. The camp commander deliberately kicked his wounded leg. The wound, undressed, was crawling with worms. An old man hanged himself after learning of his son’s death. Another prisoner died in the freezing cold. After more than three months in detention, he was brought out in an exchange of prisoners organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross. His father and two brothers have still not made it to Tuzla.

  The story is harrowing enough. But he’s a bad witness. His tale is poorly told, confusing, and he seems to be mixing what happened to others with what happened to him. Notebooks open on the table, Ignatieff and I find ourselves pummeling him with questions to get the bloody story straight. Anyone here been crippled and speak English?

  In the nearby town of Živinice, a refugee camp was hit by a Serb mortar bomb just a fortnight ago. Six children were killed, four wounded. The camp turns out to be an incongruous toy town of Scandinavian-built terraced houses, each designed as an idyllic suburban home for a nuclear family of four but now sleeping forty. Old peasant women in headscarves, grubby children with large brown eyes. No work, no money, nothing to do. Empty, numbing hopelessness. Suddenly, there is another visiting party, with Julie Christie in black trousers and gray sweater, camera at the ready. The children immediately form into a group to have their photograph taken. They raise their hands and make the V sign. V for Victory.

  Dijana

  In a coffee break, I talk to a girl called Dijana, from Sarajevo. She is in her early twenties and beautiful, with high cheekbones and large, liquid, oval eyes; stylishly dressed in black, carefully made up in white. At first, she is unforthcoming, almost hostile, until I mention the name of a good friend who has been coming regularly to Sarajevo in the worst times of the siege. I add, “You must be totally fed up with all these well-intentioned foreigners always asking the same questions.” “Yes,” she says, and smiles for the first time. “A lot of people come just for themselves, to say they’ve been here, to show off.”

  Now she’d like to ask me something. Why did the West do nothing to help Sarajevo? Sarajevo was a very special place before the war. They lived well, better than many in the West. Now their life is utterly destroyed and degraded. Her brother was just starting to study. But he’s been four years a soldier, and she doesn’t think he can ever return to normal life. And the West has done nothing—nothing—just watched them being killed. She wants to say to UNPRO-FOR, “just clear out and give me a weapon to fight with, and I’ll see if I can avoid being raped or whatever.” Anger polishes her English.

  What is she to do? Perhaps she could emigrate, but she doesn’t want to be a dishwasher somewhere. “My children might become Canadian or whatever, but I wouldn’t be—I’d always be Sarajevan.” At the independent Radio Zid, she and her friends try to pretend they live in a normal country. They do reports on films, play pop music, and give their listeners beauty tips. For example, water after rice has been boiled in it is very good for the skin. She smiles, an angry smile.

  Like it or not (and she doesn’t), Dijana is a Western television producer’s dream victim. Beautiful in black and white, eloquent, bitter. Victim, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein.

  Sarajevo

  For days on end, they sat at home, freezing, in the dark, without electricity, gas, or running water, waiting for a mortar bomb to hit them from the hills. Or they forced themselves to walk to work, although often there was no work to do, risking death by sniper fire at every crossroads. However many descriptions you have read and television reports you’ve watched, until you see the place for yourself you don’t really grasp how its peculiar, unique, and beautiful location lays the whole city out as a kind of super bowl-shaped target for the snipers in the surrounding hills.

  They saw friends wounded or killed. They were degraded in a hundred small, everyday ways. They had to wash themselves and their clothes in a couple of buckets of water. They had to scavenge for firewood. They were impoverished by the black-market prices and the lack of normal incomes. They were humiliated by having to receive charity from visiting foreigners: the discreet envelope, the embarrassed smile. And then there was the noise, early at morning, late at night, as death rained gigantically down.

  Now they are like deep-sea divers dragged too quickly up to the surface. They have psychological divers’ bends. If you, the West, could stop it now—they say—why couldn’t you stop it three years ago? And, because they’re sure we could have stopped it, they feel that what they’ve been through has been senseless. Worse still, British and French soldiers have been here all the time, patrolling the ghetto walls while they were frozen, degraded, bombarded, and picked off like insects.

  Quite a few of those to whom I have introductions—academics, journalists, artists, filmmakers—have their flats in one large modern housing estate in an area called Ciglane. The estate is built up a steep hillside, with staggered balconies and large windows, like a ziggurat, thus offering perfect target practice for Serb artillery. When I join Senada in the tiny Café Herc, in the middle of the estate (only yesterday they took the sandbags down from the front window), an unshaved, weary, mildly tipsy man says, “How I hate foreigners!” They are bitter about the indifference of the West, about those who didn’t come. But now they are also bitter about those who kept coming back—on safari—and then flew out to safety with their Sarajevo tales. “It seemed to us a sort of necrophilia,” says Senada.

  “Who really helped?” I ask Zdravko Grebo, a law professor and director of Radio Zid, whom every visiting foreigner goes to see. “Everyone and no one,” he says. Everyone—even Bianca Jagger, who just stayed for a few hours at the airport—helped a little to draw the world’s attention to what was happening in Sarajevo. But nobody, because the siege went on and on and on.

  But they are bitter, too, about their own friends and colleagues who have left. Sitting in the cramped editorial office of the weekly Dani, an open metal oven burning firewood in the corner, Ozren Kebo talks of “cowardice” and “betrayal.” He describes a pop concert in Zagreb where thousands of Sarajevans wept as a well-known Sarajevan pop group sang the refrain of their hit song, “Sarajevo, I’m staying here.” But they didn’t stay here, says Ozren. He did. With the recent easing of the siege, there’s been another wave of emigration.

  At times, it seems the only people they can still respect, even relate to at all, are
those who have stayed, like them, and gone through the same experience. They are proud of how they’ve continued to produce newspapers, literary quarterlies, weeklies, concerts, radio programs. The cultural resistance. The black humor of the siege. The wonderful posters by the “Trio” artists: “Enjoy Sara-Jevo,” a perfect parody of the famous red-and-white “Enjoy Coca-Cola” poster, or “Enjoy the Winter Olympics, Sarajevo 1994/95,” with the Olympic rings done in barbed wire. (The 1984 Winter Olympics were held here.)

  Suada Kapić, editor of the Survival Guide to Sarajevo, gives me her latest production, a large glossy magazine called LIFE—its title printed with the E reversed—with profiles of people who stayed. (She tells me Time-Life’s lawyers have protested at the infringement of copyright.) Sometimes the pathos of the intellectuals seems a little heavy. And the black humor, too. For example, “What is the difference between Auschwitz and Sarajevo?” “In Sarajevo there’s no gas.” But I hardly feel in a position to say, “Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

  Yet the worst thing is their bitterness about themselves. Four years ago, they led a life as normal and civilized as that of their contemporaries in Budapest or Athens. They enjoyed the easygoing café lifestyle of their own city, went skiing in the hills around Pale, perhaps vacationed in Italy. Now they are reduced to this humiliating role of victim and international zoo exhibit. Zdravko Grebo, unofficial spokesman number one for Sarajevo, says, “You know, since you’re here with Senada, as a friend, I’ll tell you what I really want. What I really want is to be left alone, to get back to my books and my music, not to have to travel to conferences and endlessly answer these questions.”