History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  In the first two years of the siege—the “romantic period”—they still felt they might save their Sarajevo. Fluid. Tolerant. Multiethnic not as the result of a western ideology of multiculturalism—what they ironically call “multi-multi-multi”—but as a historical reality where people of Serb, Croat, Muslim, and increasingly mixed backgrounds and relationships shared the same lifestyle. Or divided, if they divided, not on ethnic lines. (To be sure, all this happened under the authoritarian roof of Titoism. In many places I find black-and-white photographs of the old man still displayed on the wall: in Radio Zid, in the PEN Club, even above two stern rows of Sarajevo rabbis in the headquarters of the Jewish community.) But now they feel this Sarajevo—their Sarajevo—has gone for good.

  Even if the peace holds, they will find themselves in the provincial capital of a rump Bosnian state, with a gently corrupt and mildly authoritarian government. And what there is of cosmopolitan culture will be living off foreign money, as artificial and ultimately as in-authentic and corrupt as the subsidized culture of West Berlin during the cold war.

  The defense of the café has failed.

  But for what some of the same people were saying three years later, see pp. 337-38.

  Karadžić

  At first glance, the poet and critic Marko Vešović, with a forehead like a small cliff and wild, swept-back hair, bears an alarming resemblance to the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. In fact, they are both Montenegrins and before the war were friends. With only the slightest prompting, Marko unfolds his tale of Karadžić.

  Radovan—“Radko” to his friends—came to Sarajevo on his own at the age of fourteen to study at secondary and then medical school. His family had suffered terribly in Montenegro from wartime reprisals by Tito’s communist partisans, and he always hated the communists. He was good-looking, bright, one of the lads. But then, as still a very young man, he made the terrible mistake of impregnating the dreadful Delilija, whom Marko describes as hideous and weighing a hundred kilos. Her father, the manager of the Europa Hotel, forced Radko to marry her and to come and live in their house. But secretly he went on womanizing. That was when his chronic lying began.

  Sonja, now propaganda minister of the Bosnian Serbs, was the child of this ghastly coupling. Marko was put down as her godfather at the christening, but Radko told him about it only afterwards—otherwise, in the Montenegrin tradition, the godfather would have had the right to choose her name.

  Like Marko and Zdravko Grebo, Karadžić took part in the ’68 demonstrations in Sarajevo. But then he got a scholarship to study in America, and they were sure he had agreed to work for the secret police. For years, they shunned him. But eventually they made it up and again attended the hard-drinking “salons,” which he loved to give. He was a charming host.

  He wanted to be a great psychiatrist, but he was too lazy to do any real work. He owed his job at the clinic to his Bosnian Muslim boss, Ismet Cerić, to whom he was devoted. Never—not even in the most intimate, drunken conversation—had Marko heard Karadžić say a word against Muslims. Once he went away to work in Belgrade. But he came back after a few months and told Cerić he couldn’t understand the mentality of the people there. (Those Serbs, you know.)

  Then he wanted to be a great poet. But had no voice of his own. His poetry was all bad imitations of Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet of decadence. When he published a book of poems in 1992, Marko and Nikola Koljević (now also a leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the hills) had to rewrite half the verses for him.

  Just a few months later, Marko turned on the television and there was Karadžić, up in the hills, looking down at Sarajevo through his binoculars and saying, “I could take it in two days.” This from someone who never even served in the army. In this, as in all else, a bragging charlatan. A liar, a trickster, a failure at everything he did.

  Yet as Marko rumbles to the close of his picaresque tale, I think that, after all, Radovan Karadžić has succeeded. He may have to live out the rest of his days in hiding as a war criminal. He may even be caught and tried or simply shot. But he’s famous at last. His name will live on, in the history books and the stories of future generations.

  BOSNIA IN OUR FUTURE

  ONE DAY, SOON, I WANT TO HIJACK HELMUT KOHL, JACQUES CHIRAC, Jacques Santer, and all the other leaders of the European Union, on the way to their latest summit, and I want to fly them to a neighborhood of Sarajevo called Ciglane. There I will drive them, past the graveyards, to the Café Herc, or perhaps, because it has more room, to the Café London. Just for an hour—since I know how busy they all are—I will have them listen to a small group of articulate, English-speaking Sarajevans. Have them listen, not, as they might expect, to yet one more plangent appeal for help, but to the sheer bottomless contempt and bitterness of people who don’t expect anything from them any more. Nothing except empty words.

  After three and a half years, this acid bitterness, so deep and tired that even the black humor of the earlier siege time hardly surfaces any more, extends to almost everyone. To anything in a blue helmet, of course. To all the endless foreign visitors on their Sarajevo safaris. But now even to some of those journalists, intellectuals, and aid workers who came early and really tried to help; even to their own Sarajevan friends who have left; even, worst of all, to themselves, for being forced into this humiliating role of victim. Yet somewhere very near the bottom of the pile is this thing which still calls itself “Europe.”

  Then, when I have got our European leaders safely back to their comfortable hotels in Brussels or Paris or Barcelona, I should like to see if they can still go on smoothly delivering their soft, prefabricated speeches about our Europe of peace and progress and ever closer union.

  1

  There are so many defeats and failures involved in Bosnia, so many dimensions and intricacies to the whole larger history of former Yugoslavia, that one hardly knows where to begin. But, at a moment when America is calling all the diplomatic shots over Bosnia, I will, perversely perhaps but not illogically, begin with Europe.

  Most people brought up in Western Europe during the cold war have imbibed, consciously or half wittingly, a Whig interpretation of European history. European history since 1945 has been told to them essentially as a story of progress toward more prosperity, more freedom, more democracy, more unity in something now ideologically called the European Union. What is more, in the 1970s and 1980s people in Eastern Europe increasingly came to believe this story. This is one of the reasons why, in 1989, they voted communism away and set out to “return to Europe.” Nineteen eighty-nine was thus the greatest triumph of this idea—but also, it now seems, its apogee.

  For since then we have, in the southeastern part of Europe, gone almost all the way back. Here there was violent conflict in the province of Kosovo already in 1989, even as the Berlin Wall fell. Within two years, there was outright war between Serbia and Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia, then between Serbians, Croatians, and Bosniaks in Bosnia. With it came a rapid descent to atrocities not seen in Europe for fifty years. These atrocities do not merely reproduce but also, so to speak, elaborate upon the already formidable repertoire of European barbarism from 1939 to 1945.

  It is not just war without quarter, massacres of civilians, camps, systematic rapes, mutilation of corpses, but also new refinements of the old European art of ethnic cleansing and the refined psychological torture of the siege of Sarajevo—to name but two innovations. Only the worst horror of them all—the systematic attempt to exterminate a whole people, as in the Holocaust of European Jewry—has so far been lacking, although there have been attempts at systematic extermination of Bosnian elites and men of military age. Now, in the Croatian Krajina, we see a familiar last act: Serbian men, women, and children fleeing on their tractors from villages where their people have lived for hundreds of years, as punishment for the sins of their compatriots—just like the Germans from the Sudetenland and Silesia in 1945. But Bosnia has still not reached its 1945.

  Early in the siege
of Sarajevo, there appeared on the wall of the half-ruined post office the familiar Serb graffito “This is Serbia!” Someone scrawled underneath, “No, you idiot, it’s a post office!” My friend Konstanty Gebert has written a whole book about that line, about the defense of the post office. But I want to add a line of my own: “This is Europe!” For all these things have been done by Europeans to other Europeans in Europe. That in itself should be enough to remind us that the story of recent European history that we have been telling ourselves and our children is little better than a fairy tale. And yet our politicians go on telling it.

  The double-think is truly surreal. “War in Europe has become unthinkable,” say our leaders. Crash go the shells into Sarajevo and Srebrenica and a thousand other towns and villages.

  2

  Of course, the war in former Yugoslavia, though entirely comparable in brutality with all but the ultimate horror of the Second World War, is not comparable in scale. But, in two respects, our own relationship to it is worse. In the Second World War, most people in the countries fighting Nazism did not, at the time, know the full extent of the horrors; and, anyway, we were at war with Nazism. But here, sitting in peace and comfort, we have watched it all on our television screens. The Warsaw ghetto in installments, every night at nine. Death brought to us live.

  If there was then the question “Why did the heavens not open?” there is even more of a question now. Why did all this coverage, these harrowing accounts by brave reporters, fail to mobilize Western European public opinion? Is it because of the Rambo loop? The young male fighters we see charging across our screens, with black headbands and cross-slung ammunition belts, partly model themselves on Rambo, but they also look to the viewer like Rambo—that is, fiction. Reality, partly modeling itself on virtual reality, is taken for unreal. Or is it the sheer complexity of the story? “Bosnia is our Spain,” says the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. But this is so much more complicated, and even Spain, as Orwell reminded us in Homage to Catalonia, was complicated enough. Another French intellectual, Alain Finkielkraut, has told us how to be Croats; but Croats, too, have now been ethnic cleansers. And so on.

  Worse still, we have not just watched from our ringside seats while people are murdered and Bosnia torn apart. Representing the European Community on a diplomatic mission to Yugoslavia as the war began in the summer of 1991, M. Jacques Poos proclaimed that “The hour of Europe has dawned.” America should kindly leave this one to us. As foreign minister of Luxembourg, M. Poos informed the peoples of disintegrating Yugoslavia that small states have no future. Ever since that aptly ridiculous moment, the states supposedly united in the European Union, and especially Britain, France, and Germany, have been directly involved in what has happened. At the very latest since the imposition of the arms embargo on Bosnia, we have directly affected the military balance of this war and become, willy-nilly, a party to the destruction. Not just we Europeans, of course. Plainly, the UN bears its own specific responsibility; and the United States and other non-European states, too.

  The point here is not to pick over, once again, the whole tortuous diplomatic and military history of the four years from, as it were, Jacques Poos to Richard Holbrooke, deploying the documentary CD-ROM now available with David Owen’s memoirs to demonstrate that the Germans were most to blame here, or the British there. Nor is it to distinguish, as one clearly should, between individual politicians, officials, and UN commanders on the ground. The point is simply to restate a few bald facts about Europe’s failure. In the last four years, we have failed to prevent the destruction and partition of a once peaceful and still beautiful part of Europe, with perhaps a quarter of a million people killed and more than two million made homeless. To many a professional soldier’s profound frustration and anger, British and French soldiers have had to sit there on the ghetto walls while the people inside were humiliated and shot. Worst of all, there is the supposed UN “safe area” of Srebrenica, where Dutch UN soldiers this summer stood by (if not worse) while Bosnian men were taken off to be killed.

  Apart from the valiant but largely vain efforts of Hans Koschnick, the EU administrator of Mostar, the EU as such is represented in Bosnia only by its monitors, known locally as “the ice-cream men” because of their ludicrous uniform of white shirts, white pullovers, white trousers, and white plimsolls. Cricket umpires whom no one obeys. Yet when all is said and done, the ice-cream men seem less caricatures than pretty fair representations of the external policy of that thing called Europe, which looked so bright and hopeful just four years ago.

  3

  Now for the excuses. First, there is the diplomat’s eternal refrain: “What would you have done?” “What was the alternative?” Well, of course we never can know “What would have happened if …” For example, if we had done nothing—including, that is, not stopping anyone get arms—then it is possible that Bosnia would have been simply obliterated, partitioned between a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia, as the postcommunist opportunist Slobodan Milošević (who started it) and the postcommunist nationalist Franjo Tudjman (who has come out on top) discussed at their secret meeting at Tito’s villa in Karadjordjevo in March 1991. But it is also possible that the Bosnians would somehow have defended more of their territory, as they somehow defended most of Sarajevo in 1992. We can only make an informed guess.

  Many of the “What was the alternative?” arguments, however, actually come back to the question of political will in the West, and specifically in Western Europe. Few soldiers will disagree with the proposition that what we have done militarily to stop the worst of the siege of Sarajevo could have been done militarily three years ago. All along, the professional soldiers were saying that we needed a large force—of the order of sixty thousand men—to stop the fighting in Bosnia. If that is what we are proposing to put in now, why did we not do it then? Ah, because there has been “a process of ripening,” one is told; because it needed three years of our masterly diplomacy to detach Milošević from Karadžić. But Karadžić himself says that ten thousand men could have stopped him.1

  And then we get to the point: that we were simply not ready to do it then. But who is “we” in this sentence? The talk turns to the reluctance of parliaments, to how public opinion would have reacted to our soldiers coming back in body bags. Actually, the British and French publics are probably less sensitive to the famous “body bags” than is American public opinion, so long as they can be persuaded that the end is good and the means patriotic. But nobody even tried to persuade them. Whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher, you can’t help wondering what might have happened if she had still been in charge.

  In the second line of excuses, there is a whole regiment of arguments from cultural prejudice. Here are the old saws about ancient hatreds and atavistic tribes. “We can’t stop people who want to kill each other,” I recently heard a senior EU official say. Here is the view that, after all, what else can you expect of the Balkans? This view is particularly associated in the United States with Robert Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghosts but implicit in a great many other analyses and commentaries. Unfortunately, too, the idea of “Central Europe,” revived in the 1980s as a political-cultural distinction against the Soviet “East,” has now been turned southward against “the Balkans,” in effect trying to make it easier for Poles and Czechs to get into the EU by suggesting that Croats, Bosnians, or Bulgarians belong to a different world. Cultural determinism as an instrument of foreign policy. And then there is the view, quite widespread among the Western diplomats and soldiers involved, that all sides are as bad as each other—meaning, in particular, that the Bosnian government side is no better than the Serbs or Croats. So a plague on all their houses.

  Now, plainly, it is important not to fall into the opposite mistake: selective idealization rather than collective demonization. To suggest that Bosnia was, as it were, a Switzerland invaded by a Nazi Serbia; that Sarajevo in 1990 was a hotbed of European genius, like Vienna in 1900; that the victims must always be guiltle
ss, because that makes things morally and aesthetically easy for their foreign supporters; and that the current Bosnian state is a model multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious, multieverything liberal democracy. This is the story that some Bosnian politicians will still try to tell you, but it is not the story that Messrs. Kohl, Chirac, and Santer will be told when I have sat them down in that café in Ciglane.

  With a self-restraint and honesty that is in the circumstances quite remarkable, the surviving liberal intellectuals of Sarajevo (who are obviously, by definition, not typical, here as everywhere else) tell a much more subtle and therefore more convincing story. They are the first to be ironic about the ideological flag of what they call “multi-multi-multi,” which has been hoisted over their city and the remains of their country.

  In crude summary, the story goes something like this. For centuries, Bosnia was, as everyone knows, a unique meeting place of east, west, and south, Orthodox, Catholic, Bogomil, Muslim, Jew, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and, from the late nineteenth century, self-consciously national Serb and Croat. Coexistence was often fragile, consisting in a peaceful living side by side rather than mixing, a respecting rather than accepting the other’s customs. It was punctuated in the first half of the twentieth century by two horrible periods of war and internecine conflict along both ethnic and political lines. After 1945, however, under Tito’s iron roof of “brotherhood and unity,” not only was coexistence restored but the mixing advanced. To this mixing, many factors contributed—not least urbanization, secularization, and some assimilation to a Yugoslav identity.

  Naturally, this process went furthest in the city of Sarajevo and furthest of all among the younger generation, who had their own zany version of post-’68 youth culture. An editor of the monthly Dani tells me he and his friends are fighting for “freedom, human rights, and urban culture,” and when I query the term urban culture he shoots back, in English, “Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” It may not have been the world’s most creative or exciting place. Many of the best and brightest left, especially for Belgrade. But it had real beauty and charm, a civilized lifestyle, the café raised to an art form.