History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  For Westerners, the skeleton in the mayor’s cupboard is his past support for the Bosnian Serbs and his infamous meeting with Radovan Karadžić in Pale. He defends this vigorously. If he hadn’t met Karadžić, he says, the national card would have been left entirely in the hands of Milošević. What is more, the West began to take him seriously only when, helped by this tactical nationalism, the Serb electorate started to take him seriously. Western criticism is so much humbug. (In fact—this is my comment, not Djindjić’s—the West is not unlike that Serb peasant, supporting the opposition once it is in power.)

  Diverse as they are, all the opposition leaders agree on one thing: They are still weak and divided, while Milošević has many cards to play. Despite recent donations by big businessmen such as Karić, now hedging their political bets, the opposition parties are still woefully underfunded and without proper organizations. The deep historical, political, and personal differences between the leaders are scarcely papered over by the facade of “Together”-ness. To give the opposition more time on the state-controlled media, as they demand at the rally, might actually be a clever move for Milošević. The more they talk, the more they will expose their differences, while Milošević can maintain his remote, statesmanlike silence. Though many claim the mantle of “the Serb Havel,” there is no single figure to unite the opposition vote.

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  No one excludes the possibility of a sudden and violent overthrow of Milošević. The comparisons people make here are not with Poland or Hungary but with Romania (the end of the Ceauşescus), Bulgaria (the parliament besieged), and, of course, Albania. “Remember,” everyone says, “this is the Balkans.” The catalyst might be a further, precipitate worsening of the economy, leading to violent protests by the unemployed or underemployed workers and worker-peasants, rather than just students and city folk. (Vesna Pesič, a sociologist by profession, gives me a small lecture on how the usual social classifications no longer apply to Serbia, but the basic point stands.)

  Barring this, however, people expect any peaceful political change to be long-drawn-out and messy. Serbian political scientists struggle to characterize the Milošević regime. It is not simply a dictatorship, says one. It is “half-legitimate,” says another. A third adapts a Latin American term to say “demokratura”: a new combination of democracy and dictatorship. Yes, Milošević still has an active secret police, though mainly for collecting information rather than for direct repression. Yes, the army is still vital, although during the demonstrations its commander signaled that it was not available for shooting students. But more important from day to day is the systematic manipulation of public opinion through the media and through the dubiously gained fortunes of business supporters both of Milošević’s own Socialist Party of Serbia and of the neocommunist Yugoslav Unity League of his influential wife, Mira Marković, who in popular mythology takes the part of Lady Macbeth.

  Yes, they tamper with the election results. But, even allowing for electoral fraud, Milošević has won a series of at least formally free elections since 1990. Although Zajedno came out ahead in the local-government elections in November 1996, the government coalition, of his and her parties, still won the more important federal elections held at the same time. According to the official figures, it got 45 percent of the vote, with a further, alarming, 19 percent going to the far-right nationalist party of Vojislav Šešelj, a notorious paramilitary commander in the Bosnian war.

  The opposition leaders hope that Milošević’s position has since been eroded by the demonstrations and their own arrival in local government, but everyone assumes that he still has significant popular support. For an outsider, this is the great mystery. Consider what Milošević has done for them. Ten years ago there was a country called Yugoslavia, “and I thought it was in Europe,” says my friend Ognjen Pribičević, one of Belgrade’s brightest political analysts. Economically, they were quite well off compared to the Czechs or Poles. Belgrade looked smarter than Warsaw. Schools and courts functioned more or less normally. They could travel freely. Yugoslavia had a good name in the world.

  Now they live in a country known as Serbia, and it is—everyone agrees—not in Europe but in the Balkans. (Before I came out I looked in five popular tourist guidebooks to Europe. Serbia featured in none of them.) Serbia is an international pariah. To be a Serb abroad is like being a German after 1945. Provided, that is, you can even get abroad. You need a visa for almost everywhere. Distinguished professors stand in line for five hours in the cold and are then refused.

  Physically, the whole place is battered and run-down. Belgrade reminds me of Warsaw in the late 1970s. If you look at the cars, the clothes, the shop windows, you feel that Poland and Yugoslavia have changed places. According to the (unreliable) statistics, average per-capita income has shrunk from around $3,000 to less than $1,000. The official unemployment figure is close to 50 percent. I visit Kragujevac, a town once made prosperous by the large Zastava car, truck, and arms factory. The war decimated the production of cars (since parts came from all over the former Yugoslavia) but was good for the arms factory. Now the peace has cut the production of arms. Most of the Zastava factory workers are paid some $20 to $25 a month for doing nothing. They line the streets selling black-market goods: trinkets, Nescafé, chocolate bars, cigarettes smuggled in via Montenegro.

  Back in Belgrade, I am taken to a vast black-market bazaar, full of new Western consumer goods, all imported without paying taxes. There is a great double line of people hawking Western cigarettes, but watch out for the “Marlboros”: They are made in Montenegro. Fake Calvin Klein, Versace, and Nike clothes adorn the stalls—mainly produced, I am told, in the Sandjak of Novi Pazar.

  Crime, corruption, and lawlessness are endemic. A notice in the hotel foyer asks you to hand over your personal firearms to the hotel security department. A security man hovers watchfully with a metal detector: Does my tweed jacket suggest a local criminal or a Western businessman? I have never seen so many obvious gangsters, not even in Russia. I note that the phrase used about the election fraud is “when Milošević stole the elections.” Elections are just one of so many things being stolen here.

  People don’t trust the banks, so they keep their money in cash. Here, as throughout former Yugoslavia, the deutsche mark is the real currency. “I don’t take dollars,” says one small businessman—“they are too easily forged.” When your money is stolen, you have no redress. Insurance? You’re joking. And the courts? A friend is meant, according to the law, to inherit a flat. But to get it he needs to pay DM 10,000—as a bribe to the judge.

  Politics and corruption are deeply intertwined, as in all the post-communist demokraturas. The ruling parties run much of the state as a private business; private businesses protect themselves by supporting the ruling parties. But one would not like to inquire too closely into the finances of opposition parties, either. The moral environment is as degraded as the physical one.

  And what of the Serbs for whom the nationalist standard was supposedly raised: the Serbs in Kosovo, the Serbs “across the Drina” in Bosnia, the Serbs in Croatia? The Serbs in the Krajina, in Croatia, have been completely expelled. The remaining Serbs in Bosnia, impoverished and brutalized, wander around the remnants of their tinpot para-state. There are at least five hundred thousand Serb refugees in Serbia, most of them still without citizenship, let alone economic assistance from the state. In Belgrade, I talk to one woman whose plundered house I visited in the Krajina in 1995. She says, “I live here like a zombie.”

  WHAT A TRIUMPHANT RECORD of achievement! And yet people still support him. Why? Since I cannot talk individually to three million people, I have the usual frustrating experience of listening to intellectual, elite explanations of what “the people” think, supplemented by opinion polls, anecdotes, and a few personal encounters. (“Vox pop” in the foreign correspondent’s knowingly ironic phrase.) First, this is, after all, a homegrown system, unlike the foreign-imposed regimes of the former Eastern Europe. Second, the
intellectuals say, there is a Balkan, backward, authoritarian political culture, which always looks to a strongman in power. (Would they have said that fifteen years ago, in old Yugoslavia?) Third, there is a kind of residual socialist conservatism, fearing the plunge into economic freedom and clinging even to the pittance the Kragujevac worker has, for fear of losing that, too. (Milošević talks a lot about privatization but does relatively little—partly, it is said, because his wife is opposed to it on ideological grounds.) Finally, Milošević has created a national siege mentality, in which everything is blamed on the hostile outside world: the Croats, the Germans, Western sanctions. This has been a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy. He started by telling them that everyone was ganging up against the Serbs—then made it so.

  As usual, the generalizations are impossible to prove; and if people soon speak otherwise, through the ballot box or on the streets, that may merely show how things have changed. But I do get a small personal sample of this mental state. A civil servant in one of the ministries, a nice family man and skilled technician, tells me he telephones the private television station BK to complain every time the pope appears on the screen, “because he’s our greatest enemy.” The pope, the Germans, the Americans: all against us. A retired major of the Yugoslav National Army—short, fat, bulging out of his grimy trousers—tells me he blames the current misery on what he calls “the American sanctions” and on the “immigrants” who come here taking all the jobs and scrounging. But these “immigrants” are actually the Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia.

  Sanctions were imposed, he says, because Muslims bombed Muslims in the marketplace in Sarajevo. And Srebrenica? “That was also Muslims killing Muslims.” He squats on his sofa like a wary toad. But why on earth would Muslims kill Muslims? Well, the Serbs tried to drive them out and they got frightened, “so they started killing each other.”

  The Zajedno opposition leaders are no good, the retired major continues, because they are not true Serbs: Djindjić was born in Bosnia, Drašković comes from Herzegovina and had a Muslim best man at his wedding. Oh yes, and his father was a communist. But wasn’t Milošević once a communist? “No, he was a banker.” The major doesn’t approve of falsifying the local election results, but he’s sure Milošević didn’t know about that: “It was the people around him.” Incidentally, he says, apropos of nothing in particular, he’d like me to know that his wife’s best friend is Jewish. In fact, his own best friend is Jewish, too.

  As I rise to leave, his wife—a schoolteacher—rather ceremoniously tells me that the Serbs still like the English, in spite of everything (i.e., everything we English have done to the poor Serbs). She hopes this conversation has given me a better picture of their country.

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  To make a modern liberal democracy out of this degraded, re-Balkanized society, suffused with national self-pity and psychological denial, would be difficult enough if the Serbs were alone with their problems in a single, clearly defined nation-state. But they are not. This is not just a matter of the remaining “Serbs outside Serbia.” Inside the present rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Serbs comprise only some two thirds of the population (or perhaps slightly more if one were to count the Serb refugees). Another 6 percent are Montenegrins, with their own semi-independent republic within the federation. At least 15 percent are Albanians—perhaps as many as two million of them, concentrated in the southern province of Kosovo.

  As so often before in Balkan and east European history, the unresolved national question cuts across, and frustrates, the attempt to democratize and modernize. As so often before, the Great Powers are called upon to sort out the mess—and end up making it worse. Diplomatic history is present in every conversation. I have never heard the Congress of Berlin mentioned so often. Talk of the frontiers, and people immediately say, “London Protocol!” The reference is to a secret treaty of 1915. “In the war …” they say, and you don’t know if we are in the First World War, the Second World War, or the most recent war. In the political imagination, the last 120 years are wired in parallel rather than in series. Dayton (1995) exists simultaneously with the Congress of Berlin (1878). For all its claimed union, “Europe” still means Britain, France, and Germany. Russia, the Orthodox brother country, features only at the margin. For real solutions you look to America. That is the lesson they all draw from the agreement signed in Ohio, USA. But can Dayton seriously be described as a solution?

  Bosnia features surprisingly little in discussions in Belgrade. The great outstanding national conundrum is now Kosovo. Kosovo is the question members of the opposition dread, because they have no answer to it. Kosovo reduces even the ebullient students to baffled silence. As all readers of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon know, Kosovo, where the Serbs lost a great battle against the Turks in 1389, has traditionally been regarded by Serbs as the mystical heartland of their great medieval state and national identity. Vuk Drašković repeats to me the familiar description “our Jerusalem.” The Serbian-Byzantine monasteries with their exquisite frescoes are still there. But 90 percent of the population is now Albanian. As you drive through the province, you see all around you, dotted across the fields, the unmistakable homesteads of Albanian extended families: several houses and sheds surrounded by a single high brick wall with a large wooden gate, like a makeshift castle. They have quite literally occupied the land.

  In the 1980s, Kosovo was (under Tito’s 1974 constitution) an autonomous province, with a largely Albanian administration. Although an Albanian rising in 1981 failed to achieve the status of a full republic, many of the Serbs were still leaving, often being forced out by discrimination and violence. In April 1987, Slobodan Milošević came to Kosovo and told the local Serbs, “No one should dare to beat you!” With this battle cry, he mounted the Serb nationalist horse and rode it—assisted ably by politicians of other nationalities and especially by the Croat Franjo Tudjman—to the bloody destruction of Yugoslavia. Kosovo itself was stripped of autonomy and placed under direct Serb administration. The Kosovar Albanians responded with the declaration of an independent Republic of Kosova (as they spell it) and extraordinary underground elections in which a majority voted for a Democratic League of Kosova. Its leader, Ibrahim Rugova, became “president of the republic.”

  Their headquarters is a large hut in the middle of a dusty bus park, full of picture-book hawkers and spitters. At the door, I am met incongruously by the “head of protocol,” who ushers me in to see “the president.” In passable French, Mr. Rugova tells me about their extraordinary underground state: the eighteen thousand schoolteachers they fund from unofficial taxes, which Kosovar Albanians pay in addition to the official Serb ones; the independent university; the attempt at health care, through an organization named after Mother Teresa. Mr. Rugova’s immediate demand is merely for an alleviation of the repression. While the Serb police dare not touch him, they regularly harass lower-level activists. He insists on Gandhiesque peaceful means and has explicitly cautioned his followers against following the example of armed insurrection across the border in Albania. But on the central goal he is quite unyielding: self-determination for his people, statehood for the republic, which he claims already exists.

  His main rival, Adem Demaci—sometimes called “the Albanian Mandela,” on account of his twenty-eight years in prison—sits opposite me on a chair in his new party headquarters and, Gandhi-like, pulls up his legs into the lotus position. He might settle for slightly less than Rugova: a republic within a very loose confederation with Serbia and Montenegro. But he wants more dramatic protest actions to achieve it. He has called on his followers to imitate the student and opposition demonstrations in Belgrade.

  That is the Kosovar Albanian mainstream. But in the last year there have also been a number of terrorist attacks, with responsibility claimed by a Kosovo Liberation Army. Are these the work of impatient young radicals, like the young Palestinians in Gaza? Or are they secretly encouraged by the Serbian leader? Even sober political observers s
peculate that a cornered Milošević, faced with total economic collapse and massive popular calls for his resignation, might in desperation play the Kosovo card, provoking a terrorist assault or armed rising, which he could then heroically suppress.

  For the time being, no one I speak to thinks the Kosovar Albanians are about to follow the example of their compatriots across the border. And this for one simple reason: Even if large quantities of small arms were to be smuggled in from the plundered arsenals of Albania, the heavily armed and professionally trained Serb army could immediately wreak terrible vengeance. “You see,” both Serbs and Albanians tell me, with chilling matter-of-factness, “there are some seven hundred purely Albanian villages. So the people there could all be killed.”

  Yet everyone talks of the longer-term possibility of war—and the seeming impossibility of any peaceful solution. The positions are so far apart now, the Serb and Albanian communities so utterly alienated. When a local Albanian leader makes an appointment with my companion, a Serb journalist, he won’t even say the name of the street in which he lives—because it’s a Serb name. I visit a state school divided by an internal Berlin Wall, so that Serb and Albanian children never meet.

  Each side speaks to you out of national martyrologies, underpinned with fantastic historical statistics. I ask the information secretary of the local Serb administration about the ethnic composition of the province. “In the twelfth century,” he begins, “the Serbs were 98 percent of the population.” “In the 1980s,” says one of Mr. Rugova’s key aides, “Kosovar Albanians served a total of twenty-seven thousand years in prison.” The mutual stereotypes are equally fantastic. The Albanians portray the local Serbs as cock-a-hoop, triumphantly ruling the roost, whereas I find them, in fact, profoundly depressed and frightened. The Serbs see the Albanians as part of some diabolic conspiracy, deliberately having so many children and spreading across the land so as to realize the “Prizren program” for a Greater Albania. (The League of Prizren, as readers will doubtless recall, was the Albanian national grouping after 1878.)