History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Not only has he kept saying these things on eighty-four foreign trips, from Argentina to Yamoussoukro. He has also dramatized them, with the skills of the professional actor he once nearly became. He has, as Princess Diana had, the ability to present compassion in a single photogenic image: the gentle embrace of a crippled child, the head bowed in sadness at a place of horror. Yet he can also make the mighty tremble. Literally so in the case of General Jaruzelski, whose knees we could see visibly shaking before he met John Paul II in 1983: “But only at the beginning,” the pope commented kindly.

  IT’S MAGNIFICENT, but has it been effective? This is much harder to judge than in the case of ordinary politicians. For how can you measure the effects of small changes in millions of human hearts? His old friend Father Józef Tischner said that the Solidarity movement in Poland was “a forest of awakened consciences.” Such forests are usually invisible.

  Politically, his most obvious contribution was to the end of communism. Gorbachev himself says, “Everything that happened in Eastern Europe would have been impossible without the presence of the pope.” I would add “including Gorbachev.” My argument is in two stages. First: without the pope, no Solidarity in Poland. His great pilgrimage in 1979 broke the barrier of fear and created the solidarity that paved the way for Solidarity. This was far more important than anything in his biographer Carl Bernstein’s overexcited tale of a “secret alliance” between the Vatican and the CIA.

  Second: without Solidarity, no Gorbachev. I don’t mean, of course, that Gorbachev would not have emerged as Soviet leader. I mean that he would not have made his seminal revision of Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe unless the persistence of Solidarity— despite Jaruzelski ’s tanks—had shown him that the Soviet Union just could not carry on in the old way. When Gorbachev gave an inch, the Poles took a mile. Here is the specific chain of causation that goes from the election of the Polish pope in 1978 to the end of communism, and hence of the cold war, in 1989.

  If this was his clearest positive contribution to world history, then his largest negative contribution has been his opposition to all forms of artificial contraception. Here, too, he has been nothing if not consistent. He came to this position after thinking deeply about love, marriage, and sexuality as a young priest. He personally encouraged Paul VI to take his stand against the pill in the fateful 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae (“On human life”). He once said to a friend who challenged him on the subject, “I can’t change what I’ve been teaching all my life.” But the result has been much needless, avoidable suffering, as poor women in the Third World, denied contraceptives or proper education on birth control, have brought unwanted children into lives of misery. Yes, that very poverty and misery against which his own heart cries out.

  After seeing off communism in the 1980s, he has spent the 1990s attacking the evils of unbridled capitalism. He tells us, far more robustly than any of the supposedly left-wing parties that again rule in much of Europe, that the rich still exploit the poor and the North damages the South. He says we are caught up in the pursuit of “having” at the expense of “being.” He says consumerism is “a web of false and superficial gratifications.” Turning red in the face with anger, he rails against liberty decayed into license, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, drugs, relativism, and postmodernism. Most people, even in his native Poland, ignore the old man’s warnings. But are we really so sure there is no truth in what he says about our world—a world more free than it has ever been before?

  AS I WRITE, I have before me a little book, some five inches by three. A miniature anthology of the pope’s teaching, it’s called Agenda for the Third Millennium. Who else would dare such a title? I can’t get anywhere with half of it, because I, like most of humankind, no longer believe. But there are things in the other half that I find magnificent, rich, and true. And important, too, for the next twenty years—never mind the next thousand. It may not be the agenda for our time. But do any of us have a better one?

  CHRONOLOGY

  1998

  21 OCTOBER. Former communist Massimo D’Alema becomes prime minister of Italy forming the fifty-sixth Italian government since 1945.

  21 NOVEMBER. New German foreign minister Joschka Fischer provokes controversy by suggesting that NATO should adopt a doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons.

  CRY, THE DISMEMEMBERED COUNTRY

  ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS COUNTRY CALLED YUGOSLAVIA. It was a medium-sized country in the southeast of Europe, and more than twenty-three million people lived there. It was not democratic, but it had a fair name in the world. Its king was called Tito. Being both largely rural and socialist, this country was not rich. But it was getting a little richer. Most of its children grew up thinking they were Yugoslavs. They had other identities, too, and strong ones. Slovenes already talked of the “narrower homeland,” meaning Slovenia, and the “wider homeland,” meaning Yugoslavia. Its Albanians were always Albanians. Still, it was a country.

  In the last decade of the twentieth century, this European country has been torn apart. At least 150,000 and perhaps as many as 250,000 men, women, and children have died in the process. And how they have died: with their eyes gouged out or their throats cut with rusty knives, women after deliberate ethnic rape, men with their own severed genitalia stuffed into their mouths. More than two million former Yugoslavs have been driven out of their homes by other former Yugoslavs, and many deprived of everything but what they could carry in precipitous flight.

  In this former country, the grotesque spectacle of a whole village burned, looted, and trashed has become an entirely normal sight. “Yeah, the usual story,” says the journalist, and drives on. A few have grown rich: mainly war profiteers, gangsters, and politicians—the three being sometimes hard to distinguish. The rest, save in Slovenia, have been impoverished, degraded, and corrupted too. Real wages in Serbia are estimated to be at the level of 1959—in the rare event of you actually being paid a wage. In Kosovo, the killing, burning, plundering, and expelling went on throughout the summer of 1998, even as West Europeans took their holidays just a few miles away. It went on though the leaders of the West had all repeatedly declared it would never, ever be allowed to happen again. Not after Bosnia.

  If you look at a current political map of Europe, you may conclude that the former country is now five states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (known to diplomats as the FRY, pronounced as in “French fries”). But the reality on the ground is at least nine parts. Bosnia is still divided between a “Serb Republic” (Republika Srpska) and a Croat-Bosniak Federation, which itself is effectively divided between Croat-controlled and Bosniak- (or “Muslim”-) controlled areas. The FRY is divided between what may loosely be called “Serbia proper,” Kosovo, and the increasingly independent-minded republic of Montenegro. But even “Serbia proper” should be disaggregated to notice the northern province of the Vojvodina, with its large Hungarian minority, and—oh, delight to the diplomatic historian!—the still partly muslim-settled Sandjak of Novi Pazar. Perhaps one should also distinguish the Albanian-settled areas from the rest of Macedonia. That makes twelve ethnically defined parts to be going on with.

  It’s not just we in the West who are largely indifferent. Most inhabitants of most of these dismembered parts themselves live in growing indifference or active antipathy to each other. In Ljubljana, a cultured Slovene woman tells me sadly that her children cannot enjoy the wonderful work of Serbian writers because they no longer read the Cyrillic alphabet. Why, she exclaims, they don’t even understand Croatian! In Sarajevo, a local veteran of the siege says, “You know, if I’m honest, we watched the television pictures from Kosovo this summer much as I suppose Westerners watched the pictures from Sarajevo.” But the feeling is reciprocated. In Priština, the capital of Kosovo, a leading representative of the mainly muslim Albanians tells me, “We don’t feel any fellowship with muslims in Bosnia, because they are Slavs.” In fact, the two groups have diametrically opp
osed goals: Bosnian “muslims” want to keep together a multiethnic state, Kosovar Albanian “muslims” want ethnic separation.1

  Across this landscape of extraordinary ethno-linguistic-religious-historical-political complexity crawl the white-and-orange vehicles of an international presence that, in its different, political-bureaucratic way, is just as complicated. SFOR, OHR, UNHCR, MSF, CARE, OSCE, USKDOM, EUKDOM, RUSKDOM: international alphabet soup poured over Balkan goulash. Americans may be the new Habsburg governors here, but French deputies tussle with British ones for priority at court, while earnest Scandinavians get on with laying the phone lines. At Sarajevo Airport, I sit next to a man whose shoulder badge proclaims “Icelandic Police.” Perhaps that Icelandic policeman will now be sent to Kosovo, to keep peace among the dervishes of Orahovac.2

  Faced with such complexity, it’s no wonder newspaper and television reports have largely stuck to a few simple, well-tried stories: bang-bang-bang, mutilated corpse, old woman weeps into dirty handkerchief, ruined mosque/church/town, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke meets Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, NATO bombers at Italian airbase, preparing not to bomb. Yawn. In truth, it needs a whole book to do justice to each single part. Here, I shall confine myself to reporting some of what I saw, in winter 1998, in just three closely related parts of the post-Yugoslav jigsaw: Kosovo, Macedonia, and Belgrade. But then I shall draw a few larger conclusions.

  1

  KOSOVO

  The fresh red blood on the fresh white snow looks unreal, like a new avant-garde exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London. But it is entirely real. This is the blood of two dead Serb policemen, shot at dawn, almost certainly by the soldiers of a tough local commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), violating the October cease-fire. The blood lies, symbolically, just beneath a ruined mosque, in the middle of an Albanian village that those Serb forces have systematically destroyed. Now the women of one of the few Albanian families daring to remain here are telling us how the Serb police beat them up after the assassination.

  Earlier, we drive through the town of Mališevo, which has been called “the most dangerous place in Europe.” This summer it was the bustling unofficial capital of the KLA’s “liberated” heartland of Drenica. They even had their own KLA number plates. Now Mališevo is completely ruined and deserted, its shopping center reduced to rubble and pulverized glass. The only people visible are heavily armed Serb police, behind their sandbags in a makeshift, fortified police station. Instead of shoppers, there are large packs of dogs scavenging, as many as twenty together, presumably domestic animals gone feral. You see these dogs all over the province and their corpses lying on the roads.

  Farther down the empty highway, we find a solitary Albanian farmer trying to rescue his car. As we stop to help him, we face a surreal sight. A large, orange-painted armored car, of the American type known colloquially as a Humvee, slowly and silently approaches. Right behind it trundles a long convoy of blue-painted armored vehicles, packed with heavily armed Serb police in their blue combat uniforms. In the middle of the convoy there are some very nasty-looking men in an unmarked white jeep. The farmer is terrified: “If the Americans weren’t there, the police would beat us up.”

  Later, he shows us his farmstead. Behind the high rough walls with which the Albanians surround the property of an extended family, we find two substantial houses, both blown up and looted. The families huddle together in one small basement room. “We can’t come back here while the Serbs are in the police station,” they say. “We can’t live under Serbia.”

  Farther on, we turn into the village of Dragobilje. Just a hundred yards off the main road patrolled by the Serb police, we meet the KLA in their brown-and-green camouflage gear. A thickset, bearded man, with hand grenades slung in a belt around his chest, speaks with us on behalf of the “122nd Brigade.” When we ask his identity, he gives his code name: “Journalist.” He explains that he actually was a journalist in Priština before the war. They are currently respecting the cease-fire, he says, but they are ready to fight again at any time for a free Kosovo. Meanwhile, several carloads of men in KLA uniforms come bucking down the muddy back lane, dodging the horned cattle and the tractor trailers carrying old men wearing traditional white caps. It’s their own local version of a Ho Chi Minh trail.

  As we drive out of Dragobilje, we see the same orange-painted Humvee halted at the roadside. Beside it, a burly American monitor is talking to a local leader. “Don’t let your guys in uniform be visible from the main road, because that will provoke them [i.e., the Serbs],” says the monitor. When the local leader starts talking about the bitter past, this quiet American says, “All you can do is look ahead—just look ahead.” And he offers help to get their school and hospital open again. “What do you need? Plastic? Just tell us what you need.”

  Another day, another ruined village in the snow, another guerrilla stronghold: Lauša to the Serbs, Llaushe for the Albanians. This was where the KLA first showed its face in public, on 28 November 1997, when two uniformed soldiers unmasked themselves and delivered a liberation speech at the funeral of a local schoolteacher shot by the Serbs.3 Now two of the Geci brothers contemplate their devastated homestead. It was once home to seven brothers and their families— some thirty-five people in all. Most are now refugees in Albania. Those who remain are living on aid. Their own crops have been burned, their cattle killed or lost. “The KLA is our self-defense,” they say. “The soldiers are all local people.” Can they imagine ever again living together with Serbs in Kosovo? The grandmother gestures to a bare wire dangling from the ceiling: “How can you live with those who hang people from light fittings?”

  Our knowledge of the KLA is still fragmentary, partly because this guerrilla army is itself quite fragmentary. It has, as one Western military observer politely puts it, a “rather horizontal” command structure. Each region is different, and regional commanders behave like local bandit chiefs. Nonetheless, we can establish a few significant things about its history, leaders, and support.

  First and foremost, its emergence is the result of Kosovar Albanians despairing of the nonviolent path that they adopted after the province was robbed of its autonomy by Milošević in 1989 and Yugoslavia began to fall apart in 1990—1991. Under their unofficially elected “President of the Republic of Kosova,” Ibrahim Rugova, they organized an extraordinary alternative state, with its own taxes, parliamentary committees, private health service, and, most impressive, unofficial education system, from primary school to university. To the frustration of Western policy makers, Rugova was unbending in his commitment to the goal of independence. To their relief, he was equally unbending in his attachment to nonviolent means. How did he propose to square the circle? By the “internationalization” of the Kosovo problem.

  Even in the early 1990s, there were those who thought change would come only with the help of more traditional methods. Many Albanians from this region go to Western Europe for training and to earn money to send home. So did they. Ramush Haradinaj, the local commander almost certainly responsible for that blood in the snow, went off to get his military training in the French Foreign Legion. In Priština, people recall first hearing of a KLA in 1993. But then it was something like one of the terrorist splinter groups from the Western European student movement of 1968. One of the KLA’s more important current political leaders, Hashim Thaci, code name “Snake,” was a student activist in Priština who then went to study in Albania and to raise funds in the West. But most of the political activists who came from three generations of formative student political protest—in 1968, 1981, and 1990-1991—were still for nonviolence.

  What changed the balance? The startling answer I am given is: “Dayton.” I’m told this by the veteran political prisoner Adem Demaci, who is now the KLA’s political representative. He dates the true emergence of the KLA to spring 1996, just a few months after the November 1995 Dayton agreement on Bosnia. I’m also told this by Veton Surroi, a favorite source for visitors from the West, whose i
nfluential daily newspaper nonetheless supported (some even say inflamed) the armed struggle. And by several others.

  They say they drew two lessons from Dayton. After more than five years of their Gandhiesque struggle for independence, the United States made a deal with Milošević over Bosnia without securing even a restoration of mere autonomy for Kosovo. So, lesson one: Nonviolence wasn’t working. Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, the Dayton agreement went a long way toward recognizing ethnic realities created by force. Lesson two: Force pays.

  There’s an element of retrospective rationalization in this account. This is not what these same people were telling me in Priština in March 1997.4 But there is also an uncomfortable element of truth. So long as Rugova kept the lid on his own people, and so long as we felt we had to deal with Milošević over Bosnia, we weren’t going to push him on Kosovo.5

  The armed rising then grew from two further developments: the looting of arsenals during the violent implosion of Albania in spring 1997, which gave the KLA access to Kalashnikovs galore, and the brutality of Serbian “reprisals” against whole extended families and villages, starting in February 1998. As always, an oppressive army and police were the best recruiting sergeants for the guerrillas.

  At each stage, more individuals from the peaceful resistance went for the gun. Thus, the KLA’s spokesman, Jakup Krasniqi, had previously studied at the underground Pedagogical Higher School in Priština. “Un bon étudiant,” says his charming, francophone professor, Abdyl Ramaj, as he shows me around the tatty bungalow that is the school’s temporary home. Most intriguing, most sobering, is the case of Shaban Shala. Until the spring of this year, Shaban Shala was the vice chairman of the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, a human-rights monitoring group supported by several Western foundations. Now he is a guerrilla commander in the hills of his native Drenica. “Well, in a way he’s still fighting for human rights,” says an embarrassed employee of the council. Well, in a way.