History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Though it’s dangerous to generalize, those who joined or actively support the KLA often have three things in common. First, many of them were political prisoners in former Yugoslavia: Demaci for a record twenty-eight years, Shaban Shala for a pretty standard nine. Second, they often come from the worst-hit rural areas. In the countryside, extended family and clan loyalties are still very strong. And, in villages such as Llaushe, the KLA is now the local community in arms. Third, they are fiercely critical of what they see as the inflexible, authoritarian, but also weak leadership of Rugova.

  These, then, are the fighters for national liberation—or “terrorist,” according to the Serb authorities—who have completely transformed the situation here. Western military observers are pretty contemptuous of their ragtag army, just as they used to be of the Bosniak army in Bosnia. They say it was wildly irresponsible of the KLA, in the liberation euphoria of the summer, to take over larger towns such as Orahovac, which they could not seriously defend. When the Serbs came back, “they just ran.” They must have known that the Serbs would then wreak vengeance on innocent civilians such as the family I visited. (In all, some quarter of a million people were made homeless in this summer of war.)

  This is true. But it’s also true that the KLA are heroes to most Kosovar Albanians. Their exploits are already the stuff of legend, ready to enter the history books beside the doubtless equally mythologized deeds of the kaçak rebel fighters against the Serbs eighty years ago. (Drenica was their stronghold, too.) Whatever its military weakness, the KLA has growing political strength. Teasing out a comparison with Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising that certainly occurs to an Englishman, Veton Surroi says, “We now need a Michael Collins.” They need a political Sinn Fein to partner their IRA.

  Moreover, the KLA in practice holds a large part of the land. The division is roughly this. The Serb forces still patrol the main towns, the main roads, and the borders with Albania and Macedonia; the KLA has most of the countryside in between. In places, the two sides are barely fifty yards apart. This is not peace. It is frozen war. The war is frozen by the heavy snows that came down suddenly in mid-November, although this has not prevented some serious fighting from going on. It is also frozen, even less effectively, by the presence of international monitors.

  There have been diplomatic monitors officially accepted here since July. Following the agreement reached by Richard Holbrooke with Slobodan Milošević on 12 October, under the threat of NATO bombing, they are becoming part of a much larger team of two thousand unarmed “verifiers” under the novel auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At the moment, they are trying to “verify” compliance with the cease-fire and some rather unclear supplementary agreements on Serb police and army numbers and locations. But the idea is that early in 1999 they should start “verifying” the implementation of a political agreement.

  Since October, the United States’s impressive ambassador to Macedonia, Christopher Hill, has been engaged in exhausting rounds of shuttle diplomacy to produce an outline for that new masterpiece of fudge. This has to reconcile the virtually unanimous insistence of Kosovar Albanians that they can no longer live “under Serbia” and that after a transitional period a door must clearly be open to independence, with the insistence of Milošević—but also of most other Serb politicians—that Kosovo must remain in Serbia, with the independence door firmly closed. Hill deals with a frustratingly disunited array of Kosovar Albanian leaders, including what he calls “the KLA guys.” On the Serb side, he deals with Milošević.

  The local Kosovo Serbs fear Milošević will sell them down the river. They are a nervous, sad bunch, hunched over their beers in tatty, dim-lit pubs, while the Albanians take you to smart new cafés. (The Serb-run Grand Hotel magnificently lives down to its reputation as the worst five-star hotel in the world.) How many Serbs are left in this medieval cradle of Serbianness? The 1991 census showed just over two hundred thousand. Some have since given up and left. But Serb refugees from other parts of former Yugoslavia have been resettled here, in prefabricated single-home settlements that stand out amid the sprawling high-walled Albanian farmsteads.

  Momčilo Trajkovic, leader of the so-called Serb Resistance Movement, says that a further twenty thousand Serbs have left the province since March. Pathetically, he now talks of their desire for a “multicultural, multiethnic” Kosovo. “Multicultural, multiethnic!” he intones, almost like a Sarajevan. What would the local Serbs do if Kosovo became independent? Some would fight, he says. Some would flee. Pause. “I think most would flee.”

  2

  Macedonia

  “We all support the UCK,” says the burly student, using the Albanian initials for the KLA. “All Albanians here are UCK.” We are sitting in the “Queen’s Club” café, in the largely Albanian town of Tetovo, in western Macedonia. Nearby, behind the closed metal doors of seemingly half-finished redbrick private houses, I have seen classrooms packed with students of the unofficial Albanian University of Tetovo.

  “Yes,” agrees that student’s professor, Zamir Dika, a lean, intense, black-bearded man, “there is total support for the KLA. We are one nation.” But there’s still a last chance to realize equal rights for Albanians peacefully, inside the present Macedonian state. And the political party he represents, the Albanian Democratic Party, proposes to seize that chance as a member of the new Macedonian coalition government. His party demands the legal recognition of Tetovo University, the release of political prisoners, ethnic Albanians’ participation in public service proportional to their numbers, and, finally, that the Albanians be recognized in Macedonia as what is called a drzavotvorna nacija—literally, a “state-creating nation.” (This is a piece of Yugoslav ethno-constitutionalist jargon that presumably derives ultimately from Fichte’s notion of a nation capable of creating a state.)

  Later, I talk to his party leader, Arbën Xhaferi, a brooding, steely, black-bearded man, in a small, dark room in a headquarters festooned with the black double-headed Albanian eagle on a red background. He says people chant “UCK” at his rallies, not the name of his party. His own support for the Kosovar armed struggle is passionate—which is not surprising, since he spent most of his adult life as a journalist in Priština. (He was a colleague of “Journalist.”) Kosovo is the cradle of Albanian nationhood, he lectures me, scene of 180 Albanian risings against Turkish rule. The Albanians are not peaceful people by nature. They are warriors. Sooner or later, Kosovo will win its right to self-determination, even though Americans try to put it “in a straitjacket.” Altogether, he informs me in a mesmerizing disquisition, the whole direction of European history is toward the separation of ethnic groups into their own states. He personally wouldn’t at all mind the Serbs annexing their “Serb Republic” part of Bosnia, if they give up Kosovo in exchange.

  As for Macedonia, well, he accepts what he calls the “international framework.” He knows the West jumps nervously at the merest whisper of secession for the Albanian part of Macedonia, fearing that its neighbors Bulgaria (which says that the Macedonian language is really a dialect of Bulgarian) and NATO member Greece (which obstinately insists that the state can’t call itself “Macedonia” because Macedonia is in Greece) might then become involved, leading to a bad case of Balkan dominoes, even to another Balkan war. An interesting gloss is added by Bejtulla Ademi, a local politician from the other Albanian party, who himself served nine years as a political prisoner, together with several present leaders of the KLA. There was, he says, a coordinating body of Albanian political parties in the former Yugoslavia, which, after playing with much more radical variants, decided in 1992 that the Albanians in Kosovo should go for independence, the Albanians in Macedonia should aim for equal rights as a “state-creating nation” in the new state, while the Albanians in Montenegro and Serbia would have to settle for plain citizenship rights.6 One step at a time.

  Next day, I watch Xhaferi at a press conference to present the new Macedonian government in the capital,
Skopje, together with the prime minister—elect, the fresh-faced Ljubco Georgievski, and the likely next candidate for president, a tubby old fox named Vasil Tupurkovski, formerly of the Yugoslav communist politburo. All three leaders privately assure me they didn’t need the pressure exerted by the United States in order for the Albanians to be included in the new government. All agree that the Macedonian nationalists of Georgievski’s party have become more moderate and pragmatic.

  The Macedonian tragedy today, Prime Minister—elect Georgievski tells me in a subsequent conversation, is no longer foreign occupation, whether Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, or communist Yugoslav. It is poverty. The country has 30 percent unemployment. To revive the economy, they need to work constructively with Greece and Bulgaria. The challenge, says Tupurkovski, is simply to make a viable state. To do that, they must have the Albanians on board. And a lot of help from the West, too. Last year, the country got just six million dollars in foreign investment.

  In the short term, things look moderately encouraging for this fragile new state of just two million people. Macedonia’s Albanian leaders are not about to lead their people in an armed uprising. But in the long run? Young Macedonian Albanians tell you they are “all KLA.” Talking to Arbën Xhaferi, I am reminded of Walter Scott’s haunting romantic insurrectionary Redgauntlet. Indeed, the Albanians here may never need to reach for the gun. All they need to do is what they do anyway: have many, many children. Albanians are now at least one quarter of the Macedonian population. At current birth rates, they will be a majority in about 2025. And doesn’t democracy mean rule by the majority?

  3

  Belgrade

  “I will lead a movement of one million Serbs to liberate Kosovo,” Vuk Drašković tells me. “My party is organized like an army. We will fight.” Fight NATO? “There is no Serbia without Kosovo. I cannot betray it. I cannot betray Jesus Christ.” And the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement pulls from his inside pocket a map marking all the Serbian Orthodox churches across the province. This from the man who early last year was still part of the Zajedno (“Together”) coalition that was supposed to bring democracy to Serbia.

  But Kosovo upsets more than just the ranting Drašković. I tell the wife of an eminently liberal friend how in Kosovo I visited the medieval Serbian monastery of Dečani. It looked indescribably beautiful in the snow. But it is now occupied by soldiers. Suddenly her eyes are full of tears. She has such happy childhood memories of visiting her grandparents in the nearby town of Peć, of a Christmas with the nuns, of a magical cave where water runs uphill…

  I explain to Biljana Dakić, one of my student guides through the great Belgrade demonstrations of 1996—1997, that I think Kosovo will become a kind of Western protectorate. “You know,” she says, “my stomach really churns when you say that. It’s such an emotional thing.” Kosovo is somehow closer to her heart even than the fate of the Serbs beyond the river Drina, in Bosnia, and formerly in the Croatian Krajina, although her own family comes from there. Čeda Antic, a patriotic and religious young Serb whom I got to know as a leader of last year’s student demonstrations, still uses the official Serb name for the province, “Kosovo and Metohija,” Metohija being the historic lands of the Serb Orthodox Church. He is equally dismayed to contemplate its loss.

  Never mind that their history of Kosovo, like the Albanians’, is partly myth.7 Never mind that they haven’t been to Kosovo for years and would not dream of living there. Never mind that they know, in their heads, that the Albanians have already won, simply by multiplying and occupying the land. The prospect of losing Kosovo is so painful because it comes on top of many other bitter blows. The former Yugoslav metropolis of Belgrade is impoverished and depressed. Its population has been swollen by Serb refugees from the parts of former Yugoslavia that Milošević’s adventurism has already lost but diminished by the emigration of much of the elite. Biljana tells me that 70 percent of her high-school classmates have left. Those that remain live in a cage, with only limited information from a few independent radio stations and newspapers and great difficulty in obtaining visas to travel to the West.

  My Serb friends feel—and they are surely right—that even sophisticated men and women in the West no longer distinguish sufficiently between the Serbian people and their regime. To be a Serb in the world today is like being a German in 1945. They also fear—and in this they are probably also right—that, just as the Germans were the last victims of Adolf Hitler, so the Serbs will be the last victims of Slobodan Milošević.

  I find that, if pressed, more and more people in Belgrade see partition as the least bad solution for Kosovo. But generally they prefer to talk about the prospects of political change in Serbia proper, rather than about Kosovo. “Democratization in Serbia” is, they insist, the key to progress in the whole of former Yugoslavia. But what chance of that? At the moment, things look worse than ever. Veran Matić, the forceful head of the independent Radio B92, sees a familiar pattern: When Milošević makes concessions externally (over Kosovo, as previously over Bosnia), he cracks down internally. This autumn saw the universities stripped of their autonomy and the passing of a draconian “information law” that threatens critical newspapers with confiscation of their assets. This has already happened, in a flagrant example of political justice, to the semi-tabloid Dnevni Telegraf, after its owner turned sharply against the regime.

  How might change for the better come? Milošević’s regime is an extreme postcommunist example of what has been called a demokratura: formally democratic, substantially authoritarian. These postcommunist demokraturas maintain their power through control of state television, the secret police, and the misappropriation of large parts of the formerly state-owned economy. Such regimes may be overthrown peacefully, but this requires a grand coalition of virtually all the forces opposed to them. I come to Belgrade from Slovakia, where the demokratura of Vladimír Mečiar has just been overthrown, at the ballot box, by just such a “coalition of coalitions”: opposition parties, nongovernmental organizations, independent media, trade unions, parts of the Church.

  In 1997, with the “walking revolution” and the “Together” coalition, it looked as if that might just be happening in Serbia. But the West gave little effective support, and “Together” soon fell apart disastrously. Drašković’s partners reneged on their promise to support his candidacy for the Serbian presidency, and he then made a shocking tactical alliance with the regime, being rewarded with the ample spoils of running the Belgrade city government. Now he and his former ally Zoran Djindjić speak more bitterly of each other than they do of Milošević. Djindjić is trying to build a broad democratic alternative again, helped by Čeda Antic and other former student activists who have joined his Democratic Party. But their current public support is small, and the necessary “coalition of coalitions” seems more remote than ever.

  Another recurrent idea is that the Milošević regime might crumble from within, perhaps being supplanted by a military coup. A recent bout of sackings, including the heads of the army and the secret police, and their replacement with confidants of Milošević’s wife, Mira Marković (a.k.a. Lady Macbeth), has fueled such speculation. Romania is close, and people wistfully recall how Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu met their end. But do these purges actually weaken Milošević or strengthen him? I, at least, don’t know anyone who can really tell me what is going on behind the closed doors of this messy, embattled, yet horribly durable regime.

  But I will venture one guess about the social psychology around it. There is a kind of chemical solution that is both deeply inert and highly unstable. It’s not bubbling at all, but one tap on the test tube and—bang!—up it goes. Serbian society today may be like that. What could the tap be? Many serious observers agree that Western sanctions against Serbia produced a certain defiant popular solidarity with Milošević, while this autumn’s NATO bombing threat occasioned a wave of xenophobia. Could concessions by Milošević over Kosovo, in the middle of an economically difficult winter, have
an opposite effect? Might that be the final tap?

  Yet even if that were so, it is possible—even likely—that power would at least initially be seized by radical nationalists such as Vojislav Šešelj rather than by conciliatory democrats. Things could get even worse before they finally get better. The tragedy of former Yugoslavia is in its sixth or seventh act. Many have observed that “it began in Kosovo and may end in Kosovo.” Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it began in Belgrade, with Milošević’s cynical exploitation of the Kosovo issue. And so the last act, too, may be in Belgrade, as Kosovo comes back to haunt him.

  4

  What have we learned from this terrible decade in former Yugoslavia? And what is to be done? We have learned that human nature has not changed. That Europe at the end of the twentieth century is quite as capable of barbarism as it was in the Holocaust of mid-century. That, during the last decades of the cold war, many in Europe succumbed to fairy-tale illusions about the obsolescence of the nation-state and war being banished forever from our continent. That Western Europe has gone on living quite happily while war returned almost every summer to the Balkans. And we have learned that, even after the end of the cold war, we can’t manage the affairs of our own continent without calling in the United States. Wherever you go in former Yugoslavia, people say, “the international community—I mean, the Americans…”

  Our Western political mantras at the end of the twentieth century have been “integration,” “multiculturalism,” or, if we are a little more old-fashioned, “the melting pot.” Former Yugoslavia has been the opposite. It has been like a giant version of the machine called a separator: a sort of spinning tub that separates out cream and butter or liquids of different consistency. Here it is peoples who were separated out as the giant tub spun furiously around. Even half-formed nationalities (Macedonian, Bosnian) were solidified by the separator, while blood dripped steadily from a filter at the bottom. But, when separation was almost complete, the West finally stepped in to try to halt the bloody process: in 1995 in Bosnia, in 1998 in Kosovo. In Bosnia, we now have a Western quasi-protectorate. Soon we may have another in Kosovo.