In the town that Serbs call Peć and Albanians call Pejë, Selim Moriqi, a gnarled fifty-one-year-old woodcutter, sits in a wheelbarrow amid the ruins. He escaped to Montenegro, walking with his children through the snows. Another epic. The Serbs killed his uncle. His house is ruined, his woodcutting equipment stolen. His family of ten has received a little aid but not enough. So here he is, with his five-year-old grandchild, trying to make a few deutsche marks by selling, yes, cigarettes. So it goes on, tale after tale.
I track down the local KLA commander, Ramush Haradinaj, a man with a ferocious reputation. Still in uniform, he talks English with what I think must originally have been the Birmingham accent of an earlier English girlfriend, now modified by that of his present Finnish wife. He says “foighting” for fighting: “The nation is going to respect the time of this foightings.”
Last autumn, I saw the fresh blood of two Serb policemen shot by Commander Ramush’s men in the nearby village of Prilep, a flagrant violation of the cease-fire. Now I charge him with responsibility for it. His reply: “I hope it was more than only two.” He was so happy to see dead police. After all, they had killed two of his own brothers. “Me,” he remarks memorably, “I couldn’t be no Mother Teresa.”
Yet even Commander Ramush insists that he is committed to demilitarizing the KLA, although he would still like his best soldiers to form the nucleus of a Kosovo professional army. He is, in fact, brighter and less thuggish than I expected, and he even claims they can live together with innocent Serbs: “The Albanian people can forgive … in the time of Tito it was no trouble.”
I drive on to Prilep. It is a collection of ruins, yet still the people are coming back. Last autumn, I visited a family in a still-intact house near the mosque. Now the mother, Gale Latifaj, stands before a pile of rubble that was once that house and weeps. Her husband is dead. Her eldest son, a KLA soldier, was killed fighting for Commander Ramush. Her youngest son has gone to try to find a tent from one of the aid organizations. Meanwhile, she has put a little water in a rusting can to heat in the midday sun, so she can wash, and carries bricks from the rubble, slowly, one by one, to build a shelter for the night. She is fifty-eight and looks about seventy.
Back in Priština, I talk to the political leader of the KLA, Hashim Thaci, formerly known as Commander Snake. In his slightly wooden Swiss German he says, “Freedom always has a price, but we have won.” Of course, it’s not people like him—now a budding young politician in jacket and tie, programmed for sound bites—but people like Mrs. Latifaj who pay the price.
YET THE WISE among the Kosovar Albanians recognize that the ultimate losers are the Kosovo Serbs. Most of them have fled already. Those who remain feel imperiled or live in ghettos. A Dutch tank stands guard at the entrance to the purely Serb village of Velika Hoča, in the KLA heartland. Local Serbs pathetically ask me if I could get them some tomatoes and water from the local town. They don’t even dare to go shopping there. A large, blowsy woman named Snjezana complains, “We were told it would be UN control but now look at your badge”—and she seizes my KFOR identity badge—“it says NATO. I don’t like people like you who come and look at us for fifteen minutes, as if we are animals in a zoo, then go away.”
The town of Kosovska Mitrovica is effectively divided at the river Ibar, with Serbs dominating the northern part of the city, Albanians the south, and French troops on the bridge over the Ibar. I watch a bunch of Serbian men, wearing sunglasses and wooden crosses around their necks, line up to chant abuse at a few Albanian kids who venture halfway across the bridge. “We’re waiting for the Russians to come here,” one says. How does he know they are coming? “I heard it on the Voice of America.”
However hard KFOR tries to persuade the Serbs and Albanians to live together, the Serbs are already reduced to tiny pockets in an essentially Albanian place. Suddenly, thanks to NATO, the tables are turned. The only authority the Serbs have left is the church. And church leaders are now saying out loud who is really to blame.
I seek out, as I always do, the exquisite monastery of Dečani, a medieval wonder nestled in the wooded foothills of the Accursed Mountains, on the border with Albania. When I have negotiated my way past the Italian armored car blocking the entrance, I am received by the black-robed and black-bearded abbot, Father Theodosius. Talking through young Brother Leonard, who speaks fluent English with a strong taste of the King James Bible, he says that during the war they “felt great injustice and great evil.” Everything was wrong: While NATO bombed Serb civilians, Serbs wreaked vengeance on Albanian civilians. Many ordinary Serb soldiers came to unburden their heavy consciences to the monks.
So has Milošević lost Kosovo for Serbia? “He has not only lost Kosovo but completely destroyed his own people, physically and spiritually.” This monastery will survive international rule, or Albanian rule, as it survived five hundred years of Ottoman rule. But the time of Slobodan Milošević will be remembered as the worst in the whole history of the Serbian nation. Brother Leonard translates: “It is not meet, in this sanctuary, even to mention that name.”
THE PROTECTORATE
IN THE VILLAGE OF VELIKA HOČA—NOW A SERBIAN GHETTO GUARDED by Dutch tanks—a woman called Snjezana jabbed an angry finger at me. “I don’t know where I live anymore,” she said. “Is it Serbia? Is it Yugoslavia? Is it… whatever?”
The correct answer is: whatever. In Kosovo, the so-called international community has embarked on an extraordinary adventure. We are setting out to build a whole new state while pretending not to. Even in Somalia or Cambodia, the UN never had a job as ambitious and complex as this. Every aspect of the state has to be built literally from ruins. Yet at the same time, because of the ambiguity of the peace deal with Milošević and the subsequent UN Security Council resolution, attention has to be paid to the continued formal sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over the devastated province.
It’s a test case for post—cold war liberal internationalism. A war justified as a humanitarian intervention leads to an international protectorate, which in turn is supposed to end with a viable, self-governing—um, er—something. How can it possibly work?
The job starts with the most elementary necessities of life: water, shelter, food, electricity for heat and light. Crops have been destroyed. You see the severed heads of dead cattle along the roads. Rubbish lies all over the place, stinking. It is not cleared, unless the local NATO troops do the job. The troops are also getting the hospitals working again. But soldiers can’t go on doing these jobs. Civilians have to take over. Here, in the essentials of life, we have one major ally: the hardiness and resourcefulness of the Kosovar Albanians. It’s incredible, and moving, to see people who have lost their houses, their life savings, their equipment, cattle, everything, just starting over with a wry shrug of the shoulders. They’re used to adversity.
But some of them are stealing what they need to rebuild their homes, and a few are killing Serbs in revenge. In early July, there were still virtually no civilian police—although in the northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica I did meet a spruce colonel of the French gendarmerie, fresh from Versailles. If you occasionally wonder why we need a state at all, you should visit a place like Kosovo that has none. This has advantages, of course. For example, you don’t need to worry about speeding fines. But you can also get robbed or killed at night, and no one will take any notice.
Everyone agrees that the top priority at the moment is law and order, which means bringing in international civilian police and appointing judges to support them. Then local police are to be trained: The gendarme from Versailles or the bobby from Liverpool is to patrol the streets side by side with a local cadet. But what laws will they enforce? At the moment, the proposal is: the criminal code of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, modified by international human-rights conventions when Yugoslav law violates them.
Then there is the matter of schools for the children who currently line the roadside, selling cigarettes and giving the V-for-victory sign to any
passing Westerner. And what about work for their parents? I was shocked to learn that, after three weeks, the UN administration still had no senior economic expert in place, for the economy is central to the prospects of recovery. Here, the problems deriving from the ambiguity of status are acute.
Cafés, restaurants, and shops may reopen easily enough, but most of the larger companies still have Yugoslav owners. Then, who will set and collect the taxes? And what about border controls and customs duties? (At the moment, the only control at the infamous Blace frontier crossing is by gum-chewing American soldiers.) And a currency? The deutsche mark is the universal unofficial tender. A restaurant owner turns up his nose when my companion offers Yugoslav dinars. A formal currency reform, such as in Bosnia, where the official currency is now the konvertibilna marka (exchange rate fixed at one KM to one D-Mark), would be the best thing for the economy. But wouldn’t that tear away even the pretense of Yugoslav sovereignty?
Meanwhile, the newly reopened cafés of Priština are filled with handsome, idealistic, suntanned foreigners—earnest Danes, charming Chileans, quiet Americans. They hardly knew where Kosovo was six months ago; now they are running it. “Hello, we met in Rwanda,” they greet each other, or “Weren’t you with the OSCE in Kazakhstan?” Their byzantine, polyacronymic structures of international administration are to be superimposed on a “transitional council” of Kosovar Albanians and Serbs, with local consultative commissions for various practical aspects of reconstruction.
Beyond this formal, polit-bureaucratic pattern there is the informal, sometimes inspiring, often corrupting reality of interaction. The names of the military occupation force, KFOR, and the skeleton civilian administration, UNMIK, have already become Albanian and Serbian words. UNMIK is pronounced with a short u, as in unpick, and KFOR is pronounced kufaw, as in guffaw. Prices of any decent apartments soar. A whole local industry grows up servicing the internationals: restaurants, drivers, interpreters. Blerim Shala, editor of the leading Kosovar Albanian weekly Zeri, tells me he is having difficulty getting his journalists to come back to work for him, since they can all earn three times as much working as interpreters for international organizations. Some of the pretty girls among them will get married and start new lives in Stockholm, Paris, or a small town in Texas.
In the longer term, Kosovo simply can’t work as a colony. The international architecture alone is far too complicated. There are endless disagreements and turf wars between the international organizations involved, starting with intense rivalries between the UN’s own different agencies. There are even greater differences between the participating nation-states, including all those absurd matters of prestige. Thus, Britain has the military commander so France has to get the civilian governor—and poor old Kosovo is lumbered with a Bernard Kouchner. Meanwhile, the Americans are taking a whole street of houses for a fifty-strong embassy (sorry, nonembassy) to run the show from behind the scenes. Then, having all stuck their fingers in the pie, the major powers will all lose interest before the job is done, as domestic political priorities turn elsewhere.
The key to making this unprecedented experiment work therefore lies in enabling the Kosovars to govern themselves, as much as possible, as soon as possible. Full, formal independence is not the most urgent thing—that must and can wait until Serbia itself becomes more democratic and cooperative, and perhaps even longer. What matters is giving substance to those “democratic self-rule institutions” to which even Milošević has already agreed. One great advantage here, as against Bosnia, is that the vast majority of the population is of one nationality. Even special minority privileges for the few remaining Serbs—and there is, ironically enough, a case for such privileges— will not change that.
The great problem is the fissiparous nature of Albanian politics. Already, this small territory with fewer than two million people has one unofficial president, two unofficial prime ministers, and at least five political parties or protoparties. (Another one was founded, or relaunched, while I was there.) For the Kosovars themselves, this is a historic test. There is a real danger that they will prove incapable of governing themselves in a halfway organized, civilized fashion. And, as we all know, long-term dependency breeds irresponsibility.
So I find myself, over an evening drink with a sophisticated British official, discussing whether old Rugova can still pull the votes; whether something can be made of young Thaci; or if Kosumi might be a “player” after all. Almost as my grandfather, who was an imperial civil servant in India, must have sat on a veranda in Delhi in 1929, wondering what old Gandhi was up to, and if young Nehru could be brought on.
It’s a rum way to end the twentieth century.
CHRONOLOGY
1999
1 JULY. Doubice, Czech Republic. A day in a beautiful rural part of northern Bohemia, accompanying Václav Havel on one of his presidential meet-the-people tours. In the evening, over a drink in the local pub, I ask him if he personally feels more free than ten years ago. “Of course I don’t feel more free,” he says. “Even in jail I felt more free in some ways.” He is imprisoned in his role, hounded from one appointment to the next by aides, security men, and the ever-prying media. But, he suggests, his own loss of freedom is the price he pays for others to be free.
8 JULY. Bruntal, Czech Republic. A very different Czech encounter. Ludvik Zifčák was the secret policeman who, during the student demonstration that started the velvet revolution on 17 November 1989, pretended to be a student beaten to death. The news of his “death” was immediately passed to the media by other secret police agents. The purpose of this secret police plot was to provoke a little local unrest, which would give a pretext for more dynamic communist leaders to take power. They hoped, as he says frankly, to save communism; in fact, they precipitated its demise. Conspiracy theories are generally a branch of fiction. Occasionally, there really are conspiracies in history; but even then, they usually go wrong, as this one did.
I ask him how he died. He laughs and says, “Well, really I just fell over. That was the whole death.” After a short spell in prison, he now works in this gray, godforsaken north Moravian town, as a pawnbroker.
23 JULY. Fourteen Serbs are murdered, presumably by Kosovar Albanians, while harvesting at a village near Lipljan in Kosovo.
30 JULY. President Clinton and Tony Blair attend summit in Sarajevo to launch the Stability Fact for southeastern Europe.
5 AUGUST. Former British defense secretary George Robertson is confirmed as new NATO secretary-general.
9 AUGUST. President Yeltsin nominates longtime KGB officer Vladimir Putin as Russian prime minister, the fourth in twelve months.
19 AUGUST. Large demonstration against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade.
23 AUGUST. German government moves to Berlin.
AUGUST. Chechen rebels invade Dagestan, clashing with Russian forces there.
SEPTEMBER. Bomb explosions in Moscow are blamed on Chechen terrorists.
9 SEPTEMBER. Former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten publishes his report on the reform of policing in Northern Ireland.
5, 12, and 19 SEPTEMBER. In Germany, the Schröder government suffers a series of defeats in provincial and local elections.
21 SEPTEMBER. KLA leaders agree to become a Kosovo Protection Force with a maximum of three thousand members and just two hundred guns.
In a deliberate gesture by the German government, the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, is the first foreign leader to visit the German government in its new-old capital, Berlin.
23 SEPTEMBER. Russian forces begin a major air offensive against Chechnya.
27 SEPTEMBER. Pro-Yeltsin politicians form “Unity” block to fight Duma elections in Russia.
27 SEPTEMBER. London. I talk to a senior NATO official about the Kosovo bombing. He says nobody at NATO headquarters in Brussels anticipated the length of the campaign. Before it started, all efforts were devoted to the herculean task of getting the nineteen member states to agree on what to do. Seen from inside the o
rganization, to achieve internal consensus was already the great victory. No one there, so far as he could see, was thinking seriously about the possible consequences in former Yugoslavia of the action agreed upon. He hopes that, in future, the organization will be better at what he memorably calls “consequence management.”
30 SEPTEMBER. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin says Russian ground forces are moving in and out of Chechnya, which he claims as part of Russia.
3 OCTOBER. In parliamentary elections in Austria, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party becomes the second strongest party in parliament, campaigning on an anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic platform. In Serbia, the brother-in-law and security guards of opposition leader Vuk Drašković are killed in a road accident, in suspicious circumstances.
10 OCTOBER. Social Democrats sink to a record low in Berlin elections, won by Christian Democrats. The postcommunist PDS wins nearly 40 percent of the vote in East Berlin.
13 OCTOBER. In the Czech town of Ustí nad Labem, a two-meter-high wall is erected to separate local Czechs from their Roma neighbors.
15-16 OCTOBER. In a special summit in Tampere, devoted mainly to cooperation on justice and home affairs, EU leaders agree in principle to open membership negotiations with a further six candidate states and with Turkey.
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