History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  18 OCTOBER. A report from “three wise men”—Richard von Weizsäcker, Jean-Luc Dehaene, and Lord (David) Simon—recommends further institutional reforms to prepare for an EU of twenty-eight member states.

  21 OCTOBER. Russian troops advance to within ten kilometers of the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. An estimated 180,000 refugees, one tenth of the Chechen population, have fled.

  27 OCTOBER. Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti is cleared by a court in Palermo of charges of collusion with the Mafia.

  31 OCTOBER. The first round of presidential elections in Ukraine leads to a runoff between incumbent Leonid Kuchma and Communist leader Petro Symonenko.

  2 NOVEMBER. French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigns following allegations of financial irregularities.

  8 NOVEMBER. Berlin. I chair a remarkable discussion between former chancellor Helmut Kohl and former presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the top floor of the tower block that the conservative publisher Axel Springer deliberately built right next to the Berlin Wall, its windows offering stunning views over the vast building site that is Berlin, the three grand old men celebrate the end of the cold war as a triumph for personal diplomacy.

  Helmut Kohl recalls how Mikhail Gorbachev resisted siren calls from Soviet hard-liners in the hours immediately after the opening of the Wall. “I’ll never forget it, Mikhail,” he says, turning to him as to an old friend, and using the familiar Du, “… that you trusted us, after you and I had got to know each other in our long nighttime conversation during your visit to Bonn.” The personal warmth between the two is unmistakable. Afterward, seated near them at dinner, it seems to me that “Helmut” treats “Mikhail” like a nice but slightly boring younger brother. George Bush, the old gentleman from Texas, is cooler and more detached, but he, too, stresses the paramount importance of personal diplomacy. Gorbachev remembers with gratitude Bush’s promise that he would not “dance on the Wall.”

  When I ask them if they think there are any important secrets about those events still in the archives, Bush and Kohl suggest that there are not many left; Gorbachev hints that there may still be a few in the Russian files. The show is crowned by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, who ten years ago spontaneously flew to Berlin to play at the Wall and now performs a joyful piece of Bach.

  Afterward, someone tells me a joke about the evening: “Which of the great men revealed most secrets?” Answer: Rostropovitch.

  9 NOVEMBER. Berlin. Exactly ten years since “the night the Wall came down.” Then, in 1989, this was a true manifestation of people power. Large crowds of East Berliners gathered at the main checkpoints in response to a misleading West German television news report that the Wall was “open,” following a bungled announcement of a new regulation on free travel by East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski. It was only the pressure of these crowds that led to the unplanned opening of the frontier. This spontaneous, popular breakthrough produced the unforgettable night when Berliners, East and West, danced on the Wall and fell into each other’s arms.

  Now, ten years on, the celebration is a purely political and media event. The scenes from 1989 have been replayed so many times on television that they have lost their impact. Every politician wants to be here, to grab his or her share of the limelight. But most ordinary Berliners say, “I’m staying at home, or just having a drink with a few friends.” Special television studios have been set up around the Brandenburg Gate, in expectation of vast crowds. In fact, the crowds are quite small and subdued. They spend much of their time watching the main German television program about the anniversary, which is rebroadcast on large outdoor screens.

  So, instead of sitting at home watching television, they stand outdoors, in the rain, watching television. Occasionally, the big screens show shots of them, the people at the Brandenburg Gate. So then what they see on television is themselves on television. They watch themselves watching themselves watching themselves watching themselves, in a kind of eternal iteration.

  Of course, television itself does not tell you that this is what is happening. When I go to be interviewed by CNN, which is broadcasting from an outdoor platform just the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, their monitors seem to be showing a large, celebrating crowd behind us. And when, in the course of the interview, I tell Christiane Amanpour that I think the Germans have a lot to celebrate, she gestures at the people behind us and says words to the effect of “and so they are.” Thus does television create its own story.

  The anniversary of the ultimate modern event is marked by the ultimate postmodern event.

  11 NOVEMBER. British House of Lords Bill receives the royal assent. Hereditary peers no longer sit of right in the House of Lords.

  14 NOVEMBER. Leonid Kuchma is reelected president of Ukraine in the second round of presidential elections. In Macedonia, Boris Trajkovski is elected president, with a significant vote from the Albanian minority, but faces accusations of electoral fraud.

  17 NOVEMBER. Prague. Another capital, another tenth anniversary: this time, that of the velvet revolution. Here I chair a discussion in Prague Castle, with the Berlin Three—Kohl, Gorbachev, and Bush— augmented by Václav Havel, Lech Wałȩsa, Danielle Mitterrand (representing her deceased husband), and Margaret Thatcher. Unexpectedly, it produces real controversy, as Lady Thatcher’s forceful neoliberal, Anglo-American triumphalism is challenged by her old sparring partner, Mikhail Gorbachev. Hearing her pep talk on the one true way, Gorbachev says, reminds him of listening to an old communist. The West cannot go on dictating terms like this. Pluralism means that there are many possible ways and combinations of ways. Unfortunately, this very pertinent response is only the beginning of a twenty-minute tirade, in which he himself goes on to lecture his largely Czech audience in the hectoring oratorical style of an old Russian communist. They had more than enough of that in the years before 1989. His style defeats his content.

  18-19 NOVEMBER. Istanbul summit of the now fifty-four members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The summit is dominated by criticism of the continuing Russian military campaign in Chechnya.

  28 NOVEMBER. The Basque separatist organization, ETA, announces an end to its cease-fire.

  29 NOVEMBER. In Belfast, the Northern Ireland Assembly confirms in office a new Northern Ireland cabinet, under the Unionist leader David Trimble, with the participation of both unionists and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. In Priština, Kosovo, an Albanian mob kills an elderly Serb professor and beats up two elderly women, thus marking the Albanian “flag day.”

  ANARCHY AND MADNESS

  BALUSHE IS BACK! WITH A QUIET SMILE ON HER PLEASANT FACE, she stands under a blue UN tarpaulin in a makeshift wooden hut. They found her wandering nearby, bemused, hungry, but otherwise unharmed. Balushe is the Latifaj family cow, and her return is a small sign of what has gone right in the place we should now, realistically, call Kosova.

  The Latifajs used to live in a large house next to the mosque in the village of Prilep, at the foot of the Accursed Mountains that separate Kosova from Albania. Now they live amid the rubble that was their house, next to the ruined mosque, in a village that Milošević’s artillery and special forces have almost entirely destroyed. A year ago, I found the whole family cowering in their yard. Serb forces had just beaten them up after a KLA ambush of Serb police outside the mosque. Five months ago, I found Granny Latifaj standing alone, weeping, in the rubble. She was trying to heat some water in a bucket by placing it in the sun.

  Today, half the family has returned. They’ve built a large wooden hut in the snow-covered ruins, with materials supplied by international agencies and charities. They have a wood-burning stove and enough wood to see them through Kosova’s freezing winter. (One daughter tells me they received an extra allowance of firewood because her brother died in the war, fighting alongside the KLA’s legendary Commander Ramush.) Like so many Kosovars, they ar
e helped out financially by family members working in Germany. They hope their fields will be cleared of land mines in time for the spring sowing. Meanwhile, with international aid and family help, they have just enough to eat. The children go to a rudimentary school, with the same teacher who used to instruct them illegally before the war. Most people in the village have come back, and, yes, they finally feel free. “We’d like to thank you,” says the hoxha, the local clergyman from the ruined mosque, whom I find repainting his own house, “you Americans and Europeans, for doing so much for our freedom.”

  This is the good news, and it’s repeated all over the battered province. The main street of every town looks like a do-it-yourself exhibition. Small shops contain everything you need to rebuild a house, from bricks and timber, through electrical cables and drainpipes, to the all-important rugs and coffee cups. A family I have visited several times in Mališevo, once the capital of the KLA and “the most dangerous place in Europe,” have such a shop, newly built with money sent from Germany by their Gastarbeiter son. The father cautiously estimates his profit at thirty-five to forty deutsche marks a day. He hopes to reconstruct his own house on the earnings from selling reconstruction materials to others.

  In the trashed bazaar of what used to be the Serbian city of Pec and is now the Albanian city of Pejë, local children have painted the ruins with brightly colored frescoes. There’s a thriving market, and even a couple of jeweler’s shops. Young girls stand in the mud, distributing calendars for Ramadan.

  In sum, most of the Kosovars who were expelled have come home; they are surviving and will eventually rebuild. Here, however, the good news ends. For Kosova today is an almighty mess. The province for which NATO fought the first war in its history is now the most ambitious project of truly international administration in the whole history of the United Nations. The experiment is not going well.

  1

  Thanks to us, Kosovo ends with an a—the Albanian as opposed to the Serbian spelling. A stands for Albanian. It also, at the moment, stands for anarchy. Take A for Albanian first. It’s now entirely clear that our intervention has decisively resolved, in favor of the Albanians, a Serb-Albanian struggle for control of this territory that goes back at least 120 years. This was neither the stated nor the real intention of Western policy makers.

  Although most Serbs don’t believe it, the representatives of the so-called international community are genuine and even passionate in their desire to see a future for the Serbs in Kosova. Dr. Klaus Reinhardt, the impressive German general who now commands the multilateral, NATO-led military force (KFOR), thumps his right fist into his left palm as he tells me that he will bring Serbs back to live again in their homes, even though those homes have been torched and plundered by Albanians since KFOR marched in. Bernard Kouchner, the very French head of the United Nations mission (UNMIK), tells me, “history will judge us on our ability to protect a minority [i.e., the Serbs] inside another minority [i.e., the Albanians in Yugoslavia].”

  These are bold terms on which to invite history’s judgment. For the reality on the ground is one of almost total ethnic separation. Many Serbs fled to Serbia proper when KFOR marched in. Most of the rest have been driven subsequently into Serbian enclaves by intimidation and outright terror from returning Albanians. Particularly among the younger generation of Albanians, who have known Serbs only as remote oppressors, there is a growing intolerance of all ethnic others (including Roma and muslim Slavs). People under thirty make up more than half the population, and young Kosovars manifest a thirst for revenge that sickens not just foreigners but also many among the older generation of Kosovars, who still have personal memories of peaceful coexistence with the Serbs.

  Just before I arrived, an elderly Serb professor was lynched by a mob celebrating the Albanian “flag day” in Priština. There used to be some forty thousand Serbs living in Priština; now there are just a few hundred. The isolated Serbian monastery of Dečani has lost all the lay Serbs who used to sustain it. When the monks need to go shopping, they travel under Italian KFOR escort to Montenegro. In Podujevo, British troops mount a twenty-four-hour guard over two remaining Serb grannies—“and the Albanians would slot them if we didn’t,” a British officer remarks, using a slang term for kill. It is entirely fitting to speak, in this context, of reverse ethnic cleansing. Yet this ethnic cleansing has been carried out under the very noses and tank barrels of more than forty thousand international troops.

  Momčilo Trajkovic, the leading Serb politician still in Kosova, fled Priština after being shot through his front door by an Albanian. He now lives in what he calls the Serb “ghetto” around the monastery of Gračanica, an area a few miles across. When he wants to travel anywhere outside the ghetto, he needs a KFOR escort. “This means,” he explains, “that I can go to Priština to meet President Clinton but I can’t go there to buy a loaf of bread.” He’s still indomitable. When I ask him how long people can live in such a ghetto, he replies, “A thousand years!” They outlived more than five hundred years of Ottoman rule, he says, and they’ll survive this! But he is alone in his heroic optimism.

  Beside these enclaves, which contain perhaps some twenty thousand to thirty thousand Serbs, there is an area north of a line running roughly east—west through the city of Kosovska Mitrovica. This area compromises less than 10 percent of the whole territory. It contains some (though not all) of the valuable Trepča mines, and is contiguous with Serbia proper. Here, an estimated 70,000 Serbs still rule the roost. The situation in the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica is amazing. When I pass the barbed-wire barriers on the bridge over the river Ibar, my papers are checked by French soldiers as I enter the Serb-controlled northern sector. French, British, and Scandinavian troops patrol this part, too, but within a few yards of a British armored car I am accosted by burly Serbs in plain clothes, armed with walkie-talkies. They sharply ask my business, and my resourceful Albanian interpreter rapidly becomes “Dragan Trajkovic from Belgrade.” We walk up through a peaceful-looking Serb town—schoolgirls giggling on their way home, couples quietly going shopping—to the regional hospital, which is run by Serbs, though with a French director and French soldiers at the gate.

  Here we meet a doctor who is also a member of a Belgrade-based, moderate nationalist opposition party. He explains that all their salaries are paid from Belgrade, and their electricity, water, and other supplies come from the north. “The multiethnic concept of Kosovo is finished,” he says. Partition is the only answer. Back in the southern part of town, the KLA-appointed unofficial Albanian mayor, Dr. Bajram Rexhepi, a surgeon who tended the KLA wounded, earning the affectionate nickname “Doctor Terrorist,” retorts that this is intolerable. If nothing changes by the spring, he says, the Albanians will again resort to pressure, even force, to storm the bridge over the river Ibar. Some of the local French soldiers have been seen carousing with Serb paramilitaries, he claims, and are pro-Serb, but he thinks their commanders are not.

  In truth, the refusal to force open the bridge over the Ibar is not French policy but that of the whole international administration, both civil and military. For if we let the massed Albanians surge across, the Serbs would either fight or flee—probably first one, then the other. We would again be party to ethnic cleansing. So instead, KFOR and UNMIK struggle ineffectually to implement a few schemes for Albanian-Serb cooperation—in the hospital, in a factory—that do nothing to change the overall reality of partition. Indeed, Kouchner has now tacitly acknowledged this, proclaiming his medium-term goal to be no longer a “multiethnic” society but “peaceful coexistence” between largely separate communities.

  Yet this hate-filled Albanian-Serb separation is only half the story—and for the future of Kosova not even the most important half. More important is that the a in Kosova stands increasingly for anarchy. It’s hard to convey what a chaotic, threatening place the Albanian 90 percent of Kosova is this winter. In the dark, through freezing fog, along potholed, icy roads, race endless columns of cars, many of them
probably stolen in Western Europe. Half the cars display no registration plates and have black-clad, unshaven young men at the wheels, driving like madmen. Once, our column stops because a kid has thrown a brick through the windscreen of what he thinks is a Serb car. More often, it’s because a car has spun off the road. I have never in my life seen so many serious traffic accidents. At one particularly nasty one, a KFOR armored car trundles past while a car lies upside down in the snow, its warning lights flashing in the dark and its driver presumably crushed. There are still virtually no police, and there is no effective law. I keep thinking of Graham Greene’s title: The Lawless Roads.

  Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia has entered with a vengeance. Young women are afraid to go out at night in Priština, for fear of being kidnapped into forced prostitution. Drug consumption among the students has soared, as the pushers get to work. In the last week of November, there were twenty-two recorded murders; several of them cold-blooded executions. The independent newspaper publisher Veton Surroi, who in the summer courageously denounced Albanian revenge killings against Serbs, sees his prophecy coming true: What began with Albanians murdering Serbs ends with Albanians murdering each other. Before and during the war, Kosovars kept assuring me that Kosova would not be like Albania: corrupt, anarchic, ruled by the gun and the gang. Increasingly, it is. Here is the Albanization of Kosova in a way no ordinary Kosovar Albanian wanted. The gangsters have stepped into a vacuum left by the slowness of the West.

  KFOR tries to do what it can. Sometimes its efforts are simply comical. As cars speed down the main street of one small town, a Swedish soldier steps out waving a little sign reading “30 kph” (kilometers per hour). The cars ignore him, of course. On the other side of the road I see a local man—unshaven, toothless, probably a little drunk—holding his sides and shaking with uncontrollable laughter at this ludicrous yet emblematic scene. The West meets the Balkans.