It was uncomfortable, unsettling. At one stage we fell in behind a column of British armor, and a drunken, angry Serb, shouting at us incomprehensibly, tried to wrench my door open and made as if to pull us out. I shot forward, past the last Challenger tank, and asked its driver if I could sneak in between him and a Warrior armored car ahead. “Sure, mate!” he said, with a broad Cockney grin. “Anything for a fellow Brit. What are you mugs doing here anyway?”
The ensuing miles were anything but amusing, a worrying miasma of threats and mud, armor, and guns. But eventually we found ourselves at the airport main gate—among the very small number of civilians who had managed to get past what we were told were Serb checkpoints. What we found there was a scene of near-total farce. The Russian armored cars, eight-wheeled and noisy, were churning back and forth up the main runway, doing their best to provoke the British paratroopers, whose job, they had supposed, had been to take and secure the airport from the departing Serbs. The British soldiers stood in the rain looking perplexed, and every five minutes or so a loud voice would sound from a speaker mounted on a Russian vehicle: “Get out of way! Russians coming!” and the drivers would gun their engines and drive the massive machines almost directly at the waiting platoons, or at the gaggle of reporters waiting disconsolately, and equally puzzled, beside them.
General Jackson was by now supposed to be in Pristina, giving a triumphalist press conference in a suitably public building, telling the world that NATO had now officially liberated Kosovo, that freedom and democracy had triumphed over tyranny and violence, and that those forced out of their homes and their country would soon be free to come back and live in peace. But General Jackson is not a triumphalist figure, and he no doubt would have had some difficulty putting the right amount of sincerity in a statement of this kind—which is why I thought he was actually marginally more comfortable when we saw him, at a moment when the Russians briefly interrupted their own triumphal bluster and let him speak to the assembled microphones.
It was a dismally stage-managed affair, as it and everything to do with NATO’s conduct of the propaganda war was bound to be. A press officer from No. 10 Downing Street, the official home of the British prime minister, was on hand to choreograph things. As that windswept and rain-soaked old warhorse, General Jackson, stepped briskly down from his helicopter she strode behind him, her army fatigues only barely disguising her and not fooling at all the Fleet Street men who knew her. Then, as the rain lanced down, so Mike Jackson, flanked by a phalanx of machine-gun-carrying sentries, offered the world NATO’s prepared statement. The Russians in the background promptly stepped on their accelerators, attempting as ordered to drown out his words with the roar of their ill-tuned engines, and torrents of smoke lifted in the background, as if half the field were suddenly on fire. The world may have been watching the pictures, but on this occasion it most certainly wasn’t listening to the words.
And in any case the wind soon whipped the general’s rain-sodden papers into a porridge of papier-mâché, so that by the time he reached the passage about the refugees soon being able to return home, he had to dispense with it totally and rely on memory and a few nudges and whispers from the woman behind him. Then he strode away, the Russians quieting their engines. Keith Graves, that most determined of television reporters, shouted out the only question that the general deigned to answer. “Was the presence of the Russians here an embarrassment?”
The general didn’t miss a beat. “Not at all. We welcome them as part of the KFOR. I look forward to discussing practical matters with them directly.”
And off he strode—not knowing, perhaps, that so pleased had President Yeltsin been with the execution of the Russians’ cheeky move that he had promoted the commander of the airport force. The man with whom Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson was now off to parley had begun the day as a mere major, commanding a force of a mere two hundred men. Now he had been made into a lieutenant general, too, and Mike Jackson would have to treat with him as a military equal.
Getting away from the airport was for us was even more difficult than finding it in the first place. Night was falling, and the rain was helping to make what was sinister begin to look and feel downright frightening. As soon as were past the airport perimeter, and had left behind the friendly invigilation of the British paratroopers, we felt very much on our own, very alone.
We took many wrong turns, and twice we came across gangs of Serb youths, heavily armed, forming themselves into impromptu roadblocks, menacing anyone trying to pass through. At one stage as I was speeding along a muddy track we passed two militiamen with rifles, and by accident I sprayed them with water as I crashed through a large pothole. They shouted, and raised their weapons and began to run—and then a hundred yards or so ahead I swore I saw the swinging red lantern of a roadblock, demanding that we stop. I assumed, for a brief moment, that our number was up. But the flashing light was simply a flag flapping in front of a lighted barn; there was no-one there to stop us, and the two running militiamen fell back and turned away, brushing the thick mud from their uniforms.
It took us a miserable hour to get back to the main road—our last direction given by a young soldier from Yorkshire, who came out from his tent and stood in the driving rain, showing us where to go on a laminated plastic map. The engine of the tank standing beside us throbbed warmly: I could, for a moment, feel something of the relief that many Albanians must be feeling right now, that at last they had some measure of security in their lives, that no one could take them away from their homes and torture and shoot them again. There was someone here to help.
But for how long? The question haunted us for the hours it then took us to drive back down the main highway to Macedonia. We weaved in and out of road blocks, watched yet more convoys churning past us, heading north where we were going south. One of the convoys was Dutch, and at nighttime its movement was even more impressive than the other convoys had been during the daytime. I was enthralled by the sight, and said so to a young woman who was standing by the road, taking pictures.
Oh yes, she said—an entire armored brigade, with light tanks and artillery pieces and self-propelled guns. Impressive, don’t you think?
I remarked on her knowledge, with a fine display of patronizing clumsiness. Wasn’t it odd, I said, that perhaps not even as lately as two days ago, phrases like “armored brigade” and “artillery pieces” and “self-propelled guns” had never even passed her pretty lips?
She grinned. “Oh yes they have,” she replied. “This is all most familiar to me. Actually, I am a lieutenant in the Dutch Army. Do let me give you my card.”
And with a broad smile she clambered up and onto a passing troop carrier, and waved farewell. Rose, proud feminist and scourge of old white males, had overheard it all. As she came toward me, I winced.
But yes, I continued as the Dutch faded from view—how long would soldiers such as these be detained here? And was all this, I wondered, indeed a real liberation? Was Operation Joint Guardian truly what General Jackson’s speech suggested that it should and would be—an unarguably powerful means, underwritten by the international community, of guaranteeing the safety and security of Kosovo, of helping to make it a place where all the ethnic groups who had been forced by history, accident and imperial fiat, to live together from now on, and to do so in peace?
I have to say that I doubted it. A military policy like this was just as unlikely to work here in the Balkans as it had been unlikely to work in Northern Ireland—another tiny province in which, in the aftermath of other more major decisions, the similarly ancient struggles for territory and power and influence, afflicted by similarly deep divisions of religion and culture, had set communities implacably and unforgivably at each others’ throats, and seemingly so for ever. No, I felt certain—only if the foreign governments could decree, as none of them could, that their soldiers would remain on the ground for years, decades even, only then might enough pressure be brought to bear so that some kind of apparent peac
e might take hold.
But if not, if the soldiers were there for only a short while, and if there was no certain foreign policy exerted over Kosovo other than the short-sighted aim of enforcing some kind of stability—then a solution would probably never be found. If no solution was found then yet more trouble, and of a viciousness not even yet seen here, would break out again, somewhere, and soon. Perhaps it would erupt first in Macedonia, to where we were heading. Or perhaps in Montenegro, from where we had come some days before. Perhaps in Bulgaria. Or Greece. Or Turkey. Or even back up in Bosnia again.
Who knew? And when, and how? And what trigger? No one could know yet. But just one thing seemed to be clear, as the rain eased and the stars came out as we climbed back up the hills towards the Macedonian frontier. This had been no liberation, I thought—no matter how earnestly the press officer from London might have wanted it to be seen that way.
The foreign troops who were here and who would be coming in during the days and weeks to come, were becoming, as all outsiders were and have been for years, entrapped in the great swamp of the Balkans. This was for them indeed, more an entrapment that a liberation; and if there was any freedom in the air today, then it was, I rather thought, an illusory kind of freedom, a freedom that was ready to be whisked away with the slightest breath of the Balkan wind.
9
A City So Sublime
THE BULGARIA to which we drew up the next day in yet another black Mercedes, and into which were obliged to drive through yet another pool of muddy-water disinfectant and cleanse our wheels of accumulated Macedonian dirt, has long been a country in a state of difficult equipoise. Bulgaria is quite literally at a pivot point, a fulcrum—a buffer-state on a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, between the oppressions of the Russia lying across the Black Sea and the Turkey lying on its southern frontier, between the darkest kinds of Communism and the most rampant excesses of modern capitalism, between Ruritanian flamboyance and pretension and the high-tech modernity of the new Eurocracy.
What little it is known for more than amply illustrates the point. Bulgaria is famous on the one hand for being the world’s great source of attar of roses (the volatile and fragrant essence that comes from flowers grown in one of its deepest fault lines, for it is on a geological and tectonic crossing point, too), for horseradish (which grows on its railway embankments and was at one time bought liberally by Messrs. Cooper of Oxford, condiment makers to the gentry) and for yogurt, which was first made in the Rhodope Mountains from a culture created out of a milk-curdling ur-germ known as Bacillus bulgaricus.
Its people are renowned for being among the most agreeable in Europe, famous for their courtesy, civility, and learning. So it was perhaps not surprising that when the Turks, in the terminal decrepitude of their empire, lashed out savagely at a timid Bulgarian uprising in the late 1870s, the world’s intelligentsia rushed to the victims’ side, much as was to happen in the Spanish civil war half a century later. So William Ewart Gladstone, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Oscar Wilde, Ivan Turgenev, and Victor Hugo all pledged their support for the eminently decent Bulgarians. Suddenly Bulgaria and its people became the cause célèbre of the more fashionable European salons—both because the Turks were so widely despised and because the poor Bulgarians the objects of such widespread affection.
And yet, and much more recently, it was a Bulgarian secret agency that tried to murder Pope John Paul II (using a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, to perform—and bungle—the deed). It was a Bulgarian agent for the Sigurnost who succeeded in murdering a BBC Bulgarian service employee and well-known dissident Georgi Markov, by stabbing him in the leg with an umbrella, its steel tip laced with ricin. It was Bulgarian secret police who used to force their way into the homes of the ethnic Turks who lived in villages in the south of the country and force them to sign papers changing their names—Mehmets becoming Mikhails, nearly a million such—on pain of torture or worse. And the word “bugger” also comes from here, from the word Bulgar, Bulgarian, and perhaps from Bogomil, and was first applied to a curious eleventh century sect that was born in what is now Bulgaria, and was infamous for its “abominable practices,” which, if a Bogomil, included as well as buggery, the eccentric and short-lived belief that Christ and Satan were the twin sons of God.
So Bulgaria, a confused melange of attar of roses and abominable practices, seemed the perfect airlock, the crossroads, the pivot point, from which to pass from the insanity of the Balkans into the supposed serenity and sublimity of the city on the Bosporus that they once had called the Porte. We arrived on a sunny morning, with the grinding sound of the NATO tanks fading fast, and we left on a blistering afternoon three days later. We stayed in a hotel that was attached to the presidential palace, and so there were guards in high boots and shakos on sentry duty around by the back door and, in the courtyard, a churchly rotunda that had been built in the fourth century by the Romans and had frescoes a thousand years old. A presidential honor guard and a Roman rotunda attached to the back of our hotel! Sofia, it seemed to me, was a city with which it was easy to become enchanted and, in Rose’s case, easy to become quite smitten.
For Rose had known a young Bulgarian man from some years back, when she lived in Venice, and here she had found him again. They had not been in contact since the time he drove all the way across to Croatia, and they had met for one sad last weekend in a village in Istria. It took some courage for Rose to look him up again when we arrived in Sofia, and for a while it took some ginger for him to breathe life back into a damaged friendship. But something did take place, and for all the while that I was in this quiet and dignified and flower-filled old city, I was left to my own devices, and I left them to theirs. In the end Rose decided that whatever had taken place was powerful enough that she would go back to Bulgaria from Turkey, and eventually she did. I would later receive letters telling of how she was sitting in a small apartment in a Sofia suburb, eating cherries and yogurt and drinking good Bulgarian red wines, and gazing silently into the middle distance with her Bulgarian beside her. He had the saddest eyes, she said, and she was smitten, and from what I could tell, quite happy too.
The American ambassador to Bulgaria was a friend of a friend: Avis Bohlen, daughter of the legendarily smooth American diplomat Chip Bohlen, a man who had been one of the great pundits on the more trying questions of the Cold War. She lived, as all American ambassadors of necessity must these days, amid conditions of great and irksome security. Once past the heavily armed gorillas in her street and at her door, however, she was a delight—knowledgeable, well read, and exuberantly pleased with her discovery of Bulgaria’s joys. Her role as one of the more involved diplomats during the lately ended war had been fascinating and educational: She was only frustrated that some of the key diplomatic bargainings—on such questions as whether Bulgaria would permit NATO warplanes the right to pass through its airspace—had been conducted not by the individual national embassies, not by officials such as she, but by the NATO ambassadors themselves, and not in Sofia but in Brussels.
The ambassador’s experience was somehow symbolic, I thought. For while Bulgaria is and always had been a country that looked as though it should be central to the doings of southern Europe, it never quite has been. One might think that centrality, at least to the Balkan problem, should have been hardwired into the Bulgarian nature: After all, no less than the Balkan Mountains, from which the Balkans get their name, are entirely in Bulgaria, for example; and nowadays the national airline is Balkan Airlines, suggesting a Bulgarian impress on all matters Balkan.* But this centrality has never been the case. In terms of the doings and undoings of southern Europe, Bulgaria has played only marginal roles: a base from which the Ottomans made their predatory excursions into Europe; the Russians’ zone of protection, to keep the Turks at bay; a place for overflights, for transit, for permissions. But little or no influence of its own—beyond the dreamy scent of rose petals, and the needle-sharp little bacillus that lives on in every container
of Yoplait or Dannon.
We drove away from Sofia with a young photographer named Boris, who wanted a lift to Turkey so that he might catch a plane from Istanbul and fly to see his parents, newly posted to Kazakhstan. He knew the best cafés en route, and we ended up among the cobbled streets of Philippopolis, now known rather less elegantly as Plovdiv, eating what was to become our favorite Balkan dish, a hotpot of cheese, eggs, and tomatoes baked in earthenware and known as sirene po shopski. He was also eager for us to try some of the scores of brands of plum and apricot brandies, or to choose from a list of wines so long that it suggested California, or Australia, or France (behind which come only Chile and Bulgaria, making up the leading five wine-exporting countries in the world). But I declined: The country road to the Turkish frontier was long and winding and dangerous, I had been told, and there were police with radar and breathalyzer kits behind every bush—just like Russia, and with penalties even more severe.
The first time I had come to Istanbul, in the spring of 1972, I had taken a stroll across a catwalk, a narrow ropeway, that stretched from Europe right into Asia. It was an extraordinary journey, and I believe I was the first person to do it—or maybe just the first Englishman. I duly wrote a piece about the venture, and in passing made a rather feeble feline joke, calling it a Persian Cat-Walk, since I fancied that from it one could eventually make it all the way to Tehran and Isfahan. But the joke was not to be: A mirthless subeditor declared the word Persia absent from the newspaper’s then-current style book, and he changed the adjective to Iranian instead.
Nonetheless it had been a most impressive walk. I had come to Turkey from Paris aboard the Orient Express, and was staying at the Pera Palas, in a room that overlooked the Galata Bridge and the Golden Horn to all the minarets and domes of a perfectly imagined Istanbul. Earlier in the day I had walked down the hill to Karakoy and taken a ferry across to look at Hay-darpasa railway station, in the event that I might take a train to Ankara.* On the way, looking out from the little boat’s port-side windows, I could see through the haze two towers, slender as minarets but glinting in the sun.
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