Rock and Hard Places (34 page)

In the hotel is a karaoke lounge. At the karaoke machine is a large man in a pastel golf shirt and interestingly-patterned trousers who is taking it very seriously indeed. “Purple rain . . . purple rain,” he groans, like a man in the tempestuous throes of a grand, passionate agony, or complete renal failure.

“Rubbish! Get off!”

Lush are heckling from a cocktail-glass-covered table up the back. Westenberg and I are joining in because some genius has booked us into a hotel in Seattle, miles and miles away over Puget Sound, and Lush have kindly agreed to find space for us on floors and spare beds.

“Booooooo!”

We are, any second now, going to get beaten to a whimpering pulp, of this I feel sure. At the bar, Al Jourgensen is flicking fifty-dollar notes at the barkeeper and barking “Margaritas for all my friends!” As his friends, for the moment, include anyone standing anywhere near him, I stick about. The barkeeper goes about his work with a terrified diligence, like a man defusing an unexploded bomb.

I don’t think they get many people who look like Jourgensen in the karaoke bars of Bremerton. Jourgensen is clad entirely in sunglasses-at-midnight black, topped off with a ten-gallon hat decorated with the polished craniums of unfortunate rodents, and is clutching a wooden staff, taller than he is, on which is mounted the skull of a goat.

 

 

 

I
N WHICH YOUR correspondent goes to war for the first time, more or less by accident.

Every reporter who finds themselves out of their depth in a war zone feels, upon their thrashing limbs, the hand of the ghost of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, attempting to drag them irrecoverably into the murky brine. (For the purposes of sustaining this metaphor, please assume that the spectre of the hapless ingenue mistakenly dispatched to an obscure African frontline in
Scoop
is, for some peculiar reason, a seaborne phantasm). At best, I reckon I managed to stay but a few strokes ahead of said spook. That said, there is something to be said for leaping into a situation you don’t understand, in anticipation that afterwards you’ll have to write something about it with your name attached. With little in the way of received wisdoms to fall back on, you’ve no choice but to keep asking people the really crucial and elemental questions: When? Where? Who? Why? What the fuck is going on here?

The latter of these, where Bosnia in the mid-1990s was concerned, was always especially pertinent.

THE DAY CROATIA re-joins the war is the day the music dies.

The annual A&M (Art & Music) festival in the pretty Istrian town of Pula has been running for one day of its scheduled three when we start hearing reports that the Croatian army has launched an enormous offensive. More than a hundred thousand troops have poured into Krajina, the nominally ethnically Serbian enclave which occupies about a third of Croatia’s territory along the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and which has been operating as a self-declared, if unrecognised, independent state since 1991. To nobody’s great surprise, the remainder of the festival is cancelled, under state of emergency laws that forbid public gatherings in open spaces.

Photographer Phil Nicholls and I had arrived in Pula a few days previously, to cover the A&M festival for
Ikon
magazine. It had been going pretty well. We were billeted in an agreeable resort complex with easy access to quiet beaches. We’d spent a lot of time loafing around the bars and cafes of Pula’s fairy-lit old city square. We’d even been quite enjoying the festival.

There had been an interesting exhibition of cartoon art, of which the recurring motifs were bitter lampoons of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) operating, with minimal success, in the former Yugoslavia, gothic demonisations of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and laments to Kurt Cobain. There had been some slightly less interesting performance art—exactly the kind of the thing, ironically, that usually provokes critics to call fervently for a swift reintroduction of conscription.

There had also been music, performed on a stage in a courtyard in the old city. I had been prevailed upon to help judge the A&M band competition, due to the sudden absence of one of the adjudicating panel, a writer for satirical Croatian paper
The Feral Tribune
. He’d vanished, either—depending on which rumour you believed—because he’d been mobilised, or because he was trying to avoid being mobilised. So I’d attempted tact about the dreary, gruff speed metal of Blockade Runner, A Je To and the promisingly named Megabitch. I’d managed to muster some enthusiasm for Leave, a skittish, Banshees-type concern from Osijek. I’d tried not to look too despondent during the set by whichever dismal headbangers had followed them, and I’d downright enjoyed The Holy Joes, the festival’s guest stars from London.

I just wasn’t too sure what to make of the rumours sweeping the site that Croatian army units were driving around town hauling fighting-age men out of their beds, that the border had been sealed, and that the Yugoslav Air Force were preparing to come to the aid of their ethnic brethren in Krajina.

 

ON WHAT WAS supposed to have been the second night of the festival, Nicholls and I head down to the site anyway. The roads are full of cars honking their horns while their occupants raise noisy toasts to the prowess of the Croatian army, and wave the Croatian flag, at its centre the sahovnica—the red-and-white checkerboard emblem of loony fascist Ante Pavelic’s World War II Nazi puppet state. News reports from the front suggest that it’s a rout: the Krajina Serbs have fled their centuries-old homeland with hardly a shot fired in return, and there is no sign of the Yugoslav or Bosnian Serb military coming to help them.

At the festival site, a few dozen people are sitting around with acoustic guitars, drinking and singing mournfully. The songs are all local, or local-ish, favourites, many by still-popular Serbian band Party Breakers. This is a subtle protest—Serbian songs were banned from Croatian radio in 1990. Since then, the Serb variant of the language which used to be called Serbo-Croatian, but which is now called Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian depending on where you’re standing or who you’re talking to, has gained some currency around Pula as code of dissent. There’s one especially bohemian squat in Pula whose residents make a point of speaking nothing else, even if this does seem a little like aggrieved Londoners trying to make a political point by affecting Yorkshire accents.

By now, the speakers and tannoys that have been hoisted all over Pula are playing nothing but Croatian radio, which in turn is playing nothing but patriotic music. This, while it is thoughtfully provided in every genre imaginable, from country to techno to powerpop, all sounds worse than the news that Bauhaus are getting back together.

The logic of this approach to programming during wartime is apparent, however: after three days of hearing it blaring from every stereo in every bar, I want to kill somebody, as well.

IT’S NOT JUST a desire to escape these infinite annoying variations on the “Y Viva Croatia” theme that drives Nicholls and me out of Pula, though they’re a factor in our decision. We get a bus to Rijeka, and from there an overnight ferry down the coast to Split. We’re both struck, on the way, by how normal everything looks. The beaches we pass are full of holidaying Slovenes and Czechs. The other passengers on the boat sit up on the top deck and sip beer while the sun disappears behind the horizon. Nothing looks at all warlike until we get to Split, and to our villa in a resort complex near Trogir. These implausibly beautiful Roman cities—Split is built around the vast ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s third century retirement palace—are full of German and English visitors, which is what you’d expect, but the former aren’t staking out deckchairs, the latter aren’t taunting them with chants of “Two world wars and one world cup, doodah, doodah,” and they’re all wearing uniforms. It’s from here and hereabouts that UNPROFOR is directing its peacekeeping operations, such as they are.

It rapidly becomes clear to us that our decision to understand the former Yugoslavia by going to the former Yugoslavia makes as much sense as trying to assess the efficiency of a pasta factory from inside a vat of tagliatelle. If—and this is an “if” big enough to block out the sun and plunge the world into a new ice age—two people in the whole ex-country agree on why the war started and how it will end, we only meet one of them. While we spend a few days in Trogir phoning round to see if we can get a lift somewhere more interesting, my map of the Balkans gets covered in arrows, dotted lines, crosshatches, circles, squares, one sort of lopsided trapezium arrangement—in fact, everything but snakes and ladders—drawn by Croatian soldiers, Bosnian refugees, Italian journalists, Bangladeshi peacekeepers, American aid workers and the hotel telephone operator.

By the time Feed the Children offer us a lift on a convoy they’re running into Bihac, I have heard, and dutifully noted, more batty and preposterous opinions than Lyndon LaRouche’s secretary. I have met Croats who claim that the Bosnian government is a clique of Koran-waving fundamentalist fanatics intent on establishing a European branch of Iran, which is probably to be expected. I have met Bosnian Muslims who think the same, which isn’t. I have met Croats who say their fat thug of a President, Dr. Franjo Tudjman, is a Balkan Churchill,
which isn’t surprising. I have met Croats who call Tudjman a bully and a war criminal, which, while it has the virtue of accuracy, is surprising. I’ve met aid workers who think NATO should bomb the Bosnian Serb Army, and aid workers who think the UN should pack up and go home. And I’ve met UN troops who think the whole thing is a total waste of everybody’s time, and UN troops who don’t want to leave.

I thought I knew my stuff. I’d been here before, hauling a backpack around the then-Yugoslavia in 1990, when the place was like a bad party at midnight, the six republics eyeing each other testily to see who’d be bold enough to be first to leave, though the whole thing still seemed a bit unlikely (“Where are you going to hold this war?” I remember asking a drunk barman in a hotel near Plitvice. “Your whole country is the size of the second-smallest state of mine. You haven’t got room, you fool.” He’d smiled at me, said, “Aha, but . . .” and fallen over). I’d tried to follow the story since. I even knew the history. Battle of Kosovo Field? 1389. Death of Tito? 1980. Red Star Belgrade’s European Cup win? 1991. Didn’t even have to look them up. I could even spell “Izetbegovic” nine times out of ten.

But by the time we get to the convoy’s assembly point in Karlovac, after an overnight drive via Senj, I can feel myself turning into Lisa Simpson: “Why? Why must people fight? Why can’t everyone live together? In peace, and stuff?”

 

I’D LIKE TO meet some Serbs, as well, to see what they make of it all, but they haven’t stuck around to be met. Croatian television carries pictures from the Krajina offensive, accompanied by reports whose gloating tone transcends any linguistic barrier, of an entire population on the march, trudging back across Bosnia towards Serbia with whatever of their possessions they can carry.

In Karlovac, we wait. Nicholls and I have ridden here up the coast in a Feed the Children Landcruiser with two Feed the Children employees, whom I’ll call Bill and Ted. Bill is a long-haired, softly-spoken young Englishman with an admirable facility for spotting the worst pun in any given situation (“Is that a school?” I’d asked on the way, pointing at a building on top of a hill. “Yes,” Bill had replied. “It’s what they call higher education.”) Ted is a robust New Zealander whose speech is a bizarre mixture of obscure kiwi colloquialisms, convoluted acronyms
of his own invention and swearing. Bill and Ted both seem to have a fair bit of time for the vanquished Republic of Krajina—Ted shows me the pages in his passport where he’s encouraged Krajina checkpoint guards to put their stamps on top of his Croatian visas (“Really pisses the fuckin’ cabbages off,” he chuckles, deploying the standard aid worker euphemism for Croats).