Rock and Hard Places (36 page)

Charlie has extraordinary silver-blue eyes, wispy sideburns and looks like he should be playing bass in Supergrass. When he’s not fighting for Croatia, he spends his time “at home, listening to rock’n’roll—Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and The Allman Brothers.” He volunteered in 1990, “because I love Croatia.” Charlie also says he’s a pacifist, and solemnly informs me that “one human life is more important than politics or nation.”

Yet he keeps risking his own.

“It’s under my skin,” he shrugs. “It’s a drug.”

He says something else to the interpreter.

“He wants to know,” she says, “if you do not love your country as well. Would you not fight if you were attacked?”

It’s not a question I’d presume to answer. The lack of plausible military threats to most western nations at this end of this century allows most of us to love our homelands like we love distant relatives—glad they’re there, and all that, but we don’t give them a lot of thought, except during World Cups. I suppose if Australia was invaded by New Zealand or menaced by militant Tasmanian secessionists, then I’d do what I usefully could—even if this would most likely amount to keeping out of the way—but the possibility doesn’t keep me awake nights.

Charlie takes the point, and I ask him whether or not he thinks that when the war ends, ex-Yugoslavs will be able to live together again.

“No,” he says. “People have suffered, and they can’t forget.”

But none of them are going to go anywhere. The people of Western Europe get on with each other, more or less, despite two terrible wars this century. What’s so special about this place?

“This,” says Charlie, with exasperation and, I think, a certain defiant pride, “is the Balkans.”

 

IT’S PROBABLY AS good an answer as any. But there’s a bottom line beneath the rhetoric and chauvinism, and I find it in a chicken shed near the Bihac Pocket village of Bajrici, not far from Cazin. This flimsy tin structure has been home for four years to thirteen gypsy families, all refugees from Bosanska Krupa. Among them is Sudic Hasib, a twenty-one-year-old with a firm handshake, a wintry, unshaven smile and a horrible, horrible mess where he should have a left leg.

Sudic’s story, by Bosnian standards, is no big deal. Sudic wasn’t killed in a headline-stealing massacre and shovelled into a satellite-detected mass grave. He wasn’t interned behind wire, or tortured and starved in a sickeningly evocative detention camp. He wasn’t a civilian evicted from his home for having the wrong surname, wrong accent or wrong ideas about God, and he wasn’t forced to walk hundreds of miles to refuge.

Sudic was a soldier, and he fought, as soldiers do, and he got hurt, as soldiers will. On June 22, 1995, he was serving with the 511th brigade of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina near Vrnograc, when he was injured by shrapnel. He doesn’t know who fired the shell—the 511th were in the thick of Bihac’s multi-player fighting, and it could have been the Bosnian Serbs, or it could have been Abdic’s militia. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says, and lights another cigarette.

The lower half of his left leg caught the worst of it, and is now held together by an unwieldy metal contraption, screwed into both ends of his shin and strapped in place by a bandage. Beneath the bandage, as Sudic cheerfully insists on showing me, is a yawning wound that exposes the bone pretty much from knee to ankle, as wide as it is deep. A nurse from a nearby hospital dabs at it with antiseptic pads, and trades banter with Sudic, but it’s the kind of joking people do to keep each other going when they’ve been assigned to a task they know is futile. Gangrene has already claimed three of the toes on Sudic’s left
foot. He lives in a room built from wooden crates in a tin chicken shed, and winter is approaching.

And he’s no big deal. Jasmina, also twenty-one, an interpreter from Cazin, can’t understand why I want to know so much about him. “This is nothing,” she says, and Sudic’s resolutely unperturbed expression suggests that he agrees with her. People get used to the strangest things—I suppose I’d feel the same about a visitor to London taking an appalled interest in someone sleeping in a shop doorway. Jasmina’s own brother suffered a head wound in the fighting for Bihac. “But he’ll be okay,” she’d said, earlier, rapping herself on the forehead. “He has a Bosnian head—very hard.”

But it’s this very banality of Sudic’s story, his little tragedy lost in the enormous one around him, that’s bothering me. While the alleged leaders of western civilisation continue to regard the war in Bosnia with the baffled distaste of Etonian prefects who have been asked to sort out the brawl happening in the playground of the borstal down the road, Sudic’s story will be retold countless times, adding further ugly grist to the Balkan mill of guilt and revenge.

Two days later, as our train out of Zagreb rolls out through the deep lime valleys of the Sava River and heads towards Llubljana, the song playing on my Walkman is Neil Young’s electrified, outraged version of Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

You know the words.

 

 

 

T
HIS ONE WAS spotted by Andrew Tuck, editor of
Monocle
, who has a rare and treasurable knack for finding a way into a story that few others would even begin to think of. We had talked vaguely about doing something by way of illustrating the alliance that appeared to be flourishing between Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez. A lesser publication would have contented itself with getting some hack to cobble together something from the news cuttings; Andrew, reading around the subject, noticed that IranAir was opening a route to Caracas, and called to ask if I fancied trying it out. At the risk of giving away the ending, I answered in the affirmative.

I’d never been to Iran before, and at time of writing I haven’t returned, and though the couple of days I spent in Tehran on this trip scarcely qualify me as an authority on the Islamic Republic, it is one of the joys of travelling as a journalist that you can learn a lot quite quickly, especially if it registers with people that you might serve as a conduit for their feelings. In Iran especially, it is not easy to be unobstrusive and independent as a visiting journalist: the Department of Foreign Affairs issues you with (and charges you for, and wastes half a day of your life wrangling) an escort, who translates for you, possibly even reliably, and brandishes the appropriate pieces of rubber-stamped official stationery every time some interfering yahoo in uniform tries
to arrest you for behaving like a foreign journalist. Annoying though this is, it does mean that people talk to you, and I thought some of what they said was interesting, especially given that they appeared to have no compunction about saying it in front of our government minder. One afternoon, as we photographed the totalitarian concrete origami of the Azadi monument, a besuited commuter paused to ask, in English, “Why do you photograph this? This country is turning to shit.” Several other people were insistent that I record their dissatisfactions, which were largely to do with lack of economic opportunity and surfeit of Koranic strictures upon everyday existence.

As became clear a couple of years later, when Iran was convulsed by violent protest about the results of its presidential election—or, to employ the correct technical term, “election”—these people were not alone in their frustrations. Nor, I’m sure, were the Iranian women on the flights I took, whose reaction to the lights and beeps that denote imminent landing or the achievement of cruising altitude also struck me as significant (and hopeful) straws in the wind. On being informed that the first IranAir flight I caught, from London’s Heathrow, would shortly, Insh’allah, be landing in Tehran, they rummaged resignedly in their carry-on luggage for the scarves and shawls that would shroud them in accordance with the dress code that Iran enforces upon its female population under threat of violence (writing or reading it as clearly as that helps, I find, in reaching the appropriate pitch of anger at this idiocy). On the outbound journey, upon hearing that we’d cleared Iranian airspace, the drab, observant garb was immediately stashed. I remember thinking that IranAir should add a second light next to the seatbelt indicator, perhaps in the shape of a ranting cleric, and/or alter their takeoff and landing announcements (“We will shortly be landing in Tehran. Please raise your seats to the upright positions, stow your tray tables, switch off all electronic equipment—and, if you’re female, enact acquiescence to the institutional misogyny of our homeland, a country where grown men, paid by the government, in the twenty-first century, are licensed to threaten, arrest or hit women for flashing an untoward quantity of hair”).

For reasons surpassing my understanding, we remain, as a species, bewilderingly content to excuse all manner of nonsense so long as someone asserts divine sanction for it. I don’t claim to know all that—much one of the benefits of doing a job that involves finding stuff out is that you are constantly reminded of the unfathomable expanses of your ignorance. But I’ve been around a bit, by now, and I hold at least a couple of truths to be self-evident.
Any government that rules by fear is illegitimate. And anybody who claims to speak or act on God’s behalf is insane.

TEHRAN AND CARACAS appear, to understate matters recklessly, curious candidates for an air link. Tehran is the capital of a Central Asian Islamic republic. Caracas is the capital of a South American “Bolivarian”—in honour of Simon Bolivar, serial vanquisher of South America’s Spanish imperial overlords—republic. Tehran is a drab, joyless, religiously straitened hovel whose people make what merry they dare behind the closed doors of private homes, and where alcohol is illegal (although available, we’ve been pleased to discover, if you fall in with the wrong crowd). Caracas, or so I’ve been reading, is a colourful, lively, unbuttoned sort of place whose people are cheerful even when they’re not out drinking until sunrise. Tehran’s women use more material restraining their hair than many Caraqueno females apparently do covering their entire bodies. Iran is probably the only country in the world not plagued by Venezuelan buskers.

The reason for the establishment of this route—the flight I’m sitting on, alongside
Monocle
photographer Christopher Sturman, is only the third of what is intended to be a weekly service—is the one thing that does unite Iran and Venezuela: brash, populist, ambitious presidents radiating a disdain of the United States, an erratic respect for human rights and a streak of what might be charitably described as eccentricity. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens the destruction of a fellow member of the UN and convenes covens of Holocaust-deniers. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, more amiably if no less oddly, has, for much of his eight-year reign, hosted a weekly four-hour television programme,
Alo Presidente
, a good deal of which is devoted to the spirited abuse of his opponents.

Ahmadinejad and Chavez have become friends of the enemy-of-my-enemy variety. They have visited each other’s countries, embraced each other as revolutionaries, supported each other diplomatically, and IranAir’s ludicrous Caracas route is an emblem of this alliance. During my brief stay in Tehran, I have been soliciting the opinions of
the people I’ve encountered: every response has included some, if not all, of the words “crazy,” “political” and “bullshit.” In fairness to the two leaders, while their relationship may have begun as instinctive solidarity against a common, larger foe, this odd couple do have some other overlapping concerns. Iran has the third largest oil reserves on Earth, Venezuela the seventh. Iran owns the world’s second-biggest natural gas stores, Venezuela the ninth.

From the perspective of a window seat in economy class, it’s clear that little of this wealth has flowed to IranAir. Before the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the state-owned airline possessed a prestigious cachet similar to that enjoyed by Emirates today. However, IranAir’s American routes were an inevitable early casualty of Khomeini’s seizure of power, and the sanctions imposed upon Iran since have restricted the purchase of new aircraft. For the passenger, this isn’t all bad. IranAir’s small fleet of ageing planes have an air of charming retro gentility, their cabins decorated with silver and blue geometric shapes only otherwise seen on the shower curtains of midwestern American motels. And despite the strictures under which it operates, the airline has a superb safety record—it cannot be blamed for its worst disaster of modern times, the 1988 downing of an Airbus A300 over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes, with the loss of all 290 aboard.

It’s just as well that there is so much consideration that can be made of the political context of our journey, and the state of repair of our transport, as it turns out that we’ve some time to kill. Indeed, in the interregnum between boarding the elderly 747 and liftoff, Christopher and I would have had time to read, memorise and recite to each other the entire umpty-thousand-verse Iranian national epic
The Shahnameh
in the original Persian, a language neither of us speak. At 8:00 AM, our 5:00 AM departure still looks no closer to occurring. These hours pass without a word of explanation from the crew, nor the merest murmur of complaint from any of the passengers. Not for the first time in my travels in the Islamic world, I’m torn between admiration for the general stoic disdain for the insistent ticking of any nearby clock, and wanting to command a mutiny.