The Fracture Zone (4 page)

Mike Jackson, who had rightly promised that I would never forget what I would see at Blace, had been angry the night before, on the juddering helicopter flight back to his forward base camp at Skopje. He had been outwardly angry, mainly because the international relief agencies—not the aid workers, but their agency bosses back in the comfort of their head offices—and who were supposed to have anticipated this flood of humankind, had not done so. In consequence the world had been caught unawares by
the exodus, had been unprepared for the extent and enormity of the crime that some could have foreseen would be perpetrated against these Albanians. The UN, in particular, had been caught wrong-footed, impotent, unable to bring more than a few bananas and garbage bags to the hundreds of thousands—here and elsewhere; there were massive outpourings of terrified and hungry people elsewhere in Macedonia too, as well as at the crossing points into Albania and Montenegro—who were relying on the organization for help. General Jackson was angry too that his troops were having to fill the gap, were having to deal with such mundane matters as chickens and rice, and whether they were
halal
or not, when the real business of his force, which was grandly titled NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, was fighting.

“I’m a NATO general, and I’m up here flying in the dark, in secrecy, well within the range of Yugoslav artillery, just to organize
meals
for these people,” he had kept saying. “That’s surely not why I’m paid to be here.”

But he had been more angry still that the refugees should be here in the first place, and that made for a deeper and darker and bleaker mood. As we had stepped off the helicopter—and this was the night before I had seen the water meadow at Blace—he had muttered something about how dreadful it all was, but that he had it in his power to help. “They’ll go back home, these people,” he said. “They’ll get their houses back, if I have anything to do with it. And we’ll find the people who drove them out. A few weeks of bombing, believe me—that’s all. A few weeks and the Serbs will cave in. Then we’ll be taking these refugees back. By God, I hope so!”

On my way out I made a small bet with one of his staff officers as to just how long it might be before Belgrade caved in, before the refugees were in fact permitted to go home. Eighty days, someone said. It was a figure that stuck in my mind. This war, one of General Jackson’s senior planners had predicted, would go on for just eighty days. It would only be an air war: No soldiers would be fighting on the ground—the Americans in
particular had no stomach for the notion of losing their boys in a battle here. But the persuasive might of the combined allied air forces would be enough, the officer said. Eighty days—he was just about sure of it.

Which meant that if matters went according to plan I could be back here in Blace, standing beside the water meadow for the third time. This time, however, I would be with a force of men and machines heading north, and behind us would come the refugees again, but this time going home.

Might it work? Could it take so short a time? The officer was confident. “Trust me,” he said. “These bombers are damn good.”

With his words ringing in my ears I then hatched a modest plan. It came about as I was on my own ride back to Skopje through the rain the next evening, after I had seen the horror of the refugee field, and was concluding that of course I shared the general’s hopes that all the homeless would be home again—but at the same time wondered whether there was much long-term wisdom and merit in the simple fact of taking all these people home and then employing international troops to guard them, for how long?—months, years, decades, maybe?—in the hope that they and the Serbs who had done all this to them might come to tolerate each another once again.

And then, as that thought duly flared and waxed and waned, so came its successor, the thought that invariably dogs anyone who is foolish enough to become interested, fascinated, or eventually obsessed with the quagmire of the Balkans. I wondered further, as the car bumped through the outskirts of the old Turkish town, the castle walls glowing warmly through the drizzle, just what it might be that was, deep down, leading these unfortunates, and all their brothers and sisters over time, to be in such a terrible situation in the first place? What forces were really at work here? I didn’t mean by that the obvious ones—the forces of today’s Serbian brutes with their rifles and bayonets, their cudgels and their knuckle-
dusters. Nor even the equally harsh forces of their official opposition, the UCK, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the men in dark uniforms who, fighting for the idea of a Greater Albania, had already committed crimes as vile, but against the Serbs.

I meant—or thought I meant—what basal forces, what innate characteristics, what elements of competing Balkan histories and cultures and ethnicities could ever have led to such a situation as this?

For there was nothing new in this. All that had changed since the last time the Balkans erupted in horror, back in the 1940s, was that these new events were taking place under the lights of television cameras, so that all the carnage and coercion and terror and torture were being brought directly into our living rooms, live, with the newly consequent power both to shock and stun us, and yet to bore and weary and anesthetize us too. What was actually happening here at Blace’s swamp camp, and all the tales we were hearing from the refugees of what had been happening up in Kosovo, were merely—as if the word
merely
could really be used in so awful a context—more manifestations of what had been going on in the Balkans for a thousand years or more. They were further excrescences of that bloodcurdling intercourse between Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Slovenes and Macedonians and Hungarians and Rumanians and Montenegrins and Albanians and Bulgarians and Greeks and Turks and Vlachs, and who had been acting either because of pressure from great powers, or grand alliances, and who had been doing so under the various orders of, or at the behest of, or led by an endless array of sultans and emperors, grand viziers and archdukes, metropolitans and pashas, janissaries and dragomans, and whole hosts of lesser mortals whose battery of names suggests something of the bewilderment of the places where they ruled.

There were among them, to name just a very few, hosts of competing and conflicting grandees of churches and districts and parties, with titles like
aga, ajan, ban, beg
or
bey, beylerbeyi,
emir, gazi, gost, imam, kapetan, kadi, khan, mameluke, mullah, pan-dur, sancàk-beg, starc, strojnik, vojnuk, voivode,
and
zupan;
or less grand but invariably more violent villains who were organized into terror bands like the White Eagles or the Black Legions, the wartime Ustashi and Chetniks, and today’s Tigers. These groups were led by men like the dreaded but outwardly genial Arkan, a Serb named Zeljko Raznatovic, who once reputedly ordered all the men of one family to bite and gnaw the testicles off one another, or his compatriot and similarly steely zealot Vojislav Seselj, a Serb paramilitary who boasted publicly of scooping out the eyeballs of his Croatian captives using only a rusty shoehorn.

And in thinking about all this I suddenly realized that I, like a score of wanderers and wonderers before me, had all of a sudden become fascinated—enraptured even—by the savage mysteries of this wretched peninsula. I had no standing in these parts at all; from centuries back, I realized as I scanned the bibliographies of the books I had, clever men and women had come to these parts in an effort to learn. And now, driven by the same strange compulsion that had brought them here before, I very much wanted as well to try and learn a little more, to see a little more, to begin to understand a little more.

After all, I was here. I had some time on my hands. I had enough to survive on for a few weeks. And this war, by all accounts, would end in eighty days. Might I not stay in the Balkans for some or all of this time, looking the place over, looking at a place that was being convulsed by a war that I could hear as distant thunder all the while but in which I could not play a part?

It seemed a beguiling idea. It was now the beginning of April. If all went as the planners believed—and I had this curious faith that it well might—then the engagement between the West and Belgrade ought to be over, and some definable event—the retaking of Kosovo by the western forces, for example—should have taken place by the middle of June. So why not
stay, and contrive some way to understand something of the context behind all that was happening?

Why not use the time, I then said to myself, to make a journey, to visit as much of the Balkans as it was possible to see, in the hope of completing a mosaic picture of the complexities of the place, one out of which might emerge something that, however blurred and fuzzy it might at first appear, did paint an approximate portrait that gave, at least to me, a context to what was happening in Kosovo?

I decided there and then. I telephoned a friend of mine, a clever and congenial traveling companion, and splendid linguist, called Rose. I had met her five years before, in an Internet discussion group about Ireland. She had been a modern linguist at Oxford—her degree was one of those very rare Congratulatory Firsts, in which the papers she wrote were so brilliant that the dons assembling for the
viva voce
part of the final examination stood up and applauded her work and asked not a single further question. When we met she was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, then went on to work at
The Nation
in New York City, and finally became the senior writer at
Colors,
the original and highly inventive Venice-based magazine. Six months before I telephoned she had embarked on the risky adventure of being a full-time freelance writer: When I tracked her down she was in Rajasthan.

She agreed readily, scenting a fascinating plan, as I knew she would. I told her that my approximate idea was to make a scimitar-shaped journey between Vienna and Istanbul,
^*
the two cities whose competing empires had done so much to create the frictions and complications of the regions between. I hoped very
much, I said, that we would reach the town from where I was telephoning, Skopje, in time to see the ending of the war that I had already seen begun.

So might we meet, in a week’s time, say, in Vienna, at Frau Demel’s fussy and mirrored old
Konditorei,
behind the Hofburg? I needed to go to Vienna first, I added, because there was the possibility that I might win permission there to see one appropriately gruesome symbol of the landscape that lay beyond. I wanted to go to Vienna to see something that had not been seen publicly for a quarter of a century, and that had more than a little relevance to what was going on in the Balkans—the severed head of a long-dead Turk.

H
APPY IS THE COUNTRY,
wrote George Bernard Shaw, that has no history.” And, by extension, unhappy are the Balkans, that have too much of it. To comprehend just
why
so much unhappiness, to begin any sort of understanding of the travails of this benighted place, one needs to do more than simply make a journey through its geography: It is essential also to make some kind of foray into its daunting chronology. And given that the story of the Balkans is, in essence, the story of the ebbing and flowing of the two great empires, Hapsburg and Ottoman, that vied for sovereignty over the lands between them, so it seemed to me at the start of this journey that our tour of Balkan history, as well as our venture into the Balkan landscape, should most properly begin in the Hapsburg’s once-great capital city, Vienna.

So we began in the old coffeehouse in the Kohlmarkt (the city’s onetime cauliflower market), with a
Kaffee brauner
and a bright pink box of those silky-smooth chocolates known by the vaguely macabre—but when you see them oh-so-apposite—name of
Katzenzungen
or
langues du chat
(cats’ tongues). The scene could hardly have been more comfortably Viennese: The bustlingly starched waitresses were dealing with flotillas of sturdy, haughty, and obviously respectable matrons (most from Vienna, though some no doubt from Nebraska or New York). If I looked carefully I could see them glancing surreptitiously at themselves in the rococo-gilded mirrors, adjusting their hats, patting the buttons on their tightish brown tweed jackets to make sure that there was room for the anticipated mountain of whipped cream that would be served with the
Kaffee mélange,
or perhaps, if it was not too inde
cently early, for the iced
mazagran,
the coffee with its gill-and-a-half of cherry liqueur, and the ever-so-tiny slice of Demel’s infamously good
Nusstorte.

Coffee seemed the appropriate metaphor with which to start. The first coffeehouse had opened in Vienna in 1685, two years after the Ottoman armies had failed in their attempt to capture and sack the city. It has long been an element of Viennese folklore that among the extraordinary bounties left behind by the fleeing armies,
^*
there were sacks of coffee beans, from which a local pleasure industry was promptly born. Everywhere today there are posters for one particular brand, Julius Meinl: the trademark is a young lad, wearing an absurdly elongated fez, and the company says it opened its first coffee shop on the very spot where the sacks of Turkish bounty were discovered. Moreover, the crescent-shaped pastry, the croissant, which in Vienna is known as the
Kipferl,
was created, all schoolchildren learn, by a long-forgotten Viennese
Hausfrau,
in celebration of the defeat of the would-be invaders and the banishing of their crescent flags. The connection between Turk and Austrian, between Istanbul and Vienna, is never far from the surface.

Not entirely by chance I had with me that morning, for deliberately light
Kaffeehaus
reading, several very old copies of
National Geographic
that underlined that very point, since each one contained an essay concerning the Balkans. In one of them, the February 1921 issue, there was a lengthy piece by one George Higgins Moses, a now-long-forgotten U.S. senator from New Hampshire and an American minister to—when it was an independent state—the Kingdom of Montenegro. It was all very
dated, a pompous and orotund essay titled
The Whirlpool of the Balkans.
But it did have some rather good lines, lines that were amply relevant to what was happening a thousand miles to the south of where we sat. The ones I thought most appropriate came in a paragraph toward the essay’s end, and I pointed them out to Rose:

Oh, the pleasure—to sit in a Viennese
Kaffeehaus
and to read of Constantinople! Once they read and thought of little else. Even these days the Viennese still cast an occasional backward glance at Turkey, to see what it’s up to, to see if it is still roiling the waters. Considering how close they came to being subjugated by the Ottomans, the Viennese have good cause to do so—though less these days than once.

In 1921, when Senator Moses was writing, a sultan was still on the throne in the newly built palace on the Bosporus, the Dolmabahce Serai, and there was some modestly forlorn hope among political innocents like the senator—and the vaguest of fears among the more sensitive Austrians—that the Ottoman
Empire, Sick Man of Europe though it may have been, might yet contrive to carry on.

It was not to be, of course. For a hundred years or more the cynical leaders of the Great Powers, East and West—the Bismarcks, Wellingtons, Castlereaghs, Metternichs—had all endeavored to keep the old tottering empire alive—for fear that it might be replaced by something far, far worse. But by the twenties the fate of the Porte—the Sublime Porte, as the empire was generally known (named for a gate into the vizier’s offices)—had already been firmly sealed. At the end of World War I, Constantinople was a city under foreign occupation; only a few years before it had suffered the indignity of being occupied by the Bulgarians, who went so far as to temporarily depose the sultan.

The sultan at the time of the senator’s essay, Mehmet VI, had but a year to live and reign, and his own successor, a cousin, though he had a further two years in the palace, was reduced by international agreement from sultan to the mere status of caliph. He eventually abdicated from that lowly post as well, going away by Orient Express to Paris. And then Kemal Atatürk came and finished off the Ottomans once and for all, made Turkey into a modern secular state, turned Topkapi and Dolmabahce into museums and Hagia Sofia into a third, and renamed the city “Istanbul.” With a wave of a republican wand, one more of the earth’s proud empires suddenly faded away, and all that was Ottoman was washed up and done with. Such threat as the Viennese might have imagined was gone for all time.

Except that even at the empire’s very end, and for a long, long while after, there was a good deal of truth to the senator’s words—that Constantinople was “where the currents that cause the whirlpool…have their origin and their end.” Flashes of the Ottomans’ refulgent but meretricious presence still haunt the Balkans today, more than a century after the pashas and the beys were forced out of the region, and seventy years after they were forced to vanish altogether. There were stories aplenty in the Aus
trian papers that morning to illustrate the point—stories from refugees who were by now fanning across Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro, recounting the terrible things that had befallen them and their families.

The happenings—some too dreadful to believe, stories of women being raped and hurled down wells, of men eviscerated, of children butchered on bayonets—were to no small extent a legacy of the old Ottoman times. The Kosovo Serbs, Orthodox Christian almost to a man and woman, had chosen to pit themselves so savagely against Albanians, seeing them as descendants of people who had been converted to Islam by “the Turk,” as the Serbs always insultingly referred to the Ottoman invaders.

There are students of the Near East today—scholars who still dabble in “the Eastern Question,” as it once was called—who will airily remark that “ancient ethnic hatreds” have precious little to do with today’s struggles in the Balkans. They argue, persuasively and knowingly, that what is happening in the region now has much more to do with struggles for territory, with economic disputes between landlord and tenant, with the cynical manipulations of contemporary politics and the Machiavellian involvements of outside powers. And they are probably technically right in saying so. But ask a Serbian Christian—as I was to do more than once in the ensuing weeks—just why is it that he, like the man in the gas station in Pec, loathes his Albanian neighbors so. Why he loathes them enough to rape Albanian women and toss them down wells. Or to eviscerate Albanians, or flay them and leave them skinless and drying in the sun.

Ask him, and he will be sure to say, in one of his breathless sentences of explanation, that he hates them deepest down of all because they are Turks, Muslims, Asians, godless fiends who have no business being in Europe in the first place.

Serbs like to remind us even today that the Battle of Kosovo Polje, back in 1389, had been a desperate attempt by Christian Europeans like themselves to halt the onrushing armies of the
Asian Turk. They failed, but the nobility of their attempt goes some way to explain why Kosovo is so important in the Serbian mind. They remain bitter—or some of their more vicious leaders do—that so little in the Balkan history that then followed, or in the human geography it created—the cities, the buildings, the bridges, educational systems, houses of worship, systems of bureaucracy—managed to escape the influence, sometimes benign but more often malign, of those majestically corrupt Ottomans.

At the height of its powers the Ottoman Empire extended from the Caspian Sea almost to the gates of Vienna. Its power and influence ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of war and sultanly whim, but for more than five hundred years, from before the Battle of Kosovo until well after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the Ottomans presided over vast tracts of territory—and, as the sultans liked to put it, seventy-two and a half races
^*
—with magnificent and perfumed equanimity.

Ottoman dominion over the Balkans had actually been in place a full sixty years before 1453, the year when Mehmet the Conqueror overran Constantinople and, standing his horse on a pile of broken bodies, had formally turned the Hagia Sofia from the Byzantine Cathedral of Divine Wisdom
^†
into his empire’s central mosque. But once the city had been successfully wrested away from the Greeks, the new rulers of so much of the Balkans and the Lower Danube Valley—and much else besides—always looked back east to the Topkapi Serai and the Sublime Porte as the spiritual and temporal centers of their authority. The Ottomans were the center of the whirlpool, and Constantinople was where the whirlpool gained its power.

And from 1453 onward it was from Topkapi that the orders went out for the steady expansion of the sultan’s domains. By 1521 the crescent battle flags had reached as far north as Belgrade and Bucharest, and as far south as Alexandria and Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Beirut. A century later the territories ruled by beys and
beylerbeis
and pashas had expanded outward in all directions, like the ripples on a pond, to include the cities of Baghdad and Benghazi. By then the shores of the Black Sea were entirely Ottoman-run. Rome was the sultans’ early primary goal—the so-called Red Apple of Ottoman desire.

A red apple—an odd choice for the symbol of imperial hopes and dreams. It had a long history: It went back even to before the attack of 1453, when the apple was said to be the orb held in the right hand of the statue of Justinian that stood in front of the Hagia Sofia—a symbol, in other words, of Constantinople itself. Then, once the Ottomans had won that city and gathered Hagia Sofia and the ancient statue (which was later torn down) into their territory, so a new apple had to be found—and Süleyman I the Magnificent, the greatest Ottoman sultan of them all, decreed that it should be Rome.

“To Rome! To Rome!” was said to be a constant cry in Süleyman’s court. He had made one vain attempt on the city in 1529, trying to besiege Vienna on the way. But he failed after a mere eighteen days. Like Napoleon in Moscow, he was defeated at least in part by the unfamiliar and atrocious winter weather.

It was a century and a half later, under the Sultan Mehmet IV, that the cry was for a new red apple—the city of Vienna itself, the seat of the Hapsburgs’ Holy Roman Empire. Once captured, it would be a bridgehead to the soft underbelly of Central Europe. This time the Turks were so numerous, their armies so well organized, and their self-confidence so unparalleled that they imagined it could be done. In the summer of 1683 their invading army reached the southern gates of the great city and prepared to lay siege. The city cathedral and the Hofburg were squarely in the
sights of the Ottoman harquebuses and within the range of their siege mortars.

In any event, it was to be a close-run thing. Had the Turks prepared a little more certainly and fought a little more aggressively, Vienna might well have gone the way of Belgrade and Budapest, Sofia and Sarajevo, Thessaloníki, Athens, Alexandria, and Cairo, and become a place of souks and mosques and dreamy Levantine administrators. But the city escaped capture, and the only memorials to just how close it came to surrender and having to endure the jeweled Ottoman heel are the croissant (baker-heroes working deep in the Viennese basements supposedly heard the Ottoman tunnelers laying mines), and places like Demel here, which owes its existence to the finding of those Turkish coffee beans. Which is why stuffy old Senator Moses made more than worthwhile reading that April day, among the ladies who lunched within the salon’s walls of ancient but reassuring mirrors.

Most of the ladies who were lunching alone seemed to be reading local popular magazines like
Profil
and serious local newspapers like
Die Presse,
papers with front pages—this was April, and the bombing campaign was still only a few weeks old—covered with images of war and carnage from a thousand miles away. There were black headlines about the questionable actions of NATO and the sturdy defiance of the tyrants in Belgrade. Vienna is a prosperous city, and the Viennese can, if they care to, project an aloof and comfortable air. But those I talked to in the coffee shop that day seemed very well aware what was going on—and aware, too, of the extraordinary role that their city and their former Hapsburg rulers, as well as the sultans who nearly fell upon them, had played in bringing about this particular aspect of modern European history.