The Fracture Zone (13 page)

And yet. It so happens that the week during which Dr. Menoni was calling for new volunteers—the week when Dr. Suurkula arrived at the Mincenta Hotel, the week during which the numbers of those performing their various yogic feats was climbing up into the one hundreds and two hundreds—during that very week, the first week of June, there were significant moves toward peace being made in Belgrade, Moscow, London, Brussels, New York, and Washington, D.C.

And on the very day that the group did manage to assemble 345 yogic fliers, Slobodan Milosevic did accept the peace proposals from NATO. Peace of a sort was beginning to break out in the Balkans at precisely the moment that the Dubrovnik Peace Project was doing its hardest and most sustained work—when, as its leaders would claim, the vibrational forces were working at their maximum.

Maybe it is all absurd. Maybe what happened in the Balkans, like whatever happened in Jerusalem, can be dismissed as a lucky coincidence. Maybe there are those in the various great churches around the world who believe that their particular prayers or other spiritual intercessions did what was necessary. The possibility that human beings, harnessing some kind of invisible and indefinable energy, can on occasion influence external affairs with which they have no physical connection—the idea intrigues, and remains intriguing, long after the absurdity of the performance has vanished into memory. There is just a faint and lingering thought from Dubrovnik that says, all too quietly—Well, why not?

The frontier with Montenegro is half an hour’s drive from the outskirts of Dubrovnik. From the main road it is possible to see—impossible to avoid, in fact—the zigzag track that was cut up the Dinaric hillside to where the American secretary of com
merce, Ron Brown, was killed in a plane crash in the spring of 1996. He had been in a U.S. Air Force Hercules, and according to reports at the time, had flown into the most terrible sudden storm and the pilot, not having the benefit of any navigation aids at the primitive Dubrovnik airfield, had flown his aircraft straight into the mountainside. Brown, along with thirty-four other members of an American trade mission, was killed.

The incident has been mired in argument ever since. Ron Brown was a black man, the highest-ranking of his race in the Clinton administration. He had been under investigation for supposed financial irregularities. And ever since his death there have been suggestions, or claims, that he might have been murdered. (Acting on a report from an air force pathologist that a wound at the top of Brown’s head could have been caused by a gunshot, the NAACP launched an investigation into the circumstances of his death.) A rash of theories, suggesting various kinds of conspiracy, flared up about a year after his death, coincident with the more florid suggestions about President Clinton and his various political problems. But, as with the White House scandals, the suggestions about improprieties surrounding Brown’s sad death quickly faded away. No one talks about the event much anymore, except in Croatia, where they have put up a memorial, and the shepherd who found the wreckage occasionally talks about the crash, and surprises listeners by saying that no, there was no storm, terrible or otherwise, on the March afternoon in question.

The most visible consequence of the tragedy, so far as Croatia itself was concerned, can be seen in the makeup of the fleet of the nation’s small airline. Mr. Brown had hoped that the directors of Croatia Airlines would order Boeing aircraft, and the dispatch of his trade mission was in part to help them make up their minds to do so. But after the accident the line decided not to buy American at all, and if you fly these days from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, or to Rome, you will do so now in a smart
new A-340 Airbus, built by a consortium of European manufacturers, in France.

The flag with the red-and-white checkered shield of Croatia, the once-notorious
sahovnica
that was also the wartime symbol of the Ustashi, fluttered over the little shack that housed the border control point south of Dubrovnik. There was no southbound traffic on the road at all—a road that still bore the scars of the fighting of the early nineties—and the skeleton staff at the checkpoint were surprised to see anyone venturing into Montenegro. The senior immigration officer was a woman, and she grinned uneasily.

“Are you sure you are wanting to go on?” she asked, with genuine concern. “Dangerous people ahead.”

But we said yes, she hastily stamped our passports, and ordered her assistant to raise the barrier. We edged ahead into the no-man’s land and rounded a corner beyond which stood a cluster of temporary shacks with the red-white-and-blue flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia snapping in the breeze above them. There was a thick steel pole across the road here, too, and behind it a group of heavily armed and camouflaged policemen and a big artillery piece that was pointed not toward us and any possible enemies back in Croatia—but back down the hill into Montenegro. For if these men perceived any threat at this frontier, was likely to come not from outside the country, but from within.

A
BLACK
M
ERCEDES
was waiting on the Montenegrin side of frontier, with two tough young Yugoslav women inside. They were called Dali and Vesna, they were university students from Belgrade, and they were known in the trade as fixers—members of an elite corps of unsung heroes who operate in all distant wars, the local helpmeets without whom almost no foreign correspondent could ever ply the craft.

I was delighted to see them. A friend at the BBC had organized their arrival, since it was said that they knew the least troublesome way to travel into the interior. It was for this kind of local knowledge that the fixers prove so invaluable—the best of them being legendarily undaunted by the most arcane of requests, and by the risks that are frequently involved.

An editor in London or New York might send an urgent message to his correspondent on the ground: Find me a young and attractive Albanian refugee who speaks serviceable English, who is pregnant after being raped by a Serb paramilitary, and find her in the next hour. The correspondent without a fixer would have little idea which way to turn. The correspondent with one, on the other hand, would turn immediately to the fixer to arrange everything, and in all probability it could and would be done.

The fortunate journalist would then make the broadcast or write the article, and in due course get all the glory, receive the “herograms.” But the fixer would receive none of this—no recognition for him or her other than the daily fee that had been agreed beforehand. The going rate in the Balkans, at least from the British and American networks and newspapers, was two hundred German marks a day.

Economic distress is most often the reason that fixers take the work. The kind of circumstances where fixers are needed—such as here, the outbreak of a complicated war in a difficult and unfamiliar part of the world—rarely embrace periods of economic contentment and social harmony. And such circumstances thus have a way of driving into the fixer corps numbers of extremely well-educated and overqualified young men and women who, because of the situation that the reporters have come to cover, are temporarily down on their luck. There was a twenty-five-year-old doctor working in the Balkans as a cameraman’s assistant; and Dali and Vesna here in Montenegro were both highly intelligent women, one taking a graduate degree in political science, the other studying to be a pharmacist. They didn’t much like the drudge work—but they needed the money. The four hundred marks that Vesna received for two days’ acting as gofer for a visiting correspondent was more than her father earned in a month.

Besides doing work they didn’t much like, and for reasons they didn’t care to reveal, and rarely winning credit for the tasks they performed, the fixers not infrequently got into trouble. While we were in the region a Kosovo Albanian fixer working for a British journalist was killed by a NATO bomb fragment, and a Macedonian fixer was murdered by Serb soldiers, along with the two German reporters who had hired him. There were long news reports noting the deaths or injuries to the correspondents, but no initial mention of the locally hired helpmeets. Their fate was reported only much later, in the laconic list of the unfortunate also-rans.

Dali and Vesna needed to have a particular skill on the day we met—and it was for this specific reason that they had been asked to meet us. They were get us into the Montenegrin capital past the very hostile and rather dangerous Yugoslav army checkpoints. They had devised a simple and probably foolproof scheme for doing so.

The fact that such a problem existed at all says much about the
curiously ambiguous situation of the mountainous, geologically chaotic and astonishingly beautiful state of Montenegro—home, it is said, to the tallest people in Europe, and probably also to the toughest. Officially it is a part of Yugoslavia, one of the country’s two constituent republics, Serbia being the other.
^*
There is a constitutionally guaranteed equivalence: both Serbia and Montenegro send twenty deputies to the federal upper house of the parliament, both Serbia and Montenegro have their own governments and their own presidents, and both maintain armed police forces. But there the similarity ends. Whereas in Serbia the interests of the dominantly Serbian federal administration can be said to coincide almost perfectly with those of the local people, almost the very opposite holds true in Montenegro.

The Montenegrins in the main may be Orthodox Christians, like most of the Serbs; but they are fiercely independent, they have a fiery reputation, and they are a people of the sea and the mountains and not the rivers and the plains. They would never, they insist today as they always have, accept subjugation by anyone. They got rid of the Turks—just the only Balkan people ever to do so. They had employed the simplest but most effective of guerrilla methods for doing so—methods that would be duplicated hundreds of years later, half a world away, by such strategists as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Mao Zedong in China.

The men—vastly tall, utterly impressive—were extraordinary snipers, and they used guns ten feet long against the invaders. When the Turks first invaded the capital of Cetinje, as they did
three times, the defenders of the local monastery touched off their powder magazine, destroying the place, killing themselves—but driving all the terrified Turks away. On other occasions the Montenegrin women would trigger landslides, and avalanches in winter, and create all kinds of havoc among the Turks’ supply lines. The children were involved in the fighting too—setting fires, firing catapults, ferrying ammunition and water to the men in the firing lines. The entire country, knitted together by family, by blood, and by loyalty to the very idea of Montenegro, became fully involved if anyone ever dared set foot inside their hallowed territory. The people knew little other than God and war, and it was the gravest of insults for one Montenegrin to sneer at another: “I know your people—all your ancestors died in their beds.”

They had gotten rid of the Turks; and, I was to be told almost every day that I was inside this happy little former kingdom, that if they had to get rid of the Serbs as well, then they would do so without any hesitation at all. A man walking beneath the cathedral walls in Kotor was the first to say about Belgrade’s Mr. Milosevic, “Let him try it—just let him try it. He’ll have the bloodiest fight he’s ever known.”

All across Montenegro there seemed a sudden eruption of anger toward the Serbs. “Every evil in the Balkans has come from them,” a café owner was quoted as saying. “They are scum,” said a painter. They had “stolen” the Montenegrin language (which has four more letters in its alphabet than plain Serbian), they were “genocidal cowards,” they “lacked a civilization,” they were of (the greatest insult of all) “Turkish descent.”

Which is why the Montenegrin police force and the Yugoslav army, both of which have constitutional responsibility for the territorial serenity and integrity of the five thousand square miles of Montenegrin territory, are at perpetual and often dangerous odds with each other. The Montenegrin police are, first, loyal to their president, a dapper young matinee idol named Milo Djukanovic;
the Yugoslav army is loyal to the federal president, who at the time of writing is Slobodan Milosevic. The two men (despite Milosevic having been the Montenegrin president’s political patron) glare at each other with ill-concealed distaste.

Djukanovic eyes Milosevic with suspicion, wary of his long-term intentions, openly challenging him to dare to try to tinker with, or worse still, try to annex, his rumbustious little republic. His ministers talk openly of declaring independence: There is already a Montenegrin airline, there is talk of Montenegrin passports, and a currency tied, like Bosnia’s, to the German mark.

Milosevic in turn rails back at Djukanovic, reminding him (with some accuracy) that he and the federal army he commands could crush him and his insignificant nation in a heartbeat, if he chose to. But the Montenegrin president has managed so far to remain sturdily—some would say cheekily—independent of Belgrade: He has astutely given himself two guarantees that this interesting situation may last.

First, the young president has worked hard, via a series of foreign expeditions and state visits and countless ambassadorial soirées, to ensure that he retains the sympathetic interest of as much of the international community as possible. It has been a strategy that has seemed to work—for during the Kosovo war all of those capitals, from Washington to London, from Helsinki to Canberra, which condemned the policies of the Yugoslav government were invariably careful to add “except, of course, for Montenegro.” They recognized President Djukanovic as somehow different, not a man to be tarred with the same brush as the leader in Belgrade.

Then again, and in tandem with his courtship of foreign governments, President Djukanovic has spent much time and energy courting the attentions of the foreign press. He has appeared to believe that the generals in faraway Belgrade, however much they might wish to rid themselves of his turbulent presence, would sim
ply never dare to touch him with the whole world looking on. (But of course Milosevic did just that in Kosovo and Bosnia, quite careless of world opinion—meaning that Montenegro’s present optimism may turn out to be ill-placed.)

Whatever Djukanovic’s chances of ultimate success, whatever his chances of long-term survival, he was certainly extraordinarily popular with the access-demanding foreign press. Even at the height of the war it was perfectly easy for a foreign corespondent to gain entry into what, it has to be remembered, was and at the time of writing still is, an integral part of Yugoslavia. The bureaucrats in Podgorica, the country’s dull little modern capital, saw to it that anyone who wished to come in, could—in sharp contrast to the situation in Belgrade, where correspondents were turned away in their droves, and those who were allowed in had to function under the most controlled of conditions.

In Montenegro reporters and photographers were given an essentially free rein, and they received all the care and attention and interested help that a sympathetic government is able to give. This, considering that there was a war going on, was almost a correspondent’s heaven. It was most unusual, and all who went to Montenegro during the war reveled in the freedoms—but at the same time wondered just how long they could last.

Those of us who were allowed to come in were handed a prettily-produced booklet about Montenegro, attached to which was an open letter, one of the more remarkable I can remember receiving. It was from the presidential palace, above the signature of the Montenegrin Secretary for Information, and was dated April 24, 1999:

Montenegro was indeed a nervous country, living on a razor’s edge, hoping neither to be seen to be supportive of the Belgrade regime, nor wanting to incur its wrath. The writers and cameramen who had come to Montenegro were skittish and nervous, too—and never more so than when any one of them encountered a patrol or a roadblock of the Yugoslav army.

It was because there was a good chance that on our journey from the Croatian frontier to Podgorica we might well come across the army that we had asked for an escort by this pair of Amazonian fixers.

They could make sure that if were stopped by any soldiers from the VJ—the Vojska Jugoslavije, the force that was the successor of the Yugoslav Federal Army—we would not be arrested, fined, our possessions stolen, our clothes stripped from our back, or ourselves beaten, tortured, or worse. This had already happened to other reporters in Montenegro: We didn’t want it happening to us.

As if to underline the schism between the army and police, the plan that Dali and Vesna had hatched required the cooperation of the constabulary itself. They had arranged that a police car would be made available to us in the town of Herceg-Novi, five miles in from the border. A VJ checkpoint was known to be sited on the shore of the Gulf of Kotor, about three miles farther on. The idea was that we would drive in the Mercedes to the police station, we would transfer to the police van and hide under blankets on the floor while the women remained in the car, and then the two vehicles, with an extra police jeep for security “in case things get rough,” would drive toward Podgorica. It should be, said Dali, exercising the colloquialisms of her last employer, “a piece of cake.”