The Fracture Zone (18 page)

There were some delays, as small suspect bombs were detonated, as a party of Yugoslav militia were disarmed and sent packing, as a group of Gurkhas got into a heated argument with some heavily armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who wanted to be photographed linking arms with the small and wiry Nepalese who appeared to have liberated them. Forty members of the MUP, the dark-uniformed Yugoslav special police, were escorted north by another troop of Gurkhas; they
said they were afraid for their own safety, scared that the Albanians might begin reprisals. One of them we spoke to was sweating profusely under his thick serge uniform. “Perhaps I’ll never come back here—I just don’t know,” he said, before the Gurkhas dropped him off in a safer part of the countryside and told him to make himself scarce.

But by noon the convoy was moving well, the infantrymen and light armor going in first, the heavy tanks rumbling through some time later in the morning. Units of the Fourth Armoured Brigade, which included such stylish army formations as the Household Cavalry, most usually photographed changing the guard outside Buckingham Palace, as well as the Irish Guards and the tanks of the King’s Royal Hussars, were pouring in by lunchtime. The lead vehicles had soon cleared the crags and canyons of the defile and were then out in the hayfields and meadows of Kosovo proper, speeding along without interruption, except at two or three junctions where other units, who had come across the border later and from different places, joined the main northbound torrent.

The roadway, which by now had been marked by black-and-yellow tac-signs of a dagger and a Gurkha knife, the
kukri,
and with a thin orange wire on each side of it marking the swept and mine-free corridor, had now been given a formal designation, just as had the routes in Bosnia: whereas we had driven down to Sarajevo on Route CLOG, this one had been marginally more attractively christened: The Blace-to-Pristina route was known as Route HAWK. And the soldiers were fast fanning out from it now, to the villages that lay to the left and right of the highway, their populations, such as remained, supposedly waiting for this day of liberation, which they must have feared might never come.

Those few refugees who came along on the convoy with us, to be the first to see the villages from which they had been expelled, were taking a very considerable risk. Just before throwing them out, the Serbs on the frontiers had confiscated many thousands of Kosovo Albanians’ identity papers and passports. All they had now
were flimsy temporary documents, like the old Nansen passports, that had been issued by the Macedonian authorities. Now these same authorities had warned them that if they made the choice to go back into Kosovo they would not be able to come back, no matter what they found at home.

A young Kosovo Albanian woman named Aferodite, whom we had met in Tetovo, had earlier tried to seize the chance of coming with us. She brought her mother and father and brother, all refugees from the latest pogroms, to see her off. But once she realized that she might discover terrible things, and would not be able to come back to her parents so long as they remained in Macedonia, she suddenly balked. She drew us a map of where her house had been, and the names of some neighbors we might try to find. She wanted to know, especially, about a baby boy who had been born in her village, a boy named Trim. But she wouldn’t come herself to find out, not until she knew she still had an escape route.

“There might be Serbs still there,” she said, trembling. “I might find that what they have done to our place is just too much for me to bear. I might want to come back—and then I find the border closed. I will stay. For now I stay.”

From what we could see on that haunting, memorably awful journey north, not a few of the Albanians who came on the convoy—and many of those others who, like Aferodite, decided to return some days or weeks later, when the situation calmed down—did find and see things that were too much to bear. We could see from the roadside scenes of the most appalling ruin. We passed villages—Kacanik itself, then Urosevac, then Gradimlje—where almost every house was gone, burned, wrecked, vandalized, covered with obscenities, the Serbian cross, Chetnik graffiti.

Such people as we could see were wandering around with a look of bedraggled bewilderment, gazing horrified at the devastation, as though for the first time. And then we spoke to them and found that this was in fact the case. They had been terrified
by what had happened, frightened beyond belief when the mobs stormed in and began their long nights of pillage and force, of rapine and rape, and they had run away, vanishing into the shelter of the deep woods on the mountainsides. They had lived by their wits, eating leaves, trapping animals, drinking from streams. It was only today, and when they saw the long trails of armor glinting on the distant road, and saw that the cars flew British flags or the blue-and-white NATO burgees, and had the letters KFOR stenciled on their flanks, that they knew it was safe to come home. And so, muddy and ragged and weary, they staggered down into Kacanik and Urosevac and Gradimlje, and stared open mouthed in shock at what had happened while they had been away.

Before long they, and other soldiers, other examiners, were finding terrible, terrible things. Graves, newly dug, with scores of ominously long and spongy lumps in the soft and giving ground. Rooms in basements that—blood-spattered and with chairs and shackles and lengths of rusty chain, and with bullet holes in the plaster—had evidently been used as torture chambers or places of execution. Skeletons by the hundred. Detached bones, some with flesh and rags still adhering, which had been dragged away by dogs. The half-burned bodies of children. The bodies of old women raped and then hatefully mutilated. Men lying with their heads smashed in with sledgehammers, children cut in half with rusty scythes. And yet more graves, scores upon scores of crudely labeled memorials, fashioned not in one final moment of compassion and decency, but only to rid the area of the stench of death so that the killers could look more comfortably and without reminders for other ghastly deeds to perform. On all sides, almost everywhere you looked, there was evidence of the vandalism of the truly cruel, of the machinations of the appallingly vile.

The soldiers who went in to these first villages, gingerly wary of the booby traps and mines that the retreating soldiers and
police had left behind, and who were advising in vain the villagers not to come until all was perfectly safe, were more stunned and shocked than most of them had ever been.

“Fifteen years I’ve been a para,” said one sergeant, holding up a chain saw and a bloodstained hammer, and opening for view a box of crudely homemade knuckle-dusters, “and I’ve never seen anything as dreadful as this. How can people behave to one another like this? What kind of hatred makes a man behave so terribly?” I had known this soldier since Ireland days, and we both knew well that the hatreds of Ireland are deep and dire. “But never like this,” said the soldier. “Never anything so bad.”

A pattern soon became obvious: It was always the big houses, those of the wealthier Albanians, the merchants and the contractors and the successful farmers, that had borne the brunt of the destruction. Envy had clearly played a part in the victimization—the same envy that once made Nigerian Hausas turn on the Ibo, or makes some Gentiles turn on the Jews, an envy that is familiar around the world and has been forever, and which is born of economic discord, of imagined exploitation, a blind revenge on anyone who manages life better, who makes for himself and his family something that others in the community have never managed to do.

The reasons behind the murderous behavior of the Balkans are legion, and they are legendary. It is now thought quite improper to dismiss all that has happened and that will continue to happen as the consequence merely of “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Economics, it is said, is in fact by far the more potent reason for the violence. And here, it seemed, was ample concrete evidence to back this theory up. Those who perpetrated the attacks in the villages we passed, where the big houses, the houses of the local squires and of what the Australians call the squatocracy, were fired first. The attacks were motivated, without a doubt, by an envy that came
from the economic disparities that coincidentally overlay the ethnic dissimilarities. It so happened that the Albanians here had evidently worked harder, had made more money, had managed to succeed where their neighbor Serbian
Lumpenproletariat
had not—and the Serbs had struck back at them, evening the economic score, demonstrating that equality was entirely possible, provided that one reduced everyone else to a similar level of ruin. The attacks and the atrocities were perpetrated not so much on the Albanians as Albanians but as a people generally, who, unfairly and in part
because
they were Albanians, had done so much better than the local Serbs.

And yet. It was not so much the scale of the attacks—the razing of house after house after house after house—but the vicious, venomous nature of the attacks that gave the lie to the idea that economics was the sole or even the main motive. The terrible things that were done—the deliberate maiming of children, the live evisceration of elderly women, the castrations with razors, the battering with mallets, the sawing off of heads, the use of blunt trowels to gouge out eyes, the rapes, the rapes, the rapes—these were acts of inhumanity done out of hatred and revenge, and that drew down on the appalling memories of generations and generations past.

It was the nature of these acts that had nothing to do with money, or land, or territory, or with the manipulative cynicism of politicians or criminals. It had to do instead with revenge, pure and simple. For academics to remark dryly that ancient ethnic loathings had little or nothing to do with what has been happening in villages like those we saw that warm summer afternoon, were denying a simple and awful truth: that there can be no imagining the horrors that can be born from the white heat of pure and unalloyed hatred. The Serbs here in Kosovo were getting back at the Albanians, as they saw it, for what the Turks had done to them. History, at least as it had been taught to them, should leave no Serbs in doubt that they, if as intolerant
and unforgiving as most in the Balkans so sadly are, had more than ample cause for doing so.
^*

A dozen miles before we came to Pristina there was a junction to a town called Lipljan on the left, and the column of soldiers, signposted by a man standing on top of a Challenger tank, all took the turn. There was a small crowd of Albanians here, and they cheering wildly as the column slowed and ponderously swung off the main road. Where the troops were going we weren’t exactly sure; the three of us, however, decided we should go straight on. It seemed symbolically important that we first visit the capital of Kosovo. It would mean going without the comforting presence of the KFOR armor, true, but a city and its population would tend, I was sure, to offer some kind of protection, some kind of safety in numbers. It nearly turned out to have been a ghastly mistake.

The first sign that all was not well came just on the outskirts of town, when our way was blocked by a long line of tractors, piled high with people and their possessions, heading for the north. It took only a moment to reason that these were Serbs—peasant farmers who were themselves now frightened that the returning Albanians would wreak vengeance on them. So they were off toward Belgrade and Mother Serbia; and if the incoming NATO troops were trying to offer them sufficient reassurance to stay, these people were not listening. They were angry, terrified, hostile to all who had put them in this position. NATO was the villain, every bit much as were the Albanians and the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (which we called the
KLA, but which people of all persuasions in the region called by the initials of the army’s real name, the UCK).

All of a sudden our accreditation badges, for which we had lined up for six hours the day before, seemed more dangerous than protective. They had the acronyms NATO and KFOR emblazoned in blue on white: To anyone who might carry a grudge, they now bore the mark of Cain. We unclipped them, hid them in our jackets, hoping that no one had seen. A group of Yugoslav army soldiers were escorting the villagers to the main Belgrade road, and they came across and looked at our car with hostile curiosity—they must have suspected we were in the NATO van, and they looked for a moment distinctly as if they were having second thoughts about how to deal with us. But after a cursory look they grunted and moved back to their own refugees, scowling, pointing, looking back at us.

Pristina was an ugly town, by turns poor and pompous, grim and grandiloquent. It smelled of coal smoke, ash, and cabbage. There were huge and tottering brown tenements, an immense and gaudy marble university littered with broken glass and piles of smoldering garbage, a soccer stadium gifted by Tito as a demonstration of the benevolence of his regime toward all, Albanian and Serb alike. Its gates stood open, the field inside gray cracked mud. It was barely used, except that on Thursdays during the soccer season it was said to be ringed with Serbian riot police who would give the Albanian soccer fans a good crack on the head if they dared so much as to raise a finger.

The Grand Hotel, five stars beside the crooked neon letters of its name, rose from the center of town as a grisly beacon to Marxist realism. It was filled with angry Serbs, all smoking, most drinking heavily, all wondering what to do next, when the soldiers arrived. The lights were off, the elevators were stopped, the telephones were not working, and there were no rooms. But I had agreed to write a story of the NATO “liberation” of Kosovo for a Sunday newspaper in London, and the deadline was now
ninety minutes away. For the following hour I hid myself behind a column at the back of a washroom, and typed frantically away, praying that the battery of my laptop would last. As to how I could transmit the copy, with no power and so no cell phone service, and the only satellite phone that I knew of still stuck with the convoy back at the turnoff—well, Write now! is the general rule in situations like this, and worry about transmitting the story later.