The Fracture Zone (19 page)

There was just one interruption. A pair of burly and unfriendly-looking Serb policemen, both with machine guns, were making a search of the hotel, found me lurking behind the column and asked me the Serbian equivalent of what the devil did I think I was doing, before going off in search of a manager, who they seemed not to be able to find. I wrote ever more furiously, well aware that they would be coming back. I managed, typing the last line with a flourish and then, presto! the power came back on, my cell phone came back to life, and I was able to telephone London and be put through to a copy-taking center nearby, and dictate those two thousand hurriedly written, ill-thought-out words. The first draft of history, as teachers have been known to call journalism, can be a sketchy thing indeed.

But then I found myself dictating the piece to a copy taker who, after taking down the first few paragraphs, confessed that he was more interested than usual, on that rainy English afternoon, to be hearing firsthand what was going on in the capital of Kosovo. The exchanges I had with that unknown man in a faraway town—the piece took perhaps twenty minutes to dictate, while I kept checking the hall for the two policemen, and my watch to make certain that I had met the deadline—added a rare moment of pleasure, I thought, to what had otherwise been a fairly wrenching day. Newspaper copy takers are a hard-bitten breed: men and women who, eternally unfazed, have quite literally heard it all, and from everywhere. They are infamous for uttering deep sighs, usually while the reporter is in the middle of dictating his or her purplest pas
sages, and asking impatiently: “Is there much more of this?” But my man today was enthusiastic, eager to hear more; and when I told him that I had to go, as the two Serb policemen were now most certainly on their way back, cradling their machine guns in their arms, he said he was truly sorry, and I think I believed him.

“But you take good care,” he added, and seemed to mean it. Moving as quickly as I dared, I cut the line, gathered up my computer, and fled back out into the open air. The day had been hot and oppressive, but now it was thundering, and within moments of my emerging, hailstones the size of cherries began clattering out of the sky. The policemen, who had followed me into the lobby, took a look up at the towering thunderheads, pointed at the carpet of mothballs gathering on the ground, shook their heads, and vanished back into the gloom. I got into the Fiat, pried it carefully out of its parking space and headed away. There were still no NATO soldiers in Pristina, and suddenly it seemed a jumpy, nervous, and rather less than welcoming place. And besides, the story of the afternoon, we gathered from our colleagues, was unfolding ten miles away, at the Pristina airport.

To the embarrassment and annoyance of the NATO planners, a small contingent of Russian troops had flown in to the airport the day before. No one in NATO wanted the Russians in Kosovo at all. The Kremlin had furiously opposed NATO’s bombing campaign, not least because the Russians, as Slavs, had long been in broad sympathy with the aims and aspirations of their ethnically similar Serb cousins. Any Russian involvement in a Kosovo peace would, from the point of view of the West, and also of the Albanians, be highly suspect. They were bound to be, at least emotionally, rather less than wholly disinterested. In a firefight between the Serbian MUPs and the Albanian UCK, for example, at least some of a troop of Russian soldiers would be certain to take sides.

Diplomatically the situation was rather worse: The Kremlin made no secret at all of wanting to have Kosovo divided, with a
Russian zone policed by Russian soldiers, and a NATO zone policed by soldiers from beyond. But that, said NATO, would effectively mean the partition of Kosovo. And that, as well as further Balkanizing a region that had suffered from all too much Balkanization in the last decade—three thousand miles of extra frontiers since 1991, and endless outbreaks of warfare and bloodshed in consequence—would reward with land, with extra territory, those very Serbs who had indulged in the vile practice of ethnic purging in the first place.

No, said NATO very firmly, all soldiers sent to Kosovo to keep the peace should be under NATO control—answerable in the first instance to General Jackson, and then via an American general in Brussels to the NATO Political Council. Equally firmly the Russian government then told NATO it would do no such thing—and just twelve hours before Captain Rea and the thousands of men and heavy armor moved in across the Macedonian frontier, so two hundred Russian airborne troops and a handful of armored cars were flown in to Pristina airport, from which they refused to budge.

We drove over to see them. I first wanted to drive to the field by way of what one might call the usual route, through Kosovo Polje and past the famous battleground of the Blackbird Field where, more than six hundred years before, the Turks had defeated the Serbs—a defeat every Serb remembered still, and vowed to avenge. The hail had turned to rain, which was stopping as I crossed an overpass beside an old army base that had been bombed by NATO jets some days before and lay in still-smoldering ruins. A roadblock of MUP forces were waiting on top of the bridge, fingering their weapons. “Go away,” is all they would say. “Turn around.”

We decided to make the airport via the southern route, the way that the NATO forces appeared to have gone when they made the turn from the main road some hours earlier. We sped south, came to a turn and were confronted by a huge column of armor moving
out of the area, back the way we had come. It was the Yugoslav army, beating a retreat as the Technical Agreement insisted it had to do, and its men were in no mood to let us pass. “Get out of the way,” they cried, and pointed rifles and machine guns at us. “Go away.”

I looked at the map, and tried another approach—passing through back streets of villages that displayed the dismaying contrasts of this strange and spiteful war. We could tell which were the Albanian villages—they were in ruins, charred and broken and deserted. And we could tell which were the Serbian towns—untouched, still alive with people—and angry, disaffected people at that, who shook their fists at us as we passed—where young men with guns moved toward us if we stopped.

I made the mistake of asking for directions in such a place, from a group of young men and soldiers manning a barricade of razor wire and burned-out cars. One of them—a tall and gangly youth with acne, his hand on the stock of his machine pistol—came toward us. He made the three-fingered gesture of Serb supremacy, and shouted with fury at us. “Get out! Get out! You have three minutes. Then your forces take over. Until then this is Serbia! Get out quickly! Three minutes—or else!”

It was uncomfortable, unsettling. At one stage we fell in behind a column of British armor, and a drunken, angry Serb, shouting at us incomprehensibly, tried to wrench my door open and made as if to pull us out. I shot forward, past the last Challenger tank, and asked its driver if I could sneak in between him and a Warrior armored car ahead. “Sure, mate!” he said, with a broad Cockney grin. “Anything for a fellow Brit. What are you mugs doing here anyway?”

The ensuing miles were anything but amusing, a worrying miasma of threats and mud, armor, and guns. But eventually we found ourselves at the airport main gate—among the very small number of civilians who had managed to get past what we were told were Serb checkpoints. What we found there was a scene of
near-total farce. The Russian armored cars, eight-wheeled and noisy, were churning back and forth up the main runway, doing their best to provoke the British paratroopers, whose job, they had supposed, had been to take and secure the airport from the departing Serbs. The British soldiers stood in the rain looking perplexed, and every five minutes or so a loud voice would sound from a speaker mounted on a Russian vehicle: “Get out of way! Russians coming!” and the drivers would gun their engines and drive the massive machines almost directly at the waiting platoons, or at the gaggle of reporters waiting disconsolately, and equally puzzled, beside them.

General Jackson was by now supposed to be in Pristina, giving a triumphalist press conference in a suitably public building, telling the world that NATO had now officially liberated Kosovo, that freedom and democracy had triumphed over tyranny and violence, and that those forced out of their homes and their country would soon be free to come back and live in peace. But General Jackson is not a triumphalist figure, and he no doubt would have had some difficulty putting the right amount of sincerity in a statement of this kind—which is why I thought he was actually marginally more comfortable when we saw him, at a moment when the Russians briefly interrupted their own triumphal bluster and let him speak to the assembled microphones.

It was a dismally stage-managed affair, as it and everything to do with NATO’s conduct of the propaganda war was bound to be. A press officer from No. 10 Downing Street, the official home of the British prime minister, was on hand to choreograph things. As that windswept and rain-soaked old warhorse, General Jackson, stepped briskly down from his helicopter she strode behind him, her army fatigues only barely disguising her and not fooling at all the Fleet Street men who knew her. Then, as the rain lanced down, so Mike Jackson, flanked by a phalanx of machine-gun-carrying sentries, offered the world NATO’s prepared statement.
The Russians in the background promptly stepped on their accelerators, attempting as ordered to drown out his words with the roar of their ill-tuned engines, and torrents of smoke lifted in the background, as if half the field were suddenly on fire. The world may have been watching the pictures, but on this occasion it most certainly wasn’t listening to the words.

And in any case the wind soon whipped the general’s rain-sodden papers into a porridge of papier-mâché, so that by the time he reached the passage about the refugees soon being able to return home, he had to dispense with it totally and rely on memory and a few nudges and whispers from the woman behind him. Then he strode away, the Russians quieting their engines. Keith Graves, that most determined of television reporters, shouted out the only question that the general deigned to answer. “Was the presence of the Russians here an embarrassment?”

The general didn’t miss a beat. “Not at all. We welcome them as part of the KFOR. I look forward to discussing practical matters with them directly.”

And off he strode—not knowing, perhaps, that so pleased had President Yeltsin been with the execution of the Russians’ cheeky move that he had promoted the commander of the airport force. The man with whom Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson was now off to parley had begun the day as a mere major, commanding a force of a mere two hundred men. Now he had been made into a lieutenant general, too, and Mike Jackson would have to treat with him as a military equal.

Getting away from the airport was for us was even more difficult than finding it in the first place. Night was falling, and the rain was helping to make what was sinister begin to look and feel downright frightening. As soon as were past the airport perimeter, and had left behind the friendly invigilation of the British paratroopers, we felt very much on our own, very alone.

We took many wrong turns, and twice we came across gangs of Serb youths, heavily armed, forming themselves into impromptu
roadblocks, menacing anyone trying to pass through. At one stage as I was speeding along a muddy track we passed two militiamen with rifles, and by accident I sprayed them with water as I crashed through a large pothole. They shouted, and raised their weapons and began to run—and then a hundred yards or so ahead I swore I saw the swinging red lantern of a roadblock, demanding that we stop. I assumed, for a brief moment, that our number was up. But the flashing light was simply a flag flapping in front of a lighted barn; there was no-one there to stop us, and the two running militiamen fell back and turned away, brushing the thick mud from their uniforms.

It took us a miserable hour to get back to the main road—our last direction given by a young soldier from Yorkshire, who came out from his tent and stood in the driving rain, showing us where to go on a laminated plastic map. The engine of the tank standing beside us throbbed warmly: I could, for a moment, feel something of the relief that many Albanians must be feeling right now, that at last they had some measure of security in their lives, that no one could take them away from their homes and torture and shoot them again. There was someone here to help.

But for how long? The question haunted us for the hours it then took us to drive back down the main highway to Macedonia. We weaved in and out of road blocks, watched yet more convoys churning past us, heading north where we were going south. One of the convoys was Dutch, and at nighttime its movement was even more impressive than the other convoys had been during the daytime. I was enthralled by the sight, and said so to a young woman who was standing by the road, taking pictures.

Oh yes, she said—an entire armored brigade, with light tanks and artillery pieces and self-propelled guns. Impressive, don’t you think?

I remarked on her knowledge, with a fine display of patronizing clumsiness. Wasn’t it odd, I said, that perhaps not even as lately as two days ago, phrases like “armored brigade” and
“artillery pieces” and “self-propelled guns” had never even passed her pretty lips?

She grinned. “Oh yes they have,” she replied. “This is all most familiar to me. Actually, I am a lieutenant in the Dutch Army. Do let me give you my card.”

And with a broad smile she clambered up and onto a passing troop carrier, and waved farewell. Rose, proud feminist and scourge of old white males, had overheard it all. As she came toward me, I winced.

But yes, I continued as the Dutch faded from view—how long would soldiers such as these be detained here? And was all this, I wondered, indeed a real liberation? Was Operation Joint Guardian truly what General Jackson’s speech suggested that it should and would be—an unarguably powerful means, underwritten by the international community, of guaranteeing the safety and security of Kosovo, of helping to make it a place where all the ethnic groups who had been forced by history, accident and imperial fiat, to live together from now on, and to do so in peace?