America is the winner in the new era of highly moral conflicts—just wars, good wars, wars to end … other wars. I covered a couple of these, in Kuwait in 1991 and Somalia in 1993. But I didn’t stick around for the aftermaths, and, it will be remembered (especially by Iraqi Shiites of the Basra region), neither did America. It wasn’t until the NATO occupation of Kosovo that I got a chance to see what happens when the ancient tradition of invasion is stood on its ear. Contrary to a million years of human instincts, conquest now entails giving rather than taking territory while exploiting the victor’s labor and resources to heap booty on the conquered.
The air war against Yugoslavia had been declared a victory. Kosovo was being run by the UN, NATO, and other forces for good. Forces for good and plenty of them—here are some of the more than three hundred well-meaning organizations that were active in Kosovo at the end of 1999: Humanity First, Emergency Corps of the Order of Malta, Center for Mind Body Medicine, Associazione Amici Dei Bambini, Mother Teresa Society, Saudi Joint Relief Committee, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Iranian Relief Committee, Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and the World Society for Protection of Animals. So, could Serbs and Albanians now live together peacefully?
A young Albanian and former Kosovo Liberation Army fighter said yes. Well, what he actually said was, “When you hate this much maybe you would kill them all, but we will try to live with them, which shows what kind of people we are.”
Something else that showed what kind of people they are was the “NATO” brand bubble gum for sale locally, with bubble gum cards depicting victims of Serb atrocities, KLA martyrs, Albanian refugees, and a cruise missile direct hit on Serbian police headquarters in Pristina.
But the KLA veteran did not look like someone who had been chewing over blood vengeance since his first Halloween. He looked like a slightly bored, faintly irritated member of a tenant committee. Which he was, except that the committee was petitioning the Norwegian army instead of a landlord.
“A sewer line is blocked,” said the tenant committee chairwoman. “Heating oil supply is low. We need more garbage containers.”
“We will not have everything for everyone,” said a beleaguered Norwegian infantry captain.
The captain was in Kosovo Polje, site of the Battle of Kosovo, where the Ottoman Turks threw the Serbs out of Kosovo in the first place, in 1389. Now Albanian Kosovars had done it again—this time by squatting rather than fighting, in a housing complex that used to be 80 percent Serb and had become 80 percent Albanian. The Norwegians were on hand to prevent murder, and also to provide more garbage containers.
“The level of hatred will always exist,” said the KLA veteran. “But we are a peaceful nation and we will try to live with them—if the people who did bad things are punished.”
“Thank you for controlling the youths who were throwing stones,” said the Norwegian captain.
“We try,” said the chairwoman.
Battle-hardened combatants beating their swords into complaints about water pressure and their spears into requests to fix the electrical wiring—it was a dream conflict for liberals, a peace-on-earth, goodwill-to-men, Kris Kringle of a military action. Kosovo was the war the war haters loved. Bianca Jagger, Susan Sontag, Barney Frank, House Democratic Whip David Bonior, the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, and various other usually reliable advocates of peace seemed to have been drinking at the VFW Hall and getting “Semper Fi” tattooed on their biceps. “I harbor no second thoughts on the morality of our course,” Senator Wellstone said. “My only regret is that our action has been less effective than I would have hoped.”
Such a regret, of course, depends upon what was hoped for. If we hoped to increase wartime destruction, we were very effective. Normally the victor in a war does most of the damage, but in Kosovo everybody got to destroy things—losers, winners, and neutral nations alike.
The locals explained how to tell the difference between the piles of rubble. When the destruction was general, it was Serbian. Serbs surrounded Albanian villages and shelled them. When the destruction was specific, it was Albanian. Albanians set fire to Serb homes and businesses. And when the destruction was pointless—involving a bridge to nowhere, an empty oil storage tank, an evacuated Serb police headquarters, and the like—it was NATO trying to fight a war without hurting anybody.
However, if we hoped to protect ethnic Albanians, we were, as Senator Wellstone mentioned, less effective. In fact, we were less effective at protecting ethnic Albanians than Slobodan Milošević: had been. According to the U.S. State Department, an estimated ten thousand Albanians were killed and 1.5 million were expelled from their homes, most of them after the NATO air war began.
On the road from Pec to Istok, in the hills of northwest Kosovo, every single building had been destroyed. Beside the highway, in a gravel patch leveled by a bulldozer, were the graves of nineteen members of the Imeraj family: men, women, and children. The tombs were covered by a type of floral arrangement particular to Kosovo. This is a thin, yardwide disk of foliage with brightly colored blossoms sprinkled on the green background and the whole wrapped tightly in cellophane. Muslim Albanians naturally have no Yuletide decorating tradition and wouldn’t understand the horrible free association caused in an American mind—“And to all a good night!”—by these mementos of the Santa War, these giant Christmas cookies of death.
We failed to protect Albanians from Serbs, but we were making up for it by protecting Serbs from Albanians, even though it was Serb persecution of Albanians that caused us to come to Kosovo, thereby giving Albanians an opportunity to persecute Serbs.
In a background briefing a British colonel said, “Out of a prewar Serbian population of thirty thousand, there are eight hundred and seventy-five Serbs left in Pristina.”
“Exactly eight hundred and seventy-five?” I asked.
“Exactly.” And (more visions of Saint Nick as NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe) the colonel knew when the Serbs were sleeping. He knew when they were awake. He had 250 of his men living with the Serbs.
“Living with them and doing what?” I asked.
“Keeping them alive.”
Sometimes. On November 29, 1999, three elderly Serbs were pulled from their car in central Pristina. The man was killed, the two women were severely beaten. On October 11, 1999, an Albanian passerby asked a Bulgarian UN worker, in Serbian, “What time is it?” The Bulgarian replied in Bulgarian, a language too similar to Serbian. He was shot to death.
But the forces for good were agreed that Serbs should stay in Kosovo. And so were the forces for bad. Milošević: wanted Serbs in Kosovo so he could claim that Kosovo was still part of Serbia. NATO wanted Serbs in Kosovo because, when you’re fighting a war to save lives, you’ve got to save somebody’s. The UN definitely wanted Serbs in Kosovo. If you don’t like multiculturalism, why have a UN? And Senator Paul Wellstone wanted Serbs in Kosovo to show how wonderful multiculturalism can be—if you’ve got forty-two thousand troops to enforce it.
Six of those troops were bivouacked in an apartment in downtown Pristina to safeguard twenty-four-year-old Maria, two floors up, the last remaining Serb in the building. This was not bad duty. Maria was beautiful. And her mother, visiting from exile in Serbia, was cute, too. It would be a hard test in bigotry for a normal man to hate this pair. Some of the local fellows managed to pass. “What time is it?” they asked Maria on the street.
I asked Maria, “How do you see your future in Kosovo?”
“I don’t see it at all,” she said. “I just sold my flat. I’m moving to Belgrade.”
“Is there any future for Serbs in Kosovo?”
“No.”
In perfect agreement with Maria was the KLA commander of the Lap region of northeast Kosovo, Major General Mustafa Remi. That is, Remi would have been a major general except that the KLA was demilitarized and had been disarmed.
“There hasn’t been a disarmament,” said General (or whatever) Remi, who was wearing a pistol and being saluted by Albanians. “We have only stored our weapons.”
I brought up the subject of UN Resolution 1244. This is the piece of paper that set NATO upon the Serbs. The resolution states, with an interesting choice of verb, that “Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
“Does the KLA,” I asked the general, “still aspire to an independent Kosovo?”
“We don’t aspire,” said Remi, doing his best—which was very good—to look scary. “We see an independent Kosovo as a reality.”
“What if the Western nations don’t support this?”
Remi’s logic was sound: “I think we are having their support, considering the support that they are offering us.”
At Camp Bondsteel, the U.S. headquarters in Kosovo, I interviewed a more affable officer. Camp Bondsteel was an eight-hundred-acre fortified compound in southern Kosovo housing thirty-five hundred U.S. soldiers atop a ridge that dominated a hundred square miles of rolling farmland. At night Bondsteel was lit the way the city on the hill of the Gospels would have been lit if they’d had diesel generators in Saint Matthew’s time. By day the earthen tracks and paths were being turned into gravel roads. The tents were being replaced with wooden barracks. The only sewage treatment plant in Kosovo had been built.
“I think the conflict is not over yet,” General Remi had told me.
The American officer said, “We learned a lesson in Bosnia. Tents only last three winters.”
I asked the officer, “Can you really turn this place into a multicultural society?”
“We’ll try our best. After all,” said the officer with an optimistic, very American smile, “if anybody can do it, we can.”
Which, back in America we, rather famously, can’t.
A bored black private stood guard at another American fortress, Camp Monteith, in southeastern Kosovo. On the subject of local hatreds, he said, “At least if they put you and me in a police lineup, they can tell us apart.”
But they can tell Maria, too. “Serbs are identifiable,” said Maria. “I can’t explain why. It’s subtle—facial structure.” She told me about a ten-year-old boy, walking down the street, who pulled a knife on her and said, “You are Serb. I kill you.” Maria’s mother said a little kid ran up to her and pantomimed a throat slitting.
Maybe it’s the bubble gum. Or maybe it’s history. Peoples who hate each other often seem to be fond of history. The Serbs, the Serbs say, have always been in Kosovo. Except that the Serbs didn’t arrive in the Balkans until the sixth century AD. So Albanians, the Albanians say, have always been in Kosovo. Although British historian Miranda Vickers says, “Serbian archaeologists have been hard at work seeking to refute … the long-standing Albanian claim for a continuity of descent from the ancient Ilyrians.” Anyway, somebody’s always been in Kosovo. And somebody else is always showing up, the way the Ottoman Turks did in 1389. The Battle of Kosovo caused a large portion of Kosovo’s Serbs to leave for, among other places, Transylvania (making one wonder why the Serbs don’t hate vampires rather than ethnic Albanians).
The Serbs reconquered Kosovo in 1912 and committed atrocities against the Albanians, who sided with Germany in 1914 and oppressed the Serbs, who regained control of Kosovo in 1918 and tyrannized the Albanians, who sided with the Germans again in 1939 and crushed the Serbs, who recaptured Kosovo in 1945 and persecuted the Albanians, who rioted in 1981 and beat and robbed the Serbs, who …
“Oh,” said Maria’s mother to Maria with an I-forgot-to-feed-the-cat look, “you got another threatening phone call. A man’s voice said, ‘What are you waiting for?’”
Food aid was the answer to that question in Gorazdevac, a Serb village in western Kosovo that once had a population of two thousand. The number of residents shrank to about thirty during the air war but had now returned to … “Eight hundred,” said the village drunk, although 770 seem to be making themselves scarce.
The village headman—or, anyway, the oldest male around—explained that it took five soldiers from the Italian armored brigade in Pec to escort a single villager into the fields. As a result, no winter wheat had been planted, there wasn’t enough livestock fodder to last until spring, and—he grew grave—“Yesterday a haystack was set on fire.”
“How are people living?” I asked.
“Food aid,” he said, serving the Italian soldiers, a son-in-law, me, and the village drunk morning glasses of Sljivovica Manastirka that, if you missed your mouth, could provide a skin peel and an eyelid tuck.
“Can Serbs and Albanians live together peacefully?” I asked.
“We would like to live as before the war,” said the headman. “Even though in the past we didn’t want to live together, we lived together.”
“There is only one God above us!” said the village drunk.
I asked if the Milosevic government had been unfair to the Albanians.
The headman’s son-in-law answered. “Milosevic called for Albanians and Serbs to live together.” Two little boys peeked shyly at the yakking men. The son-in-law said he’d named them “Wolf” and “Fearless.”
“The Albanians would start a war anyway,” said the son-in-law.
The village was a Peter Brueghel painting, if you ignored the villagers in Nikes and the corrugated metal and concrete block that augmented the thatch and the wattle-and-daub. A listing half-timbered gristmill sat athwart a stream. The stream wandered through the main road, and so did pigs.
“The cultural level of Albanians is low. Serbian culture is more high,” said the son-in-law.
Luan Mulliqi, the new Albanian director of Kosovo’s national Galeria e Arteve—which was up and running in Pristina, although things like water and electricity often weren’t—said, “What is a difficult place to live is, for culture, heaven.”
Mulliqi was giving me a tour, partly by flashlight, of an exhibit of Kosovar Albanian modern art. Intimations of dread and portraits of corpses pervaded the pictures, although most were painted a quarter of a century before, when Yugoslavia was supposedly a multicultural model to the world. Even the abstracts look worried. One of these was gloomy and terrifying without anything on the canvas except a white billowing shape. “A shroud,” said Mulliqi.
The recent artworks, created during the previous year’s chaos, were more cheerful. Mulliqi, himself a sculptor, was finishing a piece that incorporated a swatch of the green Astroturf of hope, an array of the tools of reconstruction, and some new wood rafters fastened to an old charred roof beam. A corpse was hanging from those rafters, but it was a cheerful sculpture, comparatively speaking.
Serbs argued that Kosovo’s Albanians were cheerful because they were enjoying their martyrdom. “An Albanian with seven sons will sacrifice six for Albanian independence,” said the village drunk in Gorazdevac (perhaps making poor young Wolf and Fearless think, “Don’t give Dad ideas.”)
More likely what Kosovo’s Albanians were enjoying was a chance to provide martyrdom to Serbs, especially their immediate neighbors. “Crimes in Kosovo were done by Serbs here,” said the KLA vet in Kosovo Polje. “No Serb in Belgrade would know which house Albanians lived in.”
In Pasjane, another of Kosovo’s Serb villages, the school principal begged to differ, at least about the behavior of the Serbs in his hometown. “There was no killing,” he said. “There was no looting.” He paused. A large photograph of Slobodan Milošević: hung on his office wall. “Well, maybe there was some. But all the dirty people ran away to Serbia. The people remaining in Pasjane are all honest, decent people.”
Honest, decent, and furious. Pasjane, in the far southeast of Kosovo, was under intermittent mortar attack from Albanians in the surrounding hills who hadn’t gotten the news about storing their weapons. A man had been killed two days before. The other men in Pasjane left the funeral and gathered in the churchyard. They pointed to gravestones damaged by mortar attacks. They pointed to the shrapnel scars on the church.
“This church is from the 1200s.”
“This village is from 1340.”
“First to fight the Turks.”
“Before 1389 all these villages were Serb.”
Old hatreds aside, new hatreds were growing apace—hatred for the Americans guarding Pasjane, for example.
A U.S. Army forensics team had come to gather the shell fragments from the lethal mortar attack. The Pasjane Serbs said that they believed the U.S. Army did this to hide something. When the man was killed, they said, an American armored personnel carrier was down the road. The APC turned off its engine just before the mortar shell struck. The Pasjane Serbs thought the U.S. Army was giving a signal to hidden Albanians.
Why couldn’t everyone cooperate in Kosovo the way Russian troops and NATO troops were cooperating, which, according to official military sources with whom I spoke, was “fully,” even if the Russians had arrived as peacekeeping gate-crashers and even if the Russians were supposed to be perpetrating in Chechnya what the Russians were supposed to be preventing in Kosovo and even if, as one Norwegian enlisted man said unofficially, “the Russians drink on duty”?
“Time is the best medicine,” said a colonel in the Russian medical corps who was running a civilian clinic in Kosovo Polje.
“If time is the best medicine,” I said, “why don’t we all feel better than we did twenty years ago?”
“That,” the colonel said, “is a good question.”
Another good question was: What really should be done with the Serbs and Albanians? One British soldier, on night patrol through a former Serbian—now sooty ruin—section of Pristina, said, “It’s what barbed wire was invented for.”
But advocating barbed wire would have embarrassed the forces for good, the participants in the peace blitzkrieg, the elves in the Santa War. So the tenant committee meetings went on.
“We’d like you to take down the Albanian flag on the balcony,” said the beleaguered Norwegian captain in Kosovo Polje. “It could be seen as a provocation.”
“It’s a wedding tradition,” said the chairwoman.
“The wedding was last week.”
“Flying the flag from Thursday to Monday—that is the tradition,” said the KLA veteran.
“Well, tomorrow is Tuesday,” said the captain. “And one more thing. There are too many stray dogs. They are creating a health problem …”
Said an Italian colonel in Pec, “This is the future of war.”