18

Towards Disaster in Serbia

There was a saying in Belgrade not long after the death of Tito: ‘The Slovenes have got his collection of vintage cars, the Croats have got his yachts, and we’ve got his carcass.’ This Serb resentment dated back to the early 1970s, when Tito had sacked the ‘liberal’, reform-minded Communists, and further annoyed the nationalists by giving autonomous status to Vojvodina and Kosovo. After Tito’s death, the Serbian Party continued to persecute dissident liberals and would not even reduce the teaching of Marxism in schools and at Belgrade University. At the same time, the government came down hard on even the slightest manifestation of Serbian nationalism, such as singing ‘Far Away by the Sea’, the lament for the army during the First World War.

In the aftermath of the purge in 1972, obedience to the Party, or ‘moral-political suitability’, became once more a necessary requirement for any career in business, the media or education. Dissidents called this process ‘negative selection’ since it meant that careerists and dogmatists rose to the top. A typical product of this system was Slobodan Milošević, the future leader of Serbia. A Montenegrin by ancestry, Milošević was born and grew up in the Serbian town of Požarevac, where both his father and mother were school-teachers. Young Slobodan was a conscientious pupil, wearing a carefully pressed dark suit to school; he avoided all sports and kept his own company. However, at high school he met his future wife Mirjana Marković, who was from one of the leading Communist families and was at that time training for her career as a teacher of Marxist sociology. A peculiar double tragedy cast a shadow over an otherwise tranquil youth. When Milošević was at university, his father committed suicide, as did his mother eleven years later.1

Milošević began his career in business, becoming director first of a factory and then of a leading bank, a job that took him on frequent visits to the United States. He also moved rapidly to the summit of power, being appointed head of the Belgrade Party in 1984 and of the Serbian Party in 1986. Although he was now an important man in the grey bureaucratic world of post-Tito politics, Milošević was ignored or despised by the public in Serbia. His subsequent transformation into the hero of many Serbs, and a figure of loathing outside the country, was almost entirely due to the crisis in Kosovo.

Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had dwelt on the catastrophic significance of the Battle of Kosovo, at which ‘the league and independence of the Sclavonian tribes was finally crushed’. During the next five centuries under Ottoman rule, the Serbs never forgot the fateful anniversary on St Vitus’s Day. Bards sang of it to the tune of a one-string fiddle; churchgoers prayed for the soul of Duke Lazar and other fallen heroes; the children learned that on Vidovdan no cuckoo sings, and that during the hours of darkness the rivers run red with blood.2

On 28 June 1889, the fifth centenary of the battle, the inhabitants of the new Kingdom of Serbia were able to mark the occasion in freedom, but millions of co-religionists lived under the Ottoman or Habsburg empires. In 1912, in the first of the Balkan wars, the Serbs finally won back Kosovo Polje, the whole army kneeling to kiss its soil, but they lost it again to the Germans and Austrians three years later. When the Germans and the Italians invaded in April 1941, the Royal Yugoslav Army was everywhere in retreat except in Kosovo, from which it launched an attack on Albania. As a punishment to the Serbs, the Axis conquerors permitted Albania to occupy Kosovo for the rest of the war. Afterwards, the new Communist government in Tirana did not press for sovereignty over Kosovo, even though the Albanians were in the majority. Tito’s relations with Albania, and in particular his decision to send in two divisions of Yugoslav troops, was one of the points at issue with Stalin in 1948. As soon as the break occurred, the Tirana regime became the most virulent foe of Tito. The Albanians not only sealed the Yugoslav frontier, but frequently sniped at people across it.

Tito went out of his way to help and develop the backward region of Kosovo, and came to be seen by Albanians there as an ally against the Serbs. Towards the end of the 1960s, the bulk of the federal budget for underdeveloped regions was transferred from Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia to Kosovo, so that during the 1970s federal aid provided almost three-quarters of Kosovo’s budget and investment. Under the new constitution of 1974, the region acquired autonomous status inside Serbia, and with it the power to borrow abroad. The existing college at Priština was given university status, as well as permission to bring in lecturers from Albania proper, all of whom were advocates of a union with the fatherland. By 1981, the city of Priština had 51,000 students, so that one person in three was in full-time education.

Thanks to federal aid and their natural fecundity, the Albanians in Kosovo increased during the two decades before 1981, from 67 per cent to 77 per cent of the population. The number of Serbs over the same period fell by 30,000.3 The sacking of the Serb police chief Ranković may have encouraged the growth of Albanian militancy, even triumphalism, for during the 1970s there were stories of Serbs being harassed into departure. Then, in March 1981, Albanian discontent exploded in riots at Priština University, and spread throughout Kosovo, leaving nine dead and more than two hundred injured. This was the start of the decade in which would be celebrated the sixth centenary of the Battle of Kosovo.

Both the federal and the republican governments were loath to clamp down on Albanian nationalism, for fear of being accused of Serbian brutality, especially since the Albanians had sympathy in the outside world. Thanks to two decades of emigration, there were hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Shiptars in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States, as well as in north-western Yugoslavia. Like those who remained in Kosovo, they were good linguists, persuasive talkers, and always ready to tell sympathetic journalists an account of their suffering under the Serbian regime. Some of these stories were doubtless true. However, foreign observers failed to notice the fact that, although the Serbs were supposed to be the oppressors, they themselves were departing from Kosovo, complaining about the destruction of property, the desecration of graves and many assaults and rapes. Between 1981 and 1987, there was a further net emigration of Serbs from Kosovo of 30,000, leaving those who remained constituting only 10 per cent of the population.

In April 1987 some 60,000 Serbs in Kosovo signed a petition calling upon the Belgrade government to stop what they called a ‘genocide’, and when the police arrested one of the protest leaders in Priština, violent clashes took place and were seen on television throughout Yugoslavia. Serb fear and anger were still further inflamed by a brutal remark from the leading Albanian Communist in the province, Fadil Hoxha. To someone who had complained of the numerous rapes of Serbian women in Kosovo, Hoxha retorted with what he meant as a joke, that if more Serb women were prostitutes, there would not be so many rapes.

It was at this point that Milošević for the first time took up the cause of the Kosovo Serbs. He flew down to Priština in September 1987 and told a gathering there: ‘No one is going to beat you again.’ In the view of an unsympathetic but very perceptive observer, Aleksa Djilas:

Milošević’s sympathy for the plight of the Serbs in Kosovo was genuine. He is not simply a monster only interested in power, as many of his opponents characterise him. Yet other leading communists were also interested in resolving the Kosovo problem. The difference was that Milošević found the strength to overcome the fear of the masses, so characteristic of any entrenched bureaucrat. Above all, he succeeded because he understood the power of fear and knew how to use it for his own purposes.

The mass movement of Kosovo Serbs developed spontaneously. It was not openly anti-Communist, though it could easily have become so. Milošević only gradually overcame his caution and started supporting it, but he was nonetheless the first leading Communist to do so.

With the help of the party-controlled media and the party machinery, he soon dominated the movement, discovering in the process that the best way to escape the wrath of the masses was to lead them. It was an act of political cannibalism. The opponent, Serbian nationalism, was devoured, and its spirit permeated the eater. Milošević reinvigorated the party by forcing it to embrace nationalism.4

After his vow at Priština, the now famous Milošević went back to Belgrade to take control of the government of Serbia. On 23 September 1987 all Yugoslavia watched on live television a gathering of the Serbian Communist Party in which most speakers devoted themselves to the ethnic problems of Kosovo. After more than twenty hours of debate, the former leaders were thrown out because they had not defended the Serbs. During the winter of 1987–8 Milošević quietly purged the Serbian Communist Party of liberals, federalists, believers in ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, and even some of the Croats and Slovenes working in Belgrade. Milošević and his followers took over Serbian television, Politika (the principal morning newspaper), and NIN (the most intelligent magazine), converting them all into organs of Serbian nationalism. The Serbian Writers’ Club became the centre for the revision of literature and history, giving proper attention again to the time before the Second World War and even before Yugoslavia. A former Partisan general, Dobrica Čošić, the author of several historical novels, praised the Kingdom of Serbia at the time of the Balkan wars.

Although Milošević played on the fears of millions of simple Serbs in the countryside, he ran into fierce opposition in Belgrade itself. The anti-Communist democrats, the liberal Communists and all those who feared the disintegration of Yugoslavia found themselves lumped together as dissidents. The atmosphere of Belgrade in December 1987 was patriotic and angry, with more than a hint of police repression. The traditional Gypsy bands, consisting of a fiddle, a bass and a squeeze-box, that toured the bars in the evening were now playing old favourites from the First World War such as ‘March on the Drina’ and ‘Far Away by the Sea’. The Milošević press was starting to publish supplements, books and magazines on Serbia’s struggle against the Turks from Kosovo down to the Balkan wars. The newspapers and television broadcasts ranted about the fresh Albanian demonstrations in Kosovo, and welcomed the sending of 3,000 federal militia.

For the first time since I had known Belgrade, I was warned by friends against careless talk in public places, and still more on the telephone. People were even keeping their voices down in the café of the Moskva Hotel. Outside the hotel, one of the dissidents selling the student magazines said he had twice been arrested and was now out of a job. This man, who was in his forties, said he was thinking of leaving Serbia for one of the more enlightened republics, and eighteen months later I met him again in Zagreb, selling his dissident magazines in the tunnel beneath the railway station. When I asked him what were his politics, he once more replied simply ‘Communist’. Friends I had known for thirty years were talking of going to Slovenia or even to the United States, to escape what they called a ‘Fascist’ regime.

The atmosphere in Kosovo was still more depressing. When Rebecca West visited Priština in the 1930s, she found a dusty village where there was nothing to eat but chicken and rice. Now, thanks to the subsidies from the rest of Yugoslavia, it had become a teeming, garish city, under a pall of thin brown smoke from the local industrial chimneys. Besides building apartment blocks to contain the Albanian baby boom, the city fathers had squandered money on hideous, gimcrack prestige projects, such as a public library built to look like a mosque, and an office block in the shape of a giant bicycle rack. The walls of the bedrooms in the newly erected Grand Hotel were eaten away as though by rats, and the buttons had disappeared from the tenth-floor lifts, so that guests who did not want to risk pressing a live wire had to make their way down by the stairs in the dark. Ravens wheeled over the crumbling banks and shopping centres, as they once had done over Kosovo Polje, sated with human flesh. Dogs howled all night and at dawn there came the amplified, electronic scream of the muezzin, from concrete mosques.

In spite of the 3,000 militiamen recently brought in to keep the peace, the Albanians in Priština seemed at ease. When I asked at the Belgrade Restaurant whether they did not object to the name of the capital of their oppressors, they grinned and said: ‘Everyone comes here. It’s “Brotherhood and Unity” … Other nations hate us because we have so many children. They say the population will be too large in fifty years. All of us here have at least five, or as many as ten, brothers and sisters. We don’t care. We don’t care what happens in fifty years. What matters to us is honour (besa). If someone comes to our home, he is treated like a brother. No one can harm him. We would rather die than let anything happen to him.’

Tito was still a hero to the Albanians in Priština, so that his picture was found in every shop as it no longer was in Belgrade. Already Albanians were looking to Croats like Tito for help against their traditional foe, the Serbs. Albanian patriotism was open, even triumphalist. I saw an example of this one Sunday afternoon when the peace was shattered as a motorcade, honking horns and waving the national flag (a black, two-headed eagle on a scarlet background), passed up and down the main street of Priština. It was part of a wedding feast for one of the Communist bigwigs. Roused from a siesta, I went to the only one of the three nearby cinemas that did not seem to be showing a pornographic film. The film began as a thriller set on a transcontinental express, but soon turned into an orgy in which two bandits simultaneously raped and sodomised one of the women passengers, as the audience roared Albanian words of approval.

One of the first Serbs I met in Kosovo showed me a typewritten poem beginning: ‘Where once there used to be Serbs there are now militia …’ He took me to see the Field of Blackbirds, now criss-crossed by electricity pylons and fringed by industrial chimneys. As this was December I did not see the famous red peonies, said to have taken their colouring from the blood of the fallen, like the poppies in Flanders. On the side of the Serbian Museum I read the verse in which Duke Lazar warned of the shame that would befall him:

Who is Serb and of Serbian blood

But did not come to Kosovo Field …

would have no child of his heart, whether male or female, no red wine, nor white wheat.

The Serbs were still the majority in the village of Kosovo Polje, now a suburb of Priština, although even there the Albanians were building a mosque. The Serbs I talked to believed that the Shiptars were trying to drive them out to take their property. ‘You’ve seen my home,’ one of them told me, ‘it’s a decent place for me and my wife and two children. If the Albanians take over, there’ll be three or four of them to a room. It’s disgusting, uncivilised.’ Many Serbs were willing to leave if only they could get a fair price for their house and land, but the law forbade them to leave without making a sale. If they left, they left everything. One man asked if Britain would give him political asylum, then added that he would happily go to a Serbian town like Kraljevo or Kragujevac, if he could only sell his home.

One afternoon I went to a party to bid farewell to a pair of Serb newly-weds, off to Australia not just for their honeymoon but for a life in exile. To the clatter and hammer and surge of the squeeze-box and band, the guests joined in the kolo, their arms on each other’s shoulders, jigging and bouncing, straight-backed and heads held high, as their feet in the circle moved through the twinkling, intricate steps. Later they sang some of the old Serb songs, though not ‘Far Away by the Sea’, which was banned as chauvinistic in Kosovo. Never have I attended such a dismal wedding feast, for a young couple leaving their homeland for ever.

Before leaving Kosovo I went to Gračanica to see the exquisite church founded in 1313 by Saint Milutin, the Serbian king, whose wife Simonida is also shown in one of the murals there. These Serb warrior-saints, kings, despots and emperors, together with biblical figures, spring from the faded walls with a soaring grace that recalls El Greco, himself a painter of the Byzantine school.

A churchwarden told me about Saint Milutin the King, as he is known. ‘His first wife was Bulgarian and his second wife was Greek, so they say from Carigrad’ – Tsar City, as the Serbs called Constantinople and still call modern Istanbul. The monastery was now in the care of Serbian nuns who managed a farm with its own tractor and lorry as well as horses and carts. As I was leaving, the abbess charged out of the farmhouse in a temper and started to scream at me; these women are widely renowned for fierceness. From the other direction an elderly nun was driving a flock of sheep, whacking their sides with a switch as a small dog yelped in excitement. She smiled and told me not to worry about the abbess, then talked for a bit about the farm and its problems. The local authorities claimed some of their hay, and they no longer took their produce to market in Priština. Some years ago the Albanians had taken the cheese off the stall and trampled it in the mud.

In the following year, 1988, Milošević took over the Serbian Presidency and continued to play on his countrymen’s characteristic persecution mania. He never attacked or abused the Albanians, nor later the Germans, Croats and Muslim Slavs, since Serbian persecution mania is rooted in fear rather than hatred. Even in private conversation, one rarely hears from a Serb any animosity to a people in general. Over and over again one hears that ‘the Albanians and the Croats hate us, but we don’t hate them’ or: ‘All the world hates us, us and the Jews.’

Milošević is a poor public speaker, almost as poor as Tito, and he is certainly not a rabble-rouser. However, by playing on fear, he succeeded in drawing a million people to one of his rallies in New Belgrade in October 1988. A partly orchestrated but largely spontaneous cult began to develop, accompanied by songs and jingles:

Slobodan, they call you freedom,

   you are loved by big and small.

So long as Slobo walks the land,

   the people will not be in thrall.5

Or another song I found quoted in a Zagreb magazine:

So we may live in unity, Slobodan help us.

So we may live in unity, Serbia help us.

Slobodan, dear brother, your brothers beg you,

Help us, brother Slobo, for we cannot hold out any longer.

Our ancestors perished on Kosovo Field,

As we shall, if needs be, for Serbia.

Persecution never ceases against us, your brothers and sisters;

Help us, brother Slobo, you are our father and mother.

As long as there are Serbs, so will Kosovo be ours.

Kosovo, our homeland is taken away.

Early in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution and also the beginning of the end of Communism in Europe, a Belgrade publishing house brought out a volume of speeches and interviews given by Milošević. Aleksa Djilas, after remarking upon the narrow intellectual horizon and limited vocabulary of the pieces, points out that the chapter headings are reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book: ‘The difficulties are neither unexpected nor insurmountable’, ‘The future will still be beautiful, and it is not far away’. The author’s use of military terms such as ‘mobilisation’, ‘battle’ and ‘war’ give an aggressive tone to his message. To quote Aleksa Djilas again: ‘This ponderous text seemed to be very much in harmony with the author’s large photograph on the book’s cover. He appears stiff, inhibited, hierarchical – almost robot-like.’

In Croatia, the newspapers raged at Milošević and in particular at his handling of the Kosovo crisis. Cartoonists depicted him as ‘Slobito’ (Mussolini) or ‘Stalošević’ (Stalin). The Croat party organ Vjesnik, reviewing the book of collected speeches, attributed his slogan ‘Serbia will be a state or she will be nothing’ to Hitler’s supposed statement that ‘Germany will be a world power or she will be nothing’. In fact it was Marshal Pilsudski who coined this phrase with respect to Poland in 1918. In February 1989 collections were made at offices and factories in Croatia in support of Albanian miners on strike underground at Mitrovica in Kosovo. When the Serbian government did away with autonomy for Kosovo and Vojvodina, angry crowds in Croatia replied by attacking cars with Serbian number-plates. In March 1989 fresh riots broke out in Kosovo, leaving twenty dead and more than a hundred wounded.

Arriving in Belgrade in March 1989, I found the atmosphere of the city strangely familiar from Trotsky’s description during the first Balkan War in 1912. He had seen in the stationers’ shops symbolic battle pictures of powerful horses smashing the Turkish ranks. In front of a flower shop, crowds of reservists pressed forward to read the latest reports from the front … He saw the 18th Regiment marching to war in their khaki uniforms and opanki with green sprigs in their caps. He was shocked by the scandal in the boulevard press and made fun of the foreign correspondents, stealing each other’s stories in the café of the Moskva Hotel.

Seventy-seven years later, the off-duty soldiers in khaki outnumbered civilians in cafés along Terazije and the other main streets, as they quietly chatted and sipped their beer, watching the girls go by in promenade or on roller-skates. Patriotic music blared from the street loudspeakers. Stationers’ shops were filled with pictures and books extolling the heroes of Kosovo, the Balkan wars and the greater ordeal of 1914–18. Groups of civilians and reservists pressed in front of the electronic shops to watch the latest news from Kosovo on the display TV sets. Just as in 1912 the Serbs rallied behind the cunning Prime Minister Pašić, whom Trotsky despised, so now they rallied behind Milošević, whose sulky features glowered from thousands of posters, over the old Partisan slogan ‘Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People’.

The Belgrade press was just as malicious as it had been in Trotsky’s time; the Evening News alleged that a woman journalist working for Belgrade TV, who also suffered from Aids, had gone to bed with fifteen of her male colleagues. Articles on Albanian heroin trading shared space with such matters as ‘How to lengthen your penis’. The Moskva Hotel, which somehow had survived the bombardments of two world wars, was once more the headquarters of foreign journalists hoping to pick each other’s brains. The elderly orchestra in the café, which normally stuck to Lehar and Puccini, was trying its hand at military music such as ‘March on the Drina’. Over the noise, a Montenegrin was lecturing me on the Albanians: ‘We’ve treated them too well in the past. We gave them a university. We poured money into Kosovo, more than a million dollars a day. And now they shoot our militiamen.’

Although Milošević still described himself as a Communist, and although his wife was a university lecturer in Marxist sociology, his political platform was pure Serbian nationalism, such as Trotsky encountered in 1912. There was a striking example of this in March 1989, when Borba, the federal Communist Party paper, hostile to Milošević, published a letter from a Croatian reader deploring the anti-German coup d’état of 27 March 1941, the provocation that angered Hitler into invading Yugoslavia. The reader saw this as an example of Serbian rashness, which it undoubtedly was. The Milošević newspapers castigated Borba for publishing what they called an unpatriotic letter, and went on to praise not only the coup d’état of 1941 but Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the cause of the First World War.

As well as snarling defiance at Austria and Germany, the Serbs were also warning about the danger from Islam. A Milošević author, Dehan Lučić, published a lurid book of investigative reporting called Secrets of the Albanian Mafia, which listed members of the Albanian secret service abroad.6 According to Lučić, the mafia was smuggling drugs through Belgrade airport to Canada and the United States, remitting the profits to buy out the Serbs in Kosovo. On the strength of an interview with a prostitute in an Istanbul brothel, Lučić claimed that Saudi Arabian money was backing the ‘Grey Wolf’ Muslim fundamentalists in a bid to bring south-east Europe back into the Turkish empire.

In an interview with NIN magazine, Lučić expanded his views on the Muslim peril: ‘Albanian criminals through the ages have plundered Orthodox churches, a crime they have justified by a jihad against unbelievers. Turkey, as the Ottoman Empire, tolerated this in order to bring them under its political influence. Today the same role is played by certain pan-Islamic states and their unofficial religious organisations.’ The militant Serbs were coming to see themselves as defending not only their own nation but Christendom. ‘On Kosovo, just as six hundred years ago, the battle for Europe is being fought,’ proclaimed one of the newspapers run by Milošević. The Belgrade government, which for forty years had neglected or even persecuted the Serbian Church, now organised pop concerts to raise the money to build the largest basilica in the Orthodox world. Early in 1989, the authorities made arrangements to transfer the mortal remains of Duke Lazar from Valjevo to Gračanica in Kosovo, stopping at every village on the way, so that the faithful could kiss the urn. The government even hinted that it would give a school holiday for the feast of Saint Sava, the patron saint of the Serbs but not of the Roman Catholic or Muslim Yugoslavs.

Religious weddings were now back in fashion, particularly at the old Synod Church, across the road from the Question Mark inn. Priests in robes of scarlet and gold intoned the prayers as a bass choir in the gallery sang the responses in Old Slavonic. When the time came for the sacrament, the priests put silver crowns on the heads of the bride and groom, who each held two lighted candles as they proceeded round the altar. After drinking deep from the cup of Communion wine, the couple gravely embraced. Even afterwards there was none of the jollity or facetiousness of an English wedding. The king and queen for a day had the look of preparing themselves for a sacrifice rather than marriage. It made me think of the Kosovo poem, ‘The Serbian Girl’, in which the young woman’s lover is killed on the field of battle. Outside the Synod Church there were notices offering seats on the coaches going to Kosovo for the coming sixth centenary.

At the beginning of April, I set off for Kosovo with a Yugoslav journalist. We stayed overnight at the green and attractive town of Kragujevac, whose principal tourist sight is the mass grave of the 8,000 men and boys shot by the Germans on 20 October 1941. For many years afterwards, the dead were portrayed as Partisan heroes; now, with more justice, the Chetniks were claiming them as their own. The massacre was the major justification for Draža Mihailović’s decision not to pursue an all-out war against the Axis. The restaurant where we dined had one of the best Gypsy bands I have ever heard, consisting of five dark and distinguished-looking men in moustaches. Since the executives of the local car-works who were present hailed from all parts of Yugoslavia, the band played the appropriate music, whether a Bosnian love lament, a Slovene jig or a Dalmatian shanty, hinting of salt and fish and wine. The restaurant was a pleasant reminder that ordinary Yugoslavs, as distinct from their politicians, were perfectly able to get on together.

After Kragujevac, we started to climb into the mountains of southern Serbia, towards that border region where Turks and Slavs, Muslims and Christians have fought each other for six hundred years, and where in the Second World War the Chetniks and Partisans fought each other as well as the Axis invaders. Just beyond Kraljevo, we stopped at a café to eat lamb from the spit and hear the talk of the genial landlord: ‘There are many Albanians here and Muslim Slavs. We get on fine. In fact I never serve pork or have it cooked in the kitchen because it gives offence to Muslim customers. We’ve all got to live together, isn’t that right? What’s happening in Kosovo is not the fault of the Albanians. It’s the politicians and the economy. The politicians have given them too many things free and they don’t want to work any more.’

The landlord and his friends had certain specific complaints about the Kosovo Albanians. Many with Yugoslav passports had gone to West Germany and then, instead of finding a job, had asked for political asylum: ‘The Germans say they will look into the case but meanwhile the Albanians aren’t allowed to work, while the German government gives them food and lodging. The Germans work but the Albanians idle. Naturally the Germans are getting fed up with this, for the Albanians aren’t real political refugees. They’ve nothing to fear in this country. Now we’re afraid that, in order to keep out these Albanians, the West Germans are going to make all Yugoslavs have a visa.’

A few miles further south we made a detour to visit one of the sacred places of the Serbs. The founder of their medieval empire, Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja (c.1113–99) established a monastery in the remote and beautiful gorge of the River Studenica, at a place that his son Saint Sava described as ‘a deserted hunting-ground for wild beasts’. It seemed on an April morning, like an enchanted woodland, overwhelmed by a great profusion of trees, flowers and blossom, the mountain air loud with the sound of insects and birds. The Nemanjas built here the Church of the Virgin with its renowned frescos, a smaller chapel and Serbia’s first hospital. This monastery in the mountains remained the religious centre of the Serbs, who had no political capital. The monastery survived the Turkish occupation partly because the Sultans valued it as a place to breed falcons. The Orthodox Church is strongly conservationist. The abbot of Studenica did not want to talk about Kosovo, but he was eager to get our support in opposing the plan for a hydroelectric dam on the river.

The Serbs are ever aware of the damage that man can do to nature. Crossing from Serbia proper to Kosovo province, one finds an ecological ruin. One moment the hills at the side of the road are verdant with dense forest; the next they are bare stone. Perhaps this is proof of the old Serb adage that ‘no grass grows where the Turk trod’; it may be a result of Albanian methods of farming and tree-felling, whose dire effects I saw the following year in Albania proper. It provided a gloomy introduction to Kosovo, even before we met the tanks and the truckloads of troops in combat gear.

Priština was a sadder and grimmer place than when I had been there sixteen months earlier. Tanks were parked outside the Grand Hotel. Pinned to the trees in the high street were mourning notices and photographs of the militiamen who had been killed in the fighting.

In the ice-cream parlour behind the Grand Hotel, I talked to a young Serb teacher and her lawyer husband, who dandled the baby as he described the recent confrontation: ‘Have you heard about the Albanian girl they’re turning into a martyr? She went for a militiaman with one of her stiletto-heeled shoes, trying to put his eye out. She left a big dent in his forehead before he shot her. It was hard for the militia to fire over people’s heads but they should have done so … I’ve nothing against Albanians. An Albanian was our best man. I used to go out drinking with another Albanian friend. Now their own people threaten them if they talk to us.’

His wife blamed the trouble on the economy: ‘Twenty years ago we were well off. Now we’re desperately trying to pay for food and the baby’s clothes. We don’t have any luxuries. I don’t mean a weekend in Paris, we wouldn’t dream of that, but a dinner out … Once Tito came here when I was a little girl and I was photographed giving him flowers. I was so proud. But the politicians did nothing for us. All they did was build these useless skyscrapers, these shopping precincts all falling to bits and littered with broken bottles. Look at them!’

Most of the guests at the Grand Hotel were army officers, UDBA or Belgrade officials. A Serb who was running an economic enterprise said that he still had Albanian friends and was trying to learn the language, ‘though it’s a bastard to learn’. He blamed the troubles on the Republic of Albania, which he alleged had 15,000 people living illegally in Kosovo. I got to know one of the few Albanians left in the Kosovo government; he stayed at the Grand for his own protection. He was a brave and decent man who still believed in Yugoslavia, but now he knew that his position was hopeless.

At the end of my stay, I went with the Yugoslav journalist to visit the Gračanica church that soon would be receiving the mortal remains of Duke Lazar. Across the road from the entrance I noticed a new ‘Café 1389’ and a bookstall selling The Battle of Kosovo: Myth, Legend and Reality. Four little Albanian boys were trying to rifle the church letter-box, as we went in search of the abbess. As on my previous visit, she turned out to be in a filthy temper: ‘How dare you try to come to someone else’s house? Have you no manners? What makes you think you can behave so rudely?’ Once more I was rescued by kindly old Sister Jephremia, whom I had seen before with a flock of sheep.

Sister Jephremia took us into the church and allowed us to get a close look at the frescos, which had been very much damaged over the last six centuries. The Turks had defaced some. Peasant women are said to have rubbed off the paint to use as a treatment for eye diseases. By far the worst harm had been done by recent vandals scratching hearts and initials and sometimes even their names with a date. It was only in the last few years that the State had tried to protect this wonderful building. In 1989 the politicians in Belgrade were boasting about their mission to save Christian Europe from Islam, but Sister Jephremia told us a different story:

‘The Turks came here in 1389, the year of the Battle of Kosovo. They did some damage then and over the next few hundred years. But they weren’t as bad as the Bulgarians who came here. Yes, the Bulgarians were Christians like the Serbs, but they were worse than the Turks. We all know the Turks are our enemies. We have more to fear from our friends behind our backs … It was bad for us after the war. They [the Communists] didn’t want to let us stay here. They asked why shouldn’t they pull the monastery down. They billeted the council here. The head man really hated us, and they desecrated the church.’

When I asked if these people were Serbs or Albanians, Sister Jephremia answered:

‘The Serbs were the worst. One Albanian said to me that if anyone treated a mosque like they had treated this church he would have killed him. Then in 1952 the Marshal [Tito] came on a visit here. He was photographed outside, you can see the picture. There was a man here, a learned man who spoke six languages, and he dared to speak to the Marshal. He said the church should be restored, if not for religion, as a historical monument. The Marshal agreed.

‘But in that same year they brought the army reserves and put them into the monastery. They forced us out at gunpoint. So we decided to go and protest in Belgrade. We had no help from the Patriarch. It was just our idea. I was very young and naïve and didn’t realise what a risk I took, going to see people and protesting. We didn’t see Tito but we were received by Ranković. I don’t know what he thought of us in our black clothes, but he listened to us. I was so naïve, I didn’t realise that they might have killed us. However, I’d have gone straight to heaven. Since then, more sensible people have come into government …’

Here Sister Jephremia crossed herself then looked at me with a smile:

‘You’ve been here before, some years ago, I remember.’

‘And I remember you. You were driving a flock of sheep.’

‘Yes, it was winter. Now the sheep are up in the mountains. But when you were here last, I didn’t talk like I’ve talked today, did I?’

No, she had not. Until this visit it had not occurred to me that in seven centuries Gračanica had never suffered as badly as it did under the Communists after the Second World War. We gave Sister Jephremia some money towards the church, and she in turn gave us two bottles of wine and said she would pray for us.

A few weeks later the mortal remains of Duke Lazar were brought to Gračanica, and then on 28 June 1989, almost a million Serbs gathered at Kosovo Field for the sixth centenary of the battle. By now the fear of the Serbs in Serbia proper had spread to the Orthodox Christians in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, reviving memories of the Second World War. Because of the self-fulfilling nature of persecution mania, the Serbs in Croatia did in fact start to suffer harassment, especially after the rise to power of Franjo Tudjman in 1990. And as the reports came back of Serbs being beaten up, their houses burnt and motor cars pushed into the sea, played on fear to his own advantage. Just as Milošević played on Serb fears, so Tudjman exploited Croat hatred of ‘Chetniks’. The two men needed each other to stay in power, and were in fact quite close political friends.

Millions of Serbs were opposed to Milošević and wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia. The last chance to get rid of him came in March 1991, when a huge crowd gathered in front of the Belgrade TV station, protesting against its use for Milošević propaganda. Since the government had imposed a ban on public meetings in old Belgrade, Milošević sent in tanks and troops who first used tear-gas, then fired on the demonstrators, killing two. After this first rally, organised by the opposition political parties, a larger and separate demonstration began in Marshal Tito Boulevard, now generally known by its nineteenth-century name of Terazije (The Scissors). They kept up a night-and-day vigil similar to the demonstrations the previous year in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. But whereas the Chinese were protesting against the Communist system, the Serbs were denouncing chauvinism and militarism.

By the time I reached Belgrade, the crowd had begun to disperse in a spirit of hope and confidence; Milošević had been forced to sack his placemen on the executive of Belgrade TV, and to stop jamming the Yutel channel from Sarajevo, which gave a news service free from Serb or Croat propaganda. Milošević had also lost control of the main Belgrade paper, Politika. Belgrade public opinion praised the moderation and sense of the young protesters. Instead of chanting the old Serbian battle hymns or doggerel complaints of persecution, they called for liberty to the sound of their own Slavonic pop music. Actors and TV presenters, rather than politicians, caught the mood of the crowd. Nor were these people anti-Communist dissidents, such as the world had seen in Russia, China, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Paradoxically, many of them were looking back to Tito’s Yugoslavia as a more tolerant society. Only the old, such as Milovan Djilas, remembered the time when Yugoslavia was an oppressive Communist state.

The demonstrations especially delighted those who still believed in Yugoslavia, standing above national chauvinism. The Zagreb magazine Danas hailed what it called a ‘velvet Revolution’, similar to the recent events in Czechoslovakia. It recounted the touching story that an Albanian baker had handed out free bread and cakes to the young protesters, to show his appreciation of their goodwill. One of the headlines in Danas summed up the situation in Belgrade as ‘Milošević on his knees’.

So indeed it seemed at the time. For some days Milošević did not even dare to appear in public. When he tried to stage a counter-rally in New Belgrade, at the place where a million had gathered eighteen months earlier, scarcely 5,000 people turned up, most of them old, dejected and bitter. Many were soldiers and their families living in nearby flats, who feared that the overthrow of Milošević would threaten their jobs, pensions and privileges. The few young men in the crowd looked shamefaced in front of the TV cameras. The vast majority of the city’s youth, including the students living in New Belgrade, had come to the old city to join the rally against Milošević and against a war. As someone remarked to me: ‘In New Belgrade, age; in Old Belgrade, youth.’

Notes

1 Aleksa Djilas, ‘Profile of Slobodan Milošević’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993). Djilas refers to Slavoljub Djukić’s Kako se dogodio vodja: Borba za vlast u Srbiji posle Josipa Broza (Belgrade, 1992).

2 Velemir Vesović (ed.), Kosovska bitka: Mit, legenda i stvarnosti (Belgrade, 1988), p. 17.

3 Stevan K. Pavlowitch, The Improbable Survivor: Yugoslavia and its Problems, 1918–1988 (London, 1988), p. 84.

4 Aleksa Djilas, ‘Profile of Slobodan Milošević’, p. 84.

5 Quoted in ibid.

6 Dehan Lučić, Tajne Albanske Mafije (Belgrade, 1989).