Blood and Belonging (8 page)

The Serbs in their bunkers have a case that deserves to be heard. In Yugoslavia, they were a protected constitutional nation. In an independent Croatia, they were reduced to a national minority in a state with a genocidal past. Without a state of their own, the Serbs repeat over and over, they face extermination again. The Serbian war in Bosnia is designed to give them such a state, by providing a unified land corridor from Serbia proper, connecting up the Serbian lands in western, central, and southern Croatia. Without such a corridor, the Croatian Serbs know they will not survive, and until such a corridor is secure they live from day to day in a state of armed paranoia. There is a currency and there is a flag, but there is no state in Krajina, merely a jungle. And they have no sure protector. For all their bravado, they know they cannot count on Milošević. If the price of their defense becomes too high for Serbia proper, the Krajinans know they will be sold down the river.

The Serbian case would be more convincing if they were less persuaded that the whole world, especially foreign journalists, is against them. After you have had your car commandeered by drunken paramilitaries, after you have been shot at and had your life threatened, a certain indifference to their cause tends to steal over you.

The war zones of eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar in particular, leave behind an unforgettable impression of historical retrogression. Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, Germans, Croats, and Serbs once were buried together now
lie desecrated by the bombs of both sides. Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back through five centuries here. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages. Such law and order as there is, is administered by warlords. There is little gasoline, so the villages have returned to the era before the motorcar. Everyone goes about on foot. Old peasant women forage for fuel in the woods, because there is no heating oil. Food is scarce, because the men are too busy fighting to tend the fields. In the desolate wastes in front of the bombed-out high-rise flats, survivors dig at the ground with hoes. Every man goes armed. No one ventures beyond the village. No one trusts anyone they have not known all their lives. Late-twentieth-century nationalism has delivered one part of the European continent back to the time before the nation-state, to the chaos of late-feudal civil war.

A week spent in Serbian Krajina is a week spent inside a nationalist paranoia so total that when you finally cross the last Serbian checkpoint and turn on the radio, and find an aria from Puccini playing, and look out of your window and see the wet fields in the rain, you find yourself uncoiling like a tightly wound spring, absurdly surprised to discover that a world of innocent beauty still exists.

BELGRADE

On the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, you never tell anybody where you've really come from or where you're really going. At the Croatian checkpoints, you say merely that you're going to the next Croatian town. At the Serb
checkpoints, you smile, let them search your trunk, rummage through the dirty underwear in your luggage, offer them Marlboros, and tell them over and over that you are heading toward the bosom of Mother Serbia.

At the first tollbooth on the Serbian side of the highway, you do not hand them the toll card you picked up at the Zagreb entrance. You say, instead, that you've come from the Serbian Krajina, and then you negotiate your toll fee in deutsche marks. This is the only tollbooth in Europe where, with laughter, exchange of cigarettes, and displays of mocking disbelief at what they propose to charge you, you can barter your toll fee down to a reasonable sum.

About twenty-four kilometers from Belgrade, you see your first sign of the impact of Western sanctions: enormous queues of small Zastavas, Fiats, Renault 5s stretching down the motorway from the service stations, and large crowds of men gathered around the empty pumps, waiting for the occasional delivery. They play cards, talk politics, sing along to a harmonica to pass time, but when you come up to talk and they discover that you are a Western writer, an angry knot of men soon surrounds you. A short, stubby man with a porkpie hat on his head, mud-encrusted boots, and the hands of a farmer pokes you in the chest and says, “What the hell were we supposed to do with those Croats? Stand there and wait for them to cut our throats? And what do you do? You give us these sanctions. You call that fair?” And so it goes, with themes and variations, that soon have them blaming Churchill and the British for supporting Tito rather than Draža Mihajlović. So apparently it is the fault of the British that Yugoslavia had fifty years of Communism.

Their anger would be more threatening if it were not accompanied by a certain comic ritual. The men in the
queue approach, say they don't want to have anything to do with a Westerner, turn on their heels, so that their friends can see what a splendid gesture of defiance they have made, and then they return anyway and start talking, pausing to let you take notes, peering over your shoulder to see how you write their names and so on. This, I learn in the days ahead, is part of the ritual style of Serbian nationalism itself. The dance has its opening quadrille: we won't talk, the West never understands; we despise you, you tell nothing but lies; then they start talking and never stop. Ask anybody a simple question and you get that telltale phrase: “You have to understand our history …” Twenty minutes later and you are still hearing about King Lazar, the Turks, and the Battle of Kosovo. This deep conviction that no one understands them, coupled with the fervent, unstoppable desire to explain and justify themselves, seemed to define the style of every conversation I had in Belgrade.

Next morning, when I visit a bank queue, the same rituals repeat themselves. People violently and vehemently refuse to talk, only to start into a stream of Serbian self-justification that begins with their immemorial struggle against the Turks and concludes with their defense of Serbian Bosnia against the Muslim fundamentalists. Along the way, the invective sweeps up the anti-Serbian crimes of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Tito into a rhetorical flow as muddy as a spring torrent.

Bank queues are as fundamental a part of Belgrade life as the petrol queue. The economy is in a state of advanced hyperinflation—running at 200 percent per month. In the restaurants, the price stickers on the menus change overnight. The only reliable hedge against inflation is a hard-currency account. Many private banks have opened for business
and promise to pay 10 percent per month on such accounts. How they manage to do so is a mystery. The rumor is that the private banks are deeply engaged in the nether-world of smuggling, illegal oil imports from Ukraine, and arms trading with Russia, together with the laundering of Western drug money. Some of these banks have gone bust, and the fear is that if more of them do, the Milošević regime itself might be swept away in the ensuing economic chaos.

So anxious are the small depositors about the fate of their accounts that many of them queue all night long in order to be sure to be able to withdraw their hard currency. These queues stretch hundreds of meters down the streets, a pushing, shoving mass of cold, deeply unhappy old-age pensioners, some of them weak with tiredness.

You might have thought such queues would be full of anti-Milošević grumbling. Belgrade, after all, never voted for him and has always resented its demotion from a world capital of the nonaligned movement, as it was under Tito, to an isolated, embargoed Balkan provincial capital. Yet, again, all the anger that might be directed at Milošević is directed at the West—at Churchill, at Mrs. Thatcher for having supported the Croats, at the Americans for aiding the Bosnian Muslims, and so on.

DJILAS

He answers the door of his Belgrade flat himself. His hair is white now, and age has loosened the sharp, aquiline features I remembered from the book jacket of his
Conversations with Stalin
. He is eighty-two, and seems stooped and frail as he leads me down the corridor to his study. He tells me which of the low green velvet armchairs to sit in, and asks me whether
I want tea or a drink. When I decline, he laughs and remembers the time he led a Yugoslav delegation to meet Stalin in 1944. The Russians offered them vodka, and when the Yugoslavs turned them down, the Russians shouted, “What kind of people are you?” “We were partisans,” says Milovan Djilas, with a thin, watchful smile. There is something of the puritanical partisan in him still.

Djilas was at Tito's side throughout the partisan guerrilla campaigns against the German occupiers and their Serbian and Croatian collaborators. Better than anyone else, he knows that the mutual loathings of 1993 all go back to the massacres and countermassacres among Yugoslavs between 1941 and 1945. As the last great partisan leader left alive, he is the last one who still remembers the Yugoslav dream that the next generations tore apart.

He tells me about setting off in an American Willys jeep in the summer of 1945, as Vice President of the new Yugoslavia, to establish the border between Serbia and Croatia. “I was a Montenegrin, after all,” he says with a smile, “and so I was supposed to be impartial.” What principle, I ask him, did he use to decide which villages were to go to the Croats, which to the Serbs? “The ethnic principle,” he says, and he describes how he counted up the ethnic percentages in each village along the border before deciding which ones would belong to Croatia, which to Serbia. This was the border the war was fought over, and to this day Serb nationalists accuse Djilas of selling out Serbian interests to the despised Croatians.

He was both a key architect and map-drawer of postwar Yugoslavia and the first Communist dissident in Eastern Europe. He broke with Tito in 1953 for betraying the ideals of the partisan movement and for allowing the new Communist state to be taken over by a new bureaucratic,
privileged class. For this, Tito had him imprisoned for nine years. It was in prison that he learned his meticulous, heavily accented English, using a dictionary to translate Milton's
Paradise Los
t into Serbo-Croatian.

I expect him to blame his old enemy, Tito, for failing to understand ethnic nationalism, but he shakes his head vigorously. Tito's handling of nationalism could not be faulted. He gave each republic just enough autonomy to satisfy nationalist demands, without compromising the unity of Yugoslavia. His fundamental mistake was that he never managed a democratic succession. He never created the institutions and the state of mind necessary to make democracy work. The minute the Communists began to disintegrate, Yugoslavia itself began to fall apart.

I ask him whether democracy and nationalism are compatible. In the Yugoslav case, could a democratic system have held the country together? Yes, he insists, gradual democratization, gradual relaxation of one-party rule, might have resulted in the kind of democratic culture that could have allowed the nationalisms of the region to share power together. And why didn't he democratize in time? “Because he was both the master and the slave of the privileged Communist class,” Djilas says, with the relish of a man who has lived to see his original heresy proclaimed the truth.

By failing to democratize in time, Tito threw away all of his achievements. In the end, the Communists proved no more successful than the Austro-Hungarians or the Turks in mastering the region. “We Communists,” he says, “were the last empire.”

How does he understand the nationalism that has torn his Yugoslavia apart? Balkan-nationalism, he argues, was an imported Germanic ideology, which reached these regions
only in the 1870s. Immediately, it had a fatal impact, tearing apart the complex ethnic tissue of peoples and nations who had grown together as neighbors over the centuries. He thinks of nationalism still, not as an intrinsic folk emotion, but as an alien virus, the work of city intellectuals who stirred up unlettered people and pushed a successful multi-ethnic experiment over the precipice. Few people I meet in Belgrade believe MiloÅ¡ević himself has any deep nationalist convictions. He merely knows that when he shouts from a podium, “Nobody will ever beat the Serbs again!” they applaud him to the rafters.

The West's greatest mistake, Djilas then says, is that it has “satanized” the Serbs. This comes as a surprise from someone constantly vilified in Serbian nationalist propaganda as a betrayer of Serbian interests. Yet Djilas is insistent: by placing exclusive blame on the Serbs for both the Croatian war of 1991 and the Bosnian war of 1993, the West has delivered the Serbian population into the hands of MiloÅ¡ević and the nationalists.

Thus far, the Balkan sorcerer Milošević has turned all of the brew of resentment toward the West to his own advantage. Sanctions are turning the daylong queue into a way of life for ordinary people, but the regime seems more secure than ever. Although Belgrade itself voted against Milošević in last autumn's elections, street demonstrations against the regime fizzle out almost as soon as they begin. Opposition parties are weak and divided, and even more nationalistic than Milošević. All in all, the scene is bleak confirmation of Djilas's essential point: a society with no democratic tradition has filled the post-Communist void with persecution mania directed toward the West and delusions of grandeur directed at their fellow Serbs.

In Djilas's view, the Western “satanization” of Serbia has also enabled Croatians and the Bosnian Muslims to lay claim
to the role of blameless victim. Sanctions against Serbia were unavoidable, he admits, given the siege of Sarajevo, the occupation of a quarter of Croatia, and the concentration camps for Muslims. But this only convinces Croats and Muslims that they will not receive international sanctions for acts of revenge against the Serbs.

Djilas views this all with the Olympian detachment of an old man, but there is one moment in our conversation when his detachment breaks down. “We must be the only country in Europe,” he says with cold contempt, “actively rehabilitating fascist collaborators.” He means the Croatian Ustashe, but also Serbian collaborators, the Chetniks, who fought with the Germans. The thought that everything he fought for has collapsed and everything he fought against fifty years ago has been restored to public honor momentarily clouds his face. He looks tired and dispirited. “The Second World War is not over, not here anyway,” he says with a sigh.