M
Mislav
Guest
If you have half an hour or so to spare, I'd recommend reading this August 1990 National Geographic article. 15 years later, it's amazing to see how many things mentionned here came true.
Source: www.nationalgeographic.co.../9008.html
The jackdaws came at korzo time in Pristina, capital of Kosovo Province in Yugoslavia. Cawing and squawking over the main street, they whirled down in a black mass, then flapped out toward the reddening sky only to swoop back again. It took them an hour to settle on the bare branches of the trees, and their social adjustments as night descended kept the racket going almost until curfew.
The korzo is the traditional evening stroll that people—laughing, chatting, flirting—make in every town in this Balkan country. But in Pristina it had a somber air. Joy had forsaken the town; no bands played; the cry of the jackdaws was the only sound I heard.
Families ambled under the grit-filtered glare of streetlamps, and if they talked, it was in a murmur, fearful they would be overheard. For in a street closed to all vehicles except police cars and armored vans with machine-gun turrets, they walked under the sullen scrutiny of steel-helmeted militia with bulletproof aprons and submachine guns. These citizens of Kosovo, a self-governing province of the Republic of Serbia, could be bludgeoned and jailed just for saying “Republic of Kosovo.â€
Serbia had wiped out their autonomy with tanks, troops, tear gas, and terror. Though not many Serbs live in Kosovo, they consider it the sacred heart of medieval Serbia. They cannot stand the thought of losing it to a non-Slavic, non-Orthodox populace whom they call “overbreeding defilers.â€
Ethnic Albanians, mainly Muslim and Europe’s fastest growing population, form 90 percent of Kosovo’s inhabitants. They claim descent from the Illyrians, whose homeland this was for centuries before Serbs and other Slavs swept out of the north. Finding “autonomous province†an empty phrase, Kosovo Albanians clamor for their own republic in the Yugoslav federation, coequal with Serbia.
From this confrontation comes violence. Rioting Albanians have stoned and beaten outnumbered Serbs. The state, reacting with brute force, has shot Kosovo Albanians, killing more than 35 since the first of the year.
“Some were just kids, only making the V for victory sign or chanting Lavdi!, which means ‘glory,’ or Demokraci!†I was told in a back-street café.
“Police go into people’s houses and shoot them, branding them secessionists and terrorists†was another charge.
Curfew came at nine o’clock, but I had been advised to be indoors before eight. After that, one is viewed with increasing suspicion. I lingered until 15 minutes before curfew, by then sharing the street only with scowling militia and the man who seemed to come and go from the hotel whenever I did. Everyone else had hurried home, and the jackdaws slept at last.
To understand the emotions Kosovo stirs in the Serbs, you have to go back to 1389, to the Battle of Kosovo Polje—the Field of Blackbirds—one of the largest battles ever fought in medieval Europe. I drove out from Pristina. Thick smoke from a coal-fired power plant blew across the frozen fields, pitch-black earth dusted with snow. Here a Christian alliance tried to block the northward advance of the invading Ottoman Turks.
Losses on both sides were appalling; legend says that birds tore at the corpses for weeks. The battle spelled the end of the once powerful Serbian empire, though more fierce battles lay ahead and the Turks did not occupy the land for 70 more years.
The leaders of both armies were killed. Strikingly different monuments to each stand near the hamlet of Gazimestan. A centuries-old mulberry shelters the mausoleum built where Sultan Murad I died in his tent.
No one knows where Serbian Prince Lazar fell, but a stone tower honors him and the other “heroes of Kosovo.†In the summer of 1989 on the 600th anniversary of the battle a million Serbs came to this hilltop. They were there to wrest victory from an old defeat, saying in effect that a charter of perpetual suzerainty was written in the blood Serbs had spilled there. And they came to celebrate tough new measures under which Serbia was dismantling whatever remained of Kosovo’s autonomy.
Kosovo’s Albanians stayed away.
Now, months later, I was alone at the monument. A bitter wind swirled snow around the base and stung my eyes. Beyond the cleared area, stuck on a ring of bare shrubs, hung plastic trash left behind by the celebrators.
Driving back to Pristina, I was stopped by policemen so that three big buses crammed with soldiers could pull into a military compound. Scores of tanks were parked there, poised for a five-minute dash into Pristina.
Military authorities had closed the airport, so to get to Pristina the day before I had flown to Skopje, in the neighboring republic of Macedonia. At the car-rental agency I had insisted on license plates with an “LJ†prefix—to imply that I was from Ljubljana, in Slovenia far to the north, not Belgrade, capital of Serbia as well as of Yugoslavia. I was following one of two suggestions for traveling in Kosovo. The other was, if an Albanian crowd seemed threatening, to hold up two fingers in a V sign.
* * *
What kind of land is this, where you must be ready with a signal that, with luck, will save your skin? Where you need to make sure your car isn’t from the wrong part of the country?
This is Yugoslavia: 24 million people of 24 ethnic groups and three major religions, writing in both the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic, divided into six republics—six bows drawn tight. The bowstrings sing of hatred, group against group. Civil war is discussed daily in every republic—in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Slovenia and Croatia, the most prosperous republics, threaten to secede but fear an army takeover if they try.
Geographically, Yugoslavia encompasses the diversity of all Europe. On the plains of Vojvodina waves of yellow wheat sweep northward from the Sava and Danube Rivers toward the Great Hungarian Plain. The crystalline Adriatic washes a deeply indented 3,800-mile (6,115-kilometer)-long coast including 725 islands.
But it is the mountains that dominate the land—70 percent of it. The Dinaric Alps lumber fiercely from north to south like a stone stegosaurus, until in Montenegro they lose all semblance of order and rear up in a fearsome immensity of peaks. To go from one side to the other has always been as daunting, in its way, as a journey from the Catholic north and west, facing Austria and Italy, to the Muslim and Eastern Orthodox south, bordered by Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania.
“We’re all supposed to be Yugoslavs,†Zdeslav Boskovic, a lawyer from the Croatian port of Split said. “But scratch one of us and you’ll find a Serb or Croat or something else.†And you don’t need to scratch very much.
I have traveled in Yugoslavia in all seasons, seen every part of the country, and the more I talk to people the more difficult it becomes for me to imagine a Yugoslav. I have learned to take them on their own terms, which means ethnic family yes, country maybe. Diplomatic codes that allow Yugoslavia to get along with the rest of the world do not apply within Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, under President Tito, embarked on perestroika and glasnost long before anyone outside the U.S.S.R. had heard of Mikhail Gorbachev. Breaking free from Stalin’s Eastern bloc in 1948, Yugoslavia became the most progressive communist country. Now it is struggling.
For decades the West supported Yugoslavia as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. Easy credit fueled the economy. Yugoslavs had plenty of money for holidays. Their country was a model for nonaligned nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Today Yugoslavs spend 80 percent of their wages—which average $212 a month—on food and household expenses. Their standard of living has sunk to the level of the mid-1960s. Unemployment nears 20 percent. The government is saddled with a foreign debt of 16 billion dollars. Leaders fret over low productivity while offices slam shut at 2 p.m. You learn to recognize the sound, the drowsy hum of a whole country shutting down.
Students say they have no future.
Each ethnic group blames Yugoslavia’s problems on another group, and they coddle their right to hate as if it were the primordial gift of fire. The Yugoslav ideal—that historically contentious peoples, including non-Slavs, could band together peaceably after centuries of bloodshed—has become lost in a blinding sandstorm of nationalism.
After more than 40 years in which Yugoslavs managed to subordinate their tribal passions, a former bank president stepped forward to tap those passions and put them to his own use. Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia, has gone from obscurity to dictatorship, purging party and press along the way, on the strength of one issue—persecution of Serbs in Kosovo.
Belgrade shopwindows feature portraits of Milosevic. His jowly visage glares from displays of television sets and women’s shoes. Milosevic professes to disdain his personality cult—popularity based not on improved living standards, health care, or education but on hammering Albanians and threatening to colonize Kosovo with hundreds of thousands of Serbian settlers.
In Yugoslavia, with its powerful oral tradition, it isn’t the truth that’s operative, it’s what people think is the truth. In Belgrade, with its rigidly controlled press and no one to tell them that Albanians are not raping Serbian women every week, people believe the most gruesome accounts. Consequently, the Serbian-controlled militia wreaks vengeance in Kosovo, as if acting out a time-honored Balkan vendetta.
Kenneth Anderson is an investigator with the Helsinki Watch Committee, a human-rights organization that monitors compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords. His recent report describes the situation in Kosovo as “a frightening example of the power of a one-party dictatorship, the full weight of a police state controlled by one ethnic minority unleashed against another....â€
As the tragedy of Kosovo unfolds, other republics watch uneasily; the Slovenes and Croats say that Serbia’s mailed fist in Kosovo may be parting the curtain on a scheme for the rest of the country. The Serbs respond angrily that they have special historical rights in Kosovo, where the Albanians are a majority only because they have frightened the Serbs away, and that Serbs just want equality.
In this country even “equality†is a loaded word. The federation is based on equality among the republics. What Serbian nationalists want is “one man, one vote,†which is fair enough for most countries. But, since ethnic Serbs are 40 percent of the Yugoslav population and Slovenes, for example, are only 8 percent, equality of individual voters means that Serbia takes over.
* * *
When the Turks grudgingly drew back to Constantinople after severe losses in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, their 500-year reign in southeastern Europe left a cultural and economic rift across what is now Yugoslavia.
The Serbs, nearly doubling their territory, also wanted Bosnia and Hercegovina. But Austria-Hungary had annexed the province in 1908, and kept it. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir, visited his subjects in the provincial capital of Sarajevo in 1914, he was shot dead by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist. The Austrians invaded Serbia; World War I was under way.
As the war was fought, plans were made for a Slavic union, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Formed in 1918, it included Montenegro (ethnic Serbs) as well as Bosnia and Hercegovina (ethnic Serbs and Croats).
Unity hardly led to comity, as the new country was ruled by Serbia’s King Alexander, whose despotism soon alienated the Croats and Slovenes. Perhaps his only lasting decree was to change the country’s name in 1929 to Yugoslavia, “Land of the South Slavs.†A Croatian separatist assassinated him in Marseille in 1934. The kingdom started a disintegration that didn’t end until a Croatian guerrilla leader, Josip Broz, emerged from the ashes of World War II as Marshal Tito, the only man who has ever been able to make these hostile peoples be civil to each other.
The sufferings and triumphs of Tito’s communist Partisans provided one of the most heroic chapters of the war and made him an epic figure who could get what he wanted at home and abroad. Tito silenced dissent by sending at least 7,000 critics to living hell on Goli Otok, a barren island in the Adriatic.
To prevent Serbian domination of the entire country, Tito gave greater autonomy to Vojvodina (with its large Hungarian population) and Kosovo (with its Albanian majority). That is why Serbs burn Tito’s picture in mass demonstrations today and shout for the removal of his remains (he died in 1980) from Belgrade.
* * *
To taste life in the Kosovo countryside, one day I took off my shoes at the top of a stone staircase and entered the parlor of a large Muslim Albanian family farm. I smelled wood burning in an iron stove and surveyed the array of woolen cushions and blankets around all four walls.
With its 170-year-old water mill, cattle and poultry, and good crops of wheat, corn, peppers, and cabbage, the clan, about 250 strong, is virtually self-sufficient.
One of the boys spread a tablecloth on the floor, then helped two others bring in a huge ten-inch-high wooden table to set upon it. We sat cross-legged around it and pulled the cloth over our knees. The younger men brought in platters and bowls of grilled beef chunks, yogurt with onions, salami, boiled eggs, cabbage, thick cornmeal polenta, and a pudding-like cheese. Each of us had a tablespoon and fork but no plate.
There were 18 men and boys at that meal—but no women. I had met the women in other rooms and on a tour of the farm, but they had been excluded from that chamber since time immemorial. I asked how old a boy had to be to sit with the men.
“Tradition says a boy can join us when he’s ten,†I was told. “But now that’s changing in some houses.†A child of three burst through the door and rushed over to nestle beside his father, an engineering student playing a two-stringed çifteli. Heeding a whisper, he thrust two small fingers toward me in a V.
“Before, we never talked politics in this room,†said one of the younger men. “So far we have not fought back. But now we Albanians are like cats pushed into a corner. We have nothing else to lose.â€
“We will get democracy or get killed,†said another. “They accuse us of wanting to join Albania. That is stupid. We want to stay in Yugoslavia. But in Serboslavia? Never!â€
Many Kosovars are turning to Ibrahim Rugova, a 44-year-old Albanian professor, to lead them out of the pit. His Democratic League claims 350,000 members, while communist ranks have fallen to 80,000. “We’re growing by hundreds every day,†he told me. “Not only Albanians. Turks and even some Serbs too. The only end to this foreign occupation can be if we start a dialogue. But they say they will deal only with ‘progressives.’ That is the Stalinist line: Everybody who doesn’t agree with you is not progressive.â€
To the south, in Macedonia, I found more ethnic turmoil. This seemed out of tune with the polyglot mélange—Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Gypsies, Bulgarians, Greeks—I saw mingling and bartering on the winding streets of old Skopje. In this lively bazaar, razor blades and panties from Turkey sell as fast as a smuggler can open his valise, and men in fezzes buy tea to smuggle back to Turkey. In the thick of it all, Macedonians, who form the Slavic majority, and Albanians outwardly get along.
Yet as the birthrate pushes Albanian numbers toward a fourth of Macedonia’s population, clashes are increasing.
Bogomil Gjuzel, a poet and repertory director who helped organize the League for Democracy, the first of ten alternative movements in Macedonia, told me, “The Serbs want to colonize not only Kosovo but also Macedonia. Milosevic says the Serbs must reclaim land taken from them after World War I and given to Macedonian peasants. But these people have been tilling the land ever since, and nobody’s going to take it away.â€
Saso Ordanoski, 26, deputy editor of Mlad Borec, or Young Fighter, a liberal biweekly Macedonian magazine, was optimistic. “If the official newspapers print lies, they know we’ll expose them,†he said. “We are heading toward free elections. If we can develop a good economy and a good life, we won’t need to look around for enemies.â€
Up in Belgrade people worry me worrying about their enemies, but I like the city anyway. Settled for millennia, destroyed many times, like the Serbs it keeps its pride. To me a day in Belgrade is incomplete without a walk through the dark shade of Kalemegdan park’s big chestnuts to the ramparts of the mighty fortress overlooking the strategic confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Or a visit to the Skadarlija quarter. Carryout stalls do a big business there. People buy snacks, then stroll or sit on stone walls to munch. Biting meat from wooden skewers, smartly clothed women teeter uphill, their spike heels trembling on the cobblestones.
But politics is never long out of mind. I once told an old Serbian friend, one of the gentlest men I’ve ever known, about secessionist sentiments I’d heard in Slovenia.
“Let them secede!†he roared. “Tomorrow won’t be a minute too soon. We’d rather go it alone. We don’t need the Slovenes and Croats. The Serbs have taken enough!â€
Across the Sava the towering government buildings and apartments of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) rise like hackles from reclaimed marshland. Sidewalks exist, but they are usually empty.
Lost in this immensity of pavement and concrete boxes sits the Palace of the Federation, a pile of breathtaking sterility. The president (the position revolves annually among the country’s six republics and two provinces) and the prime minister have grand offices at the head of marble staircases. But ceremonial trappings belie their relative impotence. Power resides in the republics.
Seven months ago Prime Minister Ante Markovic, a Croat, attacked Yugoslavia’s 2,600 percent inflation rate by making the dinar convertible to Western currencies and lopping off four zeros. The million-dinar note shrank to a hundred dinars. At 100,000 dinars to the dollar, the stacks of paper needed for simple transactions had become ridiculous; people were losing their multimillion-dinar shirts.
Markovic coolly concentrates on monetary reform while treating human-rights abuses as an irritant. Supporters defend his program as pragmatic: Give people security and maybe they’ll calm down; bread will still their cries for circuses. Except for vigorous economic initiatives, the federal government is largely ineffective. Elsewhere in Belgrade, leaders of the Republic of Serbia hold to their dictum: Kosovo is our own internal affair.
In the Belgrade station I joined passengers traveling not so much with suitcases as with taped bundles, into which they delved for boiled eggs and salami. A woman in a blue scarf gnawed a cold lamb’s shank clutched in one hand and wiped the fat from her lips with black bread held in the other.
Twenty bleary-eyed young men were toxic with slivovitz, lurching, shoving one another along, braying lyrics as they piled aboard. As the train pulled out, one lighted a large firecracker and threw it out to explode among waving, laughing friends. A young soldier hung out of a still open door, swinging an enormous black radio as the quickening train bore us southward.
The railroad from Belgrade to Bar on the Adriatic coast negotiates 234 bridges and 254 tunnels in its tortuous 295-mile route. The line is an engineering achievement in which the Yugoslavs justly take pride. Climbing through cornfields and plum orchards to Kolasin, crawling along a sheer wall of Montenegro’s Moraca gorge, the train descends to Titograd, then crosses the marshy north end of Lake Scutari and a cypress-slashed plain to run along the sea to Bar.
They have built a magnificent railroad only to run a squalid train on it, with little consideration for the passengers. The corridors hold as many people as the compartments. A trip to the bife, or buffet car, is more of a climb than a walk, with people sprawled in every space, cigarette smoke streaming from their mouths.
The day I rode the train about 75 men crowded the bife, guzzling and bellowing. Those who found room sat on the floor, littered with wrappers and the remnants of bread and cheese. I squirmed to within shouting distance of the counter, exchanging dinars and beer over other passengers’ heads. I retreated to a window to let in some mountain air; the window wouldn’t budge. But the bartender opened his and threw out a large box. It sailed across a waterfall, strewing trash.
* * *
The coast can be the most relaxing or the most nerve-racking section of Yugoslavia, depending on whether you are on a beach or driving to one.
The Adriatic Highway convolutes 643 spectacular miles (1,035 kilometers) from the Albanian border to Italy. It affords little margin of error on its lanes, which typically trace the edge of a precipice with no guardrail between one’s tires and a long drop into the sea. But it takes one to the walled city of Dubrovnik, a magnificence of glowing white stone, and to storied ports where the Lion of St. Mark carved on gateways recalls the imperial heyday of Venice.
I would rather travel the coast on Yugoslavia’s excellent ferry service, Jadrolinija, which annually carries 6.3 million passengers and a million vehicles. Its 120 ports of call include places as small as Drvenik, population about 150. The service is punctual, clean, and inexpensive. Without it, many of the Adriatic coast’s 66 inhabited islands would be isolated.
One day I boarded a ferry for Hvar. The island’s green hills shelter tidy ports with fine Renaissance architecture and a pleasing climate where the Venetian fleet used to winter and repair its ships. Among its blessings, Hvar, like the other islands, is free of ethnic strife. And the dependable sunshine favors lavanda—whose oil is used in perfume, after-shave, medicines, and washing powders.
Jakov Dulcic, a lavender farmer, showed me his fields. For centuries peasants had scrabbled away the stones and heaped them into whalelike hillocks to make room for the lavender. The plants were flowering, a purple mist against the green. The afternoon waned. People were riding home on donkeys.
In the nearby village of Brusje, we went to Jakov’s konoba, or wine cellar. He drew amber wine from a 450-gallon cask and lifted a loaf of goat cheese from a vat of olive oil. In a walled garden Jakov placed the pitcher on a weathered table. Neighbors arrived.
“There’s an old Brusje tradition,†he said. “Nobody pours wine in your glass. You pour what you want. If someone pours it for you, you might not want that much. “Zivili!â€
Then everybody started talking about village feasts, open doors, the korzo, the need for everyone to have a boat and veze, or connections; you could count on your friends. Love for the old ways poured out—a powerful unifying factor in a society that, with its state-imposed afflictions, could have sunk into sterile, modernistic despair.
The slanting sun played on their faces and the garden wall with a mellow saffron light, and a breeze moving down the hill stirred the roses and geraniums and rustled dry ivy against the stones. Darkness fell. Still they talked. They talked so much they lost interest in pouring wine, and no one went for candles.
I sailed farther out in the Adriatic to Vis, an island that had entered history as Issa, a Greek colony with its own Adriatic outposts. From its beautiful cup-shaped harbor I set out in a downpour to see the cave from which Marshal Tito directed the Resistance in 1944. British and American forces joined the Partisans on Vis, and their collaboration changed history: Attacking and tying down German divisions on the mainland, they helped win Allied victory in southern Europe and international recognition of Tito’s leadership.
Munching huge figs I’d plucked at roadside, I climbed a rain-soaked mountain path through rosemary and sage to the fortified entrance to Tito’s cave. In his “bedroom†water dripped from many fissures in the limestone ceiling, and the floor was all puddles.
When Tito wanted fighters, he didn’t ask where they came from. His system of ethnic balances was explained by a man in Budva: “If consensus didn’t work, there was Tito. Now we are left only with consensus, and it doesn’t work.â€
The islands are part of the Republic of Croatia, which is so divided by mountain ranges that it maintains its unity chiefly on the strength of ethnic cohesion. The maritime portion is sun-toasted villages and easy wine. Over the Dinaric Alps lies continental Croatia, with its brisk central European outlook. For long periods Venice ruled the coast, the Habsburg empire the interior, and the differences are still obvious.
Zagreb, capital of Croatia, is Yugoslavia’s economic and industrial leader. With its green parks, baroque 17th- and 18th-century buildings, and imposing boulevards rattling with streetcars, it smacks of yesteryear’s Vienna.
Last winter when Croatia announced its first free elections in 50 years, some 30 parties rushed into the fray. As students of Balkan history might have predicted, the most formidable opposition (winning a sweeping victory in this spring’s voting) was led by a man who had been imprisoned for Croatian nationalism.
Franjo Tudjman, 68, historian, author, and former Partisan general, ran his campaign out of a one-story wooden building beside Zagreb’s railroad tracks. I had to ask in several of the 15 small rooms before I found him.
“My earlier books led to a charge of espionage in 1972,†he said. “The judge wanted to put me in prison for 20 years, but Tito reduced it to two. He knew I was working against Serbian hegemony. Tito forbade all talk of ‘Great Serbia,’ but now it has become flagrant again. We have to do something about it or get out of Yugoslavia. We aren’t yet asking for independence. We want to try confederation; only with looser ties can we continue to live in Yugoslavia.â€
In the mountainous heart of Yugoslavia hundreds of schoolchildren were walking long distances along the highway while their elders herded sheep and cattle. Several families creaked along in heavy wooden wagons, their horses plodding as if each lift of a hoof might be the last. The road climbed through thick forests and along rushing rivers. Every few miles a lamb turning on a spit outside advertised a gostionica, or roadhouse.
When I first began to travel in Yugoslavia, I was amazed by the number of unfinished houses. Then I came to accept them along with mosques, minarets, castles, and campaniles as part of the architectural landscape. Some are four stories high, as if their owners hope someday to shelter several generations and tourists too. Construction may go on for years, and many builders, despairing of ever completing them, put up a door and a few windows and move into only one part.
This is called divlja gradnja (wild building). Built without permits, officially these homes do not exist. Since the graft to get permits can cost more than materials, people go ahead, undeterred by the lack of streets and utilities. From time to time the police blow up a few of the places. Work soon resumes.
* * *
Nowadays Roman Catholics, at least, have a refuge that has little to do with race or politics. Seaward from Sarajevo, up in the scraggy hills not far from the historic town of Mostar, lies the phenomenon called Medjugorje.
A decade ago you’d have been lucky if anyone 20 miles away could have told you how to get there. No hotel bed was to be found in the entire village. Nobody would have sold you a meal, although they might have given you one, figuring you must be lost if you were in Medjugorje.
Then, on June 24, 1981, six teenagers came down from the hill where they had been tending goats. Excitedly they told of seeing the Virgin Mary. She soon promised to deliver ten secrets and other messages.
Word spread rapidly. Snack bars popped up. Local people found corners for extra beds. The establishment frowned and had the visionaries examined by a psychiatrist. The Vatican remained skeptical.
Still the legend grew. Mary continued to appear every day. She said she wanted peace on earth, and wept because she saw so little of it. Now there are 12,000 tourist beds in Medjugorje, where ten times as many taxis line up as you can find at the Belgrade airport.
The trail to the top of Apparition Hill begins beside the Podbrdo Pizzeria. The first 30 yards are lined with shops selling crucifixes, plastic images, and holy portraits on polyester.
The sun was low, so I hurried up the steep trail, past small white goats that nibbled at the thornbushes. Two boys sat amid the maquis, selling white candles.
Crosses studded the hilltop. The largest rose from a pile of stones on which about 50 candles burned. Black from smoke, and with wax smoldering, the stones looked aflame.
Few stones small enough to carry remain at the site. People were scooping sand into envelopes. A group of Germans stood before the largest cross singing softly, “Maria.†As the sun melted behind the mountains and the faraway church towers glowed, 10,000 people were kneeling in worship.
I drove northward into the Alpine heights of Slovenia, the most westernized region in Yugoslavia. The Slovenes recently dropped “Socialist†from their name, to become simply the Republic of Slovenia. And the Slovenian communists decided they couldn’t tolerate the federal party and pulled out.
* * *
Refreshingly, the most popular plaza in Ljubljana was named for a poet, a sometimes bawdy one. A statue of France Preseren beams down on Preseren Square, hard by three interlocked bridges that span the willow-shaded Ljubljanica River. Rustic stalls and bright cafés radiate in all directions.
Amid Ljubljana’s air of solid accomplishment few enjoy playing rich uncle to poor relatives in the south. Rudi Tavcar, 31, with the Slovenian Chamber of the Economy, told me why he scorns the national economic system: “With only 8 percent of the population, Slovenia makes 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s gross national product and a third of its exports to the West. But we have been forced to turn over to the federation most of the hard currency we earn, with no control over how it is used. We provide 27 percent of the federal budget—just ‘floating money down the Sava.â€â€™
Slovenia’s bad relations with Serbia came to a head last winter. Riled because Slovenes didn’t seem to understand their actions in Kosovo, the Serbs and their brothers in Montenegro organized caravans of thousands to go to Ljubljana and “educate†the Slovenes. The Slovenian leadership, fearing street battles and a coup d’état, set up roadblocks. Serbs then backed down, calling the blockade violent, uncivilized, and “aggression against basic human rights and freedoms.†Two Yugoslav republics were behaving like foreign belligerents.
A Serbian boycott against Slovenian companies and products followed with more than 500 orders and contracts canceled. The boycott, harming many companies, proved convenient for others: Serbian firms reneged on 225 million dollars owed to Slovenian manufacturers; Slovenes retaliated by canceling 48 million in unpaid debts to Serbs.
One of the most successful companies in Slovenia is Adria Airways, which has broken the old communist mold and challenged JAT, the national airline. “We have made a profit for 20 years by being better than the competition,†said Janez Kocijancic, the president of Adria. Technically his airline is “socially owned,†but it operates on a free-enterprise standard of service.
Kocijancic is, remarkably, not only a businessman but also a high-ranking Communist Party official. As Slovenia approached its most important election day ever—Yugoslavia’s first free multiparty elections since World War II—Kocijancic explained why his party, which today appears enthusiastically noncommunist, decided to keep its old name, “League of Communists of Slovenia,†while adding a mollifier, “Party for Democratic Renewal,†and a new slogan, “Europe Now!â€.
“We didn’t want to avoid our responsibility for the past,†he said. “We know communism has a bad image today, especially after China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Romania’s Timisoara, and incidents here in Yugoslavia, and that it is identified with Stalinism. We don’t want people to say we cheated to win.â€
They didn’t cheat, and they didn’t win. Voters in April elected a democratic parliament, while awarding the largely ceremonial office of president to a maverick communist, Milan Kucan.
“Yugoslavia today is undemocratic and on the brink of civil war,†said Kucan, one of Yugoslavia’s most liberal politicians and a man who courageously fostered an atmosphere of freedom in Slovenia. “We are out of line with developments in Europe. We need to join the European Community, but that’s impossible as long as the Serbian policy in Kosovo persists. Kosovo is the touchstone that will mark Yugoslavia’s readiness to be a modern, progressive, democratic state. Only if we cannot achieve democracy would Slovenia consider secession.â€
It struck me that many of the people I met in Yugoslavia had spent time in prison for airing their opinions. One circulated a petition asking amnesty for political prisoners and thereby joined their ranks. Another wrote about the long-gone monarchy in such a way that present leaders saw a reflection of their own shortcomings.
Joze Pucnik, chairman of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia (DEMOS), was jailed seven years for writing psychological literature with a political twist. Returning from 23 years of teaching in West Germany to test the newly opened political process in Slovenia, he soon emerged as leader of a six-party coalition.
“People don’t want to hear anything more about communism,†he said. “It doesn’t work. It isn’t compatible with freedom. But this year, after years of stealing from the people, the communists suddenly embraced free elections!â€
Pucnik explained the empty shelves in his two-room party headquarters in a run-down apartment building: “We just moved here from a cellar.†Yet, from such a humble base, his DEMOS mounted a successful challenge to the tax-supported establishment.
“We are for confederation, the only possibility for Yugoslavia,†Pucnik told me a few weeks before DEMOS swept most of the communists out of parliament. “People are afraid of military intervention. If it comes, Yugoslavia is dead! The army can occupy our homes, but they can never make an economy. They can never make a life for us.â€
* * *
One of the few roads across the Julian Alps winds upward through a forest of larch and over Vrsic Pass at 5,285 feet (1,611 meters). I climbed through melting snow, with high peaks all around, to the tiny tavern called Postarski Dom. I sat outside on a split-log bench and felt the sun on my back. After months of trying to cram a beautiful and bewildering country into small notebooks, I was ready for pensive distance.
I looked across a chasm to pockets of snow on the cliffs. Around me, in sunny spots where knobs of limestone held the heat, patches of short grass had emerged. I listened to the breeze blowing through knee-high conifers. It was glorious up here. I wished such tranquillity could flow down across the plains and span the abyss that divides these troubled but likable peoples.
As I turned to leave, I noticed on a promontory above me a concrete bunker with gun slits. The Italian border was just over the peaks. The South Slavs no longer have to worry about foreigners. Their demons dwell within. As do their hopes.
Source: www.nationalgeographic.co.../9008.html
The jackdaws came at korzo time in Pristina, capital of Kosovo Province in Yugoslavia. Cawing and squawking over the main street, they whirled down in a black mass, then flapped out toward the reddening sky only to swoop back again. It took them an hour to settle on the bare branches of the trees, and their social adjustments as night descended kept the racket going almost until curfew.
The korzo is the traditional evening stroll that people—laughing, chatting, flirting—make in every town in this Balkan country. But in Pristina it had a somber air. Joy had forsaken the town; no bands played; the cry of the jackdaws was the only sound I heard.
Families ambled under the grit-filtered glare of streetlamps, and if they talked, it was in a murmur, fearful they would be overheard. For in a street closed to all vehicles except police cars and armored vans with machine-gun turrets, they walked under the sullen scrutiny of steel-helmeted militia with bulletproof aprons and submachine guns. These citizens of Kosovo, a self-governing province of the Republic of Serbia, could be bludgeoned and jailed just for saying “Republic of Kosovo.â€
Serbia had wiped out their autonomy with tanks, troops, tear gas, and terror. Though not many Serbs live in Kosovo, they consider it the sacred heart of medieval Serbia. They cannot stand the thought of losing it to a non-Slavic, non-Orthodox populace whom they call “overbreeding defilers.â€
Ethnic Albanians, mainly Muslim and Europe’s fastest growing population, form 90 percent of Kosovo’s inhabitants. They claim descent from the Illyrians, whose homeland this was for centuries before Serbs and other Slavs swept out of the north. Finding “autonomous province†an empty phrase, Kosovo Albanians clamor for their own republic in the Yugoslav federation, coequal with Serbia.
From this confrontation comes violence. Rioting Albanians have stoned and beaten outnumbered Serbs. The state, reacting with brute force, has shot Kosovo Albanians, killing more than 35 since the first of the year.
“Some were just kids, only making the V for victory sign or chanting Lavdi!, which means ‘glory,’ or Demokraci!†I was told in a back-street café.
“Police go into people’s houses and shoot them, branding them secessionists and terrorists†was another charge.
Curfew came at nine o’clock, but I had been advised to be indoors before eight. After that, one is viewed with increasing suspicion. I lingered until 15 minutes before curfew, by then sharing the street only with scowling militia and the man who seemed to come and go from the hotel whenever I did. Everyone else had hurried home, and the jackdaws slept at last.
To understand the emotions Kosovo stirs in the Serbs, you have to go back to 1389, to the Battle of Kosovo Polje—the Field of Blackbirds—one of the largest battles ever fought in medieval Europe. I drove out from Pristina. Thick smoke from a coal-fired power plant blew across the frozen fields, pitch-black earth dusted with snow. Here a Christian alliance tried to block the northward advance of the invading Ottoman Turks.
Losses on both sides were appalling; legend says that birds tore at the corpses for weeks. The battle spelled the end of the once powerful Serbian empire, though more fierce battles lay ahead and the Turks did not occupy the land for 70 more years.
The leaders of both armies were killed. Strikingly different monuments to each stand near the hamlet of Gazimestan. A centuries-old mulberry shelters the mausoleum built where Sultan Murad I died in his tent.
No one knows where Serbian Prince Lazar fell, but a stone tower honors him and the other “heroes of Kosovo.†In the summer of 1989 on the 600th anniversary of the battle a million Serbs came to this hilltop. They were there to wrest victory from an old defeat, saying in effect that a charter of perpetual suzerainty was written in the blood Serbs had spilled there. And they came to celebrate tough new measures under which Serbia was dismantling whatever remained of Kosovo’s autonomy.
Kosovo’s Albanians stayed away.
Now, months later, I was alone at the monument. A bitter wind swirled snow around the base and stung my eyes. Beyond the cleared area, stuck on a ring of bare shrubs, hung plastic trash left behind by the celebrators.
Driving back to Pristina, I was stopped by policemen so that three big buses crammed with soldiers could pull into a military compound. Scores of tanks were parked there, poised for a five-minute dash into Pristina.
Military authorities had closed the airport, so to get to Pristina the day before I had flown to Skopje, in the neighboring republic of Macedonia. At the car-rental agency I had insisted on license plates with an “LJ†prefix—to imply that I was from Ljubljana, in Slovenia far to the north, not Belgrade, capital of Serbia as well as of Yugoslavia. I was following one of two suggestions for traveling in Kosovo. The other was, if an Albanian crowd seemed threatening, to hold up two fingers in a V sign.
* * *
What kind of land is this, where you must be ready with a signal that, with luck, will save your skin? Where you need to make sure your car isn’t from the wrong part of the country?
This is Yugoslavia: 24 million people of 24 ethnic groups and three major religions, writing in both the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic, divided into six republics—six bows drawn tight. The bowstrings sing of hatred, group against group. Civil war is discussed daily in every republic—in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Slovenia and Croatia, the most prosperous republics, threaten to secede but fear an army takeover if they try.
Geographically, Yugoslavia encompasses the diversity of all Europe. On the plains of Vojvodina waves of yellow wheat sweep northward from the Sava and Danube Rivers toward the Great Hungarian Plain. The crystalline Adriatic washes a deeply indented 3,800-mile (6,115-kilometer)-long coast including 725 islands.
But it is the mountains that dominate the land—70 percent of it. The Dinaric Alps lumber fiercely from north to south like a stone stegosaurus, until in Montenegro they lose all semblance of order and rear up in a fearsome immensity of peaks. To go from one side to the other has always been as daunting, in its way, as a journey from the Catholic north and west, facing Austria and Italy, to the Muslim and Eastern Orthodox south, bordered by Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania.
“We’re all supposed to be Yugoslavs,†Zdeslav Boskovic, a lawyer from the Croatian port of Split said. “But scratch one of us and you’ll find a Serb or Croat or something else.†And you don’t need to scratch very much.
I have traveled in Yugoslavia in all seasons, seen every part of the country, and the more I talk to people the more difficult it becomes for me to imagine a Yugoslav. I have learned to take them on their own terms, which means ethnic family yes, country maybe. Diplomatic codes that allow Yugoslavia to get along with the rest of the world do not apply within Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, under President Tito, embarked on perestroika and glasnost long before anyone outside the U.S.S.R. had heard of Mikhail Gorbachev. Breaking free from Stalin’s Eastern bloc in 1948, Yugoslavia became the most progressive communist country. Now it is struggling.
For decades the West supported Yugoslavia as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. Easy credit fueled the economy. Yugoslavs had plenty of money for holidays. Their country was a model for nonaligned nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Today Yugoslavs spend 80 percent of their wages—which average $212 a month—on food and household expenses. Their standard of living has sunk to the level of the mid-1960s. Unemployment nears 20 percent. The government is saddled with a foreign debt of 16 billion dollars. Leaders fret over low productivity while offices slam shut at 2 p.m. You learn to recognize the sound, the drowsy hum of a whole country shutting down.
Students say they have no future.
Each ethnic group blames Yugoslavia’s problems on another group, and they coddle their right to hate as if it were the primordial gift of fire. The Yugoslav ideal—that historically contentious peoples, including non-Slavs, could band together peaceably after centuries of bloodshed—has become lost in a blinding sandstorm of nationalism.
After more than 40 years in which Yugoslavs managed to subordinate their tribal passions, a former bank president stepped forward to tap those passions and put them to his own use. Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia, has gone from obscurity to dictatorship, purging party and press along the way, on the strength of one issue—persecution of Serbs in Kosovo.
Belgrade shopwindows feature portraits of Milosevic. His jowly visage glares from displays of television sets and women’s shoes. Milosevic professes to disdain his personality cult—popularity based not on improved living standards, health care, or education but on hammering Albanians and threatening to colonize Kosovo with hundreds of thousands of Serbian settlers.
In Yugoslavia, with its powerful oral tradition, it isn’t the truth that’s operative, it’s what people think is the truth. In Belgrade, with its rigidly controlled press and no one to tell them that Albanians are not raping Serbian women every week, people believe the most gruesome accounts. Consequently, the Serbian-controlled militia wreaks vengeance in Kosovo, as if acting out a time-honored Balkan vendetta.
Kenneth Anderson is an investigator with the Helsinki Watch Committee, a human-rights organization that monitors compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords. His recent report describes the situation in Kosovo as “a frightening example of the power of a one-party dictatorship, the full weight of a police state controlled by one ethnic minority unleashed against another....â€
As the tragedy of Kosovo unfolds, other republics watch uneasily; the Slovenes and Croats say that Serbia’s mailed fist in Kosovo may be parting the curtain on a scheme for the rest of the country. The Serbs respond angrily that they have special historical rights in Kosovo, where the Albanians are a majority only because they have frightened the Serbs away, and that Serbs just want equality.
In this country even “equality†is a loaded word. The federation is based on equality among the republics. What Serbian nationalists want is “one man, one vote,†which is fair enough for most countries. But, since ethnic Serbs are 40 percent of the Yugoslav population and Slovenes, for example, are only 8 percent, equality of individual voters means that Serbia takes over.
* * *
When the Turks grudgingly drew back to Constantinople after severe losses in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, their 500-year reign in southeastern Europe left a cultural and economic rift across what is now Yugoslavia.
The Serbs, nearly doubling their territory, also wanted Bosnia and Hercegovina. But Austria-Hungary had annexed the province in 1908, and kept it. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir, visited his subjects in the provincial capital of Sarajevo in 1914, he was shot dead by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist. The Austrians invaded Serbia; World War I was under way.
As the war was fought, plans were made for a Slavic union, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Formed in 1918, it included Montenegro (ethnic Serbs) as well as Bosnia and Hercegovina (ethnic Serbs and Croats).
Unity hardly led to comity, as the new country was ruled by Serbia’s King Alexander, whose despotism soon alienated the Croats and Slovenes. Perhaps his only lasting decree was to change the country’s name in 1929 to Yugoslavia, “Land of the South Slavs.†A Croatian separatist assassinated him in Marseille in 1934. The kingdom started a disintegration that didn’t end until a Croatian guerrilla leader, Josip Broz, emerged from the ashes of World War II as Marshal Tito, the only man who has ever been able to make these hostile peoples be civil to each other.
The sufferings and triumphs of Tito’s communist Partisans provided one of the most heroic chapters of the war and made him an epic figure who could get what he wanted at home and abroad. Tito silenced dissent by sending at least 7,000 critics to living hell on Goli Otok, a barren island in the Adriatic.
To prevent Serbian domination of the entire country, Tito gave greater autonomy to Vojvodina (with its large Hungarian population) and Kosovo (with its Albanian majority). That is why Serbs burn Tito’s picture in mass demonstrations today and shout for the removal of his remains (he died in 1980) from Belgrade.
* * *
To taste life in the Kosovo countryside, one day I took off my shoes at the top of a stone staircase and entered the parlor of a large Muslim Albanian family farm. I smelled wood burning in an iron stove and surveyed the array of woolen cushions and blankets around all four walls.
With its 170-year-old water mill, cattle and poultry, and good crops of wheat, corn, peppers, and cabbage, the clan, about 250 strong, is virtually self-sufficient.
One of the boys spread a tablecloth on the floor, then helped two others bring in a huge ten-inch-high wooden table to set upon it. We sat cross-legged around it and pulled the cloth over our knees. The younger men brought in platters and bowls of grilled beef chunks, yogurt with onions, salami, boiled eggs, cabbage, thick cornmeal polenta, and a pudding-like cheese. Each of us had a tablespoon and fork but no plate.
There were 18 men and boys at that meal—but no women. I had met the women in other rooms and on a tour of the farm, but they had been excluded from that chamber since time immemorial. I asked how old a boy had to be to sit with the men.
“Tradition says a boy can join us when he’s ten,†I was told. “But now that’s changing in some houses.†A child of three burst through the door and rushed over to nestle beside his father, an engineering student playing a two-stringed çifteli. Heeding a whisper, he thrust two small fingers toward me in a V.
“Before, we never talked politics in this room,†said one of the younger men. “So far we have not fought back. But now we Albanians are like cats pushed into a corner. We have nothing else to lose.â€
“We will get democracy or get killed,†said another. “They accuse us of wanting to join Albania. That is stupid. We want to stay in Yugoslavia. But in Serboslavia? Never!â€
Many Kosovars are turning to Ibrahim Rugova, a 44-year-old Albanian professor, to lead them out of the pit. His Democratic League claims 350,000 members, while communist ranks have fallen to 80,000. “We’re growing by hundreds every day,†he told me. “Not only Albanians. Turks and even some Serbs too. The only end to this foreign occupation can be if we start a dialogue. But they say they will deal only with ‘progressives.’ That is the Stalinist line: Everybody who doesn’t agree with you is not progressive.â€
To the south, in Macedonia, I found more ethnic turmoil. This seemed out of tune with the polyglot mélange—Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Gypsies, Bulgarians, Greeks—I saw mingling and bartering on the winding streets of old Skopje. In this lively bazaar, razor blades and panties from Turkey sell as fast as a smuggler can open his valise, and men in fezzes buy tea to smuggle back to Turkey. In the thick of it all, Macedonians, who form the Slavic majority, and Albanians outwardly get along.
Yet as the birthrate pushes Albanian numbers toward a fourth of Macedonia’s population, clashes are increasing.
Bogomil Gjuzel, a poet and repertory director who helped organize the League for Democracy, the first of ten alternative movements in Macedonia, told me, “The Serbs want to colonize not only Kosovo but also Macedonia. Milosevic says the Serbs must reclaim land taken from them after World War I and given to Macedonian peasants. But these people have been tilling the land ever since, and nobody’s going to take it away.â€
Saso Ordanoski, 26, deputy editor of Mlad Borec, or Young Fighter, a liberal biweekly Macedonian magazine, was optimistic. “If the official newspapers print lies, they know we’ll expose them,†he said. “We are heading toward free elections. If we can develop a good economy and a good life, we won’t need to look around for enemies.â€
Up in Belgrade people worry me worrying about their enemies, but I like the city anyway. Settled for millennia, destroyed many times, like the Serbs it keeps its pride. To me a day in Belgrade is incomplete without a walk through the dark shade of Kalemegdan park’s big chestnuts to the ramparts of the mighty fortress overlooking the strategic confluence of the Sava and the Danube. Or a visit to the Skadarlija quarter. Carryout stalls do a big business there. People buy snacks, then stroll or sit on stone walls to munch. Biting meat from wooden skewers, smartly clothed women teeter uphill, their spike heels trembling on the cobblestones.
But politics is never long out of mind. I once told an old Serbian friend, one of the gentlest men I’ve ever known, about secessionist sentiments I’d heard in Slovenia.
“Let them secede!†he roared. “Tomorrow won’t be a minute too soon. We’d rather go it alone. We don’t need the Slovenes and Croats. The Serbs have taken enough!â€
Across the Sava the towering government buildings and apartments of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) rise like hackles from reclaimed marshland. Sidewalks exist, but they are usually empty.
Lost in this immensity of pavement and concrete boxes sits the Palace of the Federation, a pile of breathtaking sterility. The president (the position revolves annually among the country’s six republics and two provinces) and the prime minister have grand offices at the head of marble staircases. But ceremonial trappings belie their relative impotence. Power resides in the republics.
Seven months ago Prime Minister Ante Markovic, a Croat, attacked Yugoslavia’s 2,600 percent inflation rate by making the dinar convertible to Western currencies and lopping off four zeros. The million-dinar note shrank to a hundred dinars. At 100,000 dinars to the dollar, the stacks of paper needed for simple transactions had become ridiculous; people were losing their multimillion-dinar shirts.
Markovic coolly concentrates on monetary reform while treating human-rights abuses as an irritant. Supporters defend his program as pragmatic: Give people security and maybe they’ll calm down; bread will still their cries for circuses. Except for vigorous economic initiatives, the federal government is largely ineffective. Elsewhere in Belgrade, leaders of the Republic of Serbia hold to their dictum: Kosovo is our own internal affair.
In the Belgrade station I joined passengers traveling not so much with suitcases as with taped bundles, into which they delved for boiled eggs and salami. A woman in a blue scarf gnawed a cold lamb’s shank clutched in one hand and wiped the fat from her lips with black bread held in the other.
Twenty bleary-eyed young men were toxic with slivovitz, lurching, shoving one another along, braying lyrics as they piled aboard. As the train pulled out, one lighted a large firecracker and threw it out to explode among waving, laughing friends. A young soldier hung out of a still open door, swinging an enormous black radio as the quickening train bore us southward.
The railroad from Belgrade to Bar on the Adriatic coast negotiates 234 bridges and 254 tunnels in its tortuous 295-mile route. The line is an engineering achievement in which the Yugoslavs justly take pride. Climbing through cornfields and plum orchards to Kolasin, crawling along a sheer wall of Montenegro’s Moraca gorge, the train descends to Titograd, then crosses the marshy north end of Lake Scutari and a cypress-slashed plain to run along the sea to Bar.
They have built a magnificent railroad only to run a squalid train on it, with little consideration for the passengers. The corridors hold as many people as the compartments. A trip to the bife, or buffet car, is more of a climb than a walk, with people sprawled in every space, cigarette smoke streaming from their mouths.
The day I rode the train about 75 men crowded the bife, guzzling and bellowing. Those who found room sat on the floor, littered with wrappers and the remnants of bread and cheese. I squirmed to within shouting distance of the counter, exchanging dinars and beer over other passengers’ heads. I retreated to a window to let in some mountain air; the window wouldn’t budge. But the bartender opened his and threw out a large box. It sailed across a waterfall, strewing trash.
* * *
The coast can be the most relaxing or the most nerve-racking section of Yugoslavia, depending on whether you are on a beach or driving to one.
The Adriatic Highway convolutes 643 spectacular miles (1,035 kilometers) from the Albanian border to Italy. It affords little margin of error on its lanes, which typically trace the edge of a precipice with no guardrail between one’s tires and a long drop into the sea. But it takes one to the walled city of Dubrovnik, a magnificence of glowing white stone, and to storied ports where the Lion of St. Mark carved on gateways recalls the imperial heyday of Venice.
I would rather travel the coast on Yugoslavia’s excellent ferry service, Jadrolinija, which annually carries 6.3 million passengers and a million vehicles. Its 120 ports of call include places as small as Drvenik, population about 150. The service is punctual, clean, and inexpensive. Without it, many of the Adriatic coast’s 66 inhabited islands would be isolated.
One day I boarded a ferry for Hvar. The island’s green hills shelter tidy ports with fine Renaissance architecture and a pleasing climate where the Venetian fleet used to winter and repair its ships. Among its blessings, Hvar, like the other islands, is free of ethnic strife. And the dependable sunshine favors lavanda—whose oil is used in perfume, after-shave, medicines, and washing powders.
Jakov Dulcic, a lavender farmer, showed me his fields. For centuries peasants had scrabbled away the stones and heaped them into whalelike hillocks to make room for the lavender. The plants were flowering, a purple mist against the green. The afternoon waned. People were riding home on donkeys.
In the nearby village of Brusje, we went to Jakov’s konoba, or wine cellar. He drew amber wine from a 450-gallon cask and lifted a loaf of goat cheese from a vat of olive oil. In a walled garden Jakov placed the pitcher on a weathered table. Neighbors arrived.
“There’s an old Brusje tradition,†he said. “Nobody pours wine in your glass. You pour what you want. If someone pours it for you, you might not want that much. “Zivili!â€
Then everybody started talking about village feasts, open doors, the korzo, the need for everyone to have a boat and veze, or connections; you could count on your friends. Love for the old ways poured out—a powerful unifying factor in a society that, with its state-imposed afflictions, could have sunk into sterile, modernistic despair.
The slanting sun played on their faces and the garden wall with a mellow saffron light, and a breeze moving down the hill stirred the roses and geraniums and rustled dry ivy against the stones. Darkness fell. Still they talked. They talked so much they lost interest in pouring wine, and no one went for candles.
I sailed farther out in the Adriatic to Vis, an island that had entered history as Issa, a Greek colony with its own Adriatic outposts. From its beautiful cup-shaped harbor I set out in a downpour to see the cave from which Marshal Tito directed the Resistance in 1944. British and American forces joined the Partisans on Vis, and their collaboration changed history: Attacking and tying down German divisions on the mainland, they helped win Allied victory in southern Europe and international recognition of Tito’s leadership.
Munching huge figs I’d plucked at roadside, I climbed a rain-soaked mountain path through rosemary and sage to the fortified entrance to Tito’s cave. In his “bedroom†water dripped from many fissures in the limestone ceiling, and the floor was all puddles.
When Tito wanted fighters, he didn’t ask where they came from. His system of ethnic balances was explained by a man in Budva: “If consensus didn’t work, there was Tito. Now we are left only with consensus, and it doesn’t work.â€
The islands are part of the Republic of Croatia, which is so divided by mountain ranges that it maintains its unity chiefly on the strength of ethnic cohesion. The maritime portion is sun-toasted villages and easy wine. Over the Dinaric Alps lies continental Croatia, with its brisk central European outlook. For long periods Venice ruled the coast, the Habsburg empire the interior, and the differences are still obvious.
Zagreb, capital of Croatia, is Yugoslavia’s economic and industrial leader. With its green parks, baroque 17th- and 18th-century buildings, and imposing boulevards rattling with streetcars, it smacks of yesteryear’s Vienna.
Last winter when Croatia announced its first free elections in 50 years, some 30 parties rushed into the fray. As students of Balkan history might have predicted, the most formidable opposition (winning a sweeping victory in this spring’s voting) was led by a man who had been imprisoned for Croatian nationalism.
Franjo Tudjman, 68, historian, author, and former Partisan general, ran his campaign out of a one-story wooden building beside Zagreb’s railroad tracks. I had to ask in several of the 15 small rooms before I found him.
“My earlier books led to a charge of espionage in 1972,†he said. “The judge wanted to put me in prison for 20 years, but Tito reduced it to two. He knew I was working against Serbian hegemony. Tito forbade all talk of ‘Great Serbia,’ but now it has become flagrant again. We have to do something about it or get out of Yugoslavia. We aren’t yet asking for independence. We want to try confederation; only with looser ties can we continue to live in Yugoslavia.â€
In the mountainous heart of Yugoslavia hundreds of schoolchildren were walking long distances along the highway while their elders herded sheep and cattle. Several families creaked along in heavy wooden wagons, their horses plodding as if each lift of a hoof might be the last. The road climbed through thick forests and along rushing rivers. Every few miles a lamb turning on a spit outside advertised a gostionica, or roadhouse.
When I first began to travel in Yugoslavia, I was amazed by the number of unfinished houses. Then I came to accept them along with mosques, minarets, castles, and campaniles as part of the architectural landscape. Some are four stories high, as if their owners hope someday to shelter several generations and tourists too. Construction may go on for years, and many builders, despairing of ever completing them, put up a door and a few windows and move into only one part.
This is called divlja gradnja (wild building). Built without permits, officially these homes do not exist. Since the graft to get permits can cost more than materials, people go ahead, undeterred by the lack of streets and utilities. From time to time the police blow up a few of the places. Work soon resumes.
* * *
Nowadays Roman Catholics, at least, have a refuge that has little to do with race or politics. Seaward from Sarajevo, up in the scraggy hills not far from the historic town of Mostar, lies the phenomenon called Medjugorje.
A decade ago you’d have been lucky if anyone 20 miles away could have told you how to get there. No hotel bed was to be found in the entire village. Nobody would have sold you a meal, although they might have given you one, figuring you must be lost if you were in Medjugorje.
Then, on June 24, 1981, six teenagers came down from the hill where they had been tending goats. Excitedly they told of seeing the Virgin Mary. She soon promised to deliver ten secrets and other messages.
Word spread rapidly. Snack bars popped up. Local people found corners for extra beds. The establishment frowned and had the visionaries examined by a psychiatrist. The Vatican remained skeptical.
Still the legend grew. Mary continued to appear every day. She said she wanted peace on earth, and wept because she saw so little of it. Now there are 12,000 tourist beds in Medjugorje, where ten times as many taxis line up as you can find at the Belgrade airport.
The trail to the top of Apparition Hill begins beside the Podbrdo Pizzeria. The first 30 yards are lined with shops selling crucifixes, plastic images, and holy portraits on polyester.
The sun was low, so I hurried up the steep trail, past small white goats that nibbled at the thornbushes. Two boys sat amid the maquis, selling white candles.
Crosses studded the hilltop. The largest rose from a pile of stones on which about 50 candles burned. Black from smoke, and with wax smoldering, the stones looked aflame.
Few stones small enough to carry remain at the site. People were scooping sand into envelopes. A group of Germans stood before the largest cross singing softly, “Maria.†As the sun melted behind the mountains and the faraway church towers glowed, 10,000 people were kneeling in worship.
I drove northward into the Alpine heights of Slovenia, the most westernized region in Yugoslavia. The Slovenes recently dropped “Socialist†from their name, to become simply the Republic of Slovenia. And the Slovenian communists decided they couldn’t tolerate the federal party and pulled out.
* * *
Refreshingly, the most popular plaza in Ljubljana was named for a poet, a sometimes bawdy one. A statue of France Preseren beams down on Preseren Square, hard by three interlocked bridges that span the willow-shaded Ljubljanica River. Rustic stalls and bright cafés radiate in all directions.
Amid Ljubljana’s air of solid accomplishment few enjoy playing rich uncle to poor relatives in the south. Rudi Tavcar, 31, with the Slovenian Chamber of the Economy, told me why he scorns the national economic system: “With only 8 percent of the population, Slovenia makes 20 percent of Yugoslavia’s gross national product and a third of its exports to the West. But we have been forced to turn over to the federation most of the hard currency we earn, with no control over how it is used. We provide 27 percent of the federal budget—just ‘floating money down the Sava.â€â€™
Slovenia’s bad relations with Serbia came to a head last winter. Riled because Slovenes didn’t seem to understand their actions in Kosovo, the Serbs and their brothers in Montenegro organized caravans of thousands to go to Ljubljana and “educate†the Slovenes. The Slovenian leadership, fearing street battles and a coup d’état, set up roadblocks. Serbs then backed down, calling the blockade violent, uncivilized, and “aggression against basic human rights and freedoms.†Two Yugoslav republics were behaving like foreign belligerents.
A Serbian boycott against Slovenian companies and products followed with more than 500 orders and contracts canceled. The boycott, harming many companies, proved convenient for others: Serbian firms reneged on 225 million dollars owed to Slovenian manufacturers; Slovenes retaliated by canceling 48 million in unpaid debts to Serbs.
One of the most successful companies in Slovenia is Adria Airways, which has broken the old communist mold and challenged JAT, the national airline. “We have made a profit for 20 years by being better than the competition,†said Janez Kocijancic, the president of Adria. Technically his airline is “socially owned,†but it operates on a free-enterprise standard of service.
Kocijancic is, remarkably, not only a businessman but also a high-ranking Communist Party official. As Slovenia approached its most important election day ever—Yugoslavia’s first free multiparty elections since World War II—Kocijancic explained why his party, which today appears enthusiastically noncommunist, decided to keep its old name, “League of Communists of Slovenia,†while adding a mollifier, “Party for Democratic Renewal,†and a new slogan, “Europe Now!â€.
“We didn’t want to avoid our responsibility for the past,†he said. “We know communism has a bad image today, especially after China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Romania’s Timisoara, and incidents here in Yugoslavia, and that it is identified with Stalinism. We don’t want people to say we cheated to win.â€
They didn’t cheat, and they didn’t win. Voters in April elected a democratic parliament, while awarding the largely ceremonial office of president to a maverick communist, Milan Kucan.
“Yugoslavia today is undemocratic and on the brink of civil war,†said Kucan, one of Yugoslavia’s most liberal politicians and a man who courageously fostered an atmosphere of freedom in Slovenia. “We are out of line with developments in Europe. We need to join the European Community, but that’s impossible as long as the Serbian policy in Kosovo persists. Kosovo is the touchstone that will mark Yugoslavia’s readiness to be a modern, progressive, democratic state. Only if we cannot achieve democracy would Slovenia consider secession.â€
It struck me that many of the people I met in Yugoslavia had spent time in prison for airing their opinions. One circulated a petition asking amnesty for political prisoners and thereby joined their ranks. Another wrote about the long-gone monarchy in such a way that present leaders saw a reflection of their own shortcomings.
Joze Pucnik, chairman of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia (DEMOS), was jailed seven years for writing psychological literature with a political twist. Returning from 23 years of teaching in West Germany to test the newly opened political process in Slovenia, he soon emerged as leader of a six-party coalition.
“People don’t want to hear anything more about communism,†he said. “It doesn’t work. It isn’t compatible with freedom. But this year, after years of stealing from the people, the communists suddenly embraced free elections!â€
Pucnik explained the empty shelves in his two-room party headquarters in a run-down apartment building: “We just moved here from a cellar.†Yet, from such a humble base, his DEMOS mounted a successful challenge to the tax-supported establishment.
“We are for confederation, the only possibility for Yugoslavia,†Pucnik told me a few weeks before DEMOS swept most of the communists out of parliament. “People are afraid of military intervention. If it comes, Yugoslavia is dead! The army can occupy our homes, but they can never make an economy. They can never make a life for us.â€
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One of the few roads across the Julian Alps winds upward through a forest of larch and over Vrsic Pass at 5,285 feet (1,611 meters). I climbed through melting snow, with high peaks all around, to the tiny tavern called Postarski Dom. I sat outside on a split-log bench and felt the sun on my back. After months of trying to cram a beautiful and bewildering country into small notebooks, I was ready for pensive distance.
I looked across a chasm to pockets of snow on the cliffs. Around me, in sunny spots where knobs of limestone held the heat, patches of short grass had emerged. I listened to the breeze blowing through knee-high conifers. It was glorious up here. I wished such tranquillity could flow down across the plains and span the abyss that divides these troubled but likable peoples.
As I turned to leave, I noticed on a promontory above me a concrete bunker with gun slits. The Italian border was just over the peaks. The South Slavs no longer have to worry about foreigners. Their demons dwell within. As do their hopes.