Balkan journal 3

This is the third of a series of articles about the author’s 11-month stay in the Balkans as a Knight International Press fellow.

by Chris Braithwaite

The mountains of the Balkans are made chiefly of limestone.  The relatively soft, water-soluable rock, uplifted from the bottom of ancient seas, tints the rivers green.  These bright, clear waterways have marked the mountains in turn.  Not content to dig spectacular canyons, the rivers sometimes plunge directly into the mountainsides and emerge miles away.  Inside the mountains they leave caves of astounding depth and unforgettable beauty.  Caves like Postojna, so famous and popular that visitors enter on a miniature railroad.  Caves as mysterious as Skocjanske, which offers precarious trails cut into the side of a roaring underground river canyon.  Caves as remote as Krizna, that can only be visited in tiny rubber boats paddled upstream by the wavering light of lanterns attached to the helmets that guide Alojz Troha issues to his visitors. 

In Vojvodina, the Serbian province that borders Hungary to the north, corn, sunflowers and cash crops grow in endless rows on the rich, table-flat plains.  The perfect order imposed by the huge machines that move briskly across the horizon is reminiscent of the American Midwest, or California's Central Valley.

The rolling hills of Macedonia are intensively cultivated by hand.  Patient farmers tend a single cow or a few goats as they graze on the roadside grass.  Families converge on small hay fields in mid-summer, cutting, raking, gathering the crop by hand, forking it loose onto horse-drawn wagons. 

The mountains of Montenegro are so steep and rocky that they have been reshaped into ancient terraces of white stone, narrow shelves for shimmering olive groves that run for miles along the coastal mountains above the Adriatic Sea.  If I could not live in Vermont I would try to find a way to live in Montenegro, amid the olives perhaps, or in one of the walled coastal cities left by the Venetians, cities like Kotor and Herzig Novi. 

Montenegro is about the same size as Vermont and has about the same number of people.  Even its name is similar.  Montenegro is an Italian rendering of its Serbian name, Crna Gora, which means Black Mountain.  The people there reminded me of home, too.  Proud to live in a small and difficult place.  Independent.  Conscious of their history.  In the capital city of Podgorica (formerly Titograd) young people come out at night in such numbers, even in January, that they take the downtown streets away from the automobiles.  They crowd the streets and the sidewalk cafés, tall young men and slender dark women with high, elegant cheekbones and a taste for tight clothes in leather and black.  Far to the north in Serbia, at the opposite corner of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the streets of Belgrade share this sense of vitality.

But when you say that Belgrade is a charming city, the answer is inevitably the same:  "Ah, you should have been here ten years ago."

All that unites the people of former Yugoslavia, in the aftermath of the wars that tore it apart, is a sense of loss. 

People measure their losses in a number of ways. There are the graveyards, of course, and the ruined towns and cities of the two countries that bore the brunt of the war, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.  But even in Serbia, widely — and justifiably — regarded as the victimizer rather than the victim of the conflict, those who remain lament the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who left.  They were the young and the well-educated, I was told.  They left for North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. 

The loss can also be measured in dry economic statistics.  None of the republics of former Yugoslavia have recovered the level of national income they enjoyed a decade ago, under Communism.  Slovenia, the wealthiest republic and the first to break away in 1991, is close to pre-war levels.  Bosnia and Herzegovina is at the opposite extreme, with about 20 percent of the productive capacity it had before the war.  Serbia is only slightly better off, at about 50 percent. 

Less tangible, but hardly less painful to the people I talked to, is the loss of standing in the eyes of the world.  Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito was a Communist state.  But because of Tito's stubborn independence from Soviet influence and control, the country enjoyed a special status during the Cold War.  Unlike citizens of other Eastern European nations, Yugoslavians could travel on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  I was told many times that the Yugoslavian passport was among the most valuable in the world for that reason.  Yugoslavia's experiment with the concept of "Self-Management" of industry by its workers was studied by economists all over the world. 

"Communism with a human face" was a phrase frequently attached to Yugoslavia. 

That phrase has been eclipsed by another Balkan contribution to the political vocabulary of the twentieth century: "ethnic cleansing."

"We are not in the world," Ljiljana told me over lunch in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.  A travel agent and the wife of the editor of one of Belgrade's independent daily newspapers, Ljiljana had worked as our translator on an earlier visit to Belgrade. 

I wasn't quite sure what she meant at the time. But I got an inkling a few months later, in Athens, Greece.  We were on vacation then, four of us, and wondering if we could get permission to travel to Montenegro, which has joined Serbia in a "rump" state called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  Greece is also a Balkan nation, separated from Montenegro by a single rather small country, Albania. 

We walked into the offices of two travel agents in Athens and enquired about travel to Montenegro.  Both responded with the same question:  "Where is Montenegro?"

Not in this world, indeed.

Yugoslavia destroyed itself in the name of nationalism. While I'm not sure I have a perfect grasp of these terms, I would venture to say that Yugoslavia was racially homogeneous, but ethnically diverse.

It was mostly populated by Slavs who came south across the Danube River centuries ago.  In comparison with the New World nations of North America, with their complex mix of Native American, European, African and Asian peoples, Yugoslavia was a pretty straightforward place.  It had a common language, called Serbo-Croatian, though there were distinct Slavic "first languages" in Slovenia and Macedonia. 

The six republics that made up Yugoslavia had their ethnic and religious differences.  Slovenians and Croatians had been mostly Catholic Christians.  The Serbs in Serbia and Montenegro had worshiped in the Orthodox Christian Church, as had most of the people in Macedonia.  The republic called Bosnia and Herzegovina was a mix of Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Slavs, now called Bosniaks. 

Tito led the Partisans against the Fascist forces which occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World War, and emerged from the war with the nation firmly under his control. 

Like all Communist leaders, he was antagonistic to the practice of any religion.  And to hold his small country together, he suppressed all expressions of nationalism.

Tito died in 1980 without leaving an heir to his virtually absolute power.  As the Communist Party lost its grip on the nation over the decade that followed Tito's death, the ideas it had suppressed became the ideas of liberation. Prominent among these was nationalism. 

The emergent Serbian Orthodox Church promoted the new nationalism, but it was by no means alone.  The first clear expression of Serb nationalism came from the academic world.  The Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts first came to the public's attention in 1986. It warned that the Serbs were in such an unjust position in Yugoslavia that their very existence was threatened.  They were the victims of a deep conspiracy of their fellow-countrymen, the Slovenes and the Croats. 

The press, freshly liberated from rigid Party orthodoxy, was also ready to celebrate its freedom by enthusiastically endorsing the nationalist cause.

An ambitious Communist Party functionary named Slobodan Milosevic recognized in this nationalism the key to power.  A brilliant political tactician, but a man with no strategic vision beyond his own grasp of power, Milosevic led the Serbs down the road to catastrophe. 

Here are the conclusions of Laura Silber and Allan Little, authors of the best book I have found on the subject, The Death of Yugoslavia:

The book traces Milosevic's conscious use of nationalism as a vehicle to achieve power and then to strengthen his control first over Serbia, and then over Yugoslavia.  His original dream was to step into the shoes of Josip Broz Tito as leader of the whole of Yugoslavia.  But by 1991, when he found this unattainable, he chose an alternate project, the creation of a new enlarged Serbian state, encompassing as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible.  His centralizing, authoritarian leadership and calculated, clever manipulation of the politics of ethnic intolerance provoked the other nations of Yugoslavia, convincing them that it was impossible to stay in the Yugoslav federation and propelling them down the road to independence...

This is not to say that Milosevic was uniquely malign or solely guilty.  The foot soldiers of Yugoslavia's march to war were legion and were drawn from all the nationalities in the country.

The war was over by the time I got to the Balkans, at least for now.  What I soaked up, as I traveled more than 11,000 miles back and forth across them, was the enormous sense of loss. 

What is to be learned from all this?  Perhaps only that, besides being a deadly impulse, nationalism is also a durable one.  Suppressed for decades in post-war Yugoslavia, it bubbled up poisonously as soon as the opportunity arose.  People who had lived together in apparent harmony were suddenly, unbelievably, at each others' throats. 

Would these people, who are after all not so very different, have been able to work things out in a more open, democratic society?  The question is entirely speculative. 

To return to a situation much closer to home, the answer may come from Quebec.  As a force for good or evil on this planet, Quebec nationalism sits on the edge of a knife.  Will it be used to preserve a unique culture in alien territory, and thus enrich the lives of French and English-speaking Canadians alike?  Or will it be used to set people against each other over differences which, to any rational outsider, are a cause for celebration rather than hatred?  There, as in what was once Yugoslavia, the fate of a unique, highly civilized nation hangs in the balance. 

I leave the final word to Matija Beckovic, a Montenegrin poet.  A stanza of his epic poem, Epiphany, reads like this:

Heaven is not for us, Montenegrins,
nor is there a path from here to there.
Hell is our patrimony.
And this hell, o Lord, we came to love,
even in heaven we would long for it,
even heaven we would turn to hell.
What would a Serb do in heaven,
when no one's there he could call a Kinsman?
In hell we are at least all together...