Blood and Belonging (7 page)

Their vehicle of choice is a four-wheel-drive Cherokee Chief, with a policeman's blue light on the roof to flash when speeding through a checkpoint. They pack a pistol but they don't wave it about. They leave vulgar intimidation to the bodyguards in the back of the jeep, the ones with shades, designer jeans, and Zastava machine pistols. They themselves dress in the leather jackets, floral ties, and pressed corduroy trousers favored by German television producers. They bear no resemblance whatever to Rambo. The ones I began meeting at the checkpoints on the roads leading off from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity were short,
stubby men who in a former life had been small-time hoods, small-town cops, or both. Spend a day with them, touring their world and you'd hardly know that most of them are serial killers.

Warlords not only dominate the war zones, but have worked their way to the heart of power in the authoritarian single-party states of Croatia and Serbia alike.

War criminals are celebrities in the Balkans. They have seats in the Serbian Parliament. One of them, VojislavŠešelj, the self-styled Duke of the Serbian Chetniks, runs his own party as well as a full-time paramilitary unit. Another,Željko Raznjatović, a.k.a. Arkan, controls an eight-hundred-strong paramilitary unit called the Tigers, who raped and tortured their way through eastern Slavonia in the Croatian war of 1991. This odious thug, on the run from an Interpol warrant for an attempted murder in Sweden, is a parliamentary deputy and operates a number of immensely profitable sanctions-busting businesses, including selling smuggled petrol for hard currency at petrol stations around Belgrade. Ever the postmodern Prince of Darkness, Arkan has launched himself into celebrity franchising. In Serbian farmhouses in eastern Slavonia, the icon you are most likely to see beside an image of Saint Sava is a large colored calendar with a different picture of Arkan for every month of the year.

At anti-Milošević demonstrations in Belgrade, which I attended at the end of my journey, who should appear, cruising through the middle of the crowd in his Cherokee Chief, but this smiling killer in a smart sheepskin jacket, waving suavely to left and right, obviously reveling in his provocation of Belgrade's impotent peace party.

Croatians will tell you that the fact that Arkan is allowed to serve as a deputy in the Serbian Parliament is proof that
Serbia is a fascist regime. It is not. There are functioning opposition parties and newspapers, and, indeed, just as much democracy in Belgrade as there is in Zagreb. It is Djilas's characterization of Serbian politics—“democracy with a tinge of banditism”—that best describes the way warlords have worked their way into the heart of the system.

There are warlords on the Croatian side, too—if not in Zagreb, then in the front-line towns like Osijek, run by town council president and local party boss Branimir Glavaš. When you tour the town in Glavaš's jeep, it is like being with a spectacularly popular local politician in a small American town. He comes across a local wedding and the band serenades him. The bridegroom asks him to kiss the bride; the revelers hand him bottles to sample. It is hard to remember that this man is leader of the Glavaš Unit, a paramilitary group held responsible not merely for the defense of Osijek but for the cleansing of Serbian villages and for the murder of Croatian policemen who sought to maintain good relations with Serbs.

Glavaš flashes a policeman's badge at the police checkpoints, as well as a military pass at the front line. The limits of his power are as imprecise as they are pervasive. He has translated the nefarious glamour of the warlord into peacetime power, yet he assures you with a snap of his fingers that he could remobilize his paramilitaries overnight. Thirty kilometers away, across the front line in Serb-held Vukovar, there is Mr. Kojić, the Serbian equivalent of Mr. Glavaš. Same jeep, same courteous manner. Same guns.

The warlords are nationalists, but their convictions are uninteresting. They are technicians of violence, rather than ideologues. Earlier than everybody else, they understood
that ethnic nationalism had delivered the ordinary people of the Balkans straight back to the pre-political state of nature, where, as Hobbes predicted, life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, the man with a Zastava machine pistol and a Cherokee Chief is king. For he can provide the two commodities everybody here craves: security and vengeance.

Once the Yugoslav Communist state began to spin apart into its constituent national particles, the key questions soon became: Will the local Croat policemen protect me if I am a Serb? Will I keep my job in the soap factory if my new boss is a Serb or a Muslim? The answer to these questions was no, because no state remained to enforce the old inter-ethnic bargain. As a result, every individual rushed, pell-mell, to the next available source of protection: the warlord.

For the warlord not only offers protection. He offers a solution. He tells his people: If we cannot trust our neighbors, we must rid ourselves of them. If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by nationalist hatred. Cleansing is the warlord's coldly rational solution to the war of all against all. Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace. With me and my boys to protect you.

VUKOVAR

After dark in Vukovar, your car headlights range over pock-marked walls, roofless ruins, and piles of rubble on both sides of the road. You do not stop at the bullet-shredded STOP signs because there are no cars at the crossroads. People must be living here, because you occasionally see a solitary light
gleaming from behind a shutter in one of the bombed-out tower blocks. But you see no one because no one ventures out after dark. Rats scuttle to and fro across the road to forage in the garbage. In the distance, you hear an occasional burst of small-arms fire.

This ghost town was once a Habsburg episcopal seat on the Danube. In 1991, it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945. When the Serbian paramilitaries and the Yugoslav National Army finally “liberated” the town in November 1991, at a cost of something like nine thousand lives, there was nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.

The self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina has its eastern headquarters in Vukovar. “Krajina” means the military frontier. Serbian settlement in Croatia was established in the seventeenth century by the Austro-Hungarians as a buffer zone between them and the Ottomans. As the appointed defenders of European civilization against the Turks in the Balkans, the Serbs have always gone armed. The gun culture here is ancestral.

In the town square, a banner has been stretched over the road from one pulverized house to another. It reads: “Welcome to Vukovar, Year One.” But, eighteen months after entering the town, the Serbs have done nothing to rebuild it. It should probably be left as it is. UNESCO could fence it off and declare it a European heritage site. What could be more European, after all, than our tradition of senseless nationalist warfare?

The Serbs have taken down the Croatian street signs and replaced them with Serbian ones in Cyrillic, but the Croatian signs are still stacked in the attic of the pulverized town
museum, as if somewhere in their minds the Serbs expect that the Croatian signs will one day go back up again.

In the museum attic, too, is a still more extraordinary sight: three bronze busts—Marx, Engels, and Lenin—sitting on the main roof beam, dispatched there in the 1980s at the official death of Communist ideology, and now revealed by the bombardment that blew away all the roof tiles and the false ceiling concealing the roof beams. These three bronze busts were the only exhibit in the museum to have survived the siege intact.

While the responsibility for the destruction of Vukovar lies squarely with the tanks and artillery of the Yugoslav National Army which lobbed 150,000 shells into the place, the Croatians also appear to have dynamited parts of it as they withdrew, so that the Serbs would gain nothing but rubble for their pains. The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense. When I asked a Serbian tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders. “War has many such tragedies … Leningrad … Stalingrad …” But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand, military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb. Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, “So you want to be independent, do you? This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end of it is nothing but ruins.”

It is hard not to think, as you stand in shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction. All these ancient
walls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.

Some quite uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here. The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in a video arcade. It didn't even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs. Now many of them lie on the city's outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.

The Serbs have inherited the ruins that they themselves have made. One might have expected regret or shame, or failing that, some state of moral confusion about what they had done to the city. But nothing, not a syllable. Only a kind of embarrassed silence.

It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration. No one is responsible for anything but the other side. In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot. Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first. Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on. Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication. Nowhere did this reach such a nadir as
in Vukovar. The pistol-toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was a Hungarian; the Krajinan Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar hospital handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city. For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.

Serbian Krajina calls itself a state, but is more like a feudal kingdom run by small-time warlords, called Deputy Minister This and Supreme Commander That, whose power depends on how many cars, weapons, and men they can commandeer. You soon discover that their writ usually runs out at the next checkpoint.

Mr. Kojić, the security boss of Vukovar and district, assures you he has the town under control, but there are three impact clusters on the bulletproof windshield of his Passat from a firefight with the local gangsters three nights before. There are guns everywhere: on the backs of old men bicycling out to guard duty on their village checkpoints; hanging from the belts of the militiamen who check your papers at the entrance to the town; behind the counter in the local bar. Everywhere in Krajina, the democracy of violence rules.

At night, the Serbs of Krajina sit in bunkers at the entrance of their villages with their guns trained down the lonely roads, waiting for the Croats to come at them. It's a village war, and the front line often runs right between two back gardens. One rainy night I went out to the front lines about thirty kilometers from Vukovar. With the faint glow of the
Croat positions in Vinkovci clearly visible, I scuttled to the Serbian trenches under washing lines, over garden fences, past old discarded washbasins and newly hoed vegetable gardens. When I reached the safety of the Serb bunker, I could hear Croatian music from the other side, mixed with the grunting of Serbian pigs in the sty next door.

From their positions, the Serbs can see the homes they were forced to flee; they can see their neighbors in their gunsights. One paramilitary called Chobi Chetnik, with a sign reading “Serbia: Liberty or Death” on his battledress, got on the CB radio at two in the morning to taunt the Ustashe a hundred meters away. This is a war where the enemies went to school together, worked in the same haulage company, and now talk on the CB every night, laughing, taunting, telling jokes. Then they hang up and try to line each other up in their gunsights.

And so it goes, night after night, neither peace nor war, the two sides straining at the leash, taunting and testing each other, probing each other's positions with small-arms fire and the occasional lob of a mortar or artillery shell.

The Serb positions are defended by ex-Yugoslav army officers,
Dad's Army
village volunteers, and wild Chetnik paramilitaries. Without the UN, they know, they would be quickly overrun. You can see their desperation in the way they drink, and in the listless fatalism that steals over their faces when the bravado of the bunker dies away.

The Croat forward lines, which I visited at Osijek, thirty kilometers from Vukovar, look altogether more impressive. They are dug in behind a stretch of dynamited motorway, and they seem to be both more disciplined and more belligerent than the Serbs. They believe the UN is ratifying the permanent occupation of a third of their country, and the
men in their flak jackets and helmets wave their Zastava automatics in the direction of the Serbian lines and tell you the Croatian flag will soon be flying over Vukovar. More front-line bravado perhaps, but I left both sides feeling that the cease-fire in eastern Slavonia hangs by a thread.