Acclaim for
robert d. kaplan's
BALKANGHOSTS
"Kaplan is a striking and evocative writer, and the Balkans offerhim all the richness of a Garcia Marquez world, where the fantastic is everyday life."
—San FranciscoExaminer
"With remarkable clarity, [Kaplan] explains problems that all sideshave lived with throughout the long history of theBalkan peninsula. . . . Mr. Kaplan succeeds in presenting the everyday experience of different Balkan communities in a vivid and significantway. Balkan Ghosts offers the complexity, brutality and beauty intraveling in both the past and the present."
—SeattleTimes
"A timely field guide to the ethnic and religious passions of 'Europe's forgotten rear door.' Few writers surpass Kaplan in the ability to pack useful information into a small space."
—San FranciscoChronicle
"An often rewarding odyssey filled with vivid writing."
—Wall Street Journal
"Historical perspective makes Kaplan a superb observer. . . . Heartfully blends his reporter's notes with rich historicalreflection."
—Business Week
"A well-documented account of the Balkans' past and present. . . .Kaplan . . . forcefully illustrates that the irreconcilable differencesamong Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians are only one part of theseething ethnic, religious and cultural tensions tearing at a muchlarger region."
—PittsburghPost Gazette
ROBERT D. KAPLAN
BALKANGHOSTS
A Journey Through History
Robert D. Kaplan has reported from over forty countries forThe Atlantic andThe New Republic, among otherpublications. His magazine articles of the 1980s andearly 1990s were the first by an American writer to warn of the coming cataclysm in the Balkans. He is the authorofThe Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite; Soldiersof God, on the war inAfghanistan; andSurrender or Starve, on the Ethiopian famine. He recently settled inWashington,D.C., with his wife and son, after fifteenyears abroad.
PREFACE
In a world rapidly becoming homogenized through the proliferation of luxury hotels, mass tourism, and satellite communications, fewer and fewer unsimulated adventures remain. But the information overflow means that events are now being forgotten at a faster and faster rate. Adventure may invite one, therefore, to use landscape as a vehicle to reveal the past and the historical process.
InAbroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, the American scholar Paul Fussell writes that "the secret of the travel book" is "to make essayistic points seem to emerge empirically from material data intimately experienced." In other words, at its very best, travel writing should be a technique to explore history, art, and politics in the liveliest fashion possible. Mary McCarthy'sThe Stones of Florence and Dame Rebecca West'sBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon are the best examples of this that I can think of. I have tried, however clumsily, to aim my star in their direction.
Balkan Ghostsis not a typical survey book. It progresses vertically, in idiosyncratic fashion, from the most specific to the most general: from an essay about the war guilt (or innocence) of one Croatian cleric to a speculation about the fall of empires. My experience in each country was different. InRomaniaI "traveled extensively, meeting all kinds of people, while inBulgariaI experienced the country through a personal friendship with one individual. InGreece, I didn't so much travel as live in the country, in theAthensarea for seven straight years. I hope that the varying styles of the book reflect the variety of my experiences throughout the Balkans.
Regions such asMontenegroinYugoslaviaand Maramures in northwestRomaniaare not discussed, andBosniaandAlbaniaare given much less attention than they undoubtedly deserve. Notwithstanding the atrocities committed against the Muslim population there, the ethnic conflict inBosniais most effectively explained as an extension of the Serb-Croat dispute. I have therefore discussedBosniain the chapter aboutCroatia. My coverage ofAlbaniais folded into the chapter on "Old Serbia" because I have chosen to explain the Serbs mainly through their historical conflict with Muslim Albanians. Although the world's attention may now be focused onYugoslavia, my particular Balkan odyssey centered onRomaniaandGreece, and the book reflects this. The Balkans are a peninsula of whichBosniais only a part. And while today the headlines may be aboutBosnia, tomorrow they may be about a different area of the Balkans, for the whole peninsula has entered a cataclysmic period that will last for many years. Nevertheless, nothing I write should be taken as a justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops inBosnia, which I heartily condemn.
Throughout the 1980s, I tried—usually to no avail—to interest editors and the general public in the Balkans and the brewing troubles there. It is sadly ironic that my worst fears have proved correct. One of the victims of the fighting was a journalist with the same name as myself, David Kaplan of ABC News. (My middle initial stands for "David.") I hope that this book may help explain a region that another Kaplan, whom I never knew, lost his life covering.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As with my earlier books onEthiopiaandAfghanistan, Cullen Murphy and William Whitworth ofThe Atlantic provided encouragement and a willingness to publish a significant portion of the manuscript in the magazine. An excerpt also appeared inThe New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, through the support of Nancy Newhouse. Other helpful editors included Nancy Sharkey, Janet Piorko, and Agnes Greenhall atThe New York Times; Dorothy Wick-enden atThe New Republic; Owen Harries atThe National Interest; and Seth Lipsky, Amity Shlaes, and Peter Keresztes atThe Wall Street Journal in Brussels. My agent, Carl D. Brandt, kept the faith through troubled waters. My editor, David Sobel, helped make a roughhewn product more presentable, without compromising it. Grants arranged through theMadisonCenterfor Educational Affairs gave me the wherewithal to turn an idea into reality. For this I must thank Peter Frumkin, Charles Horner, Les Lenkowsky, Patty Pyott, and Tom Skladony.
My interest in the Balkans grew out of reporting trips made in the early 1980s.1 thank Joe Geshwiler and Randal Ashly atThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mark Richards at "ABC Radio News," and Marilyn Dawson atThe Toronto Globe and Mail, for their indulgence of my Balkan passion.
Ernest Latham, Kiki Munshi, and Phillip E. Wright are Foreign Service officers of whom theUnited Statesshould be proud, bubbling with scholarly knowledge about the countries in which they served. Their enthusiasm was catching: a precious gift for which I am ever grateful.
Nicholas X. Rizopoulos of the Council on Foreign Relations was an exacting critic. Richard Carpenter kept invaluable archives on the Greek press and on public events inGreece. Alan Lux-enberg and Daniel Pipes at the Foreign Policy Research Institute inPhiladelphiaarranged lectures for me to deliver, which further clarified my ideas. Elinor Appel and Amy Meeker atTheAtlantic,and Suzanne MacNeille atThe New York Times, fact-checked parts of the manuscript, thereby making it a better one.
Other help and sage advice came from Paul Anastasi, Renzo Cianfanelli, Bill Edwards, Elizabeth Herring, Mattyas Jevnisek, George Konrad, Barry Levin, Samuel and Kay Longmire, Mircea Milcu, Fritz Molden, P. D. Montzouranis, Alberto Nar, Corneliu Nicolescu, John D. Panitza, Carol Reed, Norman Rosendahl, Tony Smith, Sergiu Stanciu, Nicholas Stavroulakis, Ivan Stefanovic, Gabor Tarnai, Mircea Tanase, Ruxandra Todiras, Admantios Vassilakis, Agayn Ventzislav, and Teddie Weyr.
Thank you all.
The Balkans, which in Turkish means "mountains," run roughly from the Danube to the Dardanelles, from Istria to Istanbul, and is a term for the little lands of Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece ana part of Turkey, although neither Hungarian nor Greek welcomes inclusion in the label. It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars. Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists. KarlMarx called them "ethnic trash." I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.
—C. L. SULZBERGBR, A Long Row of Candles
I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else.
—REBECCA WEST, Black Lamt and Grey Falcon
PROLOGUE:
SAINTS, TERRORISTS, BLOOD, AND HOLY WATER
I shivered and groped. I deliberately chose this awful, predawn hour to visit the monastery of Pec in "Old Serbia." In the Eastern Orthodox Church, spiritual instruction exacts toil and rewards it with a revelation of hell and redemption that is equally physical. If the intruder from the West is not willing to feel with his whole being, he cannot hope to understand.
Inside the Church of the Apostles, painted in A.D.1250, my eyes needed time. The minutes were long and, like the unbroken centuries, full of defeat. I carried neither a flashlight nor a candle. Nothing focuses the will like blindness.
The "blind man is not hindered by eyes; he keeps . . . steady on the same road, like a drunk man holding onto the fence," wrote Petar Petrovic Njegos inThe Mountain Wreath, the greatest poem of the Serbian language. In it the mass murder of Islamic converts is justified as a means to sustain a local batde against theMuslim Turks.*Fleetingly, just as the darkness began to recede, I grasped what real struggle, desperation, and hatred are all about.
[*. Njegos was a nineteenth-century bishop ofMontenegro, a mountainous area adjacent toSerbia. The mass murder he wrote about took place near the end of the seventeenth century.}
The workings of my eyes taught me the first canon of national survival: that an entire world can be created out of very little light. It took only another minute or so for the faces to emerge out of the gloom—haunted and hunger-ravaged faces from a precon-scious, Serb past, evincing a spirituality and primitivism that the West knows best through the characters of Dostoyevsky. I felt as though I were inside a skull into which the collective memories of a people had been burned.
Dreams took shape, hallucinations: St. Nicholas, with his purple robe and black, reminding eyes at the back of my head; St. Sava, Serbia's patron saint and founder of this very church, who descended through the watery void to proffer gifts of mercy and inspiration; the Ascended Christ, a dehumanized peasant-god beyond the last stage of physical suffering, more fearful than any conqueror or earthly ideology.
Apostles and saints intermingled with medieval Serbian kings and archbishops. They all appeared through a faith's distorting mirror: with elongated bodies and monstrous hands and heads. Many of the saints' eyes had been scratched out. According to a peasant belief, the plaster and dye used to depict a saint's eyes can cure blindness.
Superstition, idolatry"?That would be a Western mind talking. A mind that, in Joseph Conrad's words, did "not have an hereditary and personal knowledge of the means by which an historical autocracy represses ideas, guards its power, and defends its existence. It would never occur" to a citizen of the West, writes Conrad inUnder Western Eyes, "that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure either of investigation or of punishment."
This church posted a warning: the deeper the darkness grows, the less rational and more terrifying becomes the resistance.
"InBulgariaand inGreece, inYugoslavia, in all the countries ofEuropewhich have lived under Turkish rule it is the same," lamented the incarcerated Madame Deltchev, the victim of a Sta-linist purge in Eric Ambler'sJudgement on Deltchev. "Then, our people lived behind their walls in small worlds of illusion . . . they painted the walls with scenes of national life. . . . Now that we are again inside our walls, the habits of our parents and our childhood return."
The distance these monumental forms had to travel while my eyes adjusted to the dark was infinite: through Ottoman centuries, the most evil wars, and communist rule. Here, in this sanctum of dogma, mysticism, and savage beauty, national life was lived. Only from here could it ever emerge.
"You don't know what it is to kill with a hammer, with nails, clubs, do you?"
Ismail shouted above the music, his face flashing purple from blinking, Day-Glo lights. I was still in Pec, in Old Serbia, in a disco frequented by Muslim Albanians, not far from the Serbian monastery.
"Do you know why I don't like to drink plum brandy, why I drink beer always? Because the Chetniks [World War II Serbian partisans] used to do their killing after drinking plum brandy. Do you know what it is to throw a child in the air and catch it on a knife in front of its mother? To be tied to a burning log? To have your ass split with an axe so that you beg the Serbs, beg them, to shoot you in the head and they don't?
"And they go to their church after. They go to their goddamn church. I have no words. . . ."
Ismail shuddered. "There are things that are beyond evil, that you just can't speak about."
He went on shouting. Ismail was only twenty-six; he had no personal knowledge of the events he described. Rats infest his house, he told me. The Serbs were to blame.
It was10:30 A.M.,November 30, 1940. Snow was beginning to fall inBucharest. Inside theChurchofHie Gorgani, built in the seventeenth century to honor a Romanian general who fought the Turks, hundreds of candles illumined the red-robed Christ in the dome. Coffins, draped in green flags with gold embroidery, lined the sides of the nave. Altar boys carried in trays ofcoliva (colored sugar bread) for the dead. Fourteen members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael—the fascist "Iron Guard"—including the organization's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, were about to be buried and canonized as "national saints" by priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who had been chanting and swinging censers all night.
Two years earlier, in 1938, King Carol II's police had'strangled the fourteen men, stripped the bodies naked, and doused them with sulfuric acid in a common ditch to hasten their decomposition. But in late 1940, Carol fled andRomaniafell under an Iron Guard regime. The victims' remains, little more than heaps of earth, were dug up and placed in fourteen coffins for reburial. At the end of the funeral service, the worshipers heard a voice recording of the dead Legionnaire leader, Codreanu. "You must await the day to avenge our martyrs," he shrieked.
A few weeks later, revenge was taken. On the night of January 22, 1941, the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael—after singing Orthodox hymns, putting packets of Romanian soil around their necks, drinking each other's blood, and anointing themselves with holy water—abducted 200 men, women, and children from their homes. The Legionnaires packed the victims into trucks and drove them to the municipal slaughterhouse, a group of red brick buildings in the southern part ofBucharestnear theDimbovitsaRiver. They made the victims, all Jews, strip naked in the freezing dark and get down on all fours on the conveyor ramp. Whining in terror, the Jews were driven through all the automated stages of slaughter. Blood gushing from decapitated and limbless torsos, the Legionnaires thrust each on a hook and stamped it: "fit for human consumption." The trunk of a five-year-old girl they hung upside down, "smeared with blood .. . like a calf," according to an eyewitness the next morning.
It was10 P.M.,December 17, 1989. At the monastery of Moldovitsa in Moldavia, it was too dark to see the frescos, but Mother Tatulici Georgeta Benedicta imagined the scene of the Last Judgment: wild animals disgorging all the people they have eaten; a few good deeds outweighing all the bad deeds on the Scales of Justice; angels, painted in glowing sulfur dye, wrapping up the signs of the zodiac to announce that time itself has come to an end.
Mother Benedicta prayed for her customary eight hours. Unlike inBucharest, there were no informers here, no microphones in the confession box. In the beech forests ofRomania's far north, the regime—like those of the Turks long before—"has fewer eyes." The weather had been unusually warm. Mother Benedicta saw a rainbow the other day, although there was no rain. On this day, she heard rumors about a massacre of children. For the first time in her life, she remained all night in the church and prayed.
Joined by other sisters, she spent the next three nights in the church, praying.
"Then God performs his miracle. He puts an idea into the Drac's [Devil's] head to call a televised meeting, at which the people, no longer afraid, humiliate the Drac. And thus he who was like Herod, who killed the children ofTimisoarajust as Herod killed the children ofPalestine, is executed on the same day that our Lord was born."