Letter From a Traveller
to the President of the Republic
By Régis Debray
On returning from Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo
I feel morally bound to pass my impression on to you: I am afraid,
Monsieur le Président, that we are taking a wrong turning.
You are a practical man. You have little time for the intellectuals
who fill the media with grandiloquent and peremptory near-misses.
And that is good, for neither have I. So I will stick to facts.
Everyone has their own version of those, you will say; to each
his own. Certainly those I was able to observe on the spot during
a short visit - a week in Serbia (taking in Belgrade, Novi Sad,
Nis and Vramje and including four days in Kosovo visiting Pristina,
Prej, Pritzren and Produjevo) between 2 and 9 May - do not seem
to correspond with the words you have been using, in good faith
but from a distance.
I hope you will not think me biased. I had
spent the previous week in Macedonia, watched refugees arriving,
listened to their testimony which horrified me along with many
others. I wanted at all costs to go and see "from the other
side" how such an outrageous crime was possible. Having
a rooted distrust of Intourist-style journeys and journalistic
bus trips, I asked the Serbian authorities if I could have my
own translator, my own vehicle and the right to go and talk to
anyone I wanted. They agreed to these conditions and respected
them.
The question of the interpreter is an important
one. For I had already discovered, somewhat to my cost (and how
could it be otherwise?), that in Macedonia and Albania it is
possible to fall into the hands of local dragomen, mostly members
or sympathisers of the KLA, who make their network and expertise
available to newly-arrived foreigners. The accounts of exactions
are too numerous for anyone to be able to doubt some basis of
truth for them.
Nevertheless some of the accounts I recorded
turned out, when later checked in the places where they had happened,
to be exaggerated or even inaccurate. Of course that makes no
difference to the scandal and ignominy of this exodus.
What is it you keep telling us? "We are
not making war on the Serbian people but on a dictator, Milosevic,
who has refused to negotiate and has cold-bloodedly programmed
the genocide of the Kosovars. We are limiting ourselves to destroying
his repressive apparatus, a task which is already well advanced.
And the reason why we are still making air strikes despite regrettable
targeting errors and involuntary collateral damage, is that the
Serbian forces are continuing their ethnic cleansing operation
in Kosovo."
I have grounds for fearing, Monsieur le Président,
that all of >these words are misleading in the extreme.
1: "Not making war on the Serbian people..."
You may not know that the Dusan-Radevic children's theatre adjoins
the television building in the heart of old Belgrade, and the
missile that destroyed the one damaged the other. Three hundred
schools, altogether, have been damaged by bombs. Children are
left to their own devices and not attending classes. In the country
there are even some who collect toy-like yellow explosive tubes
(model CBU87). The Soviets used to scatter similar fragmentation
bombs in Afghanistan.
Demolition of factories has left a hundred
thousand workers kicking their heels, and living on an income
of 230 dinars - about £10 - a month. Nearly half the population
is unemployed. If you are hoping to turn people against the régime
by these means, you are making a mistake. Despite the lassitude
and shortages I did not notice any real fissures in the sacred
union. A young girl in Pristina said to me: "When four Chinese
are killed, citizens of a great power, the whole world is up
in arms; but when it's four hundred Serbs it doesn't seem to
count at all. Strange, wouldn't you say?"
I certainly did not witness any of the carnage
wrought by NATO bombers on buses, refugee columns, trains, the
hospital at Nis and other places. Nor the raids on Serbian refugee
camps (Majino Maselje, 21 April, four dead, twenty injured. The
refugees I mean are the four hundred thousand-odd Serbs whom
the Croatians deported from Krajina unseen by cameras and unheard
by microphones).
To stick to the places and incidents of my
stay in Kosovo, the NATO spokesman, General Wertz, declared:
"We have not attacked any convoys and we have never attacked
civilians." This is a lie. In the hamlet of Lipjan on Thursday
6 May, three kilometres from any military target in any direction,
I saw a private house that had been demolished by a missile,
causing the death of three small girls and their grandparents.
The next day, in the Gypsy quarter of Prizren, I saw two other
civilian cottages which had been reduced to rubble two hours
earlier, with several victims buried in the ruins.
2: "The dictator Milosevic..."
My contacts in the opposition - the only politicians with whom
I conversed - reminded me of the harsh realities. Autocratic,
swindling, manipulative and populist, Mr Milosevic has nevertheless
been elected three times: dictators only need to get elected
once. He respects the Yugoslav constitution. There is no single
party, and his own does not have a parliamentary majority. No
political prisoners, just changing coalitions. He is virtually
absent from the everyday landscape. People can criticize him
in public, and they do, but on the whole nobody pays much attention
to him. There is no "totalitarian" charisma weighing
on people's minds. The West seems a hundred times more befogged
by Mr Milosevic than his fellow-countrymen.
To mention Munich in connection with him is
to overturn the relationship between the weak and the strong;
to imagine that a poor and isolated country of ten million inhabitants,
one that covets nothing outside the frontiers of the former Yugoslavia,
can be compared to Hitler's overbearing and overequipped Germany.
If you hide your face too thoroughly you become unable to see.
3: "Genocide of the Kosovars..."
A terrible business. I only came across two accessible Western
eyewitnesses. One, Aleksander Mitic, admittedly of Serbian origin,
is the AFP correspondent in Pristina. The other, Paul Watson,
an Anglophone Canadian, is the central Europe correspondent of
the Los Angeles Times. Having covered Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia,
the Gulf war and Rwanda, he is not what you would call green.
Somewhat anti-Serb, he had followed the Kosovo civil war for
two years and knew every road and village. A hero, so modest.
When all the foreign journalists were expelled from Pristina
on the first day of the bombing, he had gone to ground and stayed
there, continuing to move about and observe.
His testimony is therefore balanced and, taken
in combination with other evidence, convincing. The worst exactions
were committed in the first three days of the deluge of bombs
- 24, 25 and 26 March - with burning, looting and murders. Some
thousands of Albanians were then ordered to leave. He assures
me that since that time he has not found any trace of crimes
against humanity. Of course these two scrupulous observers cannot
have seen everything. And I myself, still less. I can only testify
to Albanian peasants returning to Pudajevo, to Serbian soldiers
standing guard outside Albanian bakeries - ten of which had reopened
in Pristina - and people wounded in the bombing, Albanians and
Serbs side by side, in the 2,000-bed Pristina hospital.
So what happened? According to the two eyewitnesses,
the sudden superimposition of an international air war on a local
civil war (and an extremely cruel one at that). Let me remind
you that during 1998 1,700 Albanian combatants were killed, along
with 180 Serbian police and 120 Serbian soldiers; the KLA kidnapped
380 people and released 103, the rest (including two journalists
and 14 workers) having either disappeared or been killed, sometimes
after being tortured. The KLA said it had 6,000 clandestine members
in Pristina, and its snipers (I was told) went into action as
soon as the first bombs fell. Judging that they could not fight
on two fronts, the Serbs then seem to have decided to expel manu
militari NATO's " fifth column" or "land forces",
in other words the KLA, especially in the villages where it was
impossible to distinguish its members from the rest of the population.
Localized but undeniable, these evacuations
are described by Serb forces as "Israeli-style" and
would certainly be recognized by an old Algeria hand like yourself
(from the days when a million Algerians were rounded up by us
and shut in camps surrounded by barbed wire in order to "drain
the water from around the fish"). As in Algeria, obvious
traces were left here and there: empty villages, houses burned
to the ground. These military clashes caused civilians - mostly,
I am told, comabatants' families - to flee before the bombing
started. According to the AFP corrspondent their numbers were
very limited. "People took refuge in other neighbouring
houses," he told me. "No one was dying of hunger, getting
killed on the road or fleeing into Albania or Macedonia. There
isn't the slightest doubt that it was the NATO attack that started
the humanitarian catastrophe snowballing. Until that moment,
in fact, there was no need for reception camps at the frontiers."
Everyone agrees that in the first few days reprisals were unleashed
by so-called "uncontrolled elements", with the probable
complicity of the local police.
Mr Vuk Draskovic, the deputy prime minister
who has now started to distance himself from the régime,
is among those who told me that they have subsequently arrested
and charged three hundred persons with exactions committed in
Kosovo. Cover-up? Excuse? Apology? Nothing is out of the question.
Later the exodus continued, but on a smaller scale... on orders
from the KLA which wanted to group its supporters; for fear of
being thought "collaborators" (with the Serbs); for
fear of the bombs (since no one can tell the difference between
Serbs, Albanians and others from 20,000 feet); to join relations
who had already left; because the livestock had been killed;
because America was going to win; because it was the ideal moment
to emigrate to Switzerland, Germany or anywhere... All these
reasons were given to me on the spot. I bring them to your attention,
but do not guarantee their truth.
Is it possible that I have listened too attentively
to the "people over there"? To do the opposite would
be racist. To define a whole people - Jewish, German or Serbian
- a priori as criminal is unworthy of a democrat. After all,
during the occupation France made the acquaintance of SS divisions
manned by Albanians, Muslims and Croats, but never by Serbs.
The Serbs are a pro-Semitic and stubborn people; ten nationalities
coexist in Serbia itself; could they really have gone nazi fifty
years too late? In any case a number of Kosovar refugees told
me they had only escaped the repression through the help of Serb
neighbours and friends.
4: "The destruction of the Serb forces,
which is well advanced..." Sorry, but in fact the Serb
forces seem very fit indeed. A young sergeant picked up hitchhiking
on the Nis-Belgrade motorway asked me what was the strategic
reason for NATO's furious attacks on civilians. "When we
soldiers go to town we have to drink warm Coca-Cola because there's
no electricity. It's a nuisance, but we can live with it."
I imagine army units have their own generators.
In Kosovo, you have damaged bridges (easily
bypassed using nearby fords, when they are not still usable);
destroyed an airport of no importance; demolished empty barracks;
burned discarded army lorries; bombed helicopter mock-ups and
wooden artillery pieces artistically scattered about the fields.
This is all very well for battlefield video images and indoor
press briefings, but what happens later? Remember that the Yugoslav
armed forces, formed by Tito and his partisans, are not like
most regular armies: scattered and omnipresent, with underground
command and storage centres, set up to meet a long-term conventional
military threat (for some time a Soviet one). This is an army
that moves cattle about with its artillery to baffle infra-red
detection devices.
It is no secret that in Kosovo there are 150,000
men under arms, aged between twenty and seventy (no age limit
for reservists), of whom only 40-50,000 are in General Pavkovic's
Third army. Messages are relayed effectively by walkie-talkie
radio, and the Yugoslavs are themselves jamming telephone frequencies,
as the KLA had been using mobiles to pinpoint targets for US
bombers.
As for the expected demoralization, do not
believe in it. I am afraid that in Kosovo they are awaiting our
troops with equanimity and even with a certain impatience. A
Pristina reservist buying bread, AK over shoulder, told me: "Land
intervention by all means! At least in a real war there are dead
on both sides." The NATO planners' war game is taking place
15,000 feet above reality. I beg you, do not send our sensitive
and intelligent Saint-Cyr graduates into territory they know
nothing about. Their cause may possibly be just but they will
not be waging the defensive war (let alone the sacred one) that
- rightly or wrongly - the Serb volunteers of Kosovo and Metohija
will be fighting.
5: "They are continuing with their ethnic
cleansing ..." I was angered by the accumulation of car
number plates and identity documents - taken from people leaving
- at the frontier post on the Albanian border. The reply given
me was that it was feared the "terrorists" would use
them to disguise their own and their vehicles' identities to
re-infiltrate Kosovo. Much may have escaped my own modest investigations,
but the German defence minister was lying when he said on 6 May
that "between 600,000 and 900,000 displaced persons have
been located inside Kosovo". In a territory of only 10,000
square kilometres that would certainly have been visible to an
observer travelling on that same day from north to south and
from east to west. In Pristina, where tens of thousands of Kosovars
are still living, it is possible to dine at an Albanian pizzeria
in the company of Albanians.
Could not our ministers visit the terrain
to question unexcitable witnesses, people like the Greek doctors
with Médecins sans frontières, like priests and
ecclesiastics? I am thinking particularly of Fr Stephen, the
Prior of Prizren, who is singularly level-headed. For this civil
war is not a religious war: the innumerable mosques are intact,
with only two exceptions according to what I was told.
You can buy a country's foreign policy - as
the United States is doing with various countries in the region
- but not its dreams or its memory. If you could see the looks
of hatred on the faces of Macedonian police and customs officers
when the nightly convoys of tanks from Salonika to Skopje are
passing, driven by arrogant escorts wholly unaware of what surrounds
them, you would understand without difficulty how much easier
it will be to enter this "theatre" than to get out
of it. Would you then, like the Italian president, have the courage
or the intelligence to abandon unrealistic postulates, to seek
with Ibrahim Rugova what he has called "a political solution
on realistic foundations"?
If you do, a number of realities will force
themselves on your attention. The first is that there is no solution
without a modus vivendi between Albanians and Serbs, as Mr Rugova
insists, for there are two or more communities in Kosovo, not
just one. Without getting entangled in the war of statistics
caused by the absence of trustworthy census figures, my understanding
is that there are a million or more Albanians, a quarter of a
million Serbs and another quarter of a million members of other
communities: Islamized Serbs, Turks, Gorans or montagnards, Romanies,
"Egyptians" or Albanian-speaking gypsies, these last
having taken the Serbian side for fear of what a Greater Albania
would mean to them. The second reality is the high probability
of a resurgence of fierce internal warfare, an episode in a secular
to-and-fro, the act I without which the present act II is incomprehensible,
but which was itself the result of earlier oppression.
At the moment, politicians seem to be seeing
everything in terms of analogies with the past. It is still a
good idea to find the least bad analogies possible. You have
chosen the Hitlerian analogy, with the Kosovars as persecuted
Jews. Allow me to suggest a different one: Algeria. Mr Milosevic
is certainly no de Gaulle. But the civilian government is confronted
with an army that has had enough of losing and dreams of waging
war in earnest. And this regular army rubs shoulders with locally-born
militias that might one day come greatly to resemble a sort of
OAS.
And suppose the problem did not arise in Belgrade
but in the streets, the cafés and grocers' shops of Kosovo?
The fact is that the men I am talking about are far from reassuring.
On one or two occasions I found myself the object of fierce criticism
verging on the ugly. I owe it to the truth to say that each time
this happened it was Serbian officers who came to the rescue
and saved my bacon.
You remember de Gaulle's definition of NATO:
"An organization imposed on the Atlantic Alliance which
is no more and no less than the military and political subordination
of Western Europe to the United States of America." One
day perhaps you will explain the reasons that have led you to
modify this assessment. In the meantime I must confess to feeling
a bit humiliated when, on asking a member of the Serbian democratic
opposition why his president had rushed to receive some American
personality before a French one, I received the answer: "Look,
it's always a better idea to talk to the organ-grinder than his
monkey."
Originally printed in Le Monde on May 13.
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