The Croatian countryside was beautiful, fruitful, and fertile, like the land of milk and honey. Green buttercupped fields with clean cows knee deep in clover, and beyond, blossoming orchards busy with bees, and yet further beyond blue forested mountains. Poppies grew near the neat garden rows of green shoots springing up now in May. Women in long skirts looked up from their hoeing as we passed. Near the white plaster houses with Cezanne red tile roofs, chickens pecked in the barnyards. At one house a white cat dozed on the doorstep in the sun. The countryside seemed tranquil, serene, a prelapsarian garden where nothing bad could ever happen to you. The uniformed officer at the border crossing between Croatia and Bosnia had taken our passports -from Austrailia, from the U.S., from Germany, from England, from India. He smiled as he returned them. Perhaps he was thinking, "Good luck , ladies. You'll need it. These multiracial, multicultural, multinational deals don't work. Haven't you heard about our war?" Or maybe he thought we were after war pornography, getting our jolllies out of the ruins and the torture stories. Or do-gooders. Or maybe he just thought "Have a nice day."
After we passed into Bosnia, the landscape told another story. The complacent fields were still bright green and the mountains a solemn blue, and the poppies red, clot after clot. The indifferent sun still shone on the gardens, but now, as Dylan Thomas says, there was no "force that through the green fuse drives the flower." Only land mine fuses. Gardens planted with land mines. I wondered why the Serbs hadn't salted the ground. All the houses with an X, nine tenths of all the houses, were blackened, bombed, scorched and gutted. One of the Brits translated the graffiti on the walls: "Greater Serbia" and "Christ Killers" and sometimes the names of soccer clubs, as if this were a game with a score. Burned out cars and trucks littered the yards. Tractors stood still in the grass that had grown up around them. The cemeteries had many new white tombstones. Nothing stirred. Paradise , as before, had gone bad. In the silence I wondered if we listened hard we might hear the blood crying from the ground.
The scene in Kosovo now is much the same, only now we see it in our living rooms during prime time on the news and on the talk shows. The scene in Bosnia, reported to all the major news services by heroic international journalists, was unseen, essentially blacked out by the media and the State Department. Both scenes remind me that "The power to do evil is sovereignty," as Oscar Wilde said. And Milosevic's demoniacal success in the genocidal diasporas can be attributed not only to troops and tanks but also to stories. He arranged broadcasts of stories about, for example, Serbian babies being roasted over spits by the Muslims, who held microphones to their lips so the family and the village could hear their screams. He also arranged to have young men informed that their mothers had been raped or their fathers murdered by the Muslims, and since there was no way to contact their parents, many young men were deceived and took revenge on any Muslim they found. They were rewarded not only by fulfilling the duty of revenge but also by extra rations of plum brandy, standard issue in both the army and the paramilitary groups. But perhaps the most pervasive and powerful story was the revised account of the battle in Kosovo in 1379. Building on the revisionist history begun in the 19th century, Milosevic inspired a fierce and vengeful nationalism and a commitment to a "Greater Serbia." (Some historians say that the Serbian royal family ordered the execution of the German historian and archeologist who researched and wrote a history of the battle in 1896.)
The current Serbian account tells about the forces of Islam invading Christian Europe determined to expand their empire and to enforce their religion. It is said they destroyed everything in their path. Those who refused to be converted were often castrated, raped, or crucified. The Serbs, great Christian knights, led by Prince Lazar, however, stopped them in Kosovo. Although they finally lost the epic battle, the Serbs had extracted such a toll on the Turks that they were unable to proceed into Europe. Prince Lazar was killed, but he was avenged by Christian knights who killed the Turkish leaded Emer Murid, even though they were outnumbered 200 to one.
Now the Kosovo Field has become the Holy Field, the scene of the battle for freedom and for the Christian faith. Europe was saved from Turkish domination because although the Serbs lost, they inflicted so much damage that the Turkish army was unable to recover and proceed into Europe.
The reality is not quite so dramatic or heroic. The Ottomans didn't destroy everything in their path. In some ways, especially during the height of their empire, they were the most civilizing factor in a fairly uncivilized area. Forced conversions were not their policy except among the small percentage of people who were drafted into the army.
Some of the Turkish troops were Christians. Most of the Serbian Army consisted of llyrians (Albanians) and German mercenaries and Hungarians, and they were led by Prince Lazar, an unpopular king of a disunited and declining kingdom. He had been merely one of many contenders for the throne. The stories about the death of Lazar and of Sultan Murat have many different versions, and none of the accounts available are from contemporary sources.
And what of our stories and their affect on our identity and on our foreign policy. At the base of the Statue of Liberty is a poem by Emma Lazarus: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Does this story inform our offering of refuge to 20,000 homeless Kosovars? If our nation is "under God" and if we are, as the early colonists believed, a "city on the hill" destined to be an example "unto the whole world," are we obliged to fight genocide in other nations? And does our story about our Adamic innocence, as the people at the start of a new history free from European guilt, lie behind our failure to acknowledge and respond to the genocidal atrocities in Bosnia? The need to answer to these questions is urgent and immediate, here as well as in the Balkans, for "where there is no vision, the people perish."
