Free Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Page A

retrogression. Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, Germans, Croats, and Serbs once were buried together nowlie desecrated by the bombs of both sides. Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back through five centuries here. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages. Such law and order as there is, is administered by warlords. There is little gasoline, so the villages have returned to the era before the motorcar. Everyone goes about on foot. Old peasant women forage for fuel in the woods, because there is no heating oil. Food is scarce, because the men are too busy fighting to tend the fields. In the desolate wastes in front of the bombed-out high-rise flats, survivors dig at the ground with hoes. Every man goes armed. No one ventures beyond the village. No one trusts anyone they have not known all their lives. Late-twentieth-century nationalism has delivered one part of the European continent back to the time before the nation-state, to the chaos of late-feudal civil war.
    A week spent in Serbian Krajina is a week spent inside a nationalist paranoia so total that when you finally cross the last Serbian checkpoint and turn on the radio, and find an aria from Puccini playing, and look out of your window and see the wet fields in the rain, you find yourself uncoiling like a tightly wound spring, absurdly surprised to discover that a world of innocent beauty still exists.
    BELGRADE
    On the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, you never tell anybody where you’ve really come from or where you’re really going. At the Croatian checkpoints, you say merely that you’re going to the next Croatian town. At the Serbcheckpoints, you smile, let them search your trunk, rummage through the dirty underwear in your luggage, offer them Marlboros, and tell them over and over that you are heading toward the bosom of Mother Serbia.
    At the first tollbooth on the Serbian side of the highway, you do not hand them the toll card you picked up at the Zagreb entrance. You say, instead, that you’ve come from the Serbian Krajina, and then you negotiate your toll fee in deutsche marks. This is the only tollbooth in Europe where, with laughter, exchange of cigarettes, and displays of mocking disbelief at what they propose to charge you, you can barter your toll fee down to a reasonable sum.
    About twenty-four kilometers from Belgrade, you see your first sign of the impact of Western sanctions: enormous queues of small Zastavas, Fiats, Renault 5s stretching down the motorway from the service stations, and large crowds of men gathered around the empty pumps, waiting for the occasional delivery. They play cards, talk politics, sing along to a harmonica to pass time, but when you come up to talk and they discover that you are a Western writer, an angry knot of men soon surrounds you. A short, stubby man with a porkpie hat on his head, mud-encrusted boots, and the hands of a farmer pokes you in the chest and says, “What the hell were we supposed to do with those Croats? Stand there and wait for them to cut our throats? And what do you do? You give us these sanctions. You call that fair?” And so it goes, with themes and variations, that soon have them blaming Churchill and the British for supporting Tito rather than Draža Mihajlović. So apparently it is the fault of the British that Yugoslavia had fifty years of Communism.
    Their anger would be more threatening if it were not accompanied by a certain comic ritual. The men in thequeue approach, say they don’t want to have anything to do with a Westerner, turn on their heels, so that their friends can see what a splendid gesture of defiance they have made, and then they return anyway and start talking, pausing to let you take notes, peering over your shoulder to see how you write their names and so on. This, I learn in