Posted on: Monday, July 30, 2001

First Person Account
An uneasy spring brings fear of war to Macedonia

By David Flynn

Ethnic Albanian refugees from Macedonia arrive on March 26 in Donje Ljubinje, a village in southern Kosovo, Yugoslavia. The refugees said they were attacked by Macedonian helicopters. Advertiser library photo • March 26, 2001

On the computer screen was a truly atrocious picture, a nude soldier hacked to pieces. Meat market red. No arms.

Ivan, a DJ at KANAL77 in Stip, a city in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, changed to the next screen. This soldier had been burned, a human form in black, the mouth open in agony.

"I think the Albanians killed him first then burned him," he said.

Later, Ivan told me, "One of the families called. They want a copy of their son's photograph."

It was middle-May, and the ethnic Albanian insurgents, who had crossed the border from Kosovo, held a few villages about 30 miles from the pop radio station. Stip, with a population of 60,000, is mostly Slavic territory in the east of this cobbled-together country, roughly 100 miles long by 100 miles deep. About 600 Stip men had been conscripted into the army that week.

The situation in Macedonia had deteriorated badly in the two months since my first visit to what amounts to small town Macedonian life. I had arrived in Skopje, the capital city, on Feb. 1 as a Fulbright scholar. A few weeks later I rode a Proleter bus to see e-mail friends from Stip, young men I had met through amateur radio contacts.

Dragan Davkovski met me at the bus station, then took me to his family's house, an unfinished cube of concrete and brick. That night we walked the hilly streets of downtown Stip, noisy with teens who headed for the clubs about 11 and danced all night to Balkan Top Ten.

One club was called Doris Day.

The next morning I ate pastramyia, a kind of oval pork pizza beloved in that region. Across the table sat Goran, Davkovski's brother, studying catering in the lake resort city of Ochrid, just $1,200 in bribes to his teachers from graduating. Bribes, I learned, are needed even in elementary school.

His father, who had been one of Tito's personal bodyguards, passed the raccia, homemade clear brandy, then plastic bottles of his own sweet pinkish wine.

Two months later I visited Stip again, staying with Dragan Ristov, a news journalist at KANAL77 who also writes for newspapers. This time there was a midnight curfew, so few teens roamed the downtown streets. Club Doris Day was almost empty. At least five Stip soldiers had been killed.

"Albanski bad. Boom Boom."

That was about as deep as I had gotten into Macedonia's agonies in my short stay, living in Vlae, a suburb of Skopje. And that from a Radio Taxi driver.

The streets were jammed with taxis, because the unemployment rate was 40 percent, 60 percent among ethnic Albanians. The average wage was $150 a month, and my journalist friends made more like $100.

My first reaction to Skopje, driven from the airport by a U.S. Embassy shuttle, was of an ugly town in a beautiful valley. Surrounding the city of about 800,000 were snow-clad mountains. The River Vardar, its banks' concrete scribbled with teen graffiti, meandered through the middle.

Twenty-year-old cars like Zastavas and Ladas jammed the dusty streets, with names like Maxim Gorki, and Nicola Tesla. An earthquake had destroyed 80 percent of Skopje in 1963, and the rebuilt city was mostly gray Communist-era blocks, or Modernist public buildings like the white wedge of the National Theatre, now stained and chipped.

Fighting only 10 miles away

What is it like to live in a city when there is fighting between armies less than 10 miles from my apartment?

The invasion of ethnic Albanians, the National Liberation Army from Kosovo, in late February, came as a shock to Slavic Macedonians. Most had been born under the stability of Tito's Yugoslavia, and even in the 10 years since the breakup, their country had been an island of peace in a region of blood and rape. Skopje went into depression.

Buildings locked their doors where before they were open; taxi rides late at night became darts through deserted streets with drivers turning off their lights in fear of their lives; crowds of Albanians waited for shuttles to take them out of town, some of the 20,000 refugees who fled; soldiers in body armor controlled traffic at intersections; one Slavic policeman was "targeted," shot dead, near my university.

And from my terrace, overlooking the river, I heard the faint percussive boom of artillery to the north.

Quickly I put aside a stash of deutschemarks, necessary to pay a taxi driver to take me to Greece if necessary; they don't trust their own currency, the dinar. A friend told me how to use the basement of the house where I lived on the top floor as a shelter.

Yet, in the midst of the tension, life continued without too much disruption. I attended an exhibit of bonsai at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A friend's husband was attempting to bonsai Macedonian trees, like the boxwood.

Citizens wandered around Matka, a nature area a few miles west, climbed Mount Vodno looming above Skopje, took their kids to the zoo, or let them ride the toy cars in City Park. The shops were full; one advertised "Italian Shoes Made in Serbia. "TV featured soap operas from Spain, France and Australia, plus football (soccer) or basketball. Meat stores displayed carcasses with heads, bowls of eyes.

Later, outdoor cafes blossomed with the April roses and May cherries.

Patrons ate kebap — small sausages; burek — pastry slices filled with cheese, spinach or meat; traditional cutlets, or the popular Italian foods. They drank Turkish coffee. I frequented King Burger too much, though my favorite restaurant was called Longing for the South.

As I listened to the mortars from my terrace, a man with a staff slowly moved along his herd of goats, grazing on city grass beside the River Vardar.

Why study Fitzgerald?

At Sts. Cyril and Methodius University, the nation's best, I asked my first class, "Why are we studying F. Scott Fitzgerald, and all his whiny drunk rich people from the American '20s, when a few kilometers from here helicopter gunships are killing people?"

The consensus was that in peace, bread and sex and money and individual psychology were important, and that Fitzgerald said something about that.

When the mortars fell, basic life and death took precedence.

My other class, studying Kate Chopin, decided that by discussing how life should and should not be, particularly between men and women, we were avoiding war. War was male; war was anti-love.

• "Albanians are mobsters. They run the drug trade and the smuggling across the Kosovo border. This is what the war is about," Davkovski had told me.

• "Albanians are having 10-15 children per family, so soon they will be in the majority. It is their plan" — several Slavic Macedonians.

• "Albanians are a degraded nationality. They are not developed enough to participate in a democracy" — a student at the University.

• And often, "We Macedonians need peace to develop our economy, but those damn Albanians . . ." — many Slavic persons.

Macedonia is internally Balkanizing. The division has gotten worse during this period. A culture of separation has developed, the fear that by associating with even long-time friends of the opposite ethnic group, an Albanian or a Slavic person will be considered a traitor to her group.

"We used to live together. I had wonderful Albanian neighbors," my department head, Violeta Hristovska, repeated a common remark.

"What happened?"

"Those damn Albanians . . ."

"In March we had the yearly meeting of the Macedonian P.E.N., and not one Albanian writer showed up or even responded to the invitation, as they always had in the past," said writer and translator Zoran Anscevski.

With no census to pin down the figures, estimates of populations vary widely, but a middle guess would be Slavic 60 percent, Albanian 30 percent, and the other nationalities, such as Serbs, Turks, Vlach, and Roma (the gypsies who scavenge, beg, and sell cheap goods as a kind of subculture), the rest. The nation's entire population is only 2 million.

Whose conflict?

Turks, Vlach, etc. are "acceptable" peoples, without demands, but the conflict is between Islamic Albanians and Christian Orthodox Slavic Macedonians. My perspective is almost entirely Slavic.

As a result of the current danger there is a nostalgia for a past when Macedonia was part of a united Balkans under Josef Broz, "Tito," a Croat, in what was a unified Yugoslavia.

In the last election for Macedonia's presidency, the second-place candidate, whose first name was Tito, ran on the slogan, "After Tito, Tito."

"We had few freedoms, but there was total security," Hristovska told me.

"You could travel where you wanted through the whole Balkans. We weren't rich, but we weren't poor either."

A vast generation gap separates the older Macedonians, like Hristovska, who were born and grew up under Tito, and those either born or who grew to adulthood after the breakup of Yugoslavia under Slobodan (which ironically means "Freedom") Milosevic. The older people move more slowly; they are fatalistic; they feel like victims.

The younger have not only the energy of youth, but direct it toward expensive cars, a good house, planning new businesses. Business, however, has become more difficult. In February, travel and commerce was easy throughout the Balkan highway system. By May ethnic violence had broken out in all Balkan states again, and there were travel warnings for U.S. citizens in every Balkan nation. Two narrow openings out of Macedonia remained, other than air, Bulgaria and Greece, and both are difficult borders. Even the national airport is threatened, because it is just down the road from the fighting.

Macedonia, landlocked with no port, is growing claustrophobic.

Plans to build resort hotel

In February, when I first visited Sotir Sotiroski, a middle-aged restaurateur in Macedonia's only resort, Lake Ochrid, he was full of plans. Ochrid, "The Pearl of Macedonia," is a deep lake surrounded by mountains. Medieval monasteries and churches, a few built-in caves, are popular attractions. In a peaceful summer European tourists fill the cobblestoned streets. Sotiroski eagerly showed me sheaves of plans for a new hotel, 77 rooms.

"I have everything ready, except I need a bank loan. Only a few years ago, a bank official would be put in prison as a criminal for allowing a loan to a private individual. Now it still is impossible for me to get development money from a state bank, yet very few foreign banks have been allowed. All I can hope is that my son, who lives in Germany, can get the loan there."

Still, he was alive with pastel drawings, and hope. But, when I visited again in April, I had to ask about the hotel.

"Nothing really has happened," he said, and sounded discouraged. Foreign tourists stayed away because of the fighting. "I am still trying. What can you do?"

"What can you do?" might as well be the national motto. I heard it often.

Many mornings this spring, while the red poppies bloomed in my neighborhood, I awoke to hammering. Grass is unusual in Skopje, with "lawns" dirt patches for growing food, or arbors of grape vines shading above.

Do-it-yourself likewise is universal. A few neighbors began home renovation projects, new windows, a fence. But also indicative was Zoran.

"I planned on adding a room," he told me over Dab beer on his patio, "but then I thought, why build when it might be destroyed by bombs?"

Civil war. That was the terror. Those damn Albanskis would rise up within the city, and kill, chop, and rape.

"Albanski bad. Boom boom."

Guerrillas withdraw in March

Following the March withdrawal of the 1,500 invader National Liberation Army guerrillas above Tetovo, 30 miles west of the capital, there followed a month of peace. My second bus to Ochrid passed near this majority Albanian town during the lull, but was boarded by grim-faced soldiers checking IDs.

Soldiers pointed guns at us from sandbag emplacements every few hundred feet along the highway.

The same politicians appeared on TV each night, talking about Albanian demands for a change in the constitution, new rights. Slavic politicians, however, had their backs up, reflecting general Slavic opposition.

"Albanians already have more rights in Macedonia than they do in Albania.

"We are even giving them their own separate university (paid for by private foundations). What do they want?" Hristovska said. "We give them more and more, and they just ask for even more than that."

Endless negotiations went nowhere. Then the second force of NLA guerrillas seeped in from Kosovo in May, this time occupying border villages farther east, close to another city, Kumanova, 15 miles from Skopje. New TV pictures of distant burning houses on mountainsides.

A patrol of Macedonia soldiers, in the poorly equipped, mostly Slavic army of 15,000, was ambushed. During the funeral for eight of the dead in Bitola, the second largest city in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, reports of Albanian parties celebrating the soldiers' deaths, and rumors of guns being fired into the air in joy, led to riots. Slavic mourners destroyed more than 40 Albanian businesses there, and an Albanian businessman was killed in Skopje.

LaPalma, an ice-cream shop where I had relaxed on Sundays, was bombed a few blocks from my apartment. The bombing was attributed to a new worry, Slavic nationalists called the Lions.

If Macedonia breaks up, what then?

Blood and rape.

"In Bosnia there are villages of 5,000 that insist on being separate countries. Montenegro wants independence, but even there bits of Montenegro want to break from the small national government, and form nations of their own. They hide weapons paid for by smuggling, ready for war. We are dividing into smaller and smaller pieces," Ristov told me.

He, though in his 20s, was starting to sound as fatalistic as the old Communists.

David Flynn was temporary assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa from the fall of 1989 through the summer of 1991. He also served as director of English at Tokai International College, 1992-93. He teaches English and journalism at Volunteer State Community College near Nashville, Tenn. Beginning in February, Flynn spent four months in Skopje, capital of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, as a Fulbright scholar attached to Sts. Cyril and Methodius University.