text:
The "March 14" movement is a political vehicle for Lebanon's liberals, democrats, free-market capitalists, human rights activists, and those who want an exit from the seemingly endless war with the "Zionist entity." Unfortunately, that is not all it is. It's also a political vehicle for hard-line Sunni Arab Nationalists and other political retrogrades who only oppose Hezbollah and the Syrian Baath regime because they hate Shias and Alawites as much as they hate Jews.
My colleague "Noah Pollak is rightly horrified":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/16371 by the death worship on display in Beirut this week after Israel released the child-murdering terrorist ghoul Samir Kuntar to Hezbollah in exchange for the dead bodies of two kidnapped soldiers. "Lebanon's March 14th movement cast itself into an abyss of moral depravity that the bloc's supporters — myself included — never thought possible," he wrote. I'm sorry to say this–I'm a March 14 supporter, too–but I'm a bit less surprised, if not less repulsed, by this recent turn of events.
Such March 14 stalwarts as Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Seniora and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt participated in the gruesome festivities and gave Kuntar–who smashed in the head of a four year-old girl on a rock after murdering her father in front of her–a warm hero's welcome.
I don't know if Seniora and Jumblatt sincerely believe Kuntar is a hero for those deeds. Frankly, I doubt it. He won't be joining the March 14 movement. There is no question that he belongs to the "March 8" bloc led by Hezbollah, and that he will be perfectly willing to murder the children of the "wrong" kind of Lebanese when civil and sectarian violence explodes in his country again.
But Seniora and Jumblatt feel they have to triangulate, so to speak, and publicly throw their support behind a man who is their enemy because he is also Israel's enemy. Anti-Zionism trumps everything, even in Lebanon where the violent Jew-hatred endemic to the modern Middle East is weaker than it is most other places.
"Read the rest in COMMENTARY Magazine":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-truth-about-march-14-11685.
(Note: I wrote "a brief post":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/07/the-iraq-war-is.php on this topic a few days ago. This is an excerpt from a longer piece for COMMENTARY.)
Independent reporter Michael Yon has spent more time in Iraq embedded with combat soldiers than any other journalist in the world, and a few days ago "he boldly declared the war over":http://michaelyon-online.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1690%3Asuccess-in-iraq&catid=34%3Adispatches&Itemid=55%23yvComment:
Barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
Barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
I'm reluctant to say "the war has ended," as he did, but everything else he wrote is undoubtedly true. The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. That is a mathematical fact.
If you doubt it, "look at the data":http://michaelyon-online.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=7&Itemid=.
Security incidents, or attacks, are at their lowest level in four years. Civilian deaths are down by almost 90 percent since General Petraeus' counterinsurgency "surge" strategy went into effect. High profile attacks, or explosions, are down by 80 percent in the same time period. American and Iraqi soldiers suffer far fewer casualties than they have for years. Ethno-sectarian deaths from Iraq's civil war plunged all the way down to zero in May and June 2008.
Yon is braver than the rest of us for declaring the war over, but it's important to understand that there are no final battles in counterinsurgencies and it's impossible to pinpoint the exact dates when wars like this end. The anti-Iraqi insurgency — a war-within-a-war — really is effectively over. As long as another such war-within-a-war doesn't break out, Yon will appear more perceptive than the rest of us in hindsight when the currently low levels of violence finally do taper off into relative insignificance.
"Read the rest in COMMENTARY Magazine":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/is-the-war-over–11599.
Michael Yon infuriated a whole swath of his audience some years ago when he said Iraq was in a state of civil war. Only the most committed anti-war leftists wanted to hear it. Vice President Dick Cheney famously and foolishly said the U.S. was "turning the corner" around the same time. Cheney is a politican. Yon is a straight-shooter. So it means something when Yon writes "the following":http://michaelyon-online.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1690:success-in-iraq&catid=34:dispatches&Itemid=55#yvComment:
The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over.
I'm not willing to go that far yet and say the war in Iraq is over. I've been burned too many times by events in the Middle East. Optimism and reality don't coexist easily in that part of the world. But I'll be back in Iraq myself soon enough, and I'll weigh in on that question then.
I should add that Yon thinks we're losing the war in Afghanistan. I'm afraid he's right, and I'm sorry as hell to say it. The American public seems to think we're winning in Afghanistan and losing in Iraq, but that is not so.
I wasn't terribly productive with my writing during the past week. There were too many domestic duties and distractions — including a family reunion and my 20-year high school reunion, which was great fun. My next dispatch is just about ready, however. Look for it here Monday night. In the meantime, use the comments box for an open thread. If you read anything interesting over the weekend, feel free to share.
And be nice in the comments. Don't make me pull over the car.
And it's disastrous to even try. Make of "this":http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=9ae5fcc1-9f89-4a44-8ed9-f6deecb24884 what you will:
Most Arabs only know Barack Obama's name and skin color, so, unsurprisingly, they are fairly enthusiastic about his candidacy. But what are Thomas Friedman's Arab equivalents, the opinion leaders of the Middle East, saying about Obama? A famously diverse group–ranging from idealistic reformers to moralizing Islamists–the Arab world's pundits are almost unanimous in their skepticism of him, offering a sharp corrective to the narrative of a world united in its ardor for Obama. They have been arguing that he is not so unconventional an American politician when it comes to the Middle East, and that the people of the region have reason to be worried about an Obama presidency.
I swore I wouldn't go back to Iraq during the summer. But I'm never able to keep promises like this to myself, so I'm sucking it up and I'm going.
I am not going yet. The trip will be closer to the end of the summer than to the beginning. I have to finish my Kosovo material first. (Thanks, by the way, for indulging me while I take a break from the sandbox. Iraq is hot, depressing, and dangerous, and I faced a choice: either do something else for a bit or burn out. I chose to do something else and write about a less unpleasant topic— though my next dispatch from Kosovo will be rather dark. Go figure. It's not the Bahamas.)
Sadr City, Iraq
This time I'll embed with the military again, and if all goes well I will go to Sadr City. There might be a problem with embedding there, though. I'm not sure about that, and I need to look into it. While the trip is still open-ended, I'd like to ask: where would you send me if you could order me to a specific location? Is Sadr City a good choice, or would you prefer reports from somewhere else? Ever-changing events on the ground might change tentative plans anyway, but I'd still like to know your thoughts — especially if you are one of my generous readers who donates money for travel expenses.
Please let me know what you think in the comments.
During the last week or so, my wife and I saw the first half of the HBO mini-series John Adams on DVD, which so far is excellent and highly recommended. Watching our original thirteen colonies declare and then fight for independence is electrifying. We Americans are accustomed to revolution and war taking place inside other countries, not inside our own. But of course it wasn't always this way. We were born in revolution and war. Revolutions, as most of us have learned since, often devour their children. Reigns of terror and regimes even more grotesque than the last often follow. Other times revolutions are aborted or smashed under jackboots and tank treads. Ours could have turned out very differently than it did.
It occurred to me that I hadn't actually read the Declaration of Independence since high school. So I read it again today, shortly after midnight on Independence Day. If, like me, you hadn't read it for a while (if ever), today, exactly 232 years later, might be a good day to do it again.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
"Read the whole thing":http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm.
Earlier this year "I visited the Iraqi city of Karmah":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/03/the-liberation.php (also spelled Garma), a small city wedged between Fallujah and Baghdad. It was winter, and a time of jubilation and rebirth after the local defeat of the ferocious murder and intimidation campaign waged by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Zoriah Miller, an excellent professional photographer I met last summer in Baghdad, is there now. And he witnessed the immediate aftermath of a horrific suicide bombing just a few days ago. Safety and security in Iraq are, as ever, relative and tentative concepts.
I'm glad Zoriah is okay. Others, however, are not. I know from speaking to him that he was badly shaken up by what he saw and managed to photograph in the few fleeting minutes he was allowed on the scene.
I don't know why, exactly, I'm bringing this to your attention. Partly it is because Zoriah is a better photographer than I. His pictures in general are worth seeing. (He makes his living strictly by selling photographs, while I've made a mere pittance at that task myself.) It is also, I suppose, because the city of Karmah is somewhat important to me personally. I witnessed the re-opening of the market there right after the suicide- and car-bombers were mostly, but not completely, beaten back.
There's another reason, too, one I can't even articulate to myself. I think it's important, at least once in a while, to look at the gruesome handiwork of a suicide bomber. There is no political message in this. Zoriah, I know, has different opinions than I do about Iraq and what should be done about it even though we have seen and experienced some of the same places and people. I do not mean to propagandize or persuade by showing this to you. Make of it what you will. But look, if you can stand it, at what these killers do. "This is now part of our world":http://www.zoriah.net/blog/suicide-bombing-in-anbar-.html.
My friend and traveling companion "Sean LaFreniere":http://seanlafreniere.blogspot.com/ and I awoke at first light on the shores of Montenegro. We originally planned to catch a bus or a taxi up the mountains into Kosovo, but we still had a few hours before it was time to drop off the rental car. So we took a brief detour into nearby Albania, the country that, at least until recently, had the reputation for being the most politically, economically, and criminally dysfunctional in all of Europe.
Robert Young Pelton's Web site "Come Back Alive":http://www.comebackalive.com/df/dplaces/albania/index.htm still warns would-be travelers about the region where Sean and I were headed: "In just a few short years Albania has had the distinction of changing from a country with the most paranoid and overcontrolled communist state ever to a country without a state. It was tricky, but Albanians have risen to the challenge to become Europe's most lawless people at the turn of the century…Being a foreigner, unless you happen to know a couple of the local banditos, you stand an excellent chance of being fleeced. The minute you walk in the door and open your mouth, the $ sign will start ringing for just about everybody there – except you."
Mountains, Northern Albania
Whether that was still true of Northern Albania or not, I didn't know. Neither did Sean. And we were going in there with Belgrade plates on the car, which might not have been the brightest idea we came up with on our trip. The majority of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were displaced by Serb forces during Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing campaign in 1999, so showing up in Albania with a Serbian car only made our detour more potentially dicey than it already was.
If you drive from Montenegro to Albania you will first pass through the beautiful and prosperous ethnically-Albanian region that straddles the border.
The Albanian town of Ulcinj, Montenegro
The Albanians of Montenegro were lucky, I thought as we approached the customs agents, to live under Josip Broz Tito's relatively lenient communist system in Yugoslavia instead of suffering Enver Hoxha's full-bore Stalinist regime just a few miles away in Albania proper. Hoxha, who ranks among the most thoroughly oppressive tyrants in history, made Tito's dictatorship look libertarian.
Rozafa Castle, Northern Albania
The most enduring physical legacies of Albanian communism are the remains of more than 700,000 military bunkers Hoxha's regime installed all over the country as part of his mass mobilization campaign for the entire society. Everyday civilians were expected to hunker down in these things with machine guns and fight off an invasion from "bourgeois imperialists" or internal counter-revolutionaries. Rounded one-man concrete pill boxes still proliferate across the country in fields, in backyards, on the side of the roads, and even on beaches.
Post-communist Albania was an economic catastrophe, and what little progress had been made after the dismantlement of the regime came apart in the late 1990s when both the economy and the authority of the state unraveled. Albania — especially Northern Albania where Sean and I were headed — became by far the most lawless and chaotic place in Europe.
Sheep, Northern Albania
The country now, though, is in a transitional period. The terrible extremes of both oppression and anarchic lawlessness are past.
"Bunkers!" Sean said.
One of 700,000 bunkers built by Albania's communist tyrant Enver Hoxha
Sure enough, just up ahead, perhaps only a mile or so past the border, were a handful of Enver Hoxha's 700,000 bunkers.
I pulled over the car. We got out to take pictures. A large group of children and their schoolteacher excitedly ran up to and surrounded us.
"Hello! Hello!" the kids said. "Mister! Mister! What's your name?"
I felt like I was in Iraq — and I don't mean that in a bad way. I can't go anywhere in Iraq, especially not with my camera slung around my neck, without being mobbed by children. This never happened once in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, or Montenegro, but it happened instantly upon arrival in Albania.
"There is a very nice view on top of this hill," the schoolteacher said to Sean. "Follow us up, I will show you."
Bunker and kids, Northern Albania
So we followed the lady with the kids in tow up the hill above Hoxha's bunkers. Kids grabbed my arm and excitedly asked my name as we climbed.
"My name is Michael," I said to a young boy. "What's yours?"
"Mario," he said.
"Mister, where are you from?" said a little girl.
"America," I said.
"Yay!" The kids cheered.
Albania is fanatically pro-American, which is perhaps a bit counterintuitive to many Americans since it is at least nominally a Muslim-majority country. The conventional assumption that Muslims hate Americans everywhere isn't true.
"You should have seen President Bush's face when he came to Albania," an ethnic Albanian man later said to me in Kosovo. "All over Western Europe he was met by protests, but the entire country of Albania turned out to welcome him. He was so happy. You could see it on his face."
Albanian pro-Americanism resembles that of both Poland and Iraqi Kurdistan. The unspeakably oppressive communist regime pushed Albanians strongly into the U.S.-led Western camp, and the humanitarian rescue of Albanians in Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic's tyrannical despotism bolstered that sentiment even more.
More kids tugged at me and wanted their pictures taken. It was overwhelming, and more than a little bit startling.
Kids, Northern Albania
Slavs in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro are friendly people for the most part, but they are not exuberantly so, at least not to strangers. They are a bit friendlier than Western Europeans, perhaps, but their temperament is still European. These Albanians, by contrast, at least these children, were as ecstatically friendly as Arabs and Kurds.
The view from the top of the hill was as expansive as Sean and I were going to see.
Countryside, Northern Albania
We needed to get back in the car and head into the city of Shkodra for a brief coffee and breakfast before we ran out of time. Our rented car was due later that day in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, and we still had no idea how we would travel to Kosovo without our car.
Shkodra, by European standards, is not doing well. It's ramshackle. Many communist-era housing blocks are still run down and drab.
Housing blocks, Shkodra, Albania
Others, though, have been improved slightly with coats of paint.
Painted housing blocks, Shkodra, Albania
Pharmacy and apartment tower, Shkodra, Albania
Many of the traditional buildings that weren't bulldozed for the sake of "progress" are still a bit rough around the edges.
Shkodra, Albania
"It looks like Mexico," Sean said.
I would not have thought of that, but I can see why he said it. The traditional architecture is of the Mediterranean style, as are traditional (Spanish) buildings in Mexico. The styles aren't the same, but they are recognizably similar.
Traffic was crazy, in both good ways and bad. Balkan people are notoriously bad drivers, but after living in Lebanon I thought traffic everywhere in the former Yugoslavia was perfectly civilized. Albanians drive like Lebanese — which is to say, more aggressively than drivers I have seen anywhere else in the world. Just to underscore the point, I saw a No Honking road sign. The only other place I've ever seen these things — and it was an exact duplicate — was in Lebanon.
No Honking sign, Albania
I'll admit to enjoying that kind of traffic, however. The truth is that people in these countries are not bad drivers. They just look like bad drivers to people from outside. What they are is aggressive, and their reflexes and awareness are much more sharply honed that those of people who routinely drive in tame and predictable traffic. It's fun to join in if you know how and are used to it.
Sean and I had no time to find food in Shkodra, so we decided to just stop for coffee.
"Hello, hello!" two men said as I sat in a metal chair at the table next to them in front of a small brightly painted coffee shop on a main road. They saw my camera and gestured for me to take their picture. So I took their picture. As it turned out, it wasn't just the children of Albania who were outgoing and gregarious with visitors.
Two men, Shkodra, Albania
My chair was right next to a generator. I have no idea what shape Albania's electrical grid is in, but the one in Kosovo is hardly more advanced than Iraq's. Power cuts are common, almost daily, occurrences. Seeing a plugged-in generator outside a café was not a good sign.
When it was time to pay our waiter for the coffee, I realized we had no Albanian leks, the national currency.
"Do you seen an ATM around anywhere?" I said to Sean.
"You're going to go to an ATM just to pay for coffee?" he said.
"Well," I said, "I have some American money. Maybe they'll take that." I seriously doubted the waiter had any interest in currency from Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, or Montenegro.
I pulled an American twenty dollar bill out of my backpack and waved it at the waiter. "Will you take American money?" I said.
"I don't know how much that is," he said. "What's the exchange rate?"
"I have no idea," I said. "We just got here."
"The coffee is from house," he said.
"Are you sure?" I said. "Here, just take the twenty."
"No, no," he said. "I can't take your money. The coffee is from house. Welcome to Albania."
It's too bad we couldn't have stayed longer. From the car it appeared Shkodra has a number of high-end restaurants and cool places to hang out, in addition having the usual European consumer goods for sale alongside more basic shops that cater to people who still have little money. Shkodra is a city in transition, which is often the most rewarding kind of place to visit.
There are many statues of national heroes in town, and the one of Isa Boletini, who led battles for independence in Kosovo against both the Turkish Ottomans and the Serbs in the late 1800s, stood out for its brazen militancy.
Isa Boletini
Sean and I drove north out of town to catch the road into Podgorica, Montenegro's capital.
"There's a lot more money in the countryside," Sean said, "than there is in the city. It looks like everyone with the money to build a new house would rather build it out here."
Mosque and house, Northern Albania
Church and house, Northern Albania
That seemed right. Shkodra wasn't a slum-ridden city, but it still looked a bit rough. The countryside just to the north of city looked solidly middle class and above.
More of Enver Hoxha's crazy bunkers were in place near the Montenegrin border — a lot more.
Bunkers facing Montenegro, Northern Albania
Montenegro is a tiny country. Only half a million people live there today. The capital has fewer than 150,000. Of course Montenegro was part of the much larger and more muscular Yugoslavia when the bunkers were built, but it still struck me as patently absurd that all these pill boxes were set up along the border of such a moderate and non-expansionist country.
When I stopped the car and stepped out to take pictures of bunkers, two young Albanian boys said hello and posed for a photograph.
Two boys, Northern Albania
Sean and I waited in line behind two cars at the border post. A handful of men stood around smoking cigarettes while waiting to get their passports stamped out. One glanced down at our license plate and went bug-eyed. He reminded me that we rented our car in Belgrade when he pointed at the license plate. "You took a Serb car to Albania?" I'm pretty sure that's what he said. He might have said "You're Serbs and you went to Albania?" I can't translate precisely, but it was one or the other.
"We're Americans!" I said in a cheery voice. "We rented the car in Belgrade, but we're Americans."
"Aha!" he said and laughed, as if that explained everything.
"The price is one Euro per kilometer," the taxi driver said at the Podgorica airport where Sean and I had just dropped off the car.
"You're kidding," I said.
"One Euro per kilometer," he said again. "It is the standard rate."
The drive from Podgorica to Prishtina, Kosovo's capital, is around 300 kilometers.
"That's way too much money," I said. Sean and I would be paying the guy almost one hundred dollars an hour. It was not going to happen. It would be better to take a bus or buy a plane ticket than hire a taxi into Kosovo if that's how much it costs. "We're going to have to discuss this," I said.
The Europcar employee who met us at the taxi stand to pick up the car overheard our conversation.
"I can call a friend of mine," he said quietly and conspiratorially. "This guy is charging you too much money.
"Terrific," I said. "Yes, please call your friend."
"Just don't tell this guy I'm calling someone for you," he said. "Tell him you'll take a bus or something."
So we got ourselves a licensed taxi driver who agreed to take us to Prishtina for less than half the amount we were first quoted. He spoke almost no English at all. His vocabulary was hardly better than my extremely limited knowledge of his. Sean and I more of less gave up trying to engage him in conversation and just let him drive.
The road to Kosovo from Montenegro is breathtaking.
Canyon, Montenegro
Few places in the world can boast of such dramatic mountainous scenery. Several Serbs I met in Belgrade said Montenegro is the most beautiful country in all the former Yugoslavia, and from what I've seen, they're right.
Canyon wall, Montenegro
Much of inland Montenegro looks like the Mediterranean region must have looked before the massive deforestation that disfigures most of it now. So few people live in this country that even alongside the major highway into Kosovo is mostly still pristine wilderness. I have never seen such expansive Mediterranean forest anywhere else.
Mediterranean forest, Montenegro
Sean tried to ask our driver Ratko a few questions using simple words and improvised sign language. He made fists with both hands and placed them together. "Montenegro and Serbia," he said, then pulled his fists apart quickly to refer to Montenegro's declaration of independence from Serbia two years ago. "Good or bad?"
"Good!" Ratko said.
Ratko in the restaurant at the Hotel Afa, Prishtina, Kosovo
Sean did the two-fisted maneuver again, only this time he said "Serbia and Kosovo." He was trying to figure out what Ratko thought of Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia.
"Good!" Ratko said again.
Mountains, Montenegro
So far, everyone Sean and I spoke to in the former Yugoslavia thought Kosovo's newfound independence was a good thing — including the Serbs we had coffee with in Belgrade on two separate occasions. The Serbs we met, though — Filip David and Predrag Delibasic — are cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals who don't adhere to the Serbian Nationalist line.
"Montenegro and the European Union?" Sean said.
"No!" Ratko said. "European Union…big Yugoslavia."
I have a hard time imaging how a tyrant and mass-murderer like Slobodan Milosevic would ever be in charge of the European Union, but Ratko's skepticism still made some sense after his experience with an over-sized multinational federation and its violent disintegration.
Ratko took us to a Montenegrin restaurant in a cold valley far above sea level shortly before the sun went down.
Mountain restaurant, Montenegro
After dinner I decided to take a nap in the car. I was tired and could no longer see the scenery anyway. Sean woke me an hour later just as we approached the Kosovo border.
"Mike," he said and shook me awake. "I think if we keep taking this road we're going to end up in Mitrovica. Isn't Mitrovica that dangerous city in Kosovo that we're supposed to avoid?"
"It's fine," I said. "The road goes up to South Mitrovica, but doesn't cross into North Mitrovica. North Mitrovica is the place we need to stay out of."
"Okaaaay," Sean said. He sounded skeptical, but I knew South Mitrovica was fine. North Mitrovica was the place to avoid.
North Mitrovica is a bad place for Americans because it's the most politically radicalized of the Serb cities in Kosovo, and it's the most unstable and violent. Mitrovica used to be a relatively normal mixed Serb-Albanian city, but Albanians have since moved to the south side of the city, and Serbs live almost exclusively in the north across the bridge over the Ibar River that cuts the city in half.
Ethnic map, Kosovo
Mitrovica, Kosovo
Self-described Bridge Watchers — bands of political radicals, former paramilitary fighters, and garden variety troublemakers — have been standing watch on the Serb side of the bridge and harassing those who cross to the southern Albanian side. Sometimes those who attempt to cross are ganged up on by mobs and "beaten up in the street":http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-bridge-watchers-terrorise-mitrovica-786166.html.
Rioting exploded across the Serb side of the city in March when UN soldiers and police tried to clear out a courthouse occupied by Serbian Nationalists opposed to Kosovo's declaration of independence. Tanks were sent into the streets. More than 100 people were wounded in violent clashes. A Serb demonstrator was shot in the head. A police officer from Ukraine was killed by a hand grenade. Kosovo north of the Ibar isn't Iraq, but it's also not a place Sean and I had any business going without an escort, especially at night. Every single person I checked in with about traveling to North Mitrovica — including American soldiers and police officers stationed in Kosovo — warned me to stay out of there unless I was accompanied by soldiers from NATO.
Tanks in North Mitrovica, copyright Getty Images
"I think we're almost to the border," Sean said.
When we reached the last Montenegrin town before the border with Kosovo, Ratko found a civilian man on the sidewalk and pulled the car alongside him, presumably to get directions. The man on the street told Ratko which way to go and gestured left and right turns with his hands. Ratko then asked the man a question, and the man laughed and shrugged and appeared slightly nervous on our behalf. Sean and I assumed Ratko asked if it was safe for us to drive into Kosovo, and the man on the street figured it probably was, but he couldn't be sure.
After we left the last town in Montenegro, the road plunged rapidly from the Montenegrin mountains down toward the high rolling valley of Kosovo. We drove in absolute darkness. There were no street lights, no city lights, no front porch lights, and no oncoming headlights.
Towering Montenegro must make a spectacular backdrop to the west from Kosovo, I thought, and I anticipated looking back in our current direction in daylight from the country below.
We quickly cleared Montenegro's customs and got exit stamps in our passports. Then houses reappeared suddenly in the darkness before we reached the entry point on the other side.
"I guess we're in Kosovo now," I said.
"Yes, Kosovo," Ratko said.
I felt a small flush of excitement. Here was the country where Europe's most recent conflict was waged. American soldiers are still stationed there to prevent another round of war and ethnic-cleansing. In that way, it's the closest thing Europe has to Iraq. To paraphrase former Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel, "Kosovo is not Norway, and it is not Denmark":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2006/07/lebanons-premature-liberalism.php.
But where was Kosovo's entry point?
Ratko's headlights illuminated a sign welcoming us to the Republic of Serbia.
"That's strange," I said to Sean. "Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, but they still haven't taken that sign down?"
"I'll bet that sign isn't long for this world," Sean said.
We saw the entry point up ahead. A gigantic Serbian flag hung on a pole next to the customs house.
"Oh shit," I said. "We went the wrong way. We aren't in Kosovo. We're in Serbia. This is the road from Montenegro to Belgrade, not to Kosovo." Ratko thought he could take us to Prishtina by crossing the bridge from North Mitrovica — the one place in the country even American combat veterans from the Iraq war told us to stay out of. In all likelihood, it's the most dangerous place on the continent for Americans.
A Serb policeman stepped out of the customs house. Ratko had been speeding down the mountain, and the officer held up his open hand for Ratko to stop and stared at him furiously for approaching the border post at such a high speed.
"This is what I tried to tell you when I woke you up an hour ago," Sean said.
"Ah crap," I said. "I was tired and didn't know what you meant. The road we were supposed to take goes to South Mitrovica, and that's what I thought you were talking about. That would have been fine."
"We have to turn around and go back," Sean said.
"It's too late now," I said. "We're here. First we have to get away from the border post."
Ratko stepped out of the car, spoke to the Serb police man, and handed over our passports. I heard him say "Prishtina."
Great, I thought. Now the Serb police know we're trying to get to Prishtina. I hoped against hope that the border guard would tell Ratko about the Bridge Watchers and tell him we couldn't pass. Ratko and I had no language in common, and I couldn't explain it. Serbia also bans entry to anyone with a Kosovo stamp in their passport. It was entirely possible that the border police would throw us out of the country before we could even get in.
The officer took Ratko inside the customs house.
"They're yelling at each other," Sean said.
He was right. I could hear them. I sunk in my car seat and rubbed my eyes. This was not going well.
But Ratko came back a few minutes later with entry stamps in our passports. "Okay," he said. Then he drove us toward Kosovo. I looked at my map and figured out where we were. Kosovo was only twenty or so miles away.
"We have to say something," Sean said. "The police officer didn't warn him. He has no idea what he's doing."
"I know it," I said. I turned on the dome light, pointed at the map, and gestured for Ratko to pull over.
Ratko pulled over.
I didn't know how to tell him about the hazards of going through North Mitrovica. He hardly understood any English at all. So I traced the road on the map with my finger, and when my finger tip reached Mitrovica I made a slashing motion across my throat with my finger.
Ratko freaked out.
Of course I was exaggerating. No one would slit our throats in North Mitrovica. It isn't that bad. But I didn't know how else to say "danger" in improvised sign language. Ratko and I shared at most two dozen words of vocabulary.
"No, no, no, no, no," Ratko said.
"Yes, yes, yes," I said.
I couldn't convince him, in part because he thought I was trying to convince him the situation was much more dire than it actually was.
Ratko pointed outside. "Kosovo," he said.
"No," I said. "We are not in Kosovo. We're in Serbia." I pointed outside. "Serbia."
He had no idea where we were.
I pointed behind us. "Serb police," I said.
"International police," he said.
"No!" I said.
"He wore a Serbian uniform," Sean said. "The sign said Welcome to Serbia. They're flying the Serbian flag. International soldiers wouldn't do any of that."
"If he were an international police officer," I said to Sean, "he would have spoken English to us, not Serbian to Ratko."
"Of course," Sean said. "Doesn't he get that?"
Ratko had an idea. He punched a number into his cell phone, spoke briefly to the person on the other end of the line, and handed the phone over to me. "Serbian friend," he said. "English."
I took the phone from Ratko.
"Hi," I said to the Serb stranger on the other end of the line.
"Hello, Mister Michael," the man said.
"Do you know what's going on?" I said. "Ratko is trying to drive us to Prishtina from North Mitrovica. Do you know about the Bridge Watchers?"
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"Can you explain the situation to him for me please?" I said.
"Listen, Mister Michael," he said. "I follow the news, I know what you are talking about. There was a problem with some extremists, yes, but the situation has been resolved."
"Are you sure?" I said.
"Yes," he said. "I am sure. I follow the situation very closely from Belgrade."
It was certainly possible. Reporters often let the world know when violence and mayhem break out and rarely bother to fill the rest of us in when trouble quiets down. If it bleeds, it leads. If there are no more riots, beatings, or body counts in North Mitrovica, word doesn't get out. Serb reporters, though, are more likely to cover the situation than Western reporters because Serbs are directly involved. So I crossed my fingers and hoped Ratko's friend in Belgrade was right.
I handed the phone back to Ratko. "Okay," I said. "Let's go."
"What did he say?" Sean said.
"He said it's resolved," I said. "He's sure of it. I don't know, but somebody is about to be proven right or wrong by reality."
We reached the entry point into Kosovo. It was manned by German army soldiers. Ratko rolled down the window.
"Hi!" I said to the soldier who spoke perfect English. "We're trying to get to Prishtina. Can we get through this way?"
"Yes, of course," the soldier said. "You can pass."
"There's no more trouble on the bridge?" I said.
"Not today," he said and handed back our passports. "The way is clear now. Enjoy your stay in Kosovo."
Ratko slowly drove past a long line of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other NATO military vehicles.
"Montenegro good!" Ratko said loudly after we cleared what briefly looked like a war zone.
Sean and I laughed. There are no tanks in Montenegro.
I felt relieved after talking to the German soldier. If the road was safe up ahead, he should know. But we still hadn't cleared the Mitrovica bridge into the Albanian region of Kosovo, and I couldn't fully relax until we did.
Serbian national flags were flown from houses even though were no longer in Serbia. Serbs on both sides of the border insist Kosovo is Serbia even though it is not. Kosovo's Serbs even voted in Serbia's most recent election. They now have their own representatives in a foreign country's parliament, as well as their own parallel institutions inside the country they live in.
We drove past a mosque with the top of its minaret blown off. It looked like a gigantic pencil that had been snapped in two. For all the talk of Israel's supposed war crimes against Palestinians and Lebanese, I never saw anything like this in the Middle East. On the contrary, I saw "a mosque in Hezbollah-controlled South Lebanon surrounded by rubble":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001359.html. But the mosque itself was not even scratched. Even Hezbollah mosques are considered inviolable by the Israel Defense Forces.
KFOR (NATO's Kosovo Force) billboards showing two NATO soldiers and a helicopter had been erected in this Serb enclave of Kosovo. I thought it highly unlikely that Serbs in North Mitrovica appreciated seeing those every day.
KFOR billboard, Prishtina, Kosovo
"You know we're banned from going to Serbia now, right?" I said to Sean.
"What?" he said.
"We just got entry stamps into Serbia," I said, "but no corresponding exit stamps. If we leave through the Kosovo airport and don't go back out through Serbia, they will know we visited Kosovo. And they won't let us back in."
"Are you sure?" he said.
"Yep," I said. "We'll have to do a stamp run to conceal our visit to Kosovo or we'll be no more welcome in Serbia than we would be in Syria with Israeli stamps in our passports."
Sean was disappointed.
"I wanted to show my wife Belgrade," he said.
"Then you have to get a new passport."
He needs a new one anyway. His current passport was stamped when he visited the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, so he's banned from visiting Greece. To my knowledge, Serbia and Greece are the only Balkan countries that act like Arab countries and ban even tourists with enemy stamps in their passports.
Ratko had no idea how to find the bridge in North Mitrovica to South Mitrovica, so he asked a random stranger, a young Serb man, in the middle of the night for directions. The young man told Ratko to follow him in his car, and we were taken to another bridge, a smaller one — not the infamous crossing guarded by the thuggish Bridge Watchers — and we crossed into the Albanian region of Kosovo.
"We made it," I said when I saw a sign that said Kosova — the Albanian spelling.
A little more than an hour later, the brightly lit skyline of Prishtina loomed ahead just over a hill.
"At last," I said. It was 2:00 in the morning.
Ratko didn't know how to find our hotel. I showed him my printed map, but it didn't help. None of us knew where we were. So he pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant for help. The attendant shrugged. A young Albanian man who looked like a soul-patched Seattle-area hipster stepped out of his car and came over.
"Hi," I said. "We're trying to find the Hotel Afa. Do you know where it is?"
"Let me see," he said and looked at the map. "Yes, I know where that is."
Ratko spoke to the young man in Serbian.
"Um," the Albanian man said. He understood Serbian, as do all Albanians in Kosovo who were schooled before the 1999 war. But they do not like to speak the language of their former oppressors. He looked at me with a pained expression on his face. "Does he speak…" he said. Then he sighed. "Never mind." And then he spoke to Ratko in fluent Serbian.
"He's Montenegrin," I tried to add helpfully, referring to Ratko.
"It's okay," the man said, "it's okay."
The young man got back in his car and escorted us all the way to our hotel.
"Thank you," Sean and I said when we arrived. "Thank you so much."
"Of course," the man said and shook hands with all three of us. "Welcome to Kosova."
Two days later, Sean and I met two American police officers in the charming Ottoman-era city of Prizren. He and I still hadn't figured out the real story in North Mitrovica, and figured these men might know. One was from Texas and spoke in a very slow drawl. The other was from Southern California.
Prizren, Kosovo
"Was it dangerous for us in North Mitrovica?" Sean said.
"Yes," the American police officer from California said. "There are some real extremists up there, and it only takes one to ruin your night."
"The road is open now, though," Sean said. "So the situation has been resolved?"
"No," the officer said. "This is by no means resolved. Nothing in Kosovo has been resolved. We're at the very beginning of a new stage here."
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All photos copyright Michael J. Totten and Sean LaFreniere
Hezbollah is alarming its Lebanese opponents by expanding its territory through the purchase of property outside Shia areas in Lebanon. Former civil war-era President Amin Gemayel went on television Thursday and said what many Lebanese have feared for months now while this has unfolded.
"There is some sort of military preparation starting from Niha in Jezzine all the way across the entire Western mountain range with military surveillance posts set up from Jezzine to Sannine all the way up to Laqlouq," "he said":http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/getstory?openform&84C5EC2CE1C1A494C2257475001CE552.
If he weren't talking about an army that really does build massive and sophisticated military infrastructure — including deep tunnels and a high-tech surveillance system in Beirut's international airport, of all places — I might suspect he was paranoid or exaggerating.
Amin's Phalange Party is a vehicle for mostly parochial and sectarian Christians, and it has a dark past, as do most parties in Lebanon. His concerns, however, are echoed at the more broad-based and mainstream "online magazine NOW Lebanon":http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=49010. "These are preparations for war," says an editorial earlier this week, "or rather preparations to ensure that if there is a war, Hezbollah's adversaries won't be able to fight one. The party knows better than to enter Christian, Druze or Sunni areas. So it has opted for control of the high ground — high ground overlooking the territories of its foes but also controlling lines of communication between mainly Shia areas in the northern Bekaa Valley, the southern Bekaa, South Lebanon, and Beirut's southern suburbs . . . [W]hat is taking place today has so transgressed the red lines of all communities that what we will almost certainly see in the near future is a dangerous logic of communal self-defense taking over."
Even if these moves by Hezbollah are being misinterpreted by the overly anxious, NOW Lebanon is correct to point out the danger for the simple reason that they are perceived as threatening. Everyone in Lebanon knows all too well why the "logic of communal self-defense" is an ominous development.
Communal self-defense means sectarian self-defense, and sectarian self-defense means exactly the same thing in Lebanon that it means in Iraq: militias. If the police and the army cannot or will not disarm Hezbollah — and they cannot and will not — then the only self-defense options remaining are personal and communal. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that an armed society is a polite society, but he didn't know the Middle East very well.
"Read the rest in COMMENTARY Magazine":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/13661.
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a "a beachhead into the rest of Europe" for "radical Muslims" and "terrorist elements." It's an assertion without evidence. "We've been here for so long," said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, "and not seen any evidence of it, that we've reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat."
Nine in 10 of Kosovo's citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn't quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren't there in significant numbers now, and they aren't likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn't one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn't coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for — as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country — was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren't for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They've had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they're meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo's religious community as well as from secular citizens.
"We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements," said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. "These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds."
"Read the rest in Standpoint Magazine":http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/157/full.
You aren't hearing about it in the Western media, but the truce agreement reached last month in Doha, Qatar, between the Lebanese government and the Hezbollah-led opposition is no more operative than "the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/13131.
"Fighting broke out":http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=48559 in the northern city of Tripoli between Sunni supporters of the "March 14" majority bloc in parliament and gunmen from the Alawite sect loyal to the Syrian Baath regime and Hezbollah. We're not talking about street brawling here. Machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades were deployed. Several houses and a gas station were burned to the ground. Ten people were killed and at least 52 people were wounded.
One of Lebanon's few pro-Syrian Sunni leaders, Omar Karami (he was prime minister during the Syrian occupation), "said the Doha agreement":http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=93486 was only a "temporary truce because historical grudges still exist." [Emphasis added.] He is right about that much, at least. Historical grudges most certainly do still exist, even if the ceasefire doesn't.
Rifaat Eid, who represents Lebanese Alawites, "claims radical Sunni remnants":http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=48482 from the terrorist group Fatah al Islam were involved. "Armed groups from outside the region come to Bab al-Tabbaneh, open fire in our direction and leave," he said. "The fighting was premeditated given the kind of weapons, their quantity, and the Islamic extremist factions that are joining the fighters . . . Is Fatah al Islam gone? I doubt it."
"Read the rest in COMMENTARY Magazine":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/13301.
A gigantic poster of genocidal Bosnian Serb war criminal "Radovan Karadzic":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radovan_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87 hung on the outside wall of a hideous communist-style apartment block.
"Get a picture of that," I said to my friend and traveling companion "Sean LaFreniere":http://seanlafreniere.blogspot.com/ as I drove our rented car through the outer suburbs of Serbia's capital Belgrade. I had the wheel and he had the camera.
"Too late," he said.
We were driving fast on a four-lane road and were almost out of the city. Our road trip from Serbia to Kosovo via Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro was just beginning.
"That's okay," I said. "We'll probably see another one."
Housing blocks, New Belgrade, Serbia
We didn't, however, see another one, not anywhere in Serbia or in Bosnia's Serb-controlled Republica Srpska. Europe's worst living political leaders still have a base of support among Serbs, but it's slowly dwindling.
Communist architecture, New Belgrade, Serbia
Outer New Belgrade looks more or less like what I expected in a post-communist city in Eastern Europe, but Old Belgrade is beautiful, sophisticated, stylish, and fun. Neither Sean nor I had any idea what to expect from Serb villages aside from the fact that they're in no way cosmopolitan as the capital is. Small Serb towns and villages — especially in the Republica Srpska — were also the least friendly places for any Americans brave enough to visit the former Yugoslavia as it violently came apart at the seams in the 1990s. Serbian-American relations are tense again since American-backed Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February this year. Extremists in the capital responded by firebombing the American Embassy and a McDonald's.
Countryside, Serbia
The countryside beyond the city limits was flat agricultural land that looked more or less like the American Midwest. Sean and I could have been in Iowa or Illinois. Bosnia, we knew, is famously much more rugged, and we'd be there in less than two hours.
"We have to stop before we reach the border," Sean said. "I still have thousands of Serbian dinars."
"Just exchange them in Bosnia," I said.
"You can't exchange them in Bosnia," he said. "You can't exchange dinars anywhere outside Serbia."
"You can't?" I said. "Are you sure?" I hadn't heard that before and it didn't sound right. He had a wad of dinars worth almost 200 dollars, though, so I pulled off the highway into a small town that looked just barely large enough that it might have a bank.
"Want to find a bar and drink some slivovitz with the locals?" I said. I was kidding slightly, but only slightly.
Serbian village
"Hmm," Sean said. He didn't know if he wanted to down slivovitz with drunk villagers or not. Neither did I.
We both wondered, though, how well we'd be received if we sidled up to a bar in the Serbian countryside and asked for shots of slivovitz in American English. With only a single exception, everyone we met in Belgrade was perfectly friendly and pleasant despite Serbia's sometimes primitive anti-Americanism.
Orthodox church, Serbia
Sometimes I'm not sure what to make of even the primitive anti-Americanism, let alone the moderate variety. I later met an Albanian woman in Kosovo who frequently travels to Belgrade to visit friends. "I go there all the time," she said. "I have friends there. I'm not paranoid about it. We go out and have a good time. But in the back of my mind I remember they are Serbs. One night I met a "Chetnik guy":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chetniks. He couldn't believe it when I said I was from Prishtina. He said Oh, I killed you during the war. I yelled at him. I screamed at him. I got so mad and felt "my eagle":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Albania coming out. But at the end he wanted to marry me."
Our randomly selected small Serbian town had only one main street. Maybe we would see a bank and maybe we wouldn't.
"There," Sean said. "On the right." They did have a bank. "Park."
There was nowhere to park in front of the bank, so I found a place a few hundred feet down the road.
A badly dressed scruffy Serb man in his fifties who had not shaved in days stared holes through me as he walked toward our car. Sean paid no attention to the man, flung open his door, and started toward the bank by himself. I guessed that meant I would stay with the car.
Scruffy Guy came up to my driver's side door. I looked around. Was I illegally parked? Was I in front of his house?
I stepped out of the car. He said something to me in Serbian.
"Do you speak English?" I said. "Do I need to move my car?"
He pointed to the license plate of the car and jabbed his open hand at me as though I owed him money.
"No," I said. He wasn't a parking attendant. "I am not giving you money."
Scruffy Guy pointed at the license plate again.
"Beograd," I said. "The car is from Beograd." That was obvious from the "BG" on the plate. "So what?" I knew he couldn't understand me, but I had to say something.
He demanded money more aggressively this time.
Scruffy Guy spat out an insult in Serbian and shuffled off. I impatiently spun the key ring around my index finger while waiting for Sean to change his money when Scruffy Guy grabbed the arm of a younger man on the sidewalk, turned him around, pointed at me menacingly as if I were a hated witch or a leper. He said God-only-knows-what in Serbian. He probably said "foreigner" in there somewhere, but I can't be certain. The younger man narrowed his eyes at me briefly, then contemptuously brushed off Scruffy Guy and walked away.
Scruffy Guy wanted money or worse, and he wanted help from his townsfolk. So he pointed his finger at me and yelled something awful in Serbian. Heads turned from every direction. I had no idea what to expect, and I prepared to jump back in the car and lock the door if even a single person approached me.
I no longer had any interest whatsoever in drinking shots of slivovitz in a run-down bar in this town with these people.
Nobody approached me, though. All eyes turned from me to Scruffy Guy, whose reputation in town — I'd be willing to bet at this point — is worse than the reputation of travelers from outside like Sean and myself. His fellow citizens seemed initially startled by my presence, but they seemed to have no interest in doing or saying anything to me. Scruffy Guy was clearly frustrated by his inability to gin up a big scene.
Even so, I was relieved when Sean came back after changing his money. I faced hostility the instant I stepped out of the car, and I was worried he might have run into some trouble as well. He didn't.
We crossed the border into Bosnia on a small village road in agricultural country. No cars were ahead of us in line at the remote border crossing, and none were behind us. The border police at each stop on our way out of Serbia and on our way into Bosnia stamped our passports without saying a word.
Bosnia didn't look or feel like a new country at first. We had only crossed into the Serb-controlled Republica Srpska. This region of Bosnia now has a Serb majority because they ethnically-cleansed it in the mid-1990s.
Sean and I tried our best to follow the map from the border to Tuzla, a city outside the Republica Srpska where we could easily find the main highway to Bosnia's capital Sarajevo. Almost every road sign, though, was in Cyrillic. Neither Sean nor I recognize most of the letters. It's an easy enough alphabet to learn, and we were both able to decipher some of the letters and read it slightly, but the signs were still not what I would call helpful.
Most road signs in Serbia proper are written in both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but the Serbian government in the Republica Srpska couldn't bother with that courtesy even though the majority in Bosnia-Herzegovina use the Latin alphabet. I didn't see a single road sign anywhere in Republica Srpska that pointed toward Sarajevo in any language or alphabet. All signs, instead, pointed to Belgrade or to small nearby villages.
Countryside, Republica Srpska, Bosnia-Herzegovina
And so we got lost. Thanks only to the location of the sun in the sky could we tell that we were heading north toward Croatia instead of south toward Sarajevo. We need to stop for directions, so I pulled into the parking lot at a gas station.
"Let's both go inside," I said and braced myself for another hostile encounter. Serbs in Bosnia tend to be more nationalistic than those in Serbia proper, and we had already had a few minor issues over there.
The station owner didn't speak a word of English, but he understood where we needed to go. He pointed at the map and used hand signals to give us directions to Tuzla. He was perfectly pleasant and charming, but another younger man coldly sized me up from head to toe and let his eyes linger on my watch. I smiled at him as though he hadn't just done that, but he kept up the Balkan Stare until Sean and I headed back to the car.
"Hey," Sean said after another hour or so of driving. "There's a mosque."
On the hill to our left was the first Muslim village we had seen since we entered Bosnia almost two hours before.
Muslim village, Bosnia-Herzegovina
"It looks like a nice little town," I said. It was just off the main road to Tuzla and Sarajevo, yet we both wanted to take a look and compare it with the Serb towns we had been driving through all day. So I turned off and drove up the hill toward the village with a mosque in its skyline.
The instant we entered the village we saw bullet and shrapnel holes in the walls.
Mortar or artillery scars, Muslim village, Bosnia-Herzegovina
None of the Serb towns or villages we passed through bore a single scar from the war that we could see, but the minute we saw a mosque, bang, just like that, we found ourselves in what was a war zone. I'm accustomed to seeing this sort of thing in the Middle East, but this was Europe.
Bosnia is a far cry from Iraq, though. Half the people we drove past on the village road were women. In an Iraqi village, all or nearly all would have been men. Women hardly ever leave the house in villages in most Arab countries. None of the women we saw in this Bosnian Muslim village wore an Islamic headscarf. In Iraq, all or nearly all village women wear an enveloping head-to-toe black abaya. This was the most outwardly secular Muslim village I had ever seen in my life, but it was typical of Muslim villages in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania as I would later see for myself.
The village was small and there was little to see, but neither Sean nor I were completely sure we had just pulled off the road to Tuzla. Perhaps we were lost again and didn't know it. So I pulled into a car repair shop and rolled down the window to ask. A man stepped out of the shop and frowned slightly when he saw the license plate on the car. The first letters were "BG," which told him we were driving a Serb car from Belgrade. Here we go again, I thought.
"Hi!" I said and tried to sound as aw-shucks American as possible. We aren't Serbs, was what I meant to convey. We aren't the people who shot up your houses. We're from a country that kinda sorta helped you a little during the war.
The man smiled. He didn't speak English, but he understood when I told him we were driving to Tuzla and he verified that the road we had just turned off was the right one.
So we continued driving toward Tuzla, in Bosnia proper outside the Republica Srpska, and wherever we saw mosques we also saw blown up houses.
Destroyed House, Bosnia-Herzegovina
There was pain and suffering on all sides during the war. No faction was entirely innocent. I take seriously the following observation written by Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon shortly before the outbreak of World War II: "English persons…of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer."
Minefield warning, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Nevertheless, it's obvious just from driving around that the Muslims of Bosnia really got hammered the hardest in the last war. I don't mean to pick on the Serbs, but the visual evidence, as well as the documented evidence, is just overwhelming.
Destroyed house near Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Two years ago Sean and I drove on a lark "from Istanbul to Iraq":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001119.html, and we passed through dozens of Turkish towns in the countryside on the way. Many Bosnian cities looked awfully familiar. "Welcome to Turkey," Sean said. "We're in Turkey."
We weren't, of course, in Turkey. But Bosnia was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. The similarities didn't surprise either of us in the slightest. There would hardly be any Muslims in Bosnia at all if it hadn't been for the Turkish Empire's expansion into the Balkan Peninsula.
Turkey is politically secular, and culturally secular to an extent. The Muslim parts of Bosnia are noticeably much more so. I don't know why. Maybe it's because Turks were Eastern Muslims before they ever pushed into Europe while Bosniaks were Europeans long before they converted to Islam. Perhaps the answer is simpler than that, or more complicated. I'm no expert in Balkan history, especially not ancient Balkan history, but I know what an Islamist environment looks like and Bosnia isn't one of them. Wahhabi Islamists are trying to radicalize Bosnia, and they are a bit of a problem, but in no way did Bosnia remind me of heavily Islamist areas I've visited, such as Egypt and the Hezbollah-occupied regions of Lebanon.
We drove past a post-modern mosque outside Sarajevo.
"I want a picture of that," I said and pulled the car into the driveway. Sean and I got out. A Muslim man walking out of the mosque flicked his eyes downward at the license plate and jabbed three fingers at Sean, muttered something rude-sounding in Bosnian, and walked around the car.
"Hi," Sean said. "We're Americans." The man just walked on.
"What was that about?" I said.
"He just stuck three fingers at me," Sean said.
"Like this?" I said and made the tri prsta, the three-fingered Serbian Nationalist salute.
"Yeah, that," Sean said.
"Why the hell would he do that?" I said.
The tri prsta means different things depending on who you ask, but they're all related in one way or another to Serbian Nationalism. Predrag Delibasic, a half-Bosnian and half-Serbian writer Sean and I met in Belgrade, told us the three fingers stand for the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Academy of Science, and the Military.
"Maybe he thought we're nationalist Serbs," Sean said, "and he was mocking us?"
I don't know. Maybe he didn't really mean to jab three fingers, and maybe he was just annoyed that I stopped the car in his walking path. Either way, I didn't like how so many people looked at the license plate on the car to figure out who we were — or supposedly were — but I found myself doing the same thing to other people and their cars after I saw that they did it to us.
The next day Sean and I drove up one of Sarajevo's big hills to get a look at the city from above.
Communist housing blocks from hill, Sarajevo
A defunct Austro-Hungarian military fort still sits up there, and it looks like it was used recently by at least one armed faction in the Bosnian War. We saw several mortar-sized holes in the walls.
Austro-Hungarian fort on hilltop overlooking Sarajevo
I parked the car in front of some residential homes at the steps leading up to the fort. A group of young Bosnian men sat at a table in the yard right in front of the car.
"Hi!" I said in English and tried to sound as American as possible. "How are you guys?"
"Hello," one of them said.
I wanted them to know we weren't Serbs in case they looked at the license plate. I wasn't paranoid and thought it awfully unlikely that they would key the car or worse if they actually thought we were from Belgrade, but it only took one second's worth of effort to make sure they didn't.
"We need to stop in Mostar," Sean said on our way out of Sarajevo toward Dubrovnik. "We have to see the Mostar Bridge."
I wanted to see it, too. It's a famous bridge built by the Turks in the 16th Century, and it was recently rebuilt after being destroyed by the Croatian Defense Council during the Bosnia War in 1993.
"We also need to get to Dubrovnik before dark," I said. "This might be the only time we'll ever get to see it, and I want some pictures."
Dubrovnik is a spectacular walled city on the Croatian coast near the border with Montenegro. We booked a hotel room in Montenegro and needed to leave for Kosovo first thing the next morning, so there would be no time to go back to Dubrovnik if we missed it during daylight.
There was no time to stop for proper food in a restaurant, so we pulled into a gas station to stock up on road food. I hoped oranges, bananas, or anything that had some nutritional value would be available, but gas stations all over the world sell little other than junk food, it seems. They had peanuts and pistachios, but the rest of our stock was a pile of cookies, potato chips, chocolates, and croissants. And the croissants were really just Twinkies from Turkey in the shape of croissants.
Sean and I wanted to speed through Bosnia and get to Croatia as quickly as possible, but the Opel we rented in Belgrade drove like it was built with a moped engine. Step on the gas and nothing much happens unless you're at a dead stop on a flat road. Passing slow trucks was impossible if there was a bend in the road anywhere in the same time zone.
The destruction wrought from ethnic-cleansing, including mass graveyards as well as blown-up houses and villages scourged by artillery fire, stretched from one end of Bosnia to the other. It was horrible.
Destroyed Muslim village, Bosnia-Herzegovina
In one otherwise beautiful town on the shore of a lake we drove past a mosque minaret with its top shot off.
"Let's drive to that mosque," Sean said. "I want a picture of that."
"No time," I said. "We have to get to Dubrovnik before dark."
"It will just take a second," he said.
"Would you rather photograph that mosque or Dubrovnik?" I said.
"It will just take a second!" he said again. "Just make a left here."
I made a left.
"You have a second," I said.
I gave Sean a hard time, but was quietly glad he talked me into it. I wanted to be talked into stopping at least once in a while. We were short on time, but neither of us wanted to see Bosnia beyond Sarajevo only from the inside of a car.
Destroyed mosque minaret, Bosnia-Herzegovina
The top of the minaret just above the muezzin's speakers for the call to prayer had been blown clean off. Seeing destroyed churches and mosques in the Balkans reminded me of the Taliban's destruction of Buddha statues at Bamiyan with anti-aircraft guns. Two blocks away from the decapitated mosque was an intact Serbian Orthodox church. This town may once have been a model of inter-religious co-existence, but it's not anymore.
"Okay," I said. "Let's get to Dubrovnik."
This time Sean got behind the wheel. I had done much of the driving and needed a break.
Bosnia is a troubled country with a dark recent past, but it's also extraordinarily beautiful. For some reason that I can't quite explain, it's hard to imagine such a terrible war erupting amid such breathtaking scenery. Sean nearly ran the car off the road when we drove through a canyon between Sarajevo and Mostar. "Oh my God," he said, "look at this place!"
Canyon between Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
I was glad he was driving or I might have actually gone off the road while gawking at the mountains and canyons.
Mostar, also, is stunning. Sean and I couldn't just drive through it without stopping, at least briefly. And besides, we were tired of road food. Potato chips and chocolate chip cookies could pass for lunch when we were in college, but not today.
So we sat at an outdoor cafe near the recently repaired bridge, ate Bosnian kebabs, and drank from bottles of locally brewed beer as the muezzin's haunting call to prayer from local mosques echoed off the looming walls of the mountains.
Mostar Bridge, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Parts of Bosnia look and feel like Turkey, but Mostar looks and feels like nowhere other than Bosnia.
Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
It's a beautiful place and, aside from the mosques and a few blown-up buildings that hadn't been fixed yet, it felt no different from anywhere else in Europe. Westerners who may be afraid of Bosnia for its Islam, and who may worry that places like Sarajevo and Mostar might resemble Iraq or the rough and reactionary immigrant neighborhoods in cities like Paris and London, have no idea what they are missing. We saw no hijabs or bearded fanatics, but plenty of liberated women and their hipster boyfriends drinking beer and wine and having a wonderful time. Bosnia, despite its troubled past, is benign.
Young people, Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
"Let's go," I said. "Mostar is great, but the sun is going down and we don't want to miss out on Dubrovnik in daylight."
Catholic Church, Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
We weren't far from the Croatian coast. It was obvious that many Catholic Croats live in Mostar and in the surrounding region. We saw lots of Croatian flags flying from houses and draped over electrical wires as we moved to the edge of Bosnia and toward the Croatian border.
The coastline of Croatia is extraordinary. Steep hills and mountains rise sheer from the shores of the sea. Wooded islands just off the coast mean the view is stunning in every direction.
Croatian coastline
The sun went down just as the outskirts of Dubrovnik came into view.
Sunset, Croatia
Dubrovnik, Croatia
"We're just minutes too late," I said and sighed. "Out pictures are going to suck." I almost said we shouldn't have stopped in Mostar, but it would have been a mistake to skip Mostar. What we needed was more time.
Old city walls, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Perhaps it was just as well. It's impossible to capture the magic of Dubrovnik in photographs. The medieval walled city on the water is gorgeous and perfect from every possible angle, but what's really special is the feel of the place as an organic whole.
Stairs, old city Dubrovnik, Croatia
Old city, Dubrovnik, Croatia
"This is the most amazing place I have ever seen," Sean said.
I almost objected. Paris is amazing. Istanbul is amazing. The old city of Jerusalem is amazing. Is Dubrovnik really better than those three? I couldn't bring myself to object, though. If Dubrovnik isn't the most amazing place I've ever seen, it certainly ranks at the top with the others.
We both kept saying "wow," around every new corner and wondered why on Earth it took so long to finally visit. I should have gone to Dubrovnik years ago, just after the war ended.
You would not have wanted to be there during the war. At the gate leading up to the old city walls is a map that shows every site that was hit and how much damage it caused.
"Grad Dubrovnik," it says. "City map of damages caused by the aggression on Dubrovnik by the Yugoslav Army, Serbs and Montenegrins, 1991-1992."
Dubrovnik was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site twelve years before the Yugoslav Army shelled and burned it. Aside from the map, however, I saw no evidence that it had ever been under siege during the war. The reconstruction job in Sarajevo impressed me, but they have done an even better job in Dubrovnik.
Many Croatians still nurse a grudge against Serbs — and many Serbs answer in kind — for what happened during the violent demise of Yugoslavia. Some Croatians would like to secede from the region altogether and claim that they are "not Balkan people at all":http://books.google.com/books?id=qTLSZ3ucaZMC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&dq=croatia+%22not+part+of+the+balkans%22&source=web&ots=pQxaDiAGPO&sig=K2ONNTgXBFFPhzLizPPABMKvi3s&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result#PPA148,M1.
Croatia, however, is part of the Balkan Peninsula — "at least its southern half is":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans.
And Croatia was involved in two of the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia. They were victims of ethnic-cleansing and mass-murder by Serbs, but they dished out the same treatment to both Serbs and Bosniaks in Croatia and Bosnia. They haven't liberated themselves from geography, nor have they exempted themselves from the rough and dirty politics of the region.
Even so, the minute Sean and I stepped inside the walls of the ancient city of Dubrovnik, I felt that at least this part of Croatia really was different, even though it lies below the Danube-Sava-Kupa line that commonly defines the region. For the entire trip so far I had half-jokingly called Bosnia and Serbia the "Middle East of Europe," but the joke is I was only half-kidding. Politics in Serbia uncomfortably resembles politics in the Arab world. Bosniaks share the religion of most of the Arabs. Belgrade and Sarajevo felt unmistakably Eastern in different ways.
Dubrovnik, though, looked and felt emphatically Western. I felt like I had passed through an invisible barrier in the dimension and had returned "home" the instant I walked through the gate. I can't tell you what, exactly, made me think of Dubrovnik as "home." I had never been there before, I knew almost nothing about the place in advance, and I stayed for such a brief period I had no time to get past the disorientation and confusion of being in a strange new city and country. But I know what "home" looks and feels like when I freshly return from somewhere else — especially while my heightened sense of stranger's awareness is still at its peak.
Historian "Peter F. Sugar":http://www.amazon.com/Southeastern-Ottoman-1354-1804-History-Central/dp/0295960337/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213929121&sr=8-5 notes Dubrovnik's unusual history in the region in Southeastern Europe Under Ottoman Rule, 1354 — 1804. "The relationship between the little city-state and the large empire," he wrote, "is extremely interesting and sui generis. Dubrovnik was the only vassal state of the Ottoman Empire whose territory was never invaded during its long vassalage, in whose internal affairs the Ottomans did not once interfere, and whose status was ambiguous from the point of view of Muslim-Ottoman jurisprudence."
Most churches in Croatia are Catholic. Maybe it was all in my head, but I felt closer to Italy on the other side of the Adriatic than I did to Bosnia even though Bosnia was less than five miles away. More tourists poked around Dubrovnik than I had seen in Sarajevo or Belgrade. Much of the city inside the medieval walls was designed on a grid pattern. The city once rivaled Venice, and it looked the part.
Still, there was an elusive and undefinable X factor about the place that was unmistakably Western, and I couldn't pin down what it was. I do not know why, but it was somehow obvious to me that, unlike much of the Balkan Peninsula, Dubrovnik had never been culturally transformed by the Turks. Dubrovnik's compass points only West. The East is at their backs just over the mountains.
Montenegro didn't strike me as Western the way Dubrovnik had just done. Montenegro is just…Montenegro.
Montenegro means Black Mountain. In the local language, Black Mountain is called Crna Gora. The Turks absorbed Montenegro into their empire, but it remained a largely autonomous island of Christianity in a sea of Muslim rule — much as Maronite Catholic Mount Lebanon did. Its mountains — which are actually green with forest — are so tall and so sheer that it must have extraordinarily difficult to safely send ground forces in and keep them there if their purpose was to put the country's people under the boot. Anyone who would have wanted to forcibly oppress Montenegrins would have been wise to look upward in terror and say never mind. The Ottomans were, in fact, thrown out entirely at the end of the 17th Century.
Sean and I couldn't see Montenegro yet, though, because we drove along the coast in the dark. It's spectacular. I knew that. I've "seen":http://www.houseinmontenegro.com/images/montenegro-houses.jpg "the":http://www.montenegrotravel.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/montenegro-photo1.jpg "pictures":http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/places/images/photos/photo_lg_montenegro.jpg. But we drove along some of the world's most extraordinary coastline on a moonless night and missed it entirely.
Well, almost entirely.
"Look at that!" I said.
What looked like a well-lit Great Wall of China shot straight up the side of a mountain.
Kotor Wall, Montenegro
"The wall":http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.discover-montenegro.com/Foto/Kotor/Stari%2520Grad/Kotor-City-Walls.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.discover-montenegro.com/kotor_stari_grad.htm&h=357&w=530&sz=43&hl=en&start=4&sig2=cE_0DiJYksXr8D3Vp6wRXw&um=1&tbnid=OBd7G7lxz9o0pM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=132&ei=EiBXSKSePIGaoQSl6PiBAw&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkotor%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG rose above the ancient city of "Kotor":http://www.welterbestiftung.org/images/Kotor-gross.jpg, presumably to prevent any hostile force from raining hell upon the townsfolk from higher ground. I wished we could have slowed down and seen Montenegro properly in the daylight, but we had to content ourselves with seeing part of it the next afternoon as we took the winding narrow road up into Kosovo.
The country is tiny, but it seemed like it took us all night to reach our hotel on the dark and twisting coast road.
"Where exactly is our hotel anyway?" Sean said.
"It's just outside Bar," I said.
"Bar?" he said. "The town's name is Bar? I don't trust a city with only three letters."
Kotor. Budva. Ulcinj. Bar. Who outside of the Balkans has heard of these places in Montenegro? I knew the capital of the country was called Podgorica, but it wasn't until I actually went to the former Yugoslavia that I had a clue how to pronounce it. (Pode-gore-EET-suh.) If I weren't a long-time geek about the Balkans, and if I didn't have a jones to see these countries for myself, I would not have heard of any of these places in Montenegro.
The only thing we really saw of Montenegro on our single night in the country was our hotel room that looked like the inside of the Brady Bunch house.
1970s hotel room, Montenegro
I unfolded our map to plot our route for the next day. Sean and I noticed that if we cut short our sleep time we could make a quick detour around Lake Skadar inside Albania before heading up into Kosovo.
"We could have breakfast in Shkodra," Sean said.
"Shkodra," I said. (The city is also known as Shkoder.) "It sounds exotic and strange. Like a city named by Klingons."
Many cities and countries in the Balkans have strange-sounding names in their original languages. Most Westerners couldn't even name which continent they belong to if their names were not translated. Some are straightforward enough: Serbia is Srbija, Kosovo is Kosova, and Macedonia is Makedonia. But Croatia is locally known as Hrvatska. (I like that name, Hrvatska. It's fun to say, and it has more gravitas than Croatia. I think we should all start calling Croatia Hrvatska.) Montenegro is Crna Gora. Albania is known by Albanians as Shqiperia. Its name means Land of the Eagles.
"I should call up my mother," Sean said, "and tell her we just left Hrvatska, we're in Crna Gora, and we're on our way to Shqiperia. What? she'd say. Where the heck are you? I thought you were in Europe. We are, I'd say. These are countries in Europe. No they aren't."
Neither Sean nor I knew the first thing about Shkodra, the mysterious-sounding place in the supposedly wild north of Shqiperia where tourists just do not go. Hardly anyone went anywhere in Albania until recently. Most outsiders' mental maps of the place might as well have been marked with the words Here There Be Dragons. All I knew then is that Northern Albanian had a reputation as the most lawless place in Europe after a devastating economic and political collapse in the late 1990s.
Robert Young Pelton's Web site "Come Back Alive":http://www.comebackalive.com/df/dplaces/albania/index.htm still warns would-be travelers about the region where Sean and I were going under his heading Dangerous Places: "In just a few short years Albania has had the distinction of changing from a country with the most paranoid and overcontrolled communist state ever to a country without a state. It was tricky, but Albanians have risen to the challenge to become Europe's most lawless people at the turn of the century…Being a foreigner, unless you happen to know a couple of the local banditos, you stand an excellent chance of being fleeced. The minute you walk in the door and open your mouth, the $ sign will start ringing for just about everybody there – except you."
Whether that was still true of Northern Albania or not (it isn't), I didn't know. And neither did Sean. And we were going in there with Belgrade plates on the car.
We left first thing the next morning.
To be continued…
If you've seen "the trailer for Adam Sandler's new movie":http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/youdontmesswiththezohan/trailer1/ You Don't Mess with the Zohan, it may be tempting to write it off as yet another low-brow comedy aimed at fifteen-year-old boys and best avoided by everyone else. But wait. After Hollywood's recent spate of dour axe-grinding films about Iraq, a fun movie featuring an Israeli counter-terrorist as the protagonist is a refreshing change, even if it is no more serious or realistic than a cartoon.
Sandler plays Zohan, an elite Israel Defense Forces commando who feels no pain, can do push ups with no hands, and can catch bullets fired at him in his nostrils. He's a superhero, basically, and his oddly likable Palestinian nemesis ("the Phantom," played by John Turturro) is an equally indestructible comic book arch-villain who also feels no pain and can defy gravity. Zohan's trouble is that he's tired of chasing bad guys, even though he's very good at it. He would rather live in the United States and work in a hair salon. So he fakes his own death and smuggles himself to New York to get away from it all and live the American dream. There'd be no movie, though, if it were that easy. Zohan is spotted by a Palestinian taxi driver, and buffoonish Arab terrorist wannabes plot to take down the Zohan at his place of employment.
The film's lead actor and co-author is a Republican, but of the Rudy Giuliani-supporting "South Park Republican" variety. Andrew Sullivan coined the phrase after South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker outed themselves as irreverent anti-leftists a few years ago. Matt Stone is a registered Republican, and Trey Parker famously said "I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals."
This, then, is no Mel Gibson movie. Gibson's politics, in fact, are swiped at in this movie. No cultural conservative could possibly have written You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Sandler's character becomes the most sought-after hairdresser in New York City because he joyfully includes sexual favors for senior citizens as part of his salon service package. At no point in the film is there even the slightest suggestion that there's anything wrong with promiscuous sex or brazen prostitution.
There's a seriousness, though, beneath the surface of what is otherwise a ridiculous and crude cartoon with live actors. Israelis are portrayed as the good guys, which is not exactly what might be expected from Hollywood these days. Jokes are made at their expense, but the humor is not politically charged. Zohan brushes his teeth with hummus, for instance. His dad stirs it in his coffee.
"Read the rest at COMMENTARY Magazine":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/12311.
Don't miss my friend and colleague Noah Pollak's latest at COMMENTARY magazine. I haven't studied Israeli history closely enough to decide whether or not Ehud Olmert is the worst prime minister in that country's history, but if he isn't "it's a near miss":http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/12251.
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Common Culture / Edition 6by Michael F. Petracca, Madeleine Sorapure
View All Available Formats & Editions
Pub. Date: 02/13/2009
Publisher: Prentice Hall
From Barbie to the Internet, the Simpsons to the malls, Common Culture, an engaging pop culture reader, can help readers develop writing skills while reading and thinking about subjects they find inherently interesting. It contains essays addressing pop culture topics along with suggestions for further reading. Topics covered in the essays include advertising,
From Barbie to the Internet, the Simpsons to the malls, Common Culture, an engaging pop culture reader, can help readers develop writing skills while reading and thinking about subjects they find inherently interesting. It contains essays addressing pop culture topics along with suggestions for further reading. Topics covered in the essays include advertising, television, popular music, cyberculture, sports, and movies.
Product Details
- 9780205645770
- Publisher:
- Prentice Hall
- Publication date:
- 02/13/2009
- Edition description:
- Older Edition
- Pages:
- 656
- Product dimensions:
- 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 Reading and writing About American Popular Culture 1
What Is Popular Culture? 2
Why Study Popular Culture? 4
Active Reading 6
Strategies for Actively Reading a Text 7
An Active Reading Casebook: Three Selections About Barbie 8
Preparing to Read 9
Reading and Annotating 9
Barbie's Shoes Hilary Tham 10
Rereading 10
Reviewing 11
Reading Pop Cultural Criticism 12
The Indignation of Barbie John Leo 12
Reading Academic Analysis 15
"Seen Through Rose-Tinted Glasses": The Barbie Doll in American Society Marilyn Ferris Motz 15
Reading Images 21
Preparing to Read 22
Reading and Annotating 23
Rereading 24
Reviewing 25
The Writing Process 26
Prewriting 27
Freewriting 27
Clustering 28
Outlining 29
Drafting 31
Thesis and Thesis Statement 31
Opening Paragraphs 32
Supporting Paragraphs 32
Evidence 33
Conclusions 35
Distancing 36
Revising 36
Revision Checklist 37
Writing Research on Popular Culture 38
Modern Language Association Documentation Format 41
American Psychological Association Documentation Format 42
Sample Student Essay 43
Role-Model Barbie: Now and Forever? Carolyn Muhlstein 43
2 Advertising 46
Approaches to Advertising 49
The Cult You're In Kalle Lasn 49
Salespeak Roy Fox 54
Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals Jib Fowles 71
How Advertising Informs to Our Benefit John E. Calfee 89
Gender in Advertising 102
You're Soaking In It Jennifer L. Pozner 102
Beefcake and Cheesecake: Insights for Advertisers Marilyn Y. Jones Andrea J. S. Stanaland Betsy D. Gelb 112
3 Television 135
The Cultural Influences of Television 137
Life According to TV Harry Waters 137
TelevisionAddiction Is No Mere Metaphor Robert Kubey Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 147
Watching TV Makes You Smarter Steven Johnson 156
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus Clay Shirky 168
Infotainment 175
Losing Our Religion Russell Peterson 175
Amusing Ourselves to Death with Television News: Jon Stewart, Neil Postman, and the Huxleyan Warning Gerald J. Erion 191
"'Fake" News versus "Real" News as Sources of Political Information: The Daily Show and Postmodern Political Reality," Jeffrey P. Jones 201
4 Popular Music 227
Is Hip-Hop Dead? 229
Rap and Race: It's Got a Nice Beat, But What About the Message? Rachel E. Sullivan 229
The Miseducation of Hip-Hop Evelyn Jamilah 244
5 Things That Killed Hip-Hop J-Zone 253
Music and Contemporary Culture 263
The Money Note: Can the Record Business Be Saved? John Seabrook 263
"Take Those Old Records Off the Shelf": Youth and Music Consumption in the Postmodern Age David Hayes 288
Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: Urban Legends and Popular Music Ian Inglis 310
In Perfect Harmony: Popular Music and Cola Advertising Bethany Klein 328
5 Technology 357
Technology, Individuals, and Communities 359
Breaking Down Borders: How Technology Transforms the Private and Public Realms Robert Samuels 359
The Judgment of Thamus Neil Postman 363
Applications 377
1 Gaming 377
The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play Nick Yee 377
Good Video Games, the Human Mind, and Good Learning James Paul Gee 383
2 Facebook, MySpace, and Social Networking 408
You Have Been Poked: Exploring the Uses and Gratifications of Facebook Among Emerging Adults Brett A. Bumgarner 408
Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life Danah Boyd 422
6 Sports and Games 453
Sport, Stars, and Society 455
Life on the Edge William Dowell the Editors of Time Magazine 455
Champion of the World Maya Angelou 464
The Unbeautiful Game Adam Gopnik 468
Discipline and Push-Up: Female Bodies, Femininity, and Sexuality in Popular Representations of Sports Bras Jaime Schultz 480
Games We Play 508
Jack of Smarts: Why the Internet Generation Loves to Play Poker Justin Peters 508
The Search for Marvin Gardens John McPhee 513
The Meaning of Life Jill Lepore 524
Fixing Kids' Sports Peter Cary Randy Dotinga Avery Comarow 537
7 Movies 550
Film and American Culture 552
The Way We Are Sydney Pollack 552
The Politics of Moviemaking Saul Austerlitz 562
Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Nonliterary Origins of Zombie Cinema Kyle Bishop 572
Apatow and Tarantino: Two Contemporary Filmmakers 591
A Fine Romance David Denby 591
Freaks, Geeks, and Mensches: Judd Apatow's Comedies of the Mature Alex Wainer 603
Pulp Fiction Alan Stone 609
She'll Kill Bill While You Chill Thomas de Zengotita 617
For Further Reading: A Common Culture Bibliography 627
Acknowledgments 633
Index by Author and Title 637
Index by Rhetorical Mode 640
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