An Impressionistic Canvass
The Calamity
It often rains in Skopje nowadays. Sudden, thunderous outpourings of acidulous and gluey fluid. People say it is the pollution from 12,000 tonnes of bombs dropped 20 km from here. The unions warn of a hot autumn. The omens are ominous. It looks like an economic crash rather than a soft landing. Tony Blair was here a while ago. He photo opportunities with photogenic refugees and promised the soft spoken and dreamy eyed Prime Minister of Macedonia 20 million British Pounds. The money never came. Blair's promise went the way of thousands of other promises made by the good and the mighty throughout the history of this melancholy part of the globe.
Emir Kusturice compared the Balkans to an island, drifting listlessly, receding wedding music in the background. It is heart rending and often provokes in me a tsunamic pity, an earthquake of goodwill. The locals are adept at using this resonance, at taking advantage of foreigners vulnerable to their music, to their costumes, to their rustic shrewdness.
In 1963, upon the occasion of a particularly malicious earthquake, which levelled Skopje – they rebuilt it from generous foreign donations. The message sank in: foreigners love disasters, natural and manmade. Foreigners are willing to shell hard currency for this indulgence. The harder the catastrophe – the harder the currency. Thus, calamities became an export industry, a major earner of foreign exchange, the opportunity of a lifetime for a few in exchange for the misery of the many.
The Aftermath
Music drifts in with the fragrances of decaying blossoms and with corpulent mosquitoes. The fragmented echoes of animated discussions. People here talk with their whole bodies. They lean forward and touch their conversants. When they meet or depart they kiss each other on the cheeks and hug passionately. It was, therefore strange to see the body language of the octogenarian president of Macedonia with his much younger Albanian counterpart. They stood apart and made diametrically opposed declarations about the future of Kosovo. Watching the old communist apparatchik Gligorov, I was reminded or Milosevic when he announced the Serb victory in operation Allied Force. He stood so rigid, as though about to break and leaned towards the camera, creating an eerie fish lens effect. Balkanians are not proud people, they are adaptable. But, in an effort to compensate for a deep-set inferiority complex, they react with vanity and narcissism. Co-existence here has never been an easy proposition and the Americans forced strange bedfellows upon each other. Accustomed to the imposing ways of superpowers, the Balkan bowed its head. But it is a contemptuous gesture. Balkanians aim to win through their surrender. They always harbour hidden agendas. Knowing this, they are also paranoid but, as distinct from the classic pathology, they do have enemies. The Balkan will wait until America joins Rome and Turkey. The only commodity it has aplenty is time. So now Gligorov and Mejdani shake hands but they both know the long knives are drawn. They both will wait for the intruders to depart, which will them go on with that traditional pastime of Balkan rulers: slaughtering each other.
The War Chests