The artillery pieces stuck like scarecrows in the middle of the fields in Kosovo are not real; they are decoys. Likewise, the fake bridge of reflective plastic carefully erected next to the real bridge, just to fool Nato pilots. I sometimes have a hard time working out what is real in this war. I have done stints in Belgrade, Kosovo, Albania’s refugee camps and Nato headquarters and, back at the start of the war, I sat through interminable MoD briefings in London. So everybody has had a chance to spin me and, if you are not careful, reality shifts each time you get off the plane.
My struggle with conflicting realities seemed to coalesce on Saturday, when I arrived in Pristina. The telephones no longer work in the Kosovar capital, but the Grand Hotel still gets Sky News and a German channel devoted almost exclusively to a programme called California Beauties, featuring bikini-clad women playing beach volleyball. I turned on Sky and there was Jamie Shea, Nato’s smooth-tongued spokesman, admonishing my colleagues and myself for our seamless incorporation into Milosevic’s propaganda machine. News had come in that Nato had bombed a place called Korisa killing more than 50 Kosovar Albanians. Shea was worried that our party of journalists, escorted by the plump-faced, dark-haired Major Petrovic of the Yugoslav Army Press Centre, might fail to uncover the truth. He hoped our group would “break free of their minders and carry out a full investigation . . . impose their will”. Get real, Jamie. In Brussels it may feel as distant as those fuzzy pictures the F16 pilots see in their cockpit at 15,000 feet but here they have no doubt that this is war. If Britain was being bombed, the government would not allow journalists from the countries doing the bombing to break free and “impose their will”.
Petrovic may wear denims rather than fatigues, but we were in no position to countermand his orders that we should film the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army from Kosovo. So we were taken to a small grassy compound, where 20 beardless boys in bright new uniforms were cleaning their guns under the trees. As the cameras started rolling, they leapt to their feet, loaded their grenade-launchers on to their backs and jumped on to a truck. That was the withdrawal. So much for reality.
Could we go to Korisa now? Not before we saw the general. We were taken up a dirt track to meet General Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Pristina Corps, a stocky, grey-haired man. Asked whether Korisa had been a “military command and control post”, as Nato had asserted, his reply suggested that he takes time off from fighting the KLA to watch Shea on the satellite TV he presumably has concealed behind a fir tree. “First they say the Serbian army did it, then at the second press conference they claim they don’t have precise data. At the third they say they will carry out a full investigation and at the fourth, when the facts are established, they admit their crimes and say they are sorry.” And, no, Korisa was not a command post.
At last, we got to Korisa. Past the deserted Albanian villages, the blackened shells of houses, burnt – presumably – by Serb paramilitaries. Past the occasional fuel tanker covered in camouflage webbing. Past armoured vehicles tucked in beside barns. Round the mountains, past the abandoned ski resort. Into the reality of war.
The scattered clothes and twisted carcasses of tractors were real. The four-year-old Albanian boy whose arm was amputated in Prizren hospital was real, and so was the girl with dark curly hair and the blood-spattered face. I know taking us to see them provides propaganda for the Serbs. But it doesn’t alter reality: these Albanian peasants were injured and others died in an air campaign which was supposed to save them. I saw no immediate evidence that Korisa was a “legitimate military target”. But even if it was, nothing I have seen has convinced me that the bombing is protecting the Albanians, or driving the Serbs out of Kosovo.
From what I could see, the Serbs are herding the remaining Albanian population into places like Korisa to keep them under control, not to use them as “human shields”. It is a standard tactic, dating from the Americans’ “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam. Lazarevic said damage to the military in Kosovo was “minimal”. Despite Shea’s doubts about my professional competence, I am not so naive as to believe what I am told. But the soldiers at checkpoints around Kosovo did not look as if they were on the run, any more than they looked as if they were withdrawing. I saw bomb-damaged barracks, but the Yugoslavs – having been helpfully told there was to be no ground campaign – did not need to maintain large concentrations of troops. They emptied the barracks before the bombing.
I picked up a second-hand poetry book from my shelf at home a few weeks ago, and came across a yellowed newspaper clipping from 1916. On one side were verbatim military communiques: one from France describing how an attack had ousted the Germans from their trenches; the other from Germany describing a tactical withdrawal.
On the other side of the clipping was a poem eulogising troops who had recently fought a glorious campaign at Gallipoli. The poem did not make it clear whether the battle had been won or lost. History eventually tells us whose version of reality represents the truth.
The writer is diplomatic correspondent for “Channel 4 News”
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