SUSO

Exploration is born of our flight towards the future: new visions; new experiences; new worlds. But what happens when we forget to hold onto the here and now?

W / MICHAEL FORDHAM
I / PAUL WILLOUGHBY

In 1997, generational intranaut Michael Fordham roused himself from cultural slumber and travelled to the Balkans to bear witness to a country sinking inexorably below the horizon, the future far beyond its grasp. He was searching for something – a truth that would take many years to surface.

Radovan Karadzic. Srebrenica. Omarska.

Round-edged syllables punctuated by cutting Balkan consonants blur into my half-dreams. It is a muggy night. The covers are off. I have gone to sleep in the spare room after working late, a room that doubles as my office. Karadzic was leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the break up of Yugoslavia and has been indicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal. He is accused by the international community of being the architect of the siege of Sarajevo; the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica; and countless other incidents of mass murder all over Bosnia Herzegovina.

The name of the town arises back into my consciousness from somewhere deeply buried. Malisevo. It is a town about an hour’s drive south west of Pristina. In the half-light of the radio’s digital readout, it is as if I am back there. I can smell the charred carpets of burned buildings. I can smell the stench of death (is it the rotten guts of cattle that had been thrown into the villages’ wells to contaminate the water, or is it human?). Swinging slowly out of bed, I draw down a sheaf of notebooks and a couple of back-up discs, and feed the CD marked ‘Sarajevo-Kosovo 1996-1999’ into the iMac on my desk.

I had taken a laptop with me on my various trips to the Balkans in those years. I would make scribbled notes with a pen and paper out in the field and then edit them on the computer each evening. The comfortingly familiar interface of the Powerbook seemed to balance temporarily the asymmetrical madness I described with my pen. Nothing out there seemed to make sense. I grew to think of that laptop as a kind of sense-making machine, a filter through which I tried to understand not only the medieval regression I was witnessing, but also the logic of my personal explorations. It was all an illusion.

Sarajevo, December 1996

New Year’s Eve in Sarajevo and we start the countdown to 1997. To say the peace here is uneasy is an understatement. The town is riddled with suspicion and a careless, unsettling kind of intimacy. People want to talk about the war as long as you ask directly. It is the thing that distinguishes their youth from mine. One of the many stories I hear today: during shelling you’d see people fucking in the street. People were cranked up on speed. They’d emerge from basement nightclubs and take bets on how exposed they could be having sex. They’d go right down to the houses on the river that faced the Serb positions on the hills and shout abuse at the Serbs. At the weekend they knew that day-trippers from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia were up there taking pot shots at them for kicks in return for a bottle of whisky. One couple made out on the central reservation of Avenue Marsala Tita right outside the Holiday Inn in one of the heaviest bombardments. They tell me about how the Chetniks and the Sarajevans during the siege would swap arms for amphetamine and cigarettes at the tunnels that led out of the city. They tell me about how the whole war was a money-making operation for Chetnik gangsters in shell suits. There is a deep darkness in these kids, fuelled by endless Turkish coffees and cigarettes – and an even deeper weariness. They all seem to love amphetamine. A girl called Valentina, who lived in Dobrinje during the war and whose sister had a baby at the height of the siege, tells me that when the ceasefires came, her little niece couldn’t get to sleep. It was the shelling’s deadly lullaby that she missed. Kids want to be, need to be, cool. They wear the siege like a particularly trendy garment. And people like me confirm their cool. If all you have is the otiose chutzpah of living in a war zone, then you can’t help ascribe to it an aesthetic.

___________________________

I sat there reading these juvenile notes and I was transported. I had first visited Yugoslavia in the summer of 1989. I had been taking a couple of A-levels at night school after a few years travelling. I arrived back home to London in 1988, just when the barmy scene that was Acid House landed and polarised my group of friends. I naturally fell into the group who were out and on one and wearing dungarees and long sleeve t-shirts pulled down over their wrists. The others were relatively straight-ahead, lager-swilling citizens with jobs, starter homes and Golf GTIs. Together we represented the twin blades of the Thatcherite creed. Despite the chemical haze I quickly realised I had to do something to get out of the shit-shovelling, building site existence I was living. So I bit the bullet, signed up for college and was faced with the prospect of a short, sharp trip before it was time to knuckle down to study. I hopped on a flight to Rome, and ended up getting the ferry from Pescara to the Croatian port of Split. From there I boarded a train to Sarajevo.

By the time we arrived at the Bosnian capital I had fallen in lust with a dark-haired girl from Zagreb who happened to share my compartment. Dejana was studying at the University of Sarajevo. At the Croat-Bosnian border Yugoslav troops had boarded and checked ID cards with a threatening, paranoid presence. I didn’t understand. I thought we were in Yugoslavia. When the soldiers left us, Dejana ranted to me about how much she hated the ‘Chetniks’. She ranted also about how she despised the Bosniaks. Dejana seemed to hate everyone. She lived in an apartment building in Grbavica, an area of high-rise estates at the end of the Avenue Marsala Tita, a Soviet-style expanse that was in juxtaposition to the Muslim area down to the east of the city. Like Yugoslavia in microcosm, the two worlds of Grbavica in the west and the old town to the east were the light and the dark, the ancient and the modern. It wouldn’t be long until the two would be torn apart

At night in her bedroom, between drags on her cigarette she’d tell me stories of how the Bosniaks were little shits who were trying to drag the sophisticated, Euro-centric Croats into a medieval maw. She’d rant too about the pig-headed Serbs up in Belgrade who thought that they deserved to rule the whole of Europe because of a battle some of their ancestors fought in Kosovo in 1389. She’d rant about the Chetniks who were her neighbours and their shitty turbo folk and tacky shell suits and spooky Orthodox creed. She appeared to be beautiful, but she was full of hate. I naively thought that beauty and hate were irreconcilable opposites until I arrived in Sarajevo.

I must admit, shamefully, that the strangeness of Dejana’s view of the world added to the attraction. I was more than up for a bit of strange. For a few weeks my world was full of sex, cigarettes, speed and espoused hatred. I was new to most of those things. It wasn’t long, though, until I had obviously outstayed my welcome. University term time was approaching. I was growing tired of hard house and amphetamine (they didn’t really dig E in Sarajevo, I have often wondered what might have happened if they had all got loved up like the rest of us). I left Grbavica one morning without saying goodbye. When I ran downstairs from the 14th floor that scrim-sunned morning (the lift was out of service again) the place reminded me of what it must have been like in East Berlin, 1964 – right down to the unsettling feeling that you were being watched. The next time I saw the place, eight years later, it was more like Stalingrad in 1943. As I waited for the train I sat on the platform with a kid in dungarees singing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ along to a stretched Dylan tape that he played on a shitty mono cassette player. I’ve often wondered what happened to him too.

Sarajevo, December 1996

Radovan Karadzic, mad poet, wavy-haired mystic and architect with military commander Ratko Mladic of the siege of Sarajevo, was the sports psychologist of the Sarajevo football team before the war, as well as a convicted fraud and quack medic. Rudy and Radan, in Bar Internet, tell me of the day a couple of years ago that the Serbs opened up on a football match in Grbavica with mortar and machine gun fire. A dozen or so fans and footballers were killed and over a hundred wounded. Everywhere the echoes of the winter Olympics, which were held in Sarajevo in 1984, resound. Smart Sarajevan graphic artists have subverted the Olympic rings in barbed wire. The anarchist sign strikes through each ring, meant to reflect the unity of the world’s youth. The stadium where the attack happened was in Grbavica, which soon after fell under the control of the ensieging Chetnik armies. I dream about stadiums a lot here. Think about it. Stadiums have a useful function in war. You can gather large numbers of people in them. They can be locked, the people inside controlled. It was in Kosovo stadium, where U2 are due to hold their concert, that Serb prisoners of war were allegedly interrogated and tortured by their Bosniak captors. The stadium was also used as a mass, open-air graveyard during the war. One group of Serbs claim that Serb civilians were massacred here. Various reports claim that the Olympic stadium, in another part of town, was used for the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims. Waves of disinformation from all sides collide here to create a chaotic sea of truth and lies.

"I was more than up for a bit of strange. For a few weeks my world was full of sex, cigarettes, speed and espoused hatred."

___________________________

At college back in London, I developed a theory of action, kind of a personal manifesto. In retrospect, it was entirely adolescent. It went something like this: I wanted to be a writer who reflected experience. I wasn’t interested in writing fiction. The world out there seemed to be bigger and more complex and more endlessly rich in stories than anything I could possibly imagine. I felt it my duty, therefore, to experience as much as I could, in as many places as I could. I would then write about them. I reasoned that I only had a certain time on the planet, and after I disappeared I would be forgotten forever. It was obvious to me that you had to try to see, feel, touch, smell, live – to explore as much as the world had to offer before you faded away.

So I made a series of excuses, a series of blags, ducks, shimmies and dives, and convinced myself and a few other people that I was a writer. I began to think of magazines that would pay me to write for them as magic carpets that could take you on any journey you asked of them. As I indulged myself in acting upon this theory, Yugoslavia imploded. I took note from afar. I did some work for a charity taking convoys of aid to Bosnia. I was due to drive one of their trucks down to the border during the siege of Sarajevo, but exams or my own fear got in the way. Meanhile I was blagging my why into the questionable profession of writing about clubs, music, fashion and sport. But Sarajevo always stayed in my consciousness. Even then I was often awake with dreams about Dejana and her fucked up friends. I had heard that Grbavica had become one of the front lines of the battle of Sarajevo. And I knew I would return one day.

Once I left college, I was lucky. This was the biggest boom time in magazines ever witnessed. The economy in the early ’90s went for a burton, but John Major’s insipid economics created a healthy cult of underground activity that eventually began to pay. My peers had turned into a generation of pie-eyed intranauts obsessed with its own image, and this self-absorption created a boom in media targeted at and created by, kids like me. I saw a gap, muscled my way into Dazed & Confused and convinced the crew there to give me a phone line and jumped-up title on the flannel panel. It was an expenses-only deal but it got me into killer parties, on the guest list at gigs and furnished me with countless gonzo moments sponsored by this or that international fashion brand. All the while I was knocking on the dole, working in a nightclub two nights a week and creaming a healthy wedge out of the stock take. I’ve never had as much spare cash. It was all self-indulgent bullshit but I wanted to keep the bullshit rolling. I rolled it in the direction of places where the tectonic plates of history were grinding against each other. I wanted to tell stories about kids in war zones because, I reasoned, they had the most interesting stories to tell. I was of my generation alright.

Sarajevo, December 1996

It is the first New Year’s Eve since the ratification of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Sarajevo is under the military jurisdiction of IFOR, the international Implementation Force of the Dayton peace agreement. Myself and the photographer rock up to a military airbase somewhere in Kent two nights after Christmas, and we are called to the tarmac to board a Hercules at dawn. We’re briefed about the tactical approach we will make into Sarajevo. This means we will circle high around the airport, out of range of any Surface to Air Missiles that may be kicking around (supposedly brandished by embittered Bosnian Serbs who are convinced they’ve gotten the bum deal out of Dayton). At the last minute, the plane will dive steep and fast to the tarmac, so we’re told not to be alarmed as this is in the interest of everyone’s safety. I love this shit. I try to foster the impression that I am some sort of spook, some sort of special operations operative on a secret mission. The plane dives and for a moment my world is in zero gravity. But the real shock is the sight of Grbavica once we arrive. I wonder how long Dejana had stayed in Sarajevo, and what had happened to her. The armoured IFOR bus edges through the slush from the airport into town. I can sense that I am approaching something I didn’t realise I was searching for. In London I have learned to be cynical. The bread and butter realities of our beliefs, our desires and our dreams are taken for granted. In Sarajevo, the city’s ruptured textures tell another story. Here at the end of the century the future and the past are colliding, creating a negative singularity into which all of these things are transformed. Kids my age here are still listening to house music, still aspiring to the lifestyle they have witnessed on MTV. But they know from experience that medieval hatred lies just below the surface of things. They have experienced all the worst-case scenarios it is possible to imagine.

___________________________

The story was ostensibly to document the youth of Sarajevo returning home and enjoying the trappings of the city’s first peaceful New Year celebration in more than five years. We did the story. Witnessed an incredible release of tension and the benign echo of war at midnight, when those just-in-case AK47s were brandished in celebration of the night sky. But somewhere in those days (I can’t remember how) we had heard for the first time the name of Kosovo. We were told that the horror that had been suspended from Bosnia had resurfaced there, now and with perhaps an even greater intensity. In the media, feel-good factors alternate with moral panics and fear. I was there, at the crux of things, and I was determined to see the reality behind the cloak of appearances. We had a contact, a friend of some of the Sarajevo UN staff, a Serbian guy who had married a Kosovar Albanian girl and was working for the OSCE in Pristina. That was all we needed. We hopped on the bus, and headed southeast.

Sarajevo, December 1996

On the journey down from Sarajevo on the bus, the Byzantine valleys of Bosnia-Herzegovina give way gradually to the broader, flatter plateau that is Kosovo. Heavy industry and tall, smoking stacks feed fetid rivers. I pass through an endlessly grey landscape punctuated by villages made up of whitewashed cinderblock walls and sloping, red slate roofs. If Sarajevo was always exotic, with a personality split between the Muslim Levant and the grim moodiness of the Iron Curtain, Kosovo is another click on the scale of strange. In the widescreen version of the drama it makes sense that Europe’s identity is being scrawled in blood on this earth. But when you get up close the broad sweep is obscured. It is simply hateful. When we arrived in Pristina and met our contact, she asked the photographer, who was born in Slovenia, not to speak Serbo-Croat. “Speak English, please,” she told him. ”It is dangerous to speak that language here. That is the language of the people who hate, who kill us.” We ascribe fantastical genealogies to the languages of the people we fear – and in so doing we demonise them.

___________________________

In retrospect our guides in Kosovo were either truly brave or foolhardy. Either way, they were excited by the prospect that we might tell a story that at the time no one was interested in. We spent two days with a father and son, Kosovar Albanians; the father, Fitim, was a professor of philosophy and the son a medical student. Fitim had been frozen out by the academic establishment because of his ethnicity and was now working in a bakery in his local (exclusively Albanian) neighbourhood. And the son was waiting for money to arrive from his uncle in the States so he could get the fuck out of Dodge and continue his studies in Switzerland. They agreed to show me what had been going on in Kosovo and I was supposed to go away, back to my self-indulgent London life and tell a story in a couple of thousand words about a place just like my hometown, where all of a sudden one bunch of people started killing another group of people, burning their homes, murdering grandfathers and mothers. I was angry. As much as I was angry with the people who had perpetrated this destruction, I was angry with Fitim and Jakob for being so relaxed, retaining their dignity when they could have easily been killed at random simply for being of Albanian descent. I was in a state.

"I was there, at the crux of things, and I was determined to see the reality behind the cloak of appearances."

Pristina, Kosovo, June 1998

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They are too unstructured, too random. They are too unforgiving of context, too integrated into their own reality. In other words, they are too truthful, ignorant of the contexts that we build around our realities in the daylight hours. In the dream I am standing outside a sports stadium with a camera. There is something going on in the stadium that I should be photographing, but am not. I peer through the gates of the stadium, trying, every now and then, to take a snapshot of what is going on inside. A manic, preoccupied man in a nameless uniform is paying me to shoot something and keeps encouraging me while administering the ferrying back and forth of people to and from the stadium. Going in, the people are happy, tanned, laughing. Coming out, they are emaciated, wretched, in agonies. I begin to take pictures of this juxtaposition, the healthy entrants and the desolate people leaving the stadium. I stumble upon an elusive formula and begin through the viewfinder to see the frozen moments of the story I aim to tell. But as I do so, the thought crystallises in my mind, that the story that I am telling is not that which I am paid to tell. I can’t be sure which is the truth. Omarska. Prijedor. Treblinka. I see images of things I was supposed to document, people whose stories I was supposed to tell. I see a schoolhouse, children looking at me with an expression of half-suspicion and half-amusement. I see a schoolhouse and a classroom smashed to bits, hardened turds littered all over the floor and every blackboard scrawled with Serb propaganda. ‘Long Live Greater Serbia’. ‘The Serbian People Unite’. ‘Serbia As Far As Tokyo’. Arcane symbols unknown to the vacuous likes of me but which nationalist zealots and historians of the Balkans would recognise immediately. I smell the rot of cattle whose carcasses are twisted, their guts shovelled out and thrown to the bottom of the wells in the villages. But I also smell the stench of human death. But does human death smell any different from bovine death? Omarska, Srebrenica, Prijedor, Pristina.

___________________________

“You have lost your sense of humour, Michael,” I remember Fitim saying as we got back into the car to leave Malisevo forever. “Fucking right I’ve lost my sense of humour. How do you expect me not to?” I sat in silence staring out at the soldier in the black jump suit as he waved us past the exit of the town and back toward Pristina. “What you must remember, Michael, is that for us, this has been our life for as long as we remember. It has turned to killing only slowly. We must laugh to continue to live.” Later that night I was paralysed, sitting in front of the Powerbook. “How can I make sense of this shit?” I say to the photographer. "That is exactly where you are wrong, Michael,” he replies, suddenly with passion. “If you make sense of this shit you are complicit in it. Your job is not to make sense. There is no sense to war.”

Malislevo, Kosovo, June 1998

If I can’t make sense of it then I have to simply write exactly what I see. Malisevo is a ghost town. 50,000 people, mostly Kosovar Albanians, lived here and in the surrounding district before the Serb offensives began. Here, now, at a time when the Serbs are officially supposed to have withdrawn from all Kosovar villages and OSCE verifiers in fluorescent orange tabards are supposed to be verifying this, Malisevo is a lifeless nightmare cordoned by Serb Special Forces and privateer militia in black jumpsuits. Strangely, they let us through the checkpoints without even stopping us. It reminds me of a dream I had as a kid. I wake up one night and the air raid siren on the top of the local police station is wailing. The siren sings for a couple of minutes, and an icy hand grips me in the middle of my chest. Then everything goes white. I open my eyes and I am walking through my corner of East London. Everything is silent, as if a neutron bomb has detonated, leaving the buildings intact, but all life erased. Everything is empty. But more than its physical emptiness, the place is drained of any residual humanity. It is as if the memory of what was here has been taken by murderous intent. It is as if the place never truly existed, that life itself was just a dream. The silence here is only broken by a pack of dogs snarling at us and fucking in the rubble. The town square is a chaos of debris and the twisted steel of children’s climbing frames. Shattered glass from the smashed shop fronts is everywhere. Kristallnacht. Everywhere are the burnt shells of pharmacies, a toy shop, a hardware store – the sorts of things you’d see in every European town obsessed with consumption. Kosovo is in apocalypse. Any thought that the Dayton Peace Agreement has ended ethnic cleansing in the Balkans is utterly false. See the truth. Hotels, bars, cafés, snappy snaps, grocers’ shops. All a chaos of ruin. The simplest houses are stripped of the paraphernalia of life. The Serbs learned from the siege of Sarajevo that you can’t kill a place by shelling it alone. To truly deal death to a culture and a society, you have to physically remove the people who were its lifeblood, and make it impossible for them to return.

___________________________

That evening in Fitim’s house it was impossible to sleep. I remember it clearly. It was a night like tonight. I was hot and restless in my bed, though outside there was an icy wind. As I read the notes I am transported to something that didn’t end up in the pieces I wrote about Kosovo. Something that remained locked on the discs on this laptop. It was a file of hundreds on that particular disc.

Peja, Kosovo, June 1998

I am conscious that I am here under a false pretence. All I can do is write a few thousand words in a style magazine that will be as a consequence fed back into the complex machinations of misunderstanding about this whole fucked up war. I feel like a tourist to the dark side of the moon. I can’t believe I ever had the arrogance to come here to try to write about these sort of situations. Who the fuck am I? I wanted to explore but have reached a point where the veil has been lifted and there is nothing underneath. There is nothing to explore but the workings of my own head. But I am here. A kid with a laptop and a small budget for expenses. If I don’t write what I see, then there is no reason to be here at all. Okay. As we leave Malisevo this morning we are stopped by a small group of young Kosovar men in ragged peasant clothes positioned in an abandoned petrol station. They have AK47s slung over their shoulders and they are obviously tired and afraid. Fitim apparently recognises one of them and pulls over. They exchange a few words and the men glance at the photographer and me. One of the men jumps into the car, the others jog over to a beaten-up old red tractor at the side of the road. Jakob says that they are going to show us something. A hard lump rises in my throat and a pang of fear shoots through me like a cold blade. The tractor bumps over some rough tracks for about five kilometres, and we follow in Fitim’s old Mercedes. Eventually we approach another huddle of burned Albanian-style houses. The roofs have been destroyed by fire like so many buildings in this area, but unlike the other places we have seen, there are more men there with weapons. They are obviously nervous. As we approach, the guys on the tractor pan across the open countryside with their weapons. We wait in the car while Fitim and the guy with the gun get out and approach the other men, standing at the gate of the compound. More glances are exchanged, and soon they usher us into the courtyard of the property. In the centre of the courtyard there is a stack of humans, just recognisable as men, perhaps old men, burned and bound hand and foot by barbed wire. They are chopped and twisted. There must be four, perhaps five of them. They look strangely small, the size of children, though somehow you can tell they are old men. The men with the guns look at me. I feel strangely detached. I am strangely removed from the reality of the situation. I ask what happened here. Serb paramilitaries began an artillery bombardment, they tell me, and this compound was hit, but not directly. Four families lived here, and as the bombardment began, the families fled with anything they could carry. There were five men who refused to leave. They were the grandfathers and uncles of the families who lived here. They were in their eighties and one was almost 100-years-old. They were too old to run, too old to feel any more fear. Before the Serbs left and the men were burned they had shat all over the charred remains of the house. The old men had obviously been tortured before they were burned, the men tell me. The soldiers usually hide the bodies in mass graves, but sometimes they like to leave a reminder of what they do. Just as a warning. The men with guns are from Malisevo and had come across this place three days ago, when they were trying to round up their families and take them to the hills down near the Albanian border. They had sent a messenger to report the atrocity to the OSCE office in Pristina, and were waiting for the OSCE staff to arrive. But we came first. You must tell this story, they say to me. You must tell this story so NATO will bomb Belgrade with Tomahawk missiles, because Milosevic is like a violent child. He only understands force.

___________________________

It’s dawn now, and I read this again and I remember. This document recalls the moment I had had enough. I realised that through my indulgent pretence I had gone too far. I felt stupid, arrogant and irresponsible. And, ironically, more than any ‘real’ journalist, whose job it might be to package a 30-second piece on the nightly news, or at best a few minutes of word and image for a longer news item, that I had 10 potential pages in which to tell this story. But I didn’t. I didn’t feel that there was context to retell the story of the stack of burnt old men. Any context in which I was to tell this story seemed to trivialise and objectify the experience. Writing it here, even, with the veil of years between the reality and the reflection, seems to be flirting with a pornography. But it seems to be justified now that I have ceased to explore the darker edges of these things, and I simply delve into the memory of what they meant to me at the time. I decided, after returning to London, to embrace the beautiful meaningless of the decadence I had begun to scorn. In fact, I went even further in the direction of decadence than I had been before, and launched a magazine about surf, skate and snowboarding. You can’t get more indulgent than that. I began to see the ability to do such a thing as nothing less than a triumph. From then on, I rode the magic carpet to much nicer places. Because I learned that the darkness is only just below the surface of things, wherever and whenever you are.