November 28, 2005
A Pair of Timberland Boots
I had a few moments to spare on my last day in Pristina, so I visited the museum.
I ended up kinda wishing I hadn't.
The museum itself is a lovely two-story building, a renovated Ottoman villa, in the center of town. (Pristina doesn't really have a center, but it's near that big intersection where there are, like, four mosques in a two-block radius.) From the outside, it looked pretty promising. Kosovo has no lack of history, goodness knows. So I was looking forward to... oh, I don't know. Stone Age fertility carvings? Roman coins? Ottoman rugs? Surely something interesting.
Well, yes and no. There was only one exhibit in the museum. It was quite a large exhibit. You could spend a while looking at it. No Roman coins or Greek vases; no, just this one big exhibit.
And that exhibit was...
Can you guess?
Weapons.
Swords. Muskets. Bayonets. Rifles. There were blades from the Ottoman days, and a lot of guns from WWI, and some more from WWII. But most of all, there were modern weapons, the kind used by the KLA to fight the Serbs. No, that's not right. Not "the kind", but the ACTUAL weapons used by the KLA. Some of them, anyway.
They had AK-47s and hunting rifles and hand grenades. They had Bowie knives and 9 mm pistols. They had the terrible .50 caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifles, the ones that can blow a man's head off from a mile away. And then they had some more AK-47s.
It might have been more interesting if the posters -- and they were quite elaborate -- had been in English. But they weren't. Only Albanian.
So, in addition to reinforcing an unfortunate stereotype about Albanians, the whole thing got pretty boring. I mean, after the dozenth or so AK-47, they do sort of run together.
There was one interesting thing. It was a glass case containing a pair of boots. They were nice looking boots, almost stylish. Something made me look twice, and there across the tongues was the label: Timberland.
The boots were there, of course, because they'd been the standard boots of the KLA. But that begs the question: what were Timberland boots doing in a war in the interior of the Balkans?
The answer is, they were sent there by the Albanian-American diaspora. The diaspora always supported the KLA, but after the massacres started -- especially the March 1998 massacre of the Jashari family -- they started emptying their pockets, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to keep the KLA going.
Someone sent along some Timberland boots, and the guerrillas fell in love with them. Apparently 1990s Kosovo was still pretty retrograde in terms of boot technology. The local boots were either heavy, clunky, and chafing, or light, leaky, and prone to disintegrate. The Timberlands, though, were warm, watertight, light, comfortable, and lasted pretty much forever.
The KLA guys were living hard and sleeping rough, hiking up and down icy mountains and fording streams swollen by rain, so good boots meant a lot. Once they got a taste of Timberland, they told their American cousins to go back and get another couple thousand pairs. Which the Americans did. And by the time the war was over, the KLA guerrillas had fallen so deeply in love with Timberland boots that they gave them the highest possible accolade... they put them in their exhibit of weapons, right next to the AK-47s.
Strangely, the Timberland Company has not made use of this remarkable story of brand loyalty. Maybe someone should tell them.
-- Oh, yeah. Those scary .50 caliber sniper rifles? Can you guess where they got those?
American gun shows. Some people have used them to kill elephants, so they're classified as hunting weapons in the US. They're perfectly legal in almost every state. So the diaspora supporters of the KLA bought a couple of dozen of them and just shipped them to Albania. The airlines didn't care as long as they were in sealed checked luggage, and Albanian Customs didn't present any problems that a $100 bill tucked into your passport couldn't solve.
They put the guns into four-wheel-drive vehicles, drove them up into the Accursed Mountains, and then took them over the border into Kosovo on the backs of men and donkeys.
A .50 caliber sniper rifle... well, it's really more like a man-portable piece of light artillery. It will punch through the armor of anything lighter than a medium tank. It'll go through Kevlar body armor like a normal bullet through light cotton. You can use it to take out a truck by shooting it in the engine block.
You can buy them at US gun stores too, but then you have to pass a background check, which can take up to three working days. At a gun show, you don't. Most of the Albanian-Americans could have passed the check, but they were in a hurry. So they just went to the gun shows instead.
Timberland boots and .50 caliber sniper rifles. More reasons for them to love America, I guess.
Posted by douglas at November 28, 2005 09:09 PMSlight correction: I think you mean .50 caliber rather than 50 mm? That would be equivalent to approximately 12.7mm, with "caliber" indicating barrel diameter as a % of an inch (so .50 caliber = .5/0.0394 = 12.69 mm). A 50mm barrel isn't _like_ a cannon, it _is_ a cannon. :^)
And yes, they're scary. A Vietnam vet in my old Guard unit used to talk about sniping at 3/4 mile with an M2 (.50 caliber) machine gun with one round and a night-scope. The newer stuff, like the Barrett (which, if I am not mistaken, is what you were looking at) adds easy man portability. Scary indeed.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at November 28, 2005 11:34 PMHi Bernard,
You're right, of course -- .50 cal, not 50 mm. I have no idea what I was thinking. Just went back and fixed that.
And yes, they were Barretts. The M82 and M82A1, developed for the US Army in the 1980s. Effective range of "over 1500 meters". The specs say they can shoot through a brick wall, or take down a helicopter.
Doug M.
The museum doesn't seem like it's part of the EU/UN/US plan to create greater inter ethnic tolerance in the province...
Posted by: Oskar L. at November 29, 2005 12:40 AMTimberlands are nice boots. If I were back in the land of ice and snow, I'd have a pair myself. But the Timberland Company is a little too hippy-dippy Ben-and-Jerry's socially conscious to really use a KLA endorsement.
On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if some KLA people haven't consulted with the Timberland people for the next design generation.
What the Kosovars really should do, of course, is make their own Timberland knock-offs. Why not? A good boot, that's how Nokia started. And then sell them at US gun shows. (I am only being slightly facetious with this part.)
Posted by: Carlos at November 29, 2005 04:04 AM"Timberlands are nice boots," hmmm... nice but not really ideal for soldiers. They might be fine for campus life but when it comes to serious outdoor activities - hiking, hunting and, I presume, soldiering - there's many more serious boots to get.
As for sniper rifles, they're great for guerilla warfare but hardly the kind of weaponry that wins wars. Whatever message the museum exhibition might convey, it was the US bombers over Belgrade which forced the Serbian army to retreat from Kosovo, not guys from Brooklyn with sniper rifles and Timberlands.
Posted by: Oskar L. at November 29, 2005 11:55 AMOskar, good point. If I were hunting -- Wisconsin is mainly deer, duck, and goose, though there's a bear season as well -- I'd want something more specialized. On the other hand, 'campus life' means something a little different in Wisconsin.
Posted by: Carlos at November 29, 2005 01:40 PMOskar, Timberland makes about three hundred different kinds of boots. Hiking boots, work boots, safety boots, you name it. Don't be fooled by the hippy-dippy ad campaigns. Timberland got their start selling waterproof boots to New England lobstermen -- deeply conservative and extremely picky customers working under incredibly demanding conditions.
The boots I saw were serious, no-kidding rough terrain footwear.
The sniper rifles: keep in mind what the KLA's goal was. They wanted to provoke a conflict that would draw in NATO.
So being able to strike from a distance, and take out JNA personnel carriers and trucks, was a huge step forward. In the context of 1998-99, it meant that the Serbs had to shift away from using light infantry (who could go into a village, search for men and guns, and leave the place ore or less intact) and helicopters (which could hover and force guerrillas into cover). Instead, they had to rely more and more on tanks, bombers, and long-range shelling... weapons systems that tended to smash villages and kill lots of civilians.
Also, during the "hot" phase of the war from March to June '99, the sniper rifles were hugely useful. They helped prevent the KLA -- now fighting in the open -- from being simply overwhelmed by JNA's superior numbers. (Though they did take heavy casualties anyway.) NATO had taken Serb air power off the board, and armor had limited effectiveness in Kosovo. So the Serbs had to shift back towards conventional infantry assaults. For this sort of combat, sniper rifles were extremely handy.
Finally, very few of the KLA were "guys from Brooklyn". There were a few diasporids in combat, but the vast majority were native Kosovars.
Doug M.
Doug,
Here in Sweden Timberland is an overpriced lifestyle brand complete with flagship stores and a kids line. Nice boots, but I don't know anyone who actually uses Timberland boots for hiking or hunting. Maybe for sailing. I didn't know they have a 'serious' line as well.
No doubt sniper rifles are effective att killing people at long range and were one factor which forced the JNA to adopt more gruesome tactics. My point was more that sniper rifles don't win wars.
My point was that its fine for museums to glorify bearded guerilla fighters but it's not what did the job in 1999 and not what's going to do it if there is a next time. The parallel would probably the Chetniks in the Bosnian war - more huff and puff (and terror) than a real military force.
Posted by: Oskar L. at November 29, 2005 03:33 PMThey have "serious" boots, and they're pretty good. That was their original business, before they got into the lifestyle thing. I think it's only a small percentage today, and it may not be easy to find outside the US.
Sniper rifles don't win wars: well, it's pretty hard to pick a single weapons system that, in isolation, "wins wars".
Guerrillas: this is an interesting and important issue. No, guerrillas by themselves don't win wars. On the other hand, the KLA "did the job" in terms of getting NATO to bomb... provoking the Serbs to provoke the world. Had there been no KLA, Kosovo would still be part of Serbia today.
I see what you're saying about glorifying bearded guerrilla fighters: this is nationalist myth-making. But as in all the best myths, there's some truth in it.
Also, it would be hard to come right out and say "we won our liberty by pissing off the Serbs to the point where they forgot themselves and committed abominable atrocities on our people." The heroic KLA fighter -- in his American boots -- is much more palatable.
Doug M.
Claudia,
You're righ, I guess it's only to be expected that a people who fough and won their freedom with guns (with or without the help of others) will want to commemorate that.
It's just that this kind of national myth making isn't very helpful if you want a multiethnic country to work.
Posted by: Oskar L. at November 29, 2005 10:10 PM