Halfway down the Danube

Rugova

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. -- Jorge Luis Borges, The Lottery of Babylon

Unhappy the land that needs heroes. -- Bertold Brecht

We were in the taxi, driving along, when suddenly the taxi driver lunged forward and stabbed the radio with a stiff index finger. The news, which had been murmuring along, suddenly boomed and blared, filling the taxi with harsh Albanian: President Rugova was dead.

"Bah!" said the taxi driver.

There was silence for a few moments. Solemn music began to play. The driver turned the radio back down.

I couldn't resist. "Bah?" I said.

"I didn't like him."

Certainly not everyone liked Ibrahim Rugova. He wasn't all that likable. He was, by all accounts, a remarkably boring man in person. And in his political life, he was stubbornly, utterly fixated on just two ideas: that Kosovo should be independent, and that this should be accomplished by nonviolent means.

Half right.

There are plenty of pocket biographies of Rugova on the web; I don't feel a need to add to them. If you're interested in the Balkans, you probably know all about him already: the pacifism, the rock collection, the scarf.

There are a couple of things, though...

Rugova was accidental. "He was a kind of loser who sat in the corner drinking too much coffee." He was the head of the Kosovo Writers' Union, for goodness' sake. Even in Kosovo, even in Kosovo under Communism -- when people took things like writers' unions sort of half seriously -- this was a little ridiculous.

Rugova got the job because the best candidate didn't want it, and none of the other candidates could tolerate each other. But nobody was threatened by Rugova. His very lack of charisma propelled him to the fore.

Rugova was stubborn, sometimes to the point of willful blindness. Clear into the summer of 1998 -- months after the KLA had become a broad-based popular movement -- he was insisting that there was no KLA, that it was all a Serbian plot to justify a crackdown. To admit otherwise was to admit that nonviolence had failed, and he was not going to do that.

On the other hand, that same stubbornness let him make a political comeback that once seemed completely impossible.

When the NATO bombing started in March 1999, Rugova disappeared for a day or two. Then he popped up in Belgrade, on Serbian television, shaking hands with Milosevic and calling for a peaceful solution. I remember watching that and thinking, what the hell. We're starting a war for this guy, and he's sitting in a chair chatting casually with Slobo?

Now imagine the feelings of most Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovars were driven from their homes that March and April by Milosevic's Operation Horseshoe. My taxi driver was one of them. He and his wife waited on a narrow mountain road for eight days. They had a three-month-old baby girl. There were tens of thousands of people on the road, trying to get into Macedonia. It was cold at night, and there wasn't enough food or water, but that wasn't the worst. The worst was not knowing if the Serbs would come at night to kill them.

No, he didn't like Rugova.

The Belgrade episode remains mysterious. Was Rugova under duress? Or was he sincerely trying to talk peace, somehow imagining he could convince Milosevic to back down? Rugova later claimed that his family had been threatened, but he was oddly reticent about the details.

And his subsequent behavior didn't help. He flew to Italy, then sat out the war there, not returning until well after the fighting had stopped.

When he did, he found himself... well, not quite a pariah, but far fallen from his previous status. Oh, he still had supporters. Rugova, that dull and difficult man, turned out to have a curious ability to inspire fanatical devotion. But in late 1999 and 2000 they were painfully few. Most Kosovars viewed him with some mixture of disillusionment, contempt, even hate. The KLA, the heroic guerrillas who had fought for Kosovo's freedom, were the province's new leaders. Rugova was finished.

Except not. A year passed, and another, and the KLA turned out not to be so heroic after all. Yes, they had fought bravely. But they knew nothing about actually governing. Months after the end of the war, there was no electricity, no running water, no heat in the winter. Some KLA members seemed to be getting rich, but the rest of the province's population was worse off than ever. There were rumors of drug smuggling, of KLA "officers" forming criminal gangs to traffic around the region in heroin, arms, prostitutes, stolen cars. Certainly there was open traffic in loot and apartments taken from the Serbs; and certainly many of the KLA guerrillas conducted themselves with a great deal of swagger. And the former comrades seemed to spend more energy bickering with each other than in working together for Kosovo.

Slowly people came back to Rugova. He hadn't changed. He had been living quietly, doing a little writing, working on his rock collection. People came to think: Rugova might be stubborn, and sometimes stubbornly wrong, but he was what he was. You knew where you stood. Rugova's party, the LDK, won an unexpected victory in Kosovo's first free elections in late 2000; and in 2002, Rugova was appointed Kosovo's President, this time for real.

Rugova is worth a long look, if only because determined pacifists in positions of real power are so rare. Rare anywhere, and doubly so in the Balkans.

But me... I don't have anything more to say about Ibrahim Rugova today.

Posted by douglas at January 31, 2006 06:33 PM