When I made my first visit to Belgrade, as a guest of the British Council about 10 years ago, there was a man in the Kneza Mihaila, that central boulevard where all Belgrade comes to promenade, and to protest. He was still there last week. You step on to his big pink scale, he slides the bolt beneath your chin and reads off your weight. He's a big man: his belly touches the back of the scale. And this is a relief. Just about every time I've been back to Yugoslavia in past years there has been less of it to see. It is the incredible shrinking man of Europe.
Could it have been otherwise? Ex-Yugoslavia is a morality play in four wars. It puts an old question with grim relish: can different tribes with different faiths inhabit the same territory in peace? On the evidence so far, the answer is no. What had been, like the man with the pink weighing machine, a generous, varied country of 22 million people, living in six republics (and two self-governing regions, a place called Vojvodina and a place no one had heard of called Kosovo), held together by a big fat chap called Tito, suddenly blew itself to smithereens.
What lit the fuse? When exactly did Yugoslavia go round the bend? Choose your combustible moment. I'd say it was in the last week of June, 1991. That is when Slovenia and Croatia walked out of the federal assembly in Belgrade and declared themselves independent. The wars of secession began almost immediately. Then Bosnia-Herzegovina collapsed into war, Macedonia did a runner, and Kosovo caught fire and is still burning. Some 10 Ten years on, that leaves just Montenegro, with Serbia, in a federation of two. "Montenegro, Ecological State", proclaims the fading propaganda in Belgrade bookshop windows. Another sentimental delusion - it has one of the filthiest coastlines on the Adriatic. If Montenegro separates, Serbia will be alone in a federation of one.
"Let it go," said the Belgrade publisher, Zoran Hamovic. "Yugoslavia is like an old sock that must unravel. First we have the divorce, maybe later the remarriage." When I first came here, Slobodan Milosevic was recently in power. Now he is on trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Belgrade has changed since Milosevic fell. Gone are the swaggering certainties. Belgrade is punch-drunk, excoriated by critics, boycotted by much of the world, and bombed by NATO. It doesn't know where it is. That is hardly surprising. "Zagreb - this way", say the motorway signs - but it's a bad joke. "Kosovo - that way", say the maps, and it really isn't kind. What you get in Belgrade now is the view from the amputation couch. Like a man who has lost several limbs, Serbia still feels phantom attachments - but when the patient tries to walk, he keeps falling over.
There is also this strange amnesia; as if time has raced Serbs away from the way things were, and they cannot bear to think about grey yesterday, or the wars, or Milosevic. But yesterday won't go away. The graves of victims murdered in Kosovo are turning up on the doorsteps of Belgrade, the ghosts are walking.
I stay at the Hyatt, then and now. There are two international hotels in new Belgrade, across the Sava River, reached by the bridge NATO didn't bomb because lots of people stood on it every night with targets pasted to their foreheads. It is a short walk to the smashed Chinese embassy, now overrun by weeds. NATO bombed it because the CIA got the "wrong" address. What they call the "Sorry, wrong number" bombing. It was a mistake that has had unexpected effects as far away as Sarajevo.
In Milosevic's Belgrade, criminality and celebrity merged. Politics moved from Marxism to mystic nationalism (usually about blood and soil, flags and fatherland) to mafiadom (usually about oil or cigarettes or guns). It is a pattern that Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia are emulating.
I wanted to begin my Yugoslav travels where I began some 10 years ago - in Novi Sad, the Hungarian ghost of central Serbia; and to end them in Kosovo, the Albanian enclave. It's easier said than done.
In the early 1990s, when the Balkan wars were breaking out, I came to Novi Sad by train from Vienna, and we were warned to sleep with our heads away from the doors because Hungarian highwaymen leaped aboard in the night and stole whatever they could lay their hands on. Heady times. You could be offered hand grenades in Novi Sad market.
In Novi Sad, the bridges over the Danube are still down. It is June 10- two years to the day since the NATO bombs stopped falling. Traffic is blocked on the river and there is not much inclination to fix things. In an odd way it wasis a good sign. Despite their reputation as fighters, wars are not what Serbs do best, and the last four have been disastrous. So the bargaining has started. If countries upriver want the Danube opened, let them pay for it.
There are other signs of a shift. Sremski Karlovci, not far from Novi Sad, blends Orthodox Serbian buildings and the opulent ochre of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which the little town once belonged. Sremski Karlovci is in gentle ruin but Zoran Hamovic has plans for its revival. He wants to take the old town hall and turn it into Translation City, a home from home for interpreters and translators who use and teach the Balkan languages - Serbian, Croatian, Greek, Albanian, Romanian. Before the Balkan wars, Serbs and Croats spoke the same language, though they would deny it now. Since the wars began, they have been inventing new words and compiling new dictionaries to prove that Serbo-Croat was a gigantic plot by the former Tito regime. And anyway, they can't think of what to say to one another. Hamovic holds that it is useful to talk to your neighbours, and desirable for them to talk back. He wants to encourage it. Anywhere else, this might seem a pretty modest proposal, but in ex-Yugoslavia, where they haven't spoken in years, it is an idea of almost demented good sense.
I take the Vienna express from Belgrade to Croatia. It is about a six-hour journey to Zagreb, the Croatian capital. In a delightful old custom from Austro-Hungarian times, the station master appears at his front door and stiffens to attention as the express slides by. You learn to make the most of delightful customs in the Balkans. When the domes of the Serbian Orthodox churches give way to the pointy-hat steeples of Catholic Croatia, the fun is over.
The train stops at the Serbian border and sits in no man's land for about an hour. Serbian police officers come aboard, documents are scrutinised, checked by walkie-talkie. Then the train inches forward to the Croatian border, sighs, stops , and it all happens again. Change your money, your head, your religion, your language - and the locomotive.
I first saw Zagreb in the spring of 1992, when Croatians fought Serbs in southern and eastern Croatia. You drove down the motorway and turned left for the front lines. In a town called Karlovac, Croat forces faced Croatian Serbs in a war at the end of the motorway. Small polite notices stuck on street corners said "Mine". The military base had been burnt and abandoned by the Yugoslav national army. Inside a great hangar were lines of blackened tanks. An officer of the Croatian militia protested to me that the Yugoslav national army was using cluster bombs, supplied - or at least built - by Britain.
In Croatia, I saw for the first time the blend of domesticity and brutality that marked the Balkan wars. Wars fought in the suburbs, in the meadows. Wars where the sniper would hide in the belfry of the pretty church, where a hospital was raked with fire because it was a hospital, where an old man went on scything a meadow as the shells came in. Wars where tanks were used to blast away the fronts of houses and leave the curtains swinging in the wind, leave untouched the sofa and the children's photos on the wall, leave empty and nameless a place that had been someone's home until a shell sheared off its face.
Backyard wars, neighbourhood wars, wars of no return, where the aim of the victors has been to wipe out every vestige of the neighbour who once lived next door, obliterate his church or mosque and then rip up his grave. Wars where yesterday's loser is tomorrow's ethnic cleanser. For the past 10 years the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia have been playing a deadly game of Balkan poker.
One day in 1992 I saw my first Croatian rally. I was in the great space in front of Zagreb station, King Tomislav Square. It was full of boots, badges, flags and bands. The Croatian leader, Franjo Tudjman, was to speak to his followers - which meant just about everybody, because if you weren't a follower you were an enemy. It was a nationalist fiesta, with songs and symbols and an angry unabashed nostalgia for Croatia's fascist Ustase past, its collaboration with Nazi Germany. There was a swirling baroque intoxication that took me as close I will ever get to something of the atmosphere that must have prevailed at Mussolini's rallies.
After the rally, I sat in the Zagreb Pen Club and heard the chairman make a grovelling apology for some wretched scribbler who had dared to criticise Tudjman's new regime - and no one turned a hair. The Croats of Zagreb said it was "democracy".
They said so loudly, and if you didn't agree they shouted and waved their fists. Their distress was understandable. Dubrovnik was under fire from the Serb navy, and large parts of eastern Croatia, in the Krajina, were in the hands of Croatian Serbs. A fellow writer put it this way: "For us Croats, the old Federation of Yugoslavia is a lost ideal. Unfortunately, for the Serbs, it is lost property.". It turned out a few years later that the Croats also felt pretty strongly about lost property. In 1995, they assembled their armies, bought lots of weapons from Argentina, attacked the Krajina Serbs and drove them out in their tens of thousands to refugee camps in Serbia, where they live today.
Cleanse or be cleansed? Victor or victim? These are very Balkan questions. Who will be which today? What a difference 10 years makes. I am back in Zagreb. No more marching bands, no more of the nationalist tat they used to flog. Everyone is feeling a lot better, they have mobile phones, and all the right brands are in all the shopping centres. Narrow your eyes and you might be - in Europe. A vintage sound truck belting out rap crosseds an empty King Tomislav Square, flying the Croat chequered flag. I don't much like Croatian rap, but it beats the Nuremberg melodies they were playing last time round.
The Croats have set out to reinvent themselves. They've traded Tudjman for the Teletubbies, who beam at you from the new shopping centres;. They've swapped their Ustase past for a European future. They've rebranded themselves as cuddly creatures, the koala bears of the Balkans. Gone are the fists and the neo-fascist nostalgia with its flags and badges. Gone are the war cries. Gone too are 165,000 Krajina Serbs.
From Zagreb I take the train to Slovenia. Ten years ago the Slovenes fought the Yugoslav national army and won in under a fortnight. I suspect that the victory was as much to their own surprise as anyone else's.
I got to Slovenia in April, 1992, shortly after that lime-tree leaf war, and I remember it as a most vivid example of instant tribalism; just add gunpowder and stir. The bullets had barely stopped flying and Slovenia was hacking out a border with Croatia. The border between Croatia and Slovenia consisted of two men in baseball caps, under a Marlboro umbrella. They called themselves "customs" and demanded deutschmarks for a "visa" fee, a request backed by soldiers.
Today, the Slovenian border is permanent, its officials wear spanking Slovenian uniforms and you must change your Croatian money for Slovenian money. Slovenia is strawberries and snowy peaks, yoghurt and yodelling. If Croatia these days is in the business of impersonating a democracy, Slovenia makes a living by giving impressions of other countries. It will do you a convincing Switzerland, or a passable Austria. Slovenia expects to be admitted to the EU any time now. After cutting itself off from the ex-Yugoslav federation, it can't wait to attach itself to another large federal body. And that perhaps explains why, for all its prosperity, there is something twitchy about Slovenia. It has all the eerie animation of a severed limb.
I wanted to go on to Sarajevo from Slovenia. Last time I was in Bosnia, I travelled by road. This time, I have to fly.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is less than an hour by air from Slovenia, but it is several lifetimes removed by any other measure. On that first initial trip by road, in 1992, I went first to Montenegro and stopped at a monastery. Outside, army trucks were rumbling up the road to Sarajevo. In the monastery garden, over coffee and honey and plum brandy, I asked the abbot: "Do you think it is right for a Christian to live with hate in his heart?" He thought for a moment and then he said: "No. But the other side is worse.".
The shooting has stopped in Sarajevo; the sadness remains. Svjetlana Nedimovic and Tarik Jusic are two young Bosnians who keep an eye on what the press and radio media says, saying, who analyse language, who talk witheringly of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their buzzwords - for NGOs drive hard bargains in their steely, gentle way. Those who take their noble shilling are expected to produce evidence that benevolence works, that Bosnians are improving;. Tthe NGOs want value for money, they desire concrete signs of "multiculturalism", "democratisation", "civil society" and the big one - "inter-ethnicity". But this is Bosnia, and what they get is division, rancour, clannishness and cleansing. And Bosnia, like other places in the incredibly shrinking Balkans, goes on shrinking. There are few Serbs left in Sarajevo, TarikJusic says: perhaps 80,000 have left since 1991.
And it is not just the Serbs. The young, the bright, the desperate, are also going.
"Have a look at the Austrian embassy," said Jusic. I did. The waves of people besieging the embassy give the place the look of some ghastly street party. They haven't come to be multicultural, they do not wish to democratise; they are ready to storm the exits. It isn't the happiest thing, losing your young to the diaspora.
And the politicians of Bosnia, it would seem, are not into inter-ethnicity. They prefer power - theirs. No one much cares to step out of line. To question, to disobey, says Nedimovic, is to take a risk. They do not do it in the political parties, intent on retaining power, or in the universities, where those in charge believe that to question is to betray. The poker players of Bosnia are power freaks. They jumped from Tito's communism to nationalism to NGO-dom, and none of it counts - what counts is a gun stuck in your ear. The mood is nicely caught by Angelina Simic, writing in the English paper, the Bosnia Daily: "If I do not control, I do not exist."
Sarajevo, once a city of many sorts of people, of inter-marriage and religious richness, is now a tightly constrained, heavily subsidised ghetto. But it's not all purity in Sarajevo, not at all. And this is where that far-away bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has had the most peculiar results.
It has led to an ever-closer expression of solidarity between Belgrade and the Chinese government, and it led to Milosevic opening his doors to many Chinese visitors wishing to extend their European horizons.
The Chinese connection runs from Belgrade, down through Serbia's unlovely stepchild in Bosnia, the Republika Srpska. From there, more and more Chinese are showing up in Sarajevo. And they haven't come to open restaurants. In some of the roughest suburbs in Sarajevo, said Nedimovic, where the locals don't scare easily, people who survived the war are suddenly terrified. It's the downside of ethnic cleansing. You've just got rid of a lot of alien Serbs and look who moved in next door . . .
Nedimovic keeps a straight face. The feeling, she says, is that Ggypsies are bad enough - now it's the Chinese! "Any minute they'll take over."
In the Balkans, the way forward is often backwards. I flew back to Ljubljana in order to fly forward to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Rebel Albanian fighters in the hills had shelled bits of the city and were threatening to hit the airport.
Thousands of refugees are on the road to Kosovo. No one knows who the men with the mortars a few miles outside the city really are. Macedonian Albanians? Kosovo Albanians? Albanian Albanians? Terrorists, extremists, patriots, mercenaries or plain criminals? A taxi driver called Ahmed offers to take me to Tetovo, where there is fighting. "We could ask who they are," said Ahmed. Then he said: "It will cost you 40 German marks."
We drove for a time; there were lots of Macedonian troops, and Ahmed said: "What happens if I get shot?" I must have looked puzzled. "I mean, what happens to the 40 marks?" said Ahmed. We were turned away by Macedonian troops before we eached Tetovo. They did not know who they were fighting. They asked me to tell them if I found out. I don't.
Nobody knows. But there are two things that everyone in Skopje - Macedonian or Albanian - does know and says repeatedly: "Our politicians, all of them, are useless," and, "We don't want a war. Please let someone make sure there is not a war."
The only "someone" able to stop a war is NATO. The Macedonians see it this way: there is SFOR in Bosnia, and KFOR in Kosovo - surely the time of MFOR is near? They may be right. If it happens, then a great stretch of southern Europe will be frozen uneasily, not into peace but into a kind of paralysis: a condition sufficient to prevent the patient from murdering his neighbours, but not enough to stop the mafias who feast on the pain of the Balkans from preying on the weak and the frightened.
I drive from Skopje into Kosovo, along the route the refugees take, mostly "good" Macedonians fleeing the "bad" Albanian militias. Moral labels are as shifting as Balkan currencies, as shifting as the ground in this earthquake zone, as shifting as the promises of local politicians, and the well-meaning bluster of western friends.
There is a Greek unit of UN troops installed at the crossing point into Kosovo. They park armoured cars in the gardens of the few surviving Serbian Orthodox churches. In the beastly game they play in the Balkans, wrecking your enemies' places of worship, even his graveyards, wins points - and points in the Balkans mean territory. Serbs destroyed many Kosovan mosques; now Kosovans are doing the same to Serb churches.
A great gulf in perception opens between agencies such as the UN, who are here for reconstruction, and local victors, who are here for revenge. One of the splashes of colour on the baking hillsides as you approach the capital, Pristina, is the Kosovo Liberation Army graveyard, rosy with red flags and wreaths.
I was here last in 1992, when sanctions against Serbia were biting. There were electricity cuts. The Grand Hotel had lost the last two letters of its name and the big neon sign on the roof read "Grand Hot". It is as gloomy as ever. Big banners over the main road proclaim "Pristina - European City". Another word favoured on the banners is "transparent". I don't believe it.
Nowhere is less transparent than Pristina. Pristina is as opaque as ever.
The monthly wage - when you can talk in such nonsensical terms - is maybe 60 or 70 deutschmarks (£24 or £28).
They reckon everything in deutschmarks in Pristina, as they do across ex-Yugoslavia. It is the true currency of the Balkans; everything else is paper. And Kosovo takes only cash. Pristina doesn't have a bank worth the name, nor a cash machine;. It takes no cheques and it has no credit cards, but it does have a few posters up preparing people in this cash economy for the arrival of the euro early next year. For what talks in Pristina is money and muscle, mixed in a black economy.
Along the dusty sidewalks, young men are hawking cigarettes, CDs and sunglasses. The cash comes from the troops and bureaucrats, the new occupying forces of NATO and the UN, who have Kosovo in their benevolent bear-hug.
There was a notion, useful while it lasted, that Serbs were nasty but Albanian Kosovans were nice. But this is the Balkans, and no one is nice. When they occupied Kosovo, the Serbs drove out hundreds of thousands of Albanian Kosovans. When Belgrade capitulated after the NATO bombing, the Kosovan Albanians returned and the Serbs fled. For good measure, the Kosovan Albanians drove out the Ggypsies, accusing them of being "collaborators". It is thought there were 100,000 in Kosovo before the conflict began. About 8,000 remain.
I fly out of Pristina airport as the other half of the George and Vladimir show flew in. President Putin had come to present medals to the Russian troops who beat Nato to Pristina airport. I left out of Prisitna with a group of visiting Americans. Cordial Christians they were, and one of them was wearing a "Prayer of Jabez" T-shirt.
"And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying: 'O that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory . . ." The prayer of Jabez has been heard in Kosovo, and it is heard in Macedonia, where the rebels in the hills find that what it takes to enlarge your territory are some mortars; and with a couple of burned-out villages you can carve out a little bit of the country and make it all your own. And if one day you add it to existing Albania, you could end up with something called "Greater Albania". That's a phrase you hear a lot in Macedonia and Kosovo, in much the same way as people used to talk of Greater Serbia when the Serbs were praying the prayer of Jabez.
To get back to Belgrade from Pristina I have to fly via Vienna - more or less the route once preferred by the Ottoman Turks when conquering this part of the Balkans.
What would Tito have made of it all, I wonder? No one mentions Tito's name except to invoke it as the embodiment of some Machiavellian master-spirit, a baleful enigma. He was, they say, an illusionist - Yugoslavia was held together by a dexterous dictator, a brutal dreamer. It was a trick, a sham, an unworkable paradox. Maybe the view of the old magician is shifting: among the banners of the many marches against Milosevic, my favourite read: "Tito come home - all is forgiven."
(Guardian Service)