Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

---

	Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Focus Books Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters

III. The secret at the heart

Tito pinned his aspirations for the future on the "hope" that Yugoslavia, if it could maintain its cohesion as a federated state and perpetuate a delicate balance between contending creeds and forces, could find a refuge from the international storm. If Tito did not say exactly these words, his supplication was conveyed in every subtlety and undertone. Perhaps if he had not been a communist, his prayers would have resounded more clearly than these muffled whispers.

******

"When I want to learn the primary truths about life in a country and the political rules that can explain its orientations, I do not turn to historical treatises or extensive political memoirs. Rather, I go straight to its literature. I listen to the poet, the storyteller and the novelist first. Then comes the turn of the historian, the politician and the diplomat."

The person who said this -- and I believe it to be succinct and sincere -- was the ambassador of the United Arab Republic (which combined Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961), Thabet Al-Aris.

Al-Aris was a professor at the University of Damascus before embarking on a career in diplomacy. He and his wife Lidia were exemplary in their representation of the unified state. It was fortunate that they were the UAR's representatives to Yugoslavia during that momentous period of world history -- the age of Kennedy, De Gaulle, Pope John XXIII, Krushchev, Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Mao Tse Tung, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and so many other key figures in politics, philosophy, science and literature in that era which the noted journalist Cy Salzberger called "the age of the last giants".

Thabet Al-Aris believed that, when the historian or politician writes, he is forced by the nature of things to write about the evident, the visual, the mobile. The poet and storyteller, on the other hand, plunge deep into the interior, spy the depths of what we call the "spirit of nations" and probe the cells that alone hold the "secret of survival".

Al-Aris learned that I was interested in Yugoslavia and was looking for primary documentary sources on the country, including its constitution. He told me in effect that all the documentation in the world would not help me understand Yugoslavia better. If I really wanted to understand the country, he said, I should explore its literature. He suggested that I begin with The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric (who eventually won the Nobel Prize in literature for this novel in 1961).

Ivo Andric was imprisoned when the German army invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, and remained in prison until the country was liberated in 1945. When he emerged from prison, he carried with him the final draft of The Bridge on the Drina, but, the novel was not translated from its original Serbo-Croatian until the early '50s, when it appeared in French then, soon afterwards, in English, Italian and German. Al-Aris himself, while he was UAR ambassador in Belgrade, was working on an Arabic translation from the French of this story, which he considered an indispensable key for anyone seeking to understand the circumstances, politics and society of Yugoslavia and its most likely prospects for the future.

In 1961, after Ivo Andric won the Nobel Prize, I read the English version of The Bridge on the Drina, published by Allen and Unwin Books in London in 1960. The novel stands out because its major protagonist is not a human being but that bridge built over the Drina in the 16th century. And, instead of character, passion, plot and denouement, we find the tides of history, religion and culture, empires, conflicts and armies converging on the banks of a river decreed by fate to separate two worlds, or many. Inexorably, these different worlds march upon the river from all directions and clash with one another across the banks, colouring the river with blood, not melted snow.

The story of the construction of the bridge -- and this is a fact, not a figment of the writer's imagination -- begins with the Ottoman Grand Vizir Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. Sokollu, who had risen in the Ottoman court to become the absolute ruler of Istanbul, was originally a Mameluke who had been abducted as a child from his native Bosnia by soldiers of the Ottoman sultan. That was the Ottoman way of creating warriors for the sultan and, sometimes, governors for his provinces, although it had its precedent in earlier periods of Islamic history (under the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, for example), and gave rise to that unique phenomenon in Arab and Islamic history known as the Mamelukes. The far-flung provinces of the Ottoman Empire needed warriors whose allegiance was to the sultan; they required governors whom he could delegate and administrators for whom he was the supreme authority. Nothing could serve these needs better than a large supply of dependent mercenaries, if the term is apt. Children of good stock would be abducted from their parents, taken to the Islamic capitals and raised on a diet of Islam and the martial arts. Their childhood would be loyalty to the sultan, their youth martial arts, their work the collecting of taxes and tariffs and their function to facilitate the sultan's rule.

THE SHARDS OF HISTORY: Top, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer with Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook; centre, left to right, Milosevich, Owen in 1977 and Vance; bottom, Stoltenberg, Baker and Annan

Yugoslavia, the Slavic lands to the north, the nearby Caucasus, parts of the Ukraine and even parts of Germany were open fields for the levying of male children. Awaiting them was a fate that would certainly be better than what they could have expected, had they been left with their families (the cruelty of the system and their anguish at separation aside).

In Egypt and Syria, the Mameluke system generated dynasties that ruled for decades. Many Mamelukes, particularly in Egypt, were originally from Yugoslavia, and specifically Bosnia.

Sokollu, the Ottoman grand vizir in Istanbul in 1565, had been abducted as a child, then had undergone conversion to Islam and an Islamic education as a boy, instruction in the arts of war and the sciences of administration as a young man. He rose to become the most powerful man in the sultanate. But he never forgot his childhood experience, especially the journey over the Drina, where danger lurked for the trembling human cargo, where whips lashed the backs of barefoot children to keep the lines of young captives moving over jagged rocks as sharp as glass, the bitter cold gnawed deep into the bones at night, and darkness was the time to make the perilous crossing of the river. The child who would later become grand vizir almost drowned. His feet left blood on the razor-sharp basalt rocks lining the banks of the river.

When Sokollu rose to the pinnacle of power, he resolved that one of the major projects to commemorate his name would be to construct a bridge over the Drina. The bridge would open the way to the opposite bank and, from there, to the mountains and prairies beyond. It would facilitate the influx of new Mamelukes to serve the interests of the sultanate in war and peace, as warriors and tax farmers. New supplies of recruits could reach their destination without half of them being killed off by the perils of the road, particularly the dangerous crossing of the Drina.

Building the bridge presented some problems, however. Above all, the peoples on the other side of the river -- mostly Christian at the time -- were not especially keen on making the abduction of their children easy for the Ottomans. The second problem would present itself after the construction of the bridge. How would it be possible to control it so as to permit for the passage of caravans of future Mamelukes without opening the floodgates of history and chaos?

Perhaps Sokollu himself epitomised the chaos of history. He was captured from Bosnia. He was born a Christian. His family name, which he later discovered using his extensive influence, was Serbian without a doubt. The incongruities of history manifest themselves dramatically in an action he later undertook in his capacity as the Sultan's vizir. Sokollu managed to reestablish contact with his family, then used his influence to help his brother become the archbishop of the Orthodox Church in Serbia. What a curious irony! An abducted brother turned Muslim Mameluke becomes the most powerful man in the Ottoman Caliphate while the second brother, never captured and never converted to Islam, is raised by a symbol of Islamic wealth and power to become the chief authority of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The Bridge on the Drina is a tragic, bloody portrait of a unique historical theatre. After the first waves of Slavic migration to the south, the nomadic chieftains settled and became feudal overlords. Then the clash of empires and religions intervened. The armies of Rome and the Catholic Church marched from the west and came to a stop at the Drina. The forces of the Byzantine Church advanced from the east and came to a stop upon the opposite bank. Somehow, the Drina was the point at which the advancing armies bearing swords and crosses ran out of breath. Against the contest of empires and creeds, the tribal chieftains turned feudal lords became local kings. Then the fortunes of Byzantium changed with the fall of Constantinople to the armies of Mehmet the Conqueror, after which there began the Ottoman Islamic advance from Albania to Kosovo, and from there to the rest of Yugoslavia.

Herein lies the significance of Kosovo (which means the plain of the blackbird). In the age of Sultan Murad, it was the political gateway to the Ottoman Empire and the religious gateway to Islam. In Kosovo was fought the decisive battle where the hero acclaimed by all Yugoslavia fell: Prince (and Saint) Lazar. Because Kosovo was the avenue into the land of the southern Slavs, the invading Ottoman forces brought with them a large Albanian rearguard. The Albanians who had trailed behind the Ottoman armies settled in Kosovo later so that, by the time the Ottoman armies withdrew, the demographic map of the area had changed.

The Islamic Ottoman incursion was initially triumphant. Its vanguard, militarily and ideologically, reached Belgrade, the capital of the Serb kingdom. The Slavs pinned their hopes of halting the Ottoman advance on the house of Hapsburg, one of the most prominent heirs to the Holy Roman Empire.

The fifth chapter of Ivo Andric's novel brings the beginning of Slavic disillusionment in the dream of independence brought from the west beneath the pennants of the Hapsburg armies. Everyone cheered the declaration that the armies brought to the Slavs of the south (a historical document which, curiously, was written in Turkish), and that was read out at a location not too far from the bridge on the Drina. It said:

"People of Bosnia-Herzegovina,

The army of the Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, has crossed the borders of your country, not to enslave you as did your enemies, the Turkish Muslims, but to bring you his armies to liberate you and to protect your land and beliefs."

By chapter eight, the Slavs of the south had discovered that the Emperor of Austria, like every other king or emperor, was only interested in expanding his realm, extending his influence and securing the glory of his name, forever if possible. And throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina could be heard the melancholy chant:

"In Bosnia-Herzegovina, every mother mourns.

Bereaved of her child, she sheds hot tears

And asks herself over and over, why?

Why did I send my son to serve under the Emperor's banner?"

In short, the self-proclaimed liberator and saviour was, in reality, an invader and conqueror. But for three hundred years, he imposed the rule and culture of the Hapsburg court on the areas of Yugoslavia claimed by his armies.

The Turks spread the call to Islam, first by word and then by the sword in order to ensure allegiance; the Austrian emperor acted no differently. In his campaign to bring the Muslims back to Christianity (Catholicism this time, rather than Eastern Orthodoxy), he, too, started with the book and then took up the sword. His aim, above all, was to ensure prolonged loyalty. Nor, toward the same end, did the Hapsburgs forget to procure allegiance by rewarding the Slavic chiefs and kings such titles as Duke, Count and Marquis, thereby creating a vast aristocracy with its sights set on Vienna. The Austrian capital became their focus of political ambition and culture. There they schemed and built palaces, while at home the strains of Mozart and Hayden accompanied their daily travail of imitating the life of the Viennese court.

Dramatic threads extend from the first page of the story to the end. There is the drama of the land which, over centuries, from the east to the west and from the north to south, was ripe for the picking. There are conflicting patriotic allegiances, all downtrodden. There are religions that, each in turn, opted to lay back in wait: wounded Christianity, torn between two churches, Islam stalked and stifled in a continent that did not want it, and Judaism burrowed in a hole.

I reread The Bridge on the Drina in the late '90s, upon the advice of a globetrotting soldier and reputed military diplomat, Fitzroy MacLean, author of Eastern Approaches, one of the major reference works on the Balkans in World War II. I had heard a lot about the man; I read his book and was greatly impressed. But meeting him never occurred to me. He was nearing 90 and I thought that, perhaps, age might have affected his memory. Then, one night, I was a dinner guest at the home of one of my closest friends, Andrew Knight, chairman of the board of directors and general editor-in-chief of the Telegraph newspapers, and the right-hand man of their owner, Conrad Black, one of the most prominent newspaper barons of modern times. Andrew's home is located on Hampstead Heath, overlooking the lights of London from the southeast. When he called me to invite me he asked, "Do you know who else I invited to dinner tonight?" I was delighted to discover that the mystery guests were Fitzroy MacLean and his wife. I learned that the following day they were setting off on a mountain-climbing expedition in Georgia.

There were six of us around the glass-topped dinner table in Andrew Knight's dining room: our hosts Andrew Knight and his wife, Begum Sabiha, who is Pakistani and somehow related to the Bhutto family; Fitzroy MacLean and his wife, a British traveler about 40 years younger than he; and my wife and myself. Dinner began at 7.00. Sabiha had asked to start early because "Fitz" had a flight that left London at dawn and had to get to bed early, before ten o'clock at any rate. As it turned out, we remained in our places around the dining table without moving until after midnight.

Andrew Knight knew that I was obsessed by what was happening in Yugoslavia. With that self-confident competence so characteristic of the new generation of chief editors who have come into prominence in particular in the US and Great Britain, Andrew steered the conversation to MacLean's experience in Yugoslavia. He cast his mind back to the adventures of his youth and started to tell the story.

In 1943, he was in Cairo as part of the Middle East Command. Cairo at the time was the eastern capital for war operations, while London was the western capital. Fitzroy MacLean received a letter from London telling him to catch the first plane back because Churchill wanted to see him. Churchill was contemplating entrusting him with a secret mission and knew from direct experience that Fitzroy was the man for the job.

MacLean was to spend the weekend in the country home allocated to the Prime Minister in Chequers. When he arrived, he found an assembly of politicians and military leaders (among those he mentioned was General Allen Brook, Imperial Forces chief of staff and architect of the entire Allied war strategy). The "Big Man", Churchill, called them in one by one to speak with them individually for a few minutes in order to commission them with a specific task. When MacLean's turn came, Churchill asked him to go on a secret mission to meet the leader of the communist resistance in Yugoslavia -- a man who was said to go by the name Tito.

During their talk, Churchill told him that the many intelligence reports he had read gave a lot of conflicting information, even with regard to the name Tito. Some reports said it was a code name for the resistance leader, others insisted that it was the pseudonym of a woman. A third set of reports contended that Tito was an acronym for an underground terrorist revolutionary society. Then Churchill said to him: "But it appears in the end that the source of all these reports was the royalist camp in Yugoslavia, and it goes without saying that they do not want the Allies to make contact with the communist resistance."

In the candlelight that flickered on the table in Andrew Knight's dining room, MacLean paused briefly, then resumed. Back in the room in Chequers, Churchill told him, "So Tito leads the communist resistance. That doesn't concern me now. I want a resistance that is effective against Hitler. The fact that it is communist is an issue that can be dealt with later."

Churchill then said: "According to our information, the Mussolini regime in Italy is about to collapse. That means that the western Adriatic coast will be liberated from the Nazis. Now I want to get things moving on the other side of the Adriatic, on the Yugoslavian side. Tito, according to new and reliable information from the imperial chief of staff, has amassed armies of resistance fighters in the mountains of Croatia. He has a transportation line to the sea in a place near the port of Split. I want you to take three or four officers with you and make a parachute landing at their location at night. Then I want you to see to coordinating their efforts with the general Allied war effort."

We sat transfixed by MacLean's narrative. That evening, he spoke at length about Tito's personality and how he was influenced by it. He told us how he set up an arms supply line and communications links with Tito's forces. He also set up a command base for Tito on a half-deserted island in the Adriatic. With the Germans stalking his forces in the Croatian highlands, he was forced to relocate his mountain headquarters frequently, disrupting regular command of the resistance. "One day," MacLean relates, "I got a message that Tito had vanished from the island. I also received several messages from London, one of which was from Churchill, who asked, 'Where's Tito?'"

After several anxious days, MacLean learned that Tito had made a secret trip to Moscow, where he was to meet Stalin to explore the future of the Balkans after the war. Early on, it was clear that the Soviets were going to enjoy overwhelming influence in the region, by virtue of the pattern of the Allied progress along the various battlefronts against Hitler.

Acting on Churchill's instructions, MacLean asked Tito how he could have gone off to meet Stalin without notifying his allies. Tito's response was, "Churchill didn't tell me when he went to a secret meeting with Roosevelt in Quebec."

Towards the end of a delightful evening with living history, Fitzroy MacLean said: "Tito was the first leader in the Eastern Bloc to defy Stalin and stand up to the Soviet Union. He believed that Yugoslavia's path to communism did not necessarily have to pass through Moscow. Stalin wanted to deliver a blow that would put Tito in his place. Tito, by striking a delicate balance with the West, made Stalin's bid very risky. It is ironic that Yugoslavia, which was the closest communist country to Washington and the most distant from Moscow, now appears to be heading for war with Washington. Isn't that odd? All those changes. All those surprises."

As we were just about to leave the table, MacLean added, "But it would not appear all that odd if we had studied Yugoslavia more closely."

I could hear the sound of a clock striking midnight. MacLean continued: "There is one word. I believe it comes from Arabic. It is the only word the Yugoslavians kept from Ottoman times. It comes from the Arabic 'inaad. It is charged with connotations. It means staunch resistance, obstinate pride and an overriding tenacity, willingness to make any sacrifice at all, even to the extent of murder or martyrdom.

"After inad -- which is the key to the Yugoslavian personality -- there is another key to understanding the history of Yugoslavia. This is The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric. If you read it, you will discover that the spectacle you see in Yugoslavia now, however strange it may appear, is a natural, vibrant and ongoing echo of history; a past that is still alive."

We were to take Fitzroy MacLean and his wife to their home in Holland Park, which was on the way to our hotel in the heart of London. In fact, I had more than one reason to drive them home. First, he had offered to present me with an autographed copy of his Eastern Approaches, which he had at his house. Second, he was still talking, and I wanted to listen.

In the car, the diplomat and veteran soldier continued, his words heavy with epic significance:

"Some historical wounds heal, leaving only a scar to indicate the place the skin was ruptured. Other wounds heal over, but the pain remains beneath the surface. Other wounds continue to bleed and fester over the years. That is the kind of wound Yugoslavia has.

"Sometimes I watch what is going on in Yugoslavia and realise that stages of history are still encountering one another in the present. Distant graves are exchanging curses with closer ones. Corpses are rising from beneath the ground, grasping for swords and crying out for old blood. The dead are throttling the dead."

(There is something about Yugoslavia that makes people talk about it in tones reminiscent of the lamentations of Greek tragedies -- or so I thought to myself.)

Continue

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg