addressed – by the media. Stateless, defenceless and finally voiceless. Eventually, posing as emergency workers to slip through the police lines, the press were able to enter the field and talk directly with people who had no idea when or how their ordeal would end.
Gaps began appearing in the screen of objectification thrown up around them, but these did nothing to alleviate the mixture of apprehension and dislike with which the intruders were greeted in Macedonia. Here, above all, they were seen as a potential threat to national stability (and ‘Slav’ ascendancy), already under pressure from the country’s Albanian minority. The desultory tones of Western governments – slow to offer support to the Macedonians in the face of this extraordinary crisis – gave rise to anger. There was much to extenuate the reaction of this little country to the overwhelming influx of refugees – it was no worse than the worst reactions in wealthier countries to the arrival of Kosovans – but in the end, it looked very much like a version of the same hostility that had driven people from their homes in the first place.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarked that ‘those whom the persecutor had singled out as the scum of the earth – Jews, Trotskyites etc – actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere.’ She was writing about the ‘denationalisations’ of the 1930s under Hitler and Stalin. The Kosovan refugees fleeing into Albania were spared the indignities of the field at Blace. They came in carts, towed by tractors, along the flaring snowline of Pastrik, down into a country that existed only in name, but which was once the lodestone of every militant Kosovan’s irredentist dreams. Here they were lodged by distant Albanian cousins: in Kukes, in the north of Albania, I saw twenty-six people living in an apartment that a family of four could have managed in Slough or Sarcelles. Yet there was a bitter aftertaste to this draught of hospitality, for it proved that blood and filiation are the best guarantees of sanctuary and that outside their clan, refugees have little to fall back on. In millions of cases, to be an asylum seeker is to be a stranger on trial. He is accused of nothing more palpable than his intentions, but these are assumed to be bad and the burden of proof rests with the defence. The ethnic Albanians forced out of Kosovo into Macedonia were not even put in the dock.
Reviewing what had happened during the 1930s, Arendt wrote at length about the capacity of nation states to project their prejudices. (Of these she had first-hand knowledge: she had left Germany in 1933, after a run-in with the Gestapo, and worked in Paris for a youth organisation, arranging the transfer of Jewish orphans to Palestine.) She believed that it was a simple matter for a totalitarian regime to ensure that the people it had turned into outcasts were received as outcasts wherever they went. She refers to an extract from a circular put out in 1938 by the German ministry of Foreign Affairs to its diplomatic staff abroad: ‘The influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the German Jewish policy … The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrating Jew is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the reaction of the country.’ Arendt was confident that this is more or less what happened. ‘Those whom persecution had called undesirable,’ she wrote, ‘became the indésirables of Europe.’
Sweeping, certainly, but her remarks catch the drift of the refugee’s central misfortune: to be shuttled along a continuum of abuse, a victim of ‘persecuting governments’ who can ‘impose their values’ on other governments – even those who oppose them in fact or on principle. For Kosovans who fled to Albania, clan and language interrupted the continuum. But most of the refugees and displaced people created by the break-up of Yugoslavia, including the Serbs, have run a gauntlet of opprobrium that begins when a regime decides that some of its citizens are guilty of ‘subversions of brotherhood and unity’, or are simply ‘barbarian’, and continues when those people are denounced by a local newspaper in a country of asylum a thousand miles away as ‘human sewage’, which is how the Dover Express described the Kosovan and Kurdish refugees holed up on the south coast of England in 1998. The government of a country of asylum may not share the views of its doughty fourth estate, but it is bound to take them into account as it draws up measures, such as those introduced in Britain, to keep asylum seekers at bay.
Depriving refugees of their assets before they flee, in order to ensure a hostile reception in countries that receive them, is harder now than it was between the wars. Army and police can raze their houses, kill their livestock, strip them of their jewellery, steal their cars and cash and destroy their papers – all of this and worse occurred in Kosovo – but they cannot intervene so easily in the network of contacts that persecuted communities build up abroad. Once a pattern of departure is set down, as it has been in Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Kosovo, the refugee can follow the thread of survival through the labyrinth with help from friends and relatives outside the country who are ready to put up money for the journey or provide support in the early stages of adaptation.
That pattern of support is as old as migration itself. What is new is the ease with which many persecuted people can move money out of a country before they leave. Once a community under pressure grasps the enormity of its situation, as ethnic Albanians in Kosovo did at the end of the 1980s, it begins to evacuate resources. The crucial transfer is psychological. When hope – the simple idea that circumstances might improve – is no longer possible in situ, it becomes fugitive. As it migrates across borders, the able-bodied and the educated go with it: often the middle classes are the most visible dissidents and among the first to leave. Redoubts are established in the wider world; jobs are secured and, in time, others consider leaving. The rhythms are those of straightforward economic migration, with a smaller flow of remittances to the homeland: it is pointless to remit earnings to a place where they can be pillaged. On the contrary, the more who leave, the greater the transfers out, as those who remain convert their wealth into hard currency and place it abroad with the help of others who have left. In due course, the free expression of political views, outlawed at home, becomes possible outside: journals, meetings, fund-raisers, levies, numbered accounts into which donations to the cause can be paid. This was the case of the Eritrean and Palestinian exiles during the 1970s and 1980s and the Kosovan community in Switzerland during the 1990s. It is also one of the reasons people can raise the money to pay for human smugglers.
The poor refugee, unlike the middle-class dissident who makes a bid for safety, is just as disadvantaged as the poor person in a stable social arrangement. In Yugoslavia, greater numbers of Serbs have been hounded from pillar to post than any other ethnic or ‘national’ group. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s there was no larger group of displaced Europeans. Yet of the 600,000 Serbs who have been uprooted once and, in some cases, several times, only a small proportion have known how to salvage their wealth. They too have been prey to the regime in Belgrade. If Milosevic wanted to strip Kosovo Albanians of their citizenship – for which few had much enthusiasm anyhow – he also used the misfortunes of other Yugoslavs, exiled by the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, to slow down the unravelling of Yugoslavia. Their hardship was as severe as anything faced by the many Yugoslavs who made their way towards the rich world.
The Marinkovic family, for example, were interlopers in Kosovo. They arrived in Pristina in 1995. Their new home lay under the shadow of a pale ochre high-rise: the military police headquarters, a source of comfort to Kosovo’s Serbian minority and an object of loathing to Albanians. Marinkovic and his relatives lived together in a large room with five beds in a wooden hut full of other Serbs, like them, from the Krajina (the self-proclaimed Serb entity within Croatia). There were several such barracks, disposed around the police building in an overground warren. They had once contained more than a hundred people but, by 1998, when I met the Marinkovic family, there were no more than forty. A refugee is, by definition, someone who has fled beyond the borders of his own country – someone who knows that the only option is to head for open water. For old Djuro Marinkovic, his daughter Anka and their dependants, the process was different. Yugoslavia simply drained around them. Federal boundaries suddenly became sand spits denoting the frontiers of new sovereign entities. When Djuro Marinkovic and his fellow Serbs from the Krajina fled towards Belgrade in 1995, they were making for the capital of a state whose jurisdiction no longer obtained in their place of origin. In the cold eye of history, they were like any Europeans
