Jeremy Harding

In the early 1990s, about 80 million people – roughly 1.5 per cent of the world’s population – were living outside the country of their birth. The figure now is closer to 120 million. Migration across international borders is not a simple phenomenon and migrants themselves are as diverse as people who stay put. The banker from Seattle who signs a five-year contract for a post in Berlin is a migrant; so is the lay-out editor in Paris who moves to Moscow to work on a Russian edition of her magazine; so is the labourer from Indonesia or Thailand who becomes a building worker in Brunei; so is the teenage boy from Shanghai indentured to a Chinese crime ring in New York. Refugees, too, are migrants. Often they share their route to safety with others who are not seeking asylum: the smuggling syndicates known as snakeheads, which induct Chinese women into a life of semi-slavery in Europe and the US, also ran dissidents to freedom in the retreat from Tiananmen Square. These things are largely a question of money. Refugees are not necessarily poor, but by the time they have reached safety, the human trafficking organisations on which they depend have eaten up much of their capital. In the course of excruciating journeys, mental and physiological resources are also expended – some of them non-renewable.’

National sovereignty, in the remains of Yugoslavia, has been a punishing master. It has evicted some in the name of an old arrangement that they never fully took account of – this, by and large, has been the fate of Kosovo Albanians – and others in the name of new arrangements that took no account of them: this is the fate of vast numbers of Serbs. In the process, sovereignty has lost a lot of credibility. Yet no sooner is it violated by a powerful alliance, as it was on 24 March by Nato, than it recovers its threadbare dignity. Its status in the abstract may even have been enhanced – in some quarters anyhow – by the fact that it was weakened in a single, real instance. But in the former Yugoslavia, a loss of any kind often insinuates itself into the annals of gain, while short-term winners – Kosovo Albanians, for instance – can barely distinguish what they are meant to have won from all they have lost.

Hour after hour the foreign press lined the raised road on the Macedonian side of the border, gazing at the thousands of refugees from Kosovo massed in the field below. It was a vigil in which the brief condolences of the powerful nations – with their digital cameras and telephoto lenses – were extended yet again to the weak. A German television engineer squatted in the road with his head down over a piece of equipment, silently crying. You could see the results of this botched internationalism on CNN or BBC World in the hotels of Skopje, although the electronic images of Blace caught little of the place itself: a triangle of low land between a river and a frontier road; a railway track running by the river, the near bank lined with willows; poplars in the middle ground. Until it was suddenly emptied one night in early April, to the dismay of the foreign press corps who had not been present, every aid agency and media outlet had its own idea of how many people were camped on that ground – forty thousand or more – or queuing to get out of it. Everyone also thought they knew the death toll.

History, it’s said again and again, is what makes the loss of Kosovo so much harder for the Serbs to entertain than any of the setbacks they’ve borne so far under the dark stewardship of Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo is the geographical fundament of Serbian Orthodoxy; the site of a legendary face-off between Christianity and Ottoman incursion. Among Serbs, this past is a far more vigorous currency than the miserable Yugoslav dinar, yet very few non-Serbs recognise it, or anything minted in Belgrade, as legal tender. We, too, can invoke history to explain our hesitation. Seven hundred years ago, Dante wrote King Milutin of Rascia into the book that lies open on the Day of Judgment. Milutin’s sin, the imperial eagle explains to the poet in the Paradiso, was to forge Venetian ducats (‘il conio di Vinegia’). Today his remote descendant Milan Milutinovic, President of Serbia, is honouring the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that the 45 ethnic Albanian villagers massacred in Recak by Serbian security forces on 15 January were all ‘terrorists’, has persuaded no one.’‘