THE ALBANIAN FOR PANTSD OWN
Now it can be told. Tom Walker
on Sir Pedi's mercy dash to the world's latest war zone
Tetovo AS Balkan wars go, it wasn't a bad one; an amuse-gueule, as the French say, no more than a tickling of the taste buds. A pleasant enough sojourn for the press, and a useful run out for all those armoured Land-Rovers left mouldering in garages across the region.
All the elements were there: the rank incompetence of the state army, guerrillas who talked a good fight before running away, the customary platitudes of Nato, and then good old Sir Paddy Ashdown riding into town, his eyes squinting inscrutably into the craggy peaks of the Shar mountains, followed by grim soundbites warning of approaching Armageddon, of powderboxes, tinderkegs and the like.
It all might happen, of course, but thankfully not yet. This was the week when we could sit on the terraces of Tetovo's dusty main boulevard with a calming glass of Skopska beer, and watch swaggering displays of Balkan bravado on the hillside above us, regularly pummelled for no apparent reason with whatever bits of artillery kit the army could crank into action. Finally, there was a delightful stink of corruption and backhanders to the deal that brought Russian helicopter gunships into town, flown by Ukrainians and hired by the state mobile-phone company, Mobimak.
'Can I borrow your binoculars, please? We're trying to shoot someone behind the garden,' asked the special policeman in full battledress, standing over my yoghurt and cornflakes on the morning of the government offensive. We had woken amid the barrage's crescendo to find the police had taken over our hotel, the mediaeval dervish's lodge called the Tekke, as a useful base from which to provide covering fire for the armoured personnel carriers zigzagging up the hill 200 metres from the dining-room. As the shots rang out, one of the dervish's disciples dashed out from his sanctuary between the cherry trees at the bottom of the garden, dragging his wife and children to safety.
In other parts of town, American journalists, especially those from CNN, received a sound kicking from angry Macedonians who had read too much about CIA plots for their own good. It was all most satisfying for us European hacks who melted into the background rather more successfully, and were treated to harrowing accounts of baby-eating and assorted horrors in Slav and Albanian sitting-rooms alike. Carole Smillie would have her work cut out with a Balkan version of Changing Rooms; swapping all those Slav icons and animal pelts for the preferred Albanian kitsch of plastic parrots and cuckoo clocks.
The leaders of the National Liberation Army (NLA) cried out for international mediation, and again the familiar name of Ashdown rang out in the highland valleys. Sir Paddy insisted he had to finish with Yeovil before taking on Tetovo, and the Albanian journalists were as confused as some of their rebels' commanders.
'Who is he?' they begged us Brits. Former Liberal leader, we said, friend of Zoti Bier. `So what's he doing here?' they rejoindered. Ask us another, we advised. One young lady from Tirana had done her research, quoting an unflattering but much loved tabloid headline that Sir Paddy would prefer to forget. Eshie Pedi pa pantalona,' was her translation. Soon he was among us, in a surgical strike that allowed him to be televised in Skopje and Tetovo within a few hours. On the other side of the lines, however, Commander Hoxha, the rebel hothead in charge of the northern Brest zone of NLA operations, was somewhat underwhelmed. 'Not heard of him,' he said on his Mobimak. 'Never been on my territory.'
In the Albanian villages suffering the pounding, the behaviour of Nato's Zoti Robertson was even more perplexing than Pedi's arrival. One minute he's helping to bomb the Slays, they seethed, and the next he's encouraging the Skopje government to send the pyrotechnics back in the other direction. As we sat in a café in the village of Lisec listening to 'Dark Side of the Smac.H■ Moon', the headman said he was tempted to take down the posters of Zoti Bier, Robertson, Cook, Solana and others among the pantheon of modem Albanian deities and replace them all with a flame-red tapestry of Skanderbeg, the 15th-century chieftain who took on the Turks (and lost). At least you knew where you stood with him, they muttered over little glasses of Russian tea.
It was all too much for the local German Kfor detachment, the greater part of which turned tail and ran. From the empty barracks of the Bundeswehr emerged a game young press officer by the name of Hans Gunter Bender, who sadly spoke little English; a misinterpreted Benderism provoked a fruitless media stampede towards a village where the 200 wounded Albanians were in fact only ten.
A defining moment came with the traffic lollipop-beating and slaying of two Albanians at a checkpoint, which sparked a tragi-comic debate between Tetovo's divided communities as to whether the grenades that the 'terrorists' were said by Macedonian television to have been carrying were in fact mobile telephones. As the truth emerged in enlarged photographs in the Skopje dailies, one libertarian German journalist who had argued in the Albanians' favour had his nose pressed into a grainy photograph of a Russian stun grenade. 'Ericsson or Nokia?' demanded his track-suited inquisitors. The same group of thugs informed us that the man seen on television running across Tetovo's hillside in the face of machine-gun fire and dubbed a daring NLA rebel by the world's broadcasters was, in fact, a mate of theirs who had gone back to feed his goats.
As the assault came to a close, the police decided that they rather liked the Tekke, and in gung-ho fashion put snipers on every approach to the hotel. Guests had to park their cars at a distance and check-in with their hands held up. Once inside, we found our fridges had been raided by the boys in blue; the Observer's correspondent even lost his taramasalata. That night a hot, feverish wind blew in from the southwest; the locals said it came from Africa, and signalled a time of drought. In the morning the armoured Land-Rovers made their last laborious grinds up the mountain roads and found the rebel villages deserted, while fires fanned by the breeze raged in the forests above. Part one of Macedonia's little war was declared to be over.
I called Sir Pedi; he said his report would be on its way to the Prime Minister, and he cautioned against optimism. Thousands of Kosovo Albanians who missed out on the last liberation fight would be making their way to Macedonia, he predicted, and the army would be gearing up for a campaign of 'unacceptable repression'. Make no mistake, he said, it remained a Balkan tinderbox. I felt the scowl of the marine commando, the cussed glare at the snowfields on high.
Tom Walker is diplomatic correspondent of the Sunday Times.
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