The Fracture Zone Read Online Free PDF Page A

thousands of innocent, modern European people had been driven from the state to the north, had fled across this hitherto invisible, politically dictated line on the ground, had poured over it past its guards and under its watchtowers, and had then collapsed, weary and wrecked, into the unfriendly and unwelcoming collective arms of the state to the south, their spirits broken, their hopes dashed from them, their dignity crushed. Why, the question seemed so pertinent, why create borders anymore?
    After all, across the rest of Europe, in the North and South and even in much of the once Marxist East, there were everywhere the signs that life was about becoming so very much less complicated. Frontiers were coming down all over Europe. The passport seemed every day less essential. The cry of “Papers!” or of “Documents, please!” became less and less frequently heard. The borderless world seemed a concept well on its way to being born, and at least in Europe itself, there was also the probability, almost a reality now, of that elegant device to be known as the single currency.
    But here in the Balkans, while elsewhere frontiers were coming down and currencies were becoming melded and melted down into one another, the very opposite was happening. Starting in early summer of 1991, no less than three thousand miles of brand-new European frontiers, de jure and de facto, had actually been drawn, surveyed, and created. By the end of 1992 there werewhole new nation-states—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia * —and in due course, one must imagine, there may be more: The new nations of Montenegro and possibly Kosovo may one day be created, too. New moneys were being minted as well—the brand-new central banks housed within the brand-new frontiers (one of them, in Bosnia, being run by a New Zealander) saw to it that four entirely brand-new currencies (the Croats’ version named after a small and fur-covered rodent, the kuna ) were actually spawned.
    It had all been so much more stable and content—or at least had seemed so—when I was first here: When this narrative began I was at a place that did not exist, next to a country which had not then been created, among a people who, in the sense of being people with the national identity to which they now belong, had not been born. And, at least superficially, it seemed to have worked: There was a certain prosperity, a certain satisfaction among the peoples of the Yugoslavia that had been hammered together earlier in the century. But now it had all changed, and the changes that had been brought about in just the last ten years seemed to have brought nothing but woe and misery and confusion. It had brought the specter of the old Balkans back among us, to terrify those who live there and threaten those who live beyond. It seemed the most wretched of situations, even though the doomsayers and Cassandras had long said, as they do with everything connected to the Balkans, that it was bound to be so.
    But once again there arose the question that seemed so eternally asked and so perpetually appropriate here: Just why? Just why is there, and seemingly always has been, this dire inevitability about the Balkans being so fractious and unsettled a corner of the world? Just what was it that had marked out this particular peninsula, this particular gyre of mountains and plains, caves and streams, and had made it a byword, quite literally, for hostility and hate?
     
    It was now well on in this early spring day, and it was getting dark, and some of the refugees had by now cut six-foot birch branches and stuck them in the mud, and had strung up flimsy sheets of black plastic from old garbage bags to act as windbreaks. A few of the more resourceful families now had little wood fires flickering and guttering in the chilly air, and occasionally there were blackened cooking pots sitting precariously on the logs, hissing with warming water. Here and there rusty tractors were being driven down into