The Books: “Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History” (Robert Kaplan)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

BalkanGhosts.bmpNext book on this shelf is called Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert Kaplan.

This was the book that launched Robert Kaplan’s career- although he had been writing books and articles for Atlantic Monthly for years – this was the book that “hit”. I didn’t read it when it first came out in 1993 – I came to it later. I read it in 2000. Why do I know this? Because I always put my name and the date I bought the dern book on the first page. I have no idea what prompted me to pick it up … Here is a theory: I discovered the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski (I love that guy so much that I list him over on the right hand side under my Stark Raving Mad Obsessions) in 1999. I blew through all of his existing books in a matter of 3 months. This was my moment of discovery. I hadn’t really been a history buff – or the foreign-correspondent-in-my-own-head – before Kapuscinski. I was a fiction reader, primarily. I mean, I KNOW about history – because I had a pretty good education, and I also watch the news, and am aware of the different “issues” facing different regions – it’s not like I’m totally isolated – but to dig deep into certain areas? To say to myself: “Okay. I need to learn about Armenia now. Let’s go buy some books” was not how I spent my time. I am so so thankful that one day, in the bookstore, browsing – I picked up Imperium by Kapuscinski. It blew me AWAY. A whole world opened up to me – a world I only vaguely knew about – the world of countries with names like Uzbekistan … Kazakhstan … the old silk road … Kapuscinski was the perfect guide. He is one of my favorite writers of all time. I would KILL to meet that guy some day. So Imperium was the beginning. I suddenly realized, in a little A-ha moment – Okay. I need to learn more about the world. And, frankly, my interest lay in central Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Not sure why. Maybe because of how he writes about those areas in Imperium – but it was like I suddenly was an addict. I needed more, more, MORE. This is STILL the case with me, in terms of those areas, and I will not be satisfied until I actually GO there. But for now? Books!!! I read all of those books in 1999 – and … my theory is that I discovered Kaplan mainly because of his proximity to Kapuscinski on any bookshelf in Barnes and Noble. They are always in the same section – and their books are always side by side. I think I picked up Balkan Ghosts randomly – because Kapuscinski’s stuff had turned me on so much, that now I was trolling the shelves, hungry, searching for more.

Balkan Ghosts was a revelation to me. He and Kapuscinski are very similar. Kaplan references Kapuscinski in his work all the time. Kapuscinski and Dame Rebecca West are his two idols. And rightly so. None of us create the wheel. We only build on the accomplishments of those who came before us. In Balkan Ghosts, Kaplan travels through the former Yugoslavia in 1991 – directly following the crack-up of the Soviet Imperium. “Dame Rebecca” traveled through Yugoslavia in 1938, I believe – as WWII approached – She wanted to see “what was going on” there. Her book (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon) is one of the most prescient books of all time. It predicts everything. Kaplan literally travels through all of these countries, carrying a copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in his bag. He follows through her footsteps. He pulls out the book randomly, to read what she wrote about this or that monastery, this cathedral, this little village – because it’s all in there. And she is STILL a better guide to that entire area than any contemporary writer could ever be. Kaplan uses her book not just as a launching-off point, but as an ongoing theme throughout the book.

Balkan Ghosts, wiht all of the information, with all of the historical context it provides – is also wonderfully written – and I can’t forget some of the people I meet in its pages. Kaplan talks to people. He records the conversations. He goes to discos – talks to dancing kids – he tracks down professors – etc. Some of these people have insights into what is going on with their country (or – in this case, more usually – their ethnic group) – and the insights are stuff that someone like a prime minister or a President can only dream of. Kaplan now has access like that – he can get in to talk to Presidents and Princes and Prime Ministers – but sometimes you get better stuff if you talk to a taxi driver.

I decided to excerpt a bit from his section on Macedonia and on the formation of IMRO.


From Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert Kaplan.

The first Macedonian guerrilla rising, as it is known, collapsed under Turkish whips and rifle butts in the suffocation cells of Bitolj prison in 1881. But while the Turks were still strong enough to crush an open insurgency, they could not prevent new insurgents and propagandists from filtering into the area.

That same year, Serbia grudgingly recognized Austria-Hungary’s occupation of Bosnia, sanctioned by the Treaty of Berlin three years earlier. In return, Serbia received the blessing of the Habsburg court to pour men and equipment into Macedonia, as a wedge against both the Ottoman Turks and the pro-Russian Bulgarians. In 1885, continued Russian pressure on Turkey resulted in the union of the southern half of Bulgaria with the already independent northern half. Fearful that the Bulgarians might yet achieve their aim of a Greater Bulgaria, the Turks discovered that they could benefit by helping the Serbs against the Bulgarians in Macedonia.

In 1897, this situation broke all bounds of complexity. An uprising on the island of Crete sparked a war between Greece and the Ottoman Turks. To prevent Bulgaria from joining forces with Greece, the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid suddenly reversed his policy in Macedonia. Rather than continuing to help the Serbs in order to contain the Bulgarians there, the Sultan now gave Bulgaria’s King Ferdinand carte blanche to help the Serbs contain the Greeks.

Meanwhile, in the town of Shtip, southeast of Skopje, six conspirators, including Gotse Delchev, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, had founded “the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization” on the ruins of the original cheti guerrilla revolt. To distinguish this indigenous movement from another Macedonian underground group set up in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization soon became the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO. IMRO spread rapidly in the 1890s, raising its money through bank robberies and kidnappings for ransom.

By the turn of the century, Macedonia was a power vacuum of sectarian violence. The absence of a viable central government or a defining concept of nationhood permitted various outside powers — all soon to disappear as a result of what Macedonia would unleash — to play out their rivalries against the backdrop of a magnificent, mountainous landscape. In Macedonia, Christian militias fought Muslim militias, and fought each other as well; bearded and bandoliered terrorists like Gotse Delchev planted bombs at cafes, open-air theatres, and railway stations; splinter groups murdered members of rival groups, conducted secret tribunals, executed civilians accused of collaboration with the “enemy”, and took hostages, such as the American Protestant missionary Ellen Stone. “Two hundred and forty-five bands were in the mountains. Serbian and Bulgarian comitadjis, Greek andartes, Albanians and Vlachs … all waging a terrorist war,” writes Leon Sciaky in Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era. Macedonia, on the day the twentieth century began, was a place of atrocities and refugee camps that people in the West were already bored by and cynical ab out; it represented a situation that would never be solved and to which the newspaper correspondents were paying far too much attention.

But by 1990, except as memorialized in a handful of old black-and-white photographs buckling inside dusty frames in the local museums of Skopje and other towns, all this was long past and forgotten — in the West, that is.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for “mixed salad” (macedoine), defines the principal illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion. Because Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, had established a great kingdom in Macedonia in the fourth century BC, the Greeks believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because the Bulgarians at the end of the tenth century under King Samuel and again in the thirteenth century under King Ivan Assen II had extended the frontiers of Bulgaria all the way west to the Adriatic Sea, the Bulgarians believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because King Stefan Dushan had overrun Macedonia in the fourteenth century and had made Skpje, in Dame Rebecca’s words, “a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians,” the Serbs believed Macedonia to be theirs. In the Balkans, history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West. Instead, history jumps arounld and moves in circles; and where history is perceived in such a way, myths take root. Evangelos Kofos, Greece’s preeminent scholar on Macedonia, has observed that these “historical legacies … sustained nations in their uphill drive toward state-building, national unification, and, possibly, the reincarnation of lost extinct empires.”

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2 Responses to The Books: “Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History” (Robert Kaplan)

  1. dorkafork says:

    Interestingly enough, Richard Holbrooke has mentioned he thought “Balkan Ghosts” had a very negative impact on the Bosnian situation. He thought it painted too bleak a picture on ethnic tensions. Instead of the result of long simmering inevitable ethnic tensions, he viewed it as the result of deliberate effort by demagoguery by Slobo et al. He felt Clinton was influenced by both “Balkan Ghosts” and Rebecca West’s book. Clinton felt that the ethnic conflict ran too deep. This then delayed US intervention when an earlier effort might have saved many more lives.

  2. red says:

    Kaplan himself said he didn’t write it thinking that Presidents would read it and make policy decisions based on it. NOW he knows his books will be looked at like that – but at the time he wasn’t famous, and had no idea tha Balkan Ghosts would become so huge. He just wanted to follow in the footsteps of Rebecca West and write about what he saw.

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