In Europe

lucky. The police officer at the station had a sense of humour, he snapped to attention right away: “Mr President. What an honour to meet you again. Of course, this is all a misunderstanding, we'll take care of it right away.” A few minutes later we were back out on the street.’
    Nothing can create new order out of poverty and chaos, nothing but the story, and the belief in that story. As though it were a royal wedding, Serbian television has devoted a whole day to the marriage of the arch-criminal Arkan, leader of the notorious Arkan Tigers paramilitary organisation, to the singer Svetlana, also known as Ceca. Ceca's newest hit – she sings what they call ‘ethnofolk’ – has been echoing in the cafés for weeks now.
    A few headlines from the popular weekly
Twilight Zone
: ‘Jacques Chirac, whose support played a definitive role in the war against the Serbian nation, will die on Christmas Day’;‘Creatures from outer space kidnapped a man for 300 years’; ‘America to fall apart on 17 January, 2000!’; ‘During the solar eclipse on 8 August, a new Hitler was born’; ‘The young wife of Václav Havel, the man who supported the war against the Serbian nation, does not have long to live’;‘Will China conquer America in 2008?’
    It is Sunday afternoon, and I have been invited to tea by a little group of female intellectuals. I find about a dozen women sitting around in a spacious nineteenth-century apartment; most of them are over sixty, they are writers, journalists and professors. The walls are covered with paintings. The group holds its salon here every second Sunday of the month and has been doing so for years, right through all the revolutions and bombardments, with home-made cakes. Today there is even Ukrainian champagne. The curtains have been drawn, the street is far away for the moment.
    The women's group is worried about the hundreds of thousands of homeless people wandering the country after the war, and about all the young people who are leaving. ‘We're not talking about semi-mafiosi orfrustrated soldiers; these are doctors, engineers, lawyers; the professional people this country needs to build itself up again.’ ‘There are even young writers leaving the country, we've never seen this before!’
    ‘I'm so tired of these never-ending complaints from Western Europe,’ a lady growls. She has just returned from an international conference on Kosovo; the French representative had stated her concern about all the inexpensive Yugoslav streetwalkers upsetting the neatly organised prostitution in Paris. ‘“Well, what are they supposed to do?” I asked her. “Being a prostitute in the West is an excellent way to earn a living these days for a poor, intelligent Yugoslav girl!”’
    The next morning at breakfast, I see a boy walk past the window of the hotel, his head shaved. Suddenly two men in leather coats come running up, they jump on him, a fight ensues, two policemen arrive and the four of them force him onto the ground. The boy lies face down on the pavement, motionless as a cornered cat. Now the policemen are on the phone. Two unmarked cars appear. They boy is kicked a few times, then carried away by two plainclothes gorillas, God only knows why. The whole arrest has taken two minutes at most.
    ‘You caught a glimpse of Miložsević's Praetorian Guard,’ my guide, Dužsko Tubić, tells me later. ‘A large portion of the population of this city has just come back from the war: refugees selling matches, former soldiers from the front lines, policemen … those may have been the men in leather coats. They were probably catching a thief, but it could also be something else, you never know.’ Nothing surprises Dužsko any more, for years he's been working as a fixer for Western journalists and camera crews, guiding them along fronts of every hue. We drive past the burned-out television tower and the partial ruins of the city's police headquarters, past offices and government buildings with huge holes blown in them. The main road to Zagreb is more or less abandoned; after a while we turn off towards the south, and by nightfall we're in Bijeljina, Dužsko's birthplace, not far from the Serb-Bosnian border.
    That night I sleep in an ethnically cleansed town. Of the 17,000 Muslims who lived here in 1991, there are no more than 1,000 left. All of the mosques have been wiped away. The spot where the biggest mosque stood is now a gravelled lot with a few cars and rubbish containers.