'Balkan Ghosts.' - response to book by Noel Malcolm - Letter to the Editor

NOEL MALCOLM ends his diatribe about Balkan Ghosts by noting the different ways in which I spell the Romanian word for Gypsies. That Malcolm would criticize me for a proofreader's error is final proof that this was not a review, but an agenda-driven essay by an area specialist, one required to apologize for the sins of his adopted region. Malcolm believes "hatred is not a driving force" in Yugoslavia; that the Bosnian war is all the doing of modern politicians--as if they work in a vacuum without a history behind them. I hope he wasn't advising the British government on the likelihood of war in Bosnia.

Malcolm's London Spectator article about Greece, "The New Bully of the Balkans," (August 15, 1992) demonstrates how he is guilty of doing what he claims I do: demonize an entire nation. So he praises me for my critical section on Greece and Papandreou. He calls it a "tour de force." Only when I conform to Malcolm's prejudices am I praised.

Malcolm accuses me of "modern Serb hatred" for not writing about the recent crimes of the Serbs. I dislike headline books, and therefore did not expand the Yugoslav section. But in the preface to Balkan Ghosts, I state that "nothing I write should be taken as justification, however mild, for the war crimes committed by ethnic Serb troops in Bosnia, which I heartily condemn."

Malcolm disagrees that Romania was a bad place for Jews. He says the twentieth century was untypical of how Jews were treated in the Balkans. All the Jews I interviewed in Romania disagree. The most bloodcurdling pogrom in Jewish history occurred in Bucharest. The twentieth century was untypical for Jews in Romania in that the suspicion of peasants for the bourgeoisie kicked over into mass murder. The mass murder would not have been possible had the hatred not existed in the first place. Malcolm disagrees with my depiction of northern Romania--the place where Romanian political anti-Semitism was invented--as anti-Semitic. His argument is that Jews fared better under the Ottoman Empire than in the Slavic-Germanic world. He doesn't say that the anti-Semitic acts I wrote about took place after Turkish control had ceased. Malcolm says Nazi policy, not Balkan hated, was responsible for crimes against Jews. But many Nazi troops in the Balkans were raised from local communities. Concentration camps in Croatia and Transdneistria were run from top-to-bottom by Croatians and Romanians.

Like some extremist Croatian newspapers, Malcolm finds me too critical of Cardinal Stepinac, convicted by Tito as a war criminal. He says my conflicted attitude toward Stepinac, at "first benign, then denunciatory," reveals how "uneasy" I am about my own writing. My writing is conflicted and uneasy, since I was determined to be fair without becoming an apologist. Malcolm, while elsewhere accusing me of polemic, here convicts me of objectivity. Malcolm defends the behavior of World War II Croatia by saying the pro-Nazi puppet state was not typical in Croatian history. It wasn't typical, but it was a defining moment. The present reality in Croatia bears me out: the style and symbols of today's Croatian regime hark back to the Ustashe.

Malcolm implies I blame the Greeks for the slaughter of Jews in Salonica during World War II. My narrative makes clear that I don't blame the Greeks for killing Jews, but for erasing their memory from the city once they had been killed by the Germans.

Malcolm claims I don't like Turks. His reason is my comment that the dignified air of Turks "was the luxury of the conquerors." The Turks were conquerors. Because of that, as I explain in my book, Turks lack the anger of Greeks, Serbs, and others who share the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude common to conquered peoples. Malcolm says my comparison of the slums in Pristina to those in Turkey evinces an anti-Turkish sentiment. The comparison makes sense. Albanians, of all Balkan peoples, identify with Turks. Also, having just spent time interviewing people in the gecekondu districts of Istanbul, I can attest to how similar they look to parts of Pristina.

The Macedonian section of Balkan Ghosts ran first in The Atlantic Monthly, and was vigorously gone over by fact checkers--a category of editor that Malcolm may never have encountered. The chapter's premise, written four years ago, was that the world's attention would focus on Macedonia by the end of the century. But Malcolm has nothing good to say about it. He claims Macedonian has long been a separate language. Many other scholars claim that is false. They say Macedonian is a dialect of western Bulgarian or south Serbian. This dispute among experts like Malcolm, who ridicule every truth except their own, is what my chapter focuses on. Concerning Macedonia, Malcolm accuses me of a pro-Greek bias. This would be news to Greeks, who have accused me of being a "Bulgarian agent." Malcolm implies that I support the Greek academic-nationalist, Evangelos Kofos. In the book's index, there are three references to Kofos: in one, I quote Kofos in order to debunk him. The other two references concern statements by Kofos that are rather innocuous. The inflammatory statement ascribed to Kofos in Malcolm's diatribe is nowhere to be found in my book.

I finished Balkan Ghosts before the first shot was fired in Yugoslavia. I predicted on paper the capacity of the region for great bloodshed. This is a vision you would never get from Malcolm's description of the Balkans--a region of kindly people (except for the Greeks), whose problems can be blamed on foreigners. Yet events have proven me right. Balkan Ghosts is in its seventh hardcover print run.

Robert Kaplan Potomac, MD

THE BASIC PROBLEM I think, is that Mr. Kaplan cannot read. I did not note the different ways in which he spells the Romanian word for gypsies; I noted that the one way he spells it is completely wrong. Does he blame proof-readers (or fact-checkers) for all the other similar errors in his book, some of them gross and persistent? He thinks I could not have advised anyone of the likelihood of war in Bosnia; on the contrary, I described in my review just how that likelihood arose. (I also predicted it, accurately analyzing its causes, not just talking vaguely of the capacity of the region for great bloodshed, in an article published six months before the war started.) I did not accuse him of modern Serb hatred for having not written about recent Serb crimes; I pointed out that what he did write about the Kosovo Albanians was in agreement with modern Serb hatred, since it ignored the history of the Serb treatment of the Albanians throughout this century and seemed to imply that the very presence of Albanians in Kosovo was a crime. I did not call Mr. Kaplan "First benign, then denunciatory" or "uneasy" about Stepinac; those phrases referred very clearly to Stepinac's own attitude to the Ustasa state. He has misread the whole passage. I did not write that Romania was not a bad place for Jews; I denied that it was as terrible as Mr. Kaplan thinks, and argued that the large-scale political violence against Jews in the twentieth century is not a typical sign of ancient ethnic hatred, given that it did not happen in the previous centuries which included the Ottoman period. His ingenious description between "typical" and "defining" is made nowhere in his book. My statement that it was Nazi policy that killed the Jews of Skopje and Salonica is not disproved by the fact that they used some local personnel; I note that Mr. Kaplan also contradicts himself on this point, blaming Balkan communities for those killings in one part of his reply and exonerating them in another. He has not understood what I wrote about the Macedonian identity: of course scholars can still argue about whether Pulevski was right to promote Macedonian as a separate language in 1875, but the point I made was that Mr. Kaplan was displaying ignorance when he wrote that "when Delchev lived [1872-1903], nobody promoted such a separate Macedonian identity." As for Dr. Kofos, the statement ascribed to him in my review is to be found, exactly as I quoted it, on page 68 of Mr. Kaplan's book. Or was that part of the book written by the proof-reader too?

COPYRIGHT 1993 The National Interest, Inc.
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