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Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter
- ISBN-10:
- 0691129037
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691129037
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691129037
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691129037
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter
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Overview
Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time—in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places. Originally addressing only a small group of friends, Carolin Emcke started the first letter after returning from Kosovo, where she saw the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in 1999. She began writing to overcome her speechlessness about the horrors of war and her own sense of failure as a reporter. Eventually, writing a letter became a ritual Emcke performed following her return from each nightmare she experienced. First published in 2004 to great acclaim, Echoes of Violence in 2005 was named German political book of the year and was a finalist for the international Lettre-Ulysses award for the art of reportage.
Combining narrative with philosophic reflection, Emcke describes wars and human rights abuses around the world—the suffering of civilians caught between warring factions in Colombia, the heartbreaking plight of homeless orphans in Romania, and the near-slavery of garment workers in Nicaragua. Freed in the letters from journalistic conventions that would obscure her presence as a witness, Emcke probes the abyss of violence and explores the scars it leaves on landscapes external and internal.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691129037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2007 |
| Series: | Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity , #1 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 1,053,524 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Echoes of Violence
Letters from a War ReporterBy Carolin Emcke
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
Chapter One
Kosovo 1 (July 1999)War kills. That is all it does.-Michael Walzer
Dear friends,
I have been back for two weeks. I do not know how to answer the questions about my time in Albania and Kosovo-as if I hadn't been there or had not returned yet.
The experiences are present, the images, the smell, the sound-everything is clear and yet it is impossible to transform it into an adequate and intelligible narrative of horror.
We wish to believe that we are able to defuse threats by giving them a name. Rumpelstiltskin loses his power when we guess his name. But sometimes Rumpelstiltskin rages even when we know what he is called. Sometimes words cannot banish, and their failure only increases our sorrow.
Maybe I simply don't know where to start.
There: in the refugee camps where the deportees were stuck, the men silently sitting on the field, smoking, covered under colored woolen blankets, the women bent over plastic buckets, washing the only clothes they had; there: on the fields where the corpses were decaying in the sun, in the hospitals with this inimitable smell of disinfection and death; there: on the overflowing marketplaces, in the devastated mosques-there we all had the same horizon of experience. We were all stuck in this world of pain and destruction. Within this context, all these horrifyingscenes made "sense." Of course, it all seemed unreal, and yet it was simultaneously too real for us to permanently call it into question. Our conversations and gestures were embedded in this context. It was a life within the same radius of violence.
Only now, back in Berlin, now when I am about to talk about this time, does its absurdity strike me.
In retrospect I can say: the experiences there are somehow separated from your reality here like the paste that I used to cut out with a biscuit-form on the cake tin at my grandmother's when I was a child.
Maybe that is why journalists are considered disturbed cynics: because the reality that they describe is so disturbed.
That is the burden of the witness: to remain with a feeling of failure, of emptiness because even the most accurate account does NOt grasp the bleakness of war.
The Task
We were in Tirana when the peace agreement was signed and the Serbian delegation agreed to pull out of Kosovo within forty-eight hours after the settlement and to withdraw to what was left of the Yugoslav republic. The air bombardment of the NATO alliance had lasted seventy-eight days, during which they flew attacks against government buildings in Belgrade, against positions of the Serbian army in Kosovo-but also against civilian targets: bridges, factories, power stations, the television station of Belgrade, and various refugee treks, "collateral damage" as the propaganda unit in Brussels would call it.
At the end of the war, we could travel together with the ground troops that had been inactive so far and the thousands of Albanian Kosovar refugees returning to Kosovo-and write from there.
Our team in Kosovo included our Albanian driver Kuijtim Bilali; his nephew and our translator, Noni Hoxha; Joanne Mariner, of Human Rights Watch from New York, whom we had met in the refugee camps in Albania; the photographer Sebastian Bolesch; and me.
We remained two more weeks in war-torn Kosovo and traveled throughout the entire region. We saw young men-who had been hiding out of fear of the Serbian militia-returning from the mountains and dirty cellars. We saw famished Albanian Kosovar prisoners with sunken eyes tied together on a truck. They were supposed to be kidnapped to Serbia and had been forgotten. We saw how the Albanian Kosovars celebrated the end of the repression. We saw everywhere how the Serbian units had raged: the burned-down farmhouses, the demolished minarets of village mosques, the mutilated corpses where the Serbian myrmidons hadn't had time to erase the traces of their deeds and to bury their victims. We saw the Serbian troops during their withdrawal, drunk from stolen booze. But we also saw Serbian civilians fleeing out of fear of revenge. We also saw the neighborhoods of the Roma standing in flames.
Death and Destruction
Since my return, people ask me: "How do you cope with what you witnessed?" "How do you digest all the experiences?"
The answer is: you don't. There are certain impressions you cannot "digest."
The sight of a seventeen-year-old girl in the hospital of Prizren in Kosovo. She had been shot by a sniper the day before the allied forces entered Kosovo. She had a brain injury and urgently needed to be transferred to the hospital in Prishtina. That night she had stayed in a room with five badly injured men: Serbs, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters, and Albanians, the enemies of the war crammed together into one overheated room. You could hear her breathe. She would probably die within the next five hours because the hospital could not transfer her to Prishtina-the Serbian troops had stolen the only ambulance for their flight at the end of the war.
The sight of a charred back of a dead Catholic Albanian Kosovar between hundreds of books in his house in Koronica. The muscles in the shrunken body were still recognizable-it looked like one of those charts from biology class where all muscles of the human body are schematically displayed. Except the man in Koronica was brown-black; his burned flesh was porous and looked hairy like scratchy fur. Arms and legs were missing. Maybe they had been cut off, maybe they were burned completely, maybe it had been the dogs.
The Homeric heroes in the Iliad fear death less than the thought of being left unburied-outside the city walls-at the mercy of stray dogs. It always seemed rather strange to me that a living person would worry about his corpse being tattered by dogs. I could not imagine a world in which dogs would run around with human limbs in their mouths.
It was the brother of the dead man who brought us to this package of withered flesh. He walked from one room to the other, in a destroyed house, and talked as if it were still intact, as if that bundle on the floor still had anything in common with the human being he grew up with.
And one does not digest: the sight of corpses without heads, of cut-off body parts, contorted bodies that had been pulled behind a truck for miles (also reminiscent of Homer); the sight of bloated or burned corpses, some two months old, one week, one day.
There is this one image I cannot forget: the foot of a male body that we found in a ravine on a field near Meja. I still remember those two inches between the black leather shoe on his right foot and the blue cotton trouser, a peasant uniform such as I would see so often in the following weeks when looking at dead civilians. The corpse had been lying there, apparently, since April. In the meantime it had rained, and it had been as hot as it can be in a Yugoslav summer. One particular part of the image haunts me, a small detail: those two inches between the tied shoe and the hem of the trouser. Without the clothes that proved that this had once been a man, there were only two inches of dead, living flesh. Nothing else.
And there was this sound, very quiet, first unnoticed, and then so penetrating in its repulsiveness that no taboo, no shame, could repress my hearing it: parasites were eating the rest of a human being.
I cannot forget the ten-year-old girl in Gjakova who stood in front of the burned-out ruins of her former house and could not say two complete, intelligible sentences. She spoke without pause as if her speech were making sense, she did not stutter, did not hesitate; she formed one incoherent sentence after another. Finally, we understood that in this house her father, her brother, her aunt, and two cousins had been killed. Her uncle and her two other brothers had been arrested by Serbian units and deported the day before NATO troops-the Kosovo Force (KFOR)-arrived.
She told us that her father had fallen off the roof celebrating the long-awaited NATO intervention. He had broken his leg and could not move when the Serbian soldiers arrived at their house. They had told the girl and her mother to leave the house-and killed everyone else in it.
I cannot forget how she stood there in her pink shirt, in front of her former living room wall, slightly oblique because there was no flat floor anymore. And I cannot forget that she could not speak properly, and that she occasionally only stared at us and then continued to speak. And that she did not seem upset at all.
She was quiet and calm and only every now and then did she seem irritated-when she realized that she did not know the trick anymore, that trick that someone had taught her, years ago, in another time: how to form sentences and make sense to others. Then she paused and suddenly felt like a stranger to herself, and then she seemed to tell herself that these words that came out of her mouth were unintelligible.
We were disadvantaged in comparison to other journalists who witnessed these images of death and destruction. Many reporters arrived in Albania or Macedonia only when the peace agreement was signed. But we had already been acquainted with the terrible events. We had been writing since April on the refugees and their fate, we had been listening to them: how their sons and husbands had been killed, what they had done before the crisis began, where they used to live, how they were expelled, how many hours they had walked till they had reached the border, when they had last seen their brother, where they were standing when a Serbian officer pulled a woman out of the throng of refugees, how they had been hiding in a barn.
At the end of the war, when we entered Kosovo, we knew exactly where to go and what to expect there. We had a map of killing in our minds-even before we arrived at the sites of the massacres.
But that meant that we could not relate to those tormented bodies as neutral bystanders toward anonymous corpses. After weeks of interviewing survivors in the camps in Albania, photographer Sebastian Bolesch and I knew the story of many of the dead; we knew whether their wives or children had survived on the other side of the border.
It also meant that we could imagine the corpses before us as fathers and brothers, as peasants or writers. We could imagine their previous lives, and sometimes we knew their relatives in Albania.
Impossible to gain distance.
But it was also conciliatory: to remember the real person, the living father or brother or cousin or neighbor; to ask for their story and narrate it; to recreate in writing a world that was supposed to be destroyed; to give each of these stinking, faceless bodies a name again and not to turn one's back.
Traces 1
The Serbian troops have pulled out the night before, and NATO units pass through the abandoned Serbian checkpoint at the border. The track vehicles raise dust and immerse the scene in a gray and yellow cloud.
The impatient Albanian victors cannot hold back their joy and longing to return faster than the convoy of army vehicles. Thousands are waiting with their cars and tractors on the side of the road, watching how the caravan of Western friends slowly winds up the pass to Molina, and then through the eye of the needle at the old checkpoint. Hundreds are queuing behind fences, behind the barbed wire, and the excitement pushes them farther and farther off the asphalt road. There are small welcome presents that the Serbian losers have left on each side of the border for the Albanian refugees. But the summer is a helpful friend, and so the hidden death is visible because the gray or green of the landmines is easy to distinguish from the dried-out grass.
Some Albanian Kosovars are dancing in the small offices of the checkpoint. What used to be the victims' repressed fear now bursts out: windows are soon destroyed. The men's silent impotence is now discharged in the joy of power, the joy of being able to destroy. Chairs are thrown, tables destroyed. A howling mob, celebrating the victory and mourning its price. Furious about the humiliation, now that it's over.
Anger is a luxury one can afford only in liberty.
Nobody in the joyful crowd pays attention to the pile of metal sheet in a corner next to the checkpoint: there are license plates, covered with dust, lying amidst broken glass. Hundreds of old car plates, ripped off the vehicles. It wasn't enough to pull Albanian women and their children from their farms and houses, it wasn't enough to steal all their belongings, rings, jewelry, and whatever cash they had left. No, at the last checkpoint, right before expelling them into a foreign country, the Serbian police officers completed their task and robbed them of the last proof that these people had ever lived in the province of Kosovo. They confiscated passports, driver's licenses, property documents-anything the Albanians had carried on their deportation.
This strategy was more than just symbolic violence. What happened in this repetitive scene at the border was not just a simple demonstration of power or humiliation of the defenseless victims. Whether the soldiers at the checkpoint acted on order of the chain of command, I cannot know. But the action was systematic enough to understand the intention behind it: never should the refugees be allowed or enabled to claim a right to return. They were not supposed to keep any proof of their belonging to Kosovo.
There is reasonable doubt concerning the discourse of genocide in Kosovo, but the coordinated separation of an entire segment of the population, the apartheid measures that increasingly excluded ethnic Albanians from access to universities, schools, and work; the collective deportations that human rights groups had documented long before the NATO bombardment; and finally the mass exodus and the destructions and killings since March-all of these had a systematic character and aimed at the eradication of all traces of an ethnic identity.
Traces 2
"The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are. When I see the blood I shall pass over you, and you will escape the destructive plague" (Exodus 12:13-14).
The bloody sign at the doors of Christian Orthodox Serbs was mostly of black paint, painted or sprayed. Six times they had to start in order to finish the writing on the wall, two crossing lines and four half-circles (the letter c, in Cyrillic s) in the corners: the Serbian cross with its four Ss, Samo Sloga Spasi Srbiju ("Only unity saves Serbia"), was supposed to help them escape the plague.
That is the archetypical symbolism that indicates inclusion and exclusion, the protection of one's own people and the extradition of the others. Whether it is the blood on the doorframe, the writing on the wall, or the word Shibboleth that locals can pronounce but strangers cannot-numerous are the biblical stories and the historic accounts of the rescue of those who could declare themselves as members, and the banishment of those who could not read the signs. Religions and cultures do not differ in this respect.
But in the horror of this war, it was those small cowardly signs on the walls of Serbian houses that I found most disgusting.
While their ethnic Albanian neighbors were fleeing in thousands, while Serbian militia expelled mothers and children like cattle from their houses, while Albanian men were deported, kidnapped, or shot-there were some Serbian civilians who didn't have anything better to do than to mark their houses with the Serbian cross?
Nowadays the term barbarity is used to describe a particularly appalling archaic form of murder-a dubious usage, as if not all murders were "barbaric." As if the technical features of contemporary killing were a moral achievement, as if the weapons of mass destruction of the first world were somehow more civilized than the machetes of the Hutu in Rwanda.
But all those who deny the moral foundations of common belonging are barbaric. So it is not only the burning of entire streets, not only the shooting of the handcuffed Albanian, that indicates the barbaric, but all those tiny little actions and gestures that separate and exclude the neighbor.
Small and Big Gestures of Resistance
On my eighteenth birthday a friend and mentor of mine wrote a piece of advice on a tiny white business card, which she passed to me across the table of the restaurant where we were celebrating. She wrote: "What matters in life? To show dignified behavior under circumstances that suggest the opposite."
It is not always great deeds-as books and films want to make us believe-that make a difference in times of war. Sometimes it is small gestures.
W. E. Sebald writes in his controversial book on aerial bombardment and literature about a woman who stood amidst the ruins after an air raid, cleaning the windows of her intact house. Primo Levi talks about his Hungarian comrade in Auschwitz who urged Levi to wash himself against all odds. What seems like a lack of moral sensibility, what seems like a cynical dullness against all the pain and sorrow around, is sometimes merely a struggle for remnants of ethical or just aesthetic standards of a former life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Echoes of Violence by Carolin Emcke Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Kosovo 1 (July 1999) 1
Lebanon (October 2000) 357
Nicaragua (April 2001) 71
Kosovo 2 (October 2000) 97
Romania (August 2001) 125
New York/Pakistan/Afghanistan (Sept. 2001-Feb. 2002) 155
Colombia (October 2002) 203
Northern Iraq/Iraq (April 2002 and March-April 2003) 245
Editorial Note 317
Acknowledgments 319