My New Favorite Person

The man at the visa window stood still, his head wobbling only slightly from side to side as he fought millennia of cultural programming to present himself to the American consul precisely as his documentation showed him to be: a young, well-educated, affluent, New York financial analyst.

"How long have you been with Merrill?" I asked. I looked up briefly then back to the documents the corporation's immigration lawyers had assembled, which showed he was employed by Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith.

"Not quite three years," he responded.

"And how long do you anticipate staying on?" This was probably the only question he could get wrong. One line, deep in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1980, Section 214(b), stipulated that "every alien shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer ... that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status ..." The chance he would screw up and say something to convince me he really intended to stay illegally in the U.S. was about nil, but I was supposed to ask nonetheless.

"Another three years, probably," he responded perfectly. Good, I thought, this one is quick and easy. I had about thirty more interviews ahead of me that morning, many of which would surely be neither quick nor easy.

Just then, my boss slipped halfway into my booth and dropped an inch-high stack of papers butterfly-clipped together into my in -box. It was the daily read-file, the collected message traffic from Washington each officer was supposed to read.

"You should look at the top one," he said and tapped his finger on the stack. I glanced at the title, VOLUNTEER CABLE: KOSOVO DIPLOMATIC OBSERVER MISSION. "As if you'd let me go," I said.

He shrugged. "We'd think about it."

A volunteer cable is a notification sent out from the Department of State to embassies and consulates worldwide announcing that a position needs to be filled badly enough that the human resources bureau is looking for volunteers. It also means that if you want to go, your boss isn't supposed to say no. At that point, the applicant could have said almost anything and still gotten his visa. It was June, the height of the visa season in Canada, and I was bored out of my skull conducting interviews. A chance to go on mission to some place called Kosovo sounded like just the ticket.

"Thanks," I said, returning to the applicant at the window. "You can come back this afternoon at three o'clock to pick up your visa."

"Thank you very much," he said, smiling broadly.

I picked up the telephone at my elbow and dialed the number listed to volunteer to go to Kosovo, wherever that was. The officer on the other end of the line had been tasked with building a team of diplomatic observers to go into a hot war during the peak season for job changes, international moves, and getting kids into schools. Apparently, the recruitment process wasn't going particularly well. When I called to volunteer, he said, "You're my new favorite person." A couple of weeks later, I was on my way to Kosovo.

The Air France gate agent took pity on me. She called me up to the counter a few minutes before boarding began and handed me an upgrade to Business Class.

"You look like you could use a comfortable seat," she said.

I didn't argue. It was a relatively short flight to Belgrade from Paris, but having some additional legroom and a couple of free drinks sounded nice. So I took the new boarding pass and proffered a sincere merci bien in return.

The JAT Airlines 737 had about a dozen seats in the front set aside for Business Class. I got a window seat. Just after takeoff, as Paris disappeared beneath the cloud layer, I pulled out what had been my near constant companion in the weeks since I had bid Montreal adieu: Noel Malcolm's Kosovo: A Short History. It was the newest book available on Kosovo's political, economic and cultural history.

Quite honestly, I had never heard of Kosovo when I volunteered to go there. I wasn't a Europeanist. I wasn't really a typical Foreign Service officer. I had come to the Foreign Service after nine years in the Army rather than directly from one of the several international relations graduate programs that serve as feeder schools for our diplomatic corps. So Malcolm's book, alongside Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little, became my crash graduate course on where I was headed and why.

On the opening page of their book, Silber and Little wrote:

"The war in Yugoslavia was not the international community's fault. The war was planned and waged by Yugoslavs. It was not historically inevitable. To attribute the calamity that engulfed the peoples of Yugoslavia to unstoppable forces is to avoid addressing oneself to the central dynamic of the war. It also lets the guilty off the hook ... Yugoslavia did not die a natural death. Rather it was deliberately and systematically killed off by men who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from a peaceful transition from state socialism and one-party rule to freemarket economy."

They continue for about four hundred pages to explain how Slobodan Milosevic and his regime had destroyed so many lives in the course of dismantling their country.

Yugoslavia was in some ways a fiction. The word Yugoslavia means, roughly, "land of the southern Slavs." Three nations have carried the name. All three sprang from the ashes of war: in 1918 and 1946 and, finally, in 1992.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 until he died in 1980. Tito understood that in order for there to be a strong and successful Yugoslavia there needed to be a weakened and compromised Serbia. I imagined Tito standing astride Yugoslavia for forty years like the Colossus of Rhodes, with a foot in Macedonia, a foot in Slovenia, and his hand firmly upon the head of Serbia, holding down the Serbs in order that all the other ethnic groups — the Croats, the Slovenes, the Bosnians and Montenegrins, the Kosovar Albanians, and the Macedonians — could stand freely. I'm sure this is how some Serbians viewed their position in Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was also horrifyingly real. Scarcely ten years after Tito's death, the nation was well on its way to a bloody, murderous, and all too...